At Play in the Fields of the Lord (19 page)

Along the river banks where sun had touched the earth, wild walls of flowering trees and shrubs sprang up on every side: pea vines with yellow flowers, stilt-root garcinias and spiny palms, myrtles, cecropias and acacias, pineapple, and plantains with their scarlet blossoms.
Hazel pointed at the pea vines, wondering if the
fruit in the pods tasted anything like the garden pea.
She also recognized deer callaloo, with its edible greens, but when Quarrier angled over to the banks to let her pick some, she held them in her hands suspiciously, then dropped them into the water.
“It’s some foreign kind of pokeberry, like we have home, but different,” she muttered.
“I don’t trust it.”
And she relapsed into her dejection, though Billy sought frantically to bring her back, pointing out bright barbets, jacamars and tanagers which crossed back and forth in front of them; he shouted as a stream of parakeets spun around a treetop, and a small, somehow familiar emerald bird bounded from limb to limb ahead.
“A kingfisher!”
Billy called.
“Lookit that funny kingfisher!”
They saw huge ant nests high up on the trunks, and the hanging nests of the caciques and oropéndolas: “Lookit the giant orioles!”
But Billy’s voice was deadened by the motors, and as the sun rose higher the birds and colors vanished, like the mist.
Hazel had long since turned to stone, and the child stopped calling.

They went on into the growing day, up the brown river, the green canyons.
The dry season had already begun; the river was shoal in places, with sand bars lengthening at the bends, and sunken trees emerging like great black feeding reptiles of another age.

A spotted sandpiper bobbed and teetered; when it flitted off—
peet-weet
—Hazel cried out in recognition of this gentle bird from home and burst into tears.
The Quechuas swung slowly around to grunt and peer and gape.
When Quarrier smiled at him, Billy glanced at his mother, shrugged in an effort to look unconcerned, and turned away again.

The wan glaze of the strip of sky over their heads had clouded to vapor above the trees, and the fierce greens had softened, thickened, closing off all sound; the motor’s roar rebounded from the green, defeated by the weight of stillness.
In this world gone dead Quarrier saw a sloth, pressed to a high trunk for camouflage.
Eyes fixed on the tree, he reached out to touch his wife, then turned when he did not find her; his hand was wavering near her breast and she watched it without expression.
The boat jumped a sunken tree and yawed around, sluicing a spray of
water across their legs; it plowed into a canebrake at the bank, and the motor stalled.

Over Hazel’s shoulder, in the sudden silence, he met the gaze of the Green Indians.
He grinned.
“Muy estúpido,”
he said.
They did not smile back.
Nor did Hazel; her face was straining, but she could not help him.
Billy’s careless whistling, well meant, was thin and airy, and pained Quarrier worst of all.

“There was a sloth,” he said, “up in that tree.”
He pointed.

She nodded, brushing aimlessly at her wet skirt.

“I wanted you and Billy to see it.”

She nodded again, and he dropped his eyes in fear of the smile that she would force.
Now the river silence he had longed for was unbearable; he yanked violently at the cranking rope, twice, three times, four, rocking the boat with the misspent strength of his own clumsiness.

They reached the abandoned settlement at Esperanza as the sun, shrouded by the pall, slid across the narrow avenue of sky between the treetops.
In 1912 the Niaruna, enraged by the brutality of the white man, had put aside their inter-village quarrels and banded together to destroy this place; there had been three survivors.
The old rubber camp had lain at a confluence of streams, and the last trace of it was a banana grove gone wild; after the massacre a metal cross had been erected on the bank.
The memorial was ten feet high, on a concrete base, and for a time it had apparently been tended.
But now the vines were so thick upon it that only one arm protruded through the green; it had lost its form and soon would be difficult to find.
Quarrier yelled at Huben, “Shall we stop and clean that cross?”
but Huben said, “That papist cross?”
and shook his head.

T
HE
Niaruna station was a two-hour journey above the Esperanza ruin.
Perched on a bank of rufous clay above a river bend, the mission shed was visible a quarter-mile downstream.
Both Tiro and Niaruna recognized the place as a frontier, which the Niaruna, but not the Tiro, crossed at will.

Now the clearing came into view.
On both sides were plantations
of manioc; well, Quarrier thought, Padre Fuentes was here long enough to plant.
Then he stared at the mission bank in disbelief.

“Hey, Pa!”
Billy turned around, mouth open, frightened.
“Pa!”

Now Huben saw what they had seen; he slowed his motor, then circled back and came up alongside the second boat.

“This could be very good,” he said, “or very, very bad.”

Quarrier was glad of Huben’s coolness.
In plain view on the bank stood a party of Niaruna, fourteen men, each with his black bow of chonta palm and long cane arrows.
The bright black hair on the brown shoulders was arrayed in fur and feathers, and the faces and chests were streaked in bold patterns of red-orange dye.
Another band of red wound up each muscled leg—the serpent.
Except for a fiber band which held the penis of each man pressed to his belly, the savages were naked; but at the end of the line, also in face paint and carrying bow and arrows, was a barefoot Indian dressed in shirt and pants too big for him, and wearing on his head the dark blue neckerchief which the missionaries recognized as that of Lewis Moon.

The boats slid forward, slow against the current; the Green Indians cocked their rifles.
Hazel Quarrier leaned forward and dragged Billy back across the seats into the stern.
“May the Lord forgive him,” she said.
“May he rest in peace.”

“Amen,” Huben said.
“He who lives by the sword, right?”

“Oh Leslie,” Andy cried.
“You needn’t gloat!”

“Suppose they try to drive us off,” Quarrier said irritably.
“Are you going to shoot?”
One of the two soldiers in his canoe, still half drunk, leveled his rifle, and Quarrier shouted at him; gazing back at the missionary with yellowed eyes, the soldier opened his mouth wide and probed the front side of his lower teeth with a slow tongue.

“We will shoot into the air,” said Huben.
“Let us pray …

The Indians stood rigid as the boats approached.
Their naked silence was so close, so overpowering that the women turned their heads away.
All prayed.
The Indians had raised their bows when the soldier raised his rifle; they were still tense.
Then the warrior in Moon’s shirt and pants loosed an arrow which dropped neatly between the boats, causing them to circle once before proceeding.

“Satan is surely among them!”
Huben cried, “Even the serpents on their legs—!”

He called out to them in greeting, and the man in the blue neckerchief snapped his head sideways in a gesture of contempt; now he drove two more arrows into the ground, so that they formed an X, facing the missionaries.
He then stalked toward the trees.

“Friends!”
Huben shouted after them.
“We are your friends!”
He waved a gift ax that he had grabbed from a pack, but they were gone.

“How did they know we were coming?”
Andy spoke to Hazel, trying to smile.
“Isn’t it strange?”

Hazel did not answer: she held Billy to her breast, muttering fiercely.
The boy tried discreetly to work free; he glanced unhappily at his father.

Quarrier said, “Well, what did you think of those wild Indians, son?”
His own voice sounded froggish to him; he longed to turn and go, and keep on going.

They stepped gingerly onto the bank, leaving the motors running.
But even after they had shut the outboards off and begun the process of unloading, Hazel Quarrier sat stolidly in her seat.
When her husband came and laid his hand upon her shoulder, she raised her eyes and stared about her.

“The
black
ones,” Hazel murmured.
“Where are
they?
”

T
HE FEATHERS OF THE CROSSED ARROWS
,
TREMBLING IN THE LIGHT
air, were all that stirred in the quiet of the clearing.
A feathered club leaned like a token barrier in the doorway of the main shelter, a dolefully sagging structure of bamboo and palm fronds.
These were bad signs, even to Huben, who liked to dismiss such heathen doings as inconsequential.
When Quarrier took the club and stuck it up under the thatching of the roof, Huben demanded, “What are you saving that for?”

“Because it interests me.
These warning signs invoke some kind of evil spirits.”

“Evil spirits!”
Huben exclaimed scornfully.
He began a loud casual humming, accompanying his faithful radio which blared away on the far side of the clearing.
Quarrier marveled at this man, who was convinced that Moon and Wolfie were possessed by demons, yet could dismiss the Indian equivalents with such conviction.
“Bye, bye, love,”
sang Leslie Huben.
The blare of
the music was unbearable in the tense silence of the jungle; Quarrier crossed the clearing and snapped off the radio.

“Relax, fella,” Huben called.

For a long time after those painted shapes had vanished back into the forest, the missionaries saw no sign of a wild Indian.
In the first week they set about clearing the vines, repairing the thatch roofs, weeding the low undergrowth from the yard and freeing the roof cross from the strangler fig that was dragging it to earth.

The plantation of maize and manioc had been looted, and many half-ripe vegetables left to rot.
The Indians had taken everything of value except the short-wave radio, which they had hurled into the river; Huben found it in a muddy pool below the bank, the silt swirling past its metal face.
They assumed that this pillage had been done by the wild Niaruna, but Quarrier became less certain of this when, three days after their own arrival, Kori’s band of outcast Niaruna from Remate appeared in their canoes; too innocent as yet to lie adroitly, they brought suspicion on themselves by the vehemence with which they condemned their brethren.
“The people of Boronai,” they yelled.
“They are still savages!
They are not like us!”
Kori insisted that Boronai and his savages had been the culprits in the looting, and to prove this he burst into tears right on the spot, out of pure shame that such Niaruna could exist.
Huben was annoyed when Quarrier laughed.

Kori’s people had been harried toward extinction by stronger clans of their own tribe.
Each time they took refuge at Remate they invited the contempt not only of their wild tribesmen, but of the Tiro and Mintipo halfbreeds, who saw their own position threatened; the latter now had rags to wear and bits of broken glass and ribbons, and were only too glad of the opportunity to despise a people they had always feared.
They persecuted and harassed Kori’s poor hunters, sluttish wives and malcontents, who rapidly lost all confidence and sought to adapt their ways to any group that would tolerate them; self-devouring, they smiled gratefully and indiscriminately from dawn to dark.
Kori himself smiled so constantly that Leslie wished to
change his name to “Happy,” but neither Andy nor the Quarriers shared his confidence in Kori’s beatitude, and the christening was given up.

Quarrier was sorry that soldiers had been used to establish the mission, though it was true that the death of Fuentes made a strong case for this precaution; Padre Fuentes had erected shelters on Tiro ground, imagining that he and the sisters would not be molested so long as they remained outside the Niaruna forest.
Huben did not hesitate to claim the place a few months later, and established Kori there almost immediately.
It was through Uyuyu, whom Padre Xantes had designated as their shepherd at Remate before leaving for Madre de Dios, that Huben had persuaded Kori and his band to accompany him: how could the padre be angry, Uyuyu said, so long as they wore clothes and thanked the mighty spirit named God-Jesu for their food?
He promised them that they would be well fed and safe, and they believed him, having already recognized that Uyuyu was more intelligent than themselves and that he understood much better how things worked.
Padre Xantes had given Uyuyu a bright silver cross on a neck chain and trained him as a teacher, and Huben had given Yoyo a bright red gringo shirt with bright blue gringo penises on it.
At first Yoyo wore the crucifix outside his shirt, but after Huben told him to throw the crucifix away, he wore it inside.

From the beginning Huben had received support from Guzmán.
“The local Comandante is a fair and broad-minded man; the Lord put those entreaties in my mouth which would open his heart to our work here with the Niaruna.”
These joyful words had appeared in Huben’s first letter from the Niaruna, the one read by the Quarriers in
Mission Fields
.
And indeed, things had gone very well.
Though the wild bands refused to come out of the jungle, they had at least come close enough to steal from the Lord’s gardens and they had not attacked.
When Huben had gone out to meet the Quarriers a few weeks later, he took the soldiers back with him to Remate, leaving Kori and his band at the new station.

So far as Kori was concerned, the withdrawal of the soldiery
had been a bad mistake.
Although he agreed heartily with Huben that the mission was perfectly safe—he had learned from Yoyo’s prosperous example to agree heartily with the missionary about everything—he had fled the place a day or two after Huben’s departure, taking with him his eight machetes and his silver crucifix, awarded him by his former spiritual adviser, Padre Xantes, in compensation for the two women of his band delivered to the savages as ransom for the nuns.
In Remate, throwing the last of his prestige to the winds, Kori had claimed that they were driven out after a furious battle with these savages; but on Huben’s return, smiling expansively, he had agreed with Leslie that this impression had been mistaken.
He promised to return immediately to the mission on the Espíritu.
His people were glad to leave a place where their nakedness had been laughed at and where they had been treated with contempt, not only as savages but as
protestantes
.
The charge had only bewildered them, since they had no idea what the word meant.

T
HE
first long days were days of hope.
Because Quarrier admired Leslie’s supreme faith and self-confidence, they worked together very well, hunting food, clearing and planting the mission garden, and teaching the Indians what they could.
Leslie was a hard worker and an effective one, far more skillful than Quarrier with tools and plants and shotguns.
And Leslie liked work for its own sake, taking strength from it; when his hands were in use, his whole face eased and softened, and a tentative humor would replace his tiresome sense of moral right.
With the vanity evaporated, with sweat on his dirty face and his hip-pocket comb forgotten, the face took on a true handsomeness of strength.

They worked on the language late into the evening, and coaxed the Indians toward prayer.
The crude chapel they had built—crotched saplings supported its eave pole, the bamboo sides were walled with mud, and the roof bamboos were overlaid with palm fronds—seemed to Quarrier the loveliest building he had ever seen.
They restored a small shelter for the Quechuas—Kori and his band had moved back into their own communal
maloca
, a rectangular palm house which, in their spiritual decrepitude, they scarcely bothered to clean out—and they put up a lean-to cookhouse shed; they partitioned the main shed and constructed a stove of baked mud brick that would burn wood.
They replanted the manioc and planted papaya and bananas, and every day they went out to the clearing edge and checked the presents for the savages that they had placed on racks raised above ground.
The gift racks were set on five-foot poles, not only as a protection against ground insects and animals, but so as to be readily seen; one had been erected on each of the three edges of the clearing, and a fourth a short distance into the jungle, on a faint trail leading eastward.

A time came when the gift racks were emptied each night for a fortnight; they prayed earnestly.
Then Billy found his friend Mutu playing with one of the Lord’s machetes, and Kori’s people were told to return the gifts.
Both Huben and Kori were enraged.
“Are we not Niaruna too?”
Kori howled.
“Does God not love us?”
When Leslie answered this with a stern lecture about stealing, Kori responded with a violent lecture of his own: Did not his people share with the gringos everything they had?
Did not Mutu teach Billy everything he knew?
Then why did the gringos lock up their food and knives and tools, and share with the Indians only when they wished the Indians to work or pray?
His people had taken the articles from the racks to punish the gringos for their bad manners.

The soldiers were furious that Kori’s band might have got away with something, and offered to shoot the entire lot for theft; once again, they muttered, as it had been since the days of the Inca, the faithful Quechuas had been foully used.
The Quechua
católicos
and Niaruna
protestantes
stamped and ranted, mutually unintelligible, and by no means clear as to why they had been dragged out to this pesthole in the first place.

H
UBEN
planned to return to Madre de Dios after the rainy season, leaving Quarrier in charge at the new station.
The prospect made Quarrier uneasy, no less so because Hazel was most
anxious that the soldiers stay.
Her fear and dislike of the jungle had not overcome her loyalty, if not to her husband, at least to their marriage vows; nevertheless she made it clear that she thought his attitude irresponsible and pig-headed and one which placed the child in danger.
Shortly after their arrival at the station on the Espíritu, she had retreated into a vast and unforgiving silence, against the day when disaster would prove her right.

Quarrier told her, in effect: If we sincerely believe that we are here in Jesus’ name, then our son must share our responsibility and our risk; if you do not agree, then you must go home with him to North Dakota.
Hazel turned on him, started to cry out, raised her fists, dropped them, groaned, blinked, burst into tears and turned away, martyred again.
“Is that what you want?”
she sobbed.
“That’s probably exactly what you want!
Well, we’re not going!”

Hazel was disgusted by Kori and his people, who were constantly underfoot, or rummaging among her things; once when she was trying to sew, Kori’s old brother squatted before her, and placing his hands upon her knees, gazed up earnestly into her nostrils, as if to see what made her tick.
The next day, having established himself as harmless, he lowered his head to peer beneath her dress, persisting in this until she jabbed him smartly with her needle.

The Indians’ nakedness she could accept so long as it seemed innocent; she eventually became resigned to the custom among young mothers of giving suck to dogs, and to loud, public, devil-may-care flatulence.
But she decried the wholesale preparation and consumption of their masato beer, to which they devoted nearly half their manioc crop; she tried with no success to teach them that all excess manioc should be reduced to farina meal, which could be bartered in Remate for printed gingham and cotton shorts.

Hazel became obsessed with shorts and dresses, once she perceived how sensual these Indians were.
Though they went off into the bushes to make love, they indulged publicly and with much laughter and enthusiasm in erotic games.
The girls stroked one another’s breasts; the women grabbed the hands of men and
clapped them, giggling, to their crotches; casually, young boys masturbated one another.
Quarrier himself was shocked.
Yet everything was done in great warmth and good spirits.
The Indians of all ages touched one another constantly, consolingly, as if to affirm and reaffirm the solidarity of the clan against the night, wild creatures, storm, against dread spirits.
He tried hard to convey this idea to Hazel, for he saw that her rigidity confused them and would do harm.
On one occasion Hazel struck away the hand of a young woman who was stroking the genitals of her little boy.
Seated on the ground, the mother stared at the white woman, astonished.