At Play in the Fields of the Lord (20 page)

“But I gave him pleasure!”

With her Indian sensitivity to disapproval, this woman became more and more angry, and her sulking infected the whole band; the Indians grew moody and depressed.
Finally the woman and her husband had to be taken downriver to Remate, and Quarrier said to Hazel, “The next time you strike an Indian for any reason, it is you who will be sent away; they do not understand it and it could be very dangerous for us all.”

She said, “And Billy?
Do you want him watching these filthy tricks?
Is that what you want?”

“Unless you tell him they are filthy, it will not occur to him; it will all seen very natural.”

“Natural!
And if one of those nasty little monkeys puts his hands on him?”

“He might enjoy it,” Quarrier said harshly.

Hazel did not know that her son, at eight, was a seasoned voyeur, having accompanied his friend Mutu on innumerable expeditions into the bushes to watch their elders puff and groan and thrash about with one another in the dirt.
Billy had not yet connected this engrossing spectacle with the phenomenon of birth, much less suspected that he himself was the product of a similar compulsion on the part of his parents.
After his first experience, in fact, he ran to report a wild and fascinating Indian custom to his father—“Boy, Pa, what savages they are!”—describing it as a kind of death struggle between man and woman.
“What good does it do them?”
he demanded of his father,
a little embarrassed now by the details he had suppressed not only because they upset him but because a description of acts so outlandish would never be believed.
“You should’ve seen it!
And afterwards they just kind of lay there in the dirt!
Grown-up Indians, just laying there looking up at the sky.
Like they were trying to remember something.
It made me feel so funny.”
The child’s voice grew thick and halting.
“Real grownups, the way they
looked
.
I felt sorry for them, Pa.
I felt so
sorry
for them!”
When Quarrier took Billy in his arms, the child burst into tears.
“You should’ve seen it,” Billy blubbered.
“It was awful.”

Quarrier failed to comfort him with the concepts of God and love, the creation of children, human birth.
As he began, the little boy was staring at him, innocent, but as the implications gathered, as the realization came that this man beside him had grappled with his own mother in that desperate manner and that, still worse, he himself was the consequence and living proof of such activity, he gradually turned his head away.
The nape of his thin neck was fiery with astonishment and shock; Quarrier did not dare touch him.
For a long time, father and son sat there together, digesting the ways of the world.

Billy whispered, “You mean, in your
birthday
suits?”
He did not turn to see his father nod.

“And Mrs.
Huben—she does that with
Mr
.
Huben?”

Now Quarrier grew very red himself, and was glad that Billy did not turn around on this occasion either.

“You mean …” Billy exclaimed at last, “you mean …”—his voice rose high and clear—“you mean …”—and he jumped to his feet, and standing there under the giant trees, pointed at himself, a small outraged boy named William Martin Quarrier, aged eight: “You mean I just came crashing down into Ma’s
under
pants?”

O
NE
day Andy saw a face among the leaves.
Catching her breath, she leaned minutely to one side, to be quite certain; the brown face, like a leaf shadow, leaned with her.
When she straightened again, it straightened; when she leaned far sideways, it leaned far
sideways.
She smiled; it did not smile.
When she called quietly to Leslie, it disappeared.
After that she saw fleeting shadows several times, but they would never answer.

Not understanding about shoes, the savages buried bamboo slivers in the pathway to the gift racks, to pierce the white men’s feet; the racks themselves were left untouched.
The whites had to assume that wherever they went, whatever they did, eyes watched them; they felt permanently self-conscious and afraid.
All they could do was wait, and the wait was endless.
Only Billy Quarrier, who played with Mutu and had his own small bow and arrows, welcomed the shadow faces in the trees; the child’s bottomless joy in his new life gave strength to all of them, even Hazel, who rarely left the cook shed.
There she took solace in the sight of household articles, and hoarded the last of the cheerfully packaged foods from home.

Hazel never tried to penetrate the jungle wall, even to inspect a gift rack, and she had avoided the wall itself since the afternoon when, resting in its shade, she was spied out from directly overhead by monkeys; these animals, after their habit in the presence of invaders, lavishly befouled her, and this so suddenly that it seemed to Hazel that the heavens had opened up and voided on her.
She burst into tears when the others laughed.

In a dream that night Hazel stood in a church with a clean simple country altar and stone bowls, and the cold clean light of a late North Dakota autumn streaming through the glass, and a choir singing.
She was lost in the beauty of this experience, and stared enchanted at the choir.
But the choir lacked red cheeks and seraphic faces, and its members were not innocent; even as their voices soared they sniggered and itched and hitched soiled cassocks to scratch white hairy legs, and some broke wind.
Their faces were loutish and their mouths pimply, and they were passing things around.
The flaunting of their frailty in such a place disgusted her and pained her heart, and this pain in her heart was like a wound, and the wound transcended her, forming again as a round opening in the clean granite ceiling of the church, like the base of a chandelier.
She gazed up at the vaults of stone to ease her pain, and then the hole opened and spewed
slime, which dripped on the stone and glass and silver of the church, and down the singing faces of the choir.
But the psalm still swelled throughout the church, and the voices remained brave and pure, and a light shone everywhere, inextinguishable, illuminating the slime itself, transfiguring it, infusing the very stink of it with eternal life.

Hazel was so frightened by this dream that she woke Martin.
Oh, how disgusting!
My mind—what is happening to me in this place!
That hole—do
you
ever dream such sickening things?
Does everybody, or is it only me?
It was like those monkeys—those creatures with men’s faces in the trees … Oh Martin, help me, that hole was the hole of God—!
She shook her head behind her hands.

But the end of the dream is beautiful, Quarrier said.
She was stricken and would not be comforted; he knew that she hated him for having listened, for failing to take her in his arms.

Billy could not find his mother any more; the distance grew between them.
He turned more and more to Andy, who loved to play with him.
The sight of them, heads together, inspecting odd flowers or small creatures of the jungle, gave Quarrier such pleasure that he scarcely noticed that Hazel watched them too.
One day after breakfast, when Andy and Billy were crouched in the dooryard on their knees and elbows, exclaiming at how the sunlight caught the blue of a pet morpho butterfly, Hazel came forth and said to them in a monotone, “That lovely color isn’t real.
It isn’t real.”
She reached down and pinched off its wing and ground it between her fingertips, then held out her fingertips and muttered, “See, it turns to gray.
It’s nothing but gray dust.
Dust unto dust.”
In tears, she started back toward the hut as the butterfly flopped along the ground in a crippled circle.

“Now Hazel, honey …” Martin started, much upset.

“Well, that was silly of you, Hazel, I must say!”
Andy jumped up, shaking off Martin’s hand.
But if Hazel had heard she gave no sign, going on into the hut.
“It doesn’t help her to indulge her, Martin,” Andy said coldly.
Seeing the child’s face, she groaned with exasperation, and sank to her knees and hugged
him.
“If we start giving way to our nerves like that, we’re all going to be in trouble,” she warned Quarrier over the child’s shoulder.
“If there’s a way to reach her, you’d better find it.”

“If you’ll excuse me, you seem a bit on edge yourself.”

“That’s right!
We’re
all
on edge!
And small wonder—we’re not idiots!
But even a slap across the face can be more help and comfort sometimes than ‘Now Hazel, honey’; it can bring you back among the living.”
Her voice trailed off; Billy was watching them.

“She’s gone
crazy!
” Billy muttered tearfully.
“I hate her!”
Andy managed a little laugh and whirled the boy off the ground, and his father said, “Don’t blame your mother, Bill.
She’s feeling kind of peaked in this heat.”

He had never called him Bill before, intending it now as an appeal and compliment, and Billy nodded.
“Sure,” he said, “it’s kind of hot, all right.”
Self-conscious in this mature role, he twisted rudely from Andy’s embrace and snatched up the butterfly, handling it roughly.

“Where are you going?”
Andy said.

“Give this stupid old butterfly to Mutu.
The Indians will know what to do.”
He ran off toward the shelters, where the crippled butterfly would be replaced by one of a litter of wild pets.
The Indians could tame practically everything but Jaguar and Scorpion and Sloth, who was always climbing.
Sloth’s wits were too slow, the Indians said, for it to realize that it could not climb to heaven.

“He’s had to grow up a little, poor old Billy,” Martin said, and was startled by the sharp look that Andy gave him; she had changed since they came here, too.

“Who hasn’t?”
she said.
She followed Hazel into the Quarriers’ quarters.

Though he dreaded her departure, Martin knew he would be happier with Andy gone.
Her presence was not worth the distraction she brought him.
Or rather, it
was
worth it, and this made him feel guilty.
He watched her constantly, observed her smallest way and habit, and could not give up his vice even when he realized that Hazel knew.
How could he explain to Hazel
that he loved Andy as anyone might love a pretty child, as unattainable as an angel?
True, he had once imagined himself in love with Andy, but surely that was only an evasion of unhappiness; the girl was a kind of lovely wraith that he had shaped to fit his need.

And he and Leslie, though much closer than before, would never work well together among Indians.
When the wild bands were contacted, Leslie intended to infect them with a need for cloth and beads, mirrors and ax heads.
Once this need was established, their exposure to the Gospel would be assured, and conversion would simply be a matter of time.
It was a basic method, used by missionaries across the world, but to Quarrier it reeked of coercion.
How did it differ, he asked Leslie, from the alcohol tactic suggested by the Syrian at Remate, which Huben had disdained?
Call it economic pressure or call it bribery—would Jesus have approved it?
Look at the people of Remate; was
that
what Salvation meant?

Victims of the Opposition, Huben said.

Well, how about Kori?
So far as Quarrier could see, the Niaruna of Kori had no real idea of God, either Catholic or Protestant; they mouthed the few religious terms they knew in return for food and care.
Leslie had weaned Kori from his extravagant adoration of the Catholic Blessed Virgin, replacing Her in the old man’s imagination with the concept of a good old-fashioned Hell, and these days Kori, without provocation, would smile beatifically and say, “Fire Place no go, all time, all time stay good, Amen.”
Kori was a tall lean-faced old man with a gratifying dignity of feature, and his photograph was to accompany Leslie’s next letter to
Mission Fields
.

Quarrier intended to start clean, having inherited from his father, an old-time missionary in China, a mistrust of the “rice Christian,” lured to the faith by food.
The one lasting method of conversion, he felt certain, was to lead them out of the darkness by Christian example—the food and medicine and time should be given freely.
He would not bribe the Indians to love Jesus, nor force them into Christian marriage.
One night, excited, he declaimed at supper that marriage might be
bad
for jungle Indians,
since their chronic malaria was thought to reduce fertility; the more various the pairings, the less chance of extinction.
Hazel sent Billy out-of-doors; to judge from her expression, extinction was a far, far better state than sin.