At Play in the Fields of the Lord (22 page)

The macaw saw him.
Because this was so, the savages across the clearing, though they could not see him through his screen of leaves, knew exactly where he was.
There were three of them in view.
The nearest, a powerful Indian with broad heavy features, was older than the other two.
All three were staring at the point of his concealment, and all three were on their knees, unarmed.
All three—there was no mistake about it—had their palms pressed together at their chins as if in prayer, though one man kept dropping his left hand to scratch uneasily at his groin.

He blinked and stared again, so powerfully did this scene affect him: the passion flowers and the bird, the green walls climbing to bright sky, the painted men, the ringing silence of the morning, strangely intensified by fear, by sun and death.
The same light that spun from the live feathers of the bird caught its dead feathers on the arrow.
Except for the execution of the dog, this tableau must have been intact for the near hour since he dropped out of the sky.

The Indians awaited him.
He backed up slowly, inch by inch, to a point where he could stand.

So elated was he, so sure once more of the inevitability of his coming, that he had to caution himself against some idiotic act of glee.
He felt omnipotent, as if by stepping forth into this sunlight he might transcend the past, and future too.
Wasn’t that the talent of a god?

But in the daylight, gods were mortal and took mortal forms.
He stripped himself of all his clothes, all but his belt, which he used to strap himself in the manner of the Indians.
With his right hand he held the revolver and with his left clutched the wadded clothes behind his back.
He filled the air with loud strange whistlings that savages might associate with the supernatural; then he
stamped forward, hurting his bare feet, and crashed out of the darkness into the light.

The macaw shrieked.
One Indian threw himself backward and ran for the cover of the forest, but the other two held their ground.
The older man seemed to shrink into himself, prepared for death, but the young warrior thrust out his jaw, face muscles quivering.

Moon stood there rigid beneath the sun, like something sprung out of the earth.
The terror of the Indians was so vibrant that he felt foolish standing over them.
He decided to sit down, not only because his penis band was slipping, but because, since his legs would no longer support him, it was the most sensible thing to do.
In an effort to look godlike, or at least ritualistic, he sat down cross-legged, one arm akimbo.

The man who had fled at his approach scrambled back out of the jungle and took his place with the others; he moved bent over, almost on all fours, to indicate that he had not really abandoned his position, had perhaps never been absent at all.
The feathers in this man’s headband were askew, and his wide mangy belt of monkey fur made him look shorter than he was.
His face was live and ugly, and he muttered over his shoulder at someone in the bushes; Moon heard the giggle of a girl.
The other two frowned, but they did not take their eyes off Moon; the younger one looked restless, on the point of action, as if at any moment he might take Moon’s initiative away from him.
Moon raised his fingers to his mouth, then dropped his hand, raised it again and dropped it, after which he rubbed his stomach.
He then looked pointedly at the oldest of the three men.
This man had long hair to his shoulders and a broad face with lines as deep as scars; he wore a simple headband without feathers and the curved incisors of a jaguar in a pendant on his chest.
Except for a thin bellyband, he was naked.
He rose slowly and came toward Moon, his face a mask of pride and terror; he stopped a few feet away.
The other two rose also, but remained in place.
Their gaze was so rigid that Moon could not support it; he fell once more to rubbing his stomach and putting his fingers to his lips.

The headman turned and called out to the jungle, and a girl came forward.
Though uneasy, she did not seem afraid; she moved with a kind of saunter.
Her wide smile, because it eased his tension, seemed to him beautiful.
The girl continued to smile even when the headman spoke to her angrily; she raised both hands to her mouth and peeked at Moon around the Indian’s shoulder.

The headman took her by the arm.
He pointed at the girl, then with both hands made a motion away from his own chest toward Moon and said,
“Pindi tai’ nunu kisu.”
Moon guessed that the girl had been placed at his disposal; if so, for the moment he was safe.
The girl went off toward the fires and came back in a little while with cakes of manioc and a calabash of masato.
Behind the headman, for Moon’s benefit, she pantomimed drinking the masato; she staggered, rolled her eyes, and touched her throat, as if about to vomit.

Encouraged by her boldness, the rest of the band came slowly from the forest; small children ran forward, slowing suddenly as they neared.
They edged in, one by one, dragging one leg around the other.
There were forty or more people now in view, of which sixteen—he counted them—were men; there were few old people, and few children.
All, from a distance, watched him eat and drink.

The sun was higher now and the birds silent; the sound of his feeding was the only sound in all the world.
He did not want to look the Indians in the face lest they perceive his utter helplessness; around him the brown legs moved closer.
He felt pale and foolish and hemmed in, like a nude in a thorn bush, and the warm grassy smell of their crowding bodies brought on another fit of fear.
He wished that he had not removed his clothes, he wished that he had brought presents for the tribe, he wished that he was in Barbados.
He was exhausted from lack of sleep, from nerves, from the withdrawal of the
ayahuasca
.
His mouth was so dry that the rancid manioc turned to chalk; yet he could not spit it out, for fear of giving insult.
The suspense among the savages was so intense that he felt claustrophobic; they awaited him.
He had come to them out of the sky, a god, a spirit, and
now he sat here, weak and naked, head bowed.
They moved closer.

On impulse he threw his arms out wide and scowled vilely at the sun.
Like deer surprised, the Indians froze for a moment where they stood, and a low gasp and exclamation—
h-chuh!
—was lost in a dismal moan of fright as they broke and fled.
In a matter of seconds he was alone in the jungle clearing.
He held his pose for a few moments to let them feast their eyes upon him from the bushes.
Then he took up Quarrier’s notebook and found the words for “come” and “friend.”
Huben had discovered that a makeshift verb without tense or declension could be formed simply by adding
wuta
to a noun; a note in the margin said, “
Wuta
: cannot really be spelled phonetically, sounds like spitting out grapeskins,
thspoota
.”
Another note read, “Yoyo says the headman to the east is called Boronai.”
He put the notebook away and called out,
“Marai-wuta,”
but his voice cracked so badly that he had to start all over again.

“Marai-wuta!”
He beat himself upon the chest.
“Mori!
Mori!”

Behind him he heard a speculative grunt, and whirled to face the young warrior who had awaited him in the clearing; this man stood at the jungle edge behind him.
In the anger of surprise Moon waved him foward to join the others; though the man obeyed him, he did so casually.
The band convened behind him.
For a Niaruna, this warrior was tall—his slim body and small shoulders made him appear as tall as Moon himself—and like the headman, he wore his hair long.
The mouth in a lean jutting face was held perpetually half open, as if about to lick its chops, and the nostrils, too, were ravenous.
The hair was held back by two long feathered wooden needles which pierced his ears, and his face was framed by two broad lines of black which, starting from the point of a large V between his eyes, zigzagged around his eye sockets and down the sides of his face.
The bright eyes and bold clear structure of his face, with the black marks like sideburns, gave him the fierce aspect of a falcon.

This man had stalked him successfully from behind, and he
himself had demonstrated anger; some sort of confrontation must take place.
Moon tapped his own chest and repeated his name, then reached across—and now the Indian flinched—and tapped the other.
The Indian, if he understood, affected not to, and was silent.
After several failures, Moon knew that he had lost face.
He pointed suddenly at the headman.
“Boronai,” he said aloud, and the Indians sighed in astonishment.
Boronai himself looked surprised and angry at hearing his name pronounced, but he said nothing.

The young Indian now tapped himself slowly.
“Aeore,” he said, pronouncing it syllable by syllable,
AY-o-ray
, and the other Indians giggled covertly.
Then he pointed at the heavy-set warrior in the monkey-fur belt: “Tukanu,” he said, and the Indians laughed again, all but Tukanu.
Aeore pointed at Moon.
“Moon,” Moon said encouragingly.

“Kisu.”
In an odd flat accusatory tone, a tone mixed with fear and suspicion, Aeore contradicted him.

Moon nodded vigorously.
Pointing at each of the three men who had awaited him in the clearing, he said, “Boronai.
Aeore.
Tukanu.”
Then he tapped himself.
“Kisu-Moon,” he said: it seemed best to retain his name, having already stated it.
“Kisu-Moon.
Mori.
Mori
.”

“Kisu-Mu,” Aeore said, unsmiling.

This is him, Moon thought, this hungry one.
This is the man who shot the arrow at the sky.

I
N HIS FIRST DAYS
,
THE DREAD IN HIS LUNGS LAY HEAVY AS COLD MUD
; he was never certain when he went to sleep that he would awake at all, and often, awaking, he would try to pretend, by keeping his eyes shut and backing into sleep again, that he was elsewhere.
But now he had lost track of the days and could rest peacefully, and he slept a great deal, as if years of fatigue had overtaken him.

He was at a beginning and at an end.
He had thrown away his bearings, like a man who treks at night into a wilderness and hurls his map into the wind and drops his compass to the bottom of an unknown river.

Though the air was hot, his body had turned cold in the gloom of the maloca; he drew his knees up to his chest and clutched them to him, then opened one eye, like a peephole.
To judge from the light it was midafternoon.
About him, the hammocks were empty, but he sensed a presence and turned his head to see the smooth, dusty back of the girl Pindi.
She was squatting by the embers of the fire, threading black polished nuts and bits
of river mussel on fine strings of silk grass, her breasts with their large dark nipples swaying, her cropped hair touching the bold bones of her face.
She wore a loincloth woven from soft fibers of wild bark, a bracelet of armadillo shell, and a beetle-wing necklace, iridescent.
Now and then she paused to spin the bast upon her thigh.

Moon studied her with pleasure: the wide young mouth hung open in absorption, the swelling of her thighs and hips which rested on her heels, the dusty skin which merged with the soft earth, the sun-born colors of her ornaments.
Beyond her, their heads silhouetted by the hard glare of the clearing, a row of children peered in at him from outside, and beyond them some figures passed, truncated by the hairy fringe of thatch.
A soft clamor of activity drifted from the far side of the clearing; there the men, laughing and hooting, were working on a new dugout.

The enthusiasm of these people for their new friend knew no bounds.
Even on that first morning they had smiled more widely than he had thought men could smile.
The Niaruna were still touched by sun.

The women had stood behind their men, arms around their waists, and the girl had laughed aloud.
“Kisu-Mu mori Pindi,”
she had said, giggling so violently, both hands to her face, that finally, unnerved by her own boldness, she had hid behind some of the other women.
Boronai had dragged her back to Kisu-Mu.
“Boronai puwa Pindi,”
he said, using both hands to indicate his own forceful techniques of copulation.
“Naki Kisu-Mu puwa Pindi.”

“Kin-wee,”
Moon said: Good.
He tried smiling at Boronai, and Boronai smiled back.

“Wai’lua.”
Boronai placed both hands gently on the ground and gazed about his clearing.
“Wai’lua.”

My earth, my earth—could that be it?

“Wai’lua Niaruna,”
Moon hazarded; there was a certain risk in this, since the white man’s name for a savage tribe was often a derogatory one provided by its enemies.
But at his words the People smiled—all but Aeore of the falcon face, who yelled contemptuously.
At this, the warrior named Tukanu stepped away from Aeore and pointed at him.
“Yuri Maha!”
Tukanu exclaimed, as if thereby distinguishing Aeore from the rest of them, for now all the people near this Indian moved back a little.
Aeore gazed at Moon without expression.

Boronai went to the maloca, his people trailing behind him, and stopped before he entered.
He turned politely to face Kisu-Mu and recited a singsong speech of welcome, then turned back again and preceded him inside.

The interior of the maloca was fully used, with hammocks strung in tiers from all the posts, and gourds and packets, palm-leaf baskets, arrow bundles, flutes, feather crowns, monkey-skin drums, drying vines, tobacco leaves and other articles suspended from the rafters.
Earthen pots, mortars and pestles, manioc sieves of wickerwork and thorn-board graters lined the walls.
There was an ancient rhythm to the chaos of the place, a genial ungeometric order, and even the dirt floor was smooth and clean; as they stood there, an old woman with a feather broom swept the ground beneath a set of hammocks at the center.
Moon supposed that these hammocks were occupied by Boronai, but he did not protest; he accepted the hammock as he had accepted Pindi, to avoid the discourtesy of refusal.

He approached the lowest hammock, but stopped when the Indians laughed; jabbering, they pointed at the blackened hearth beside the tier, then at the girl Pindi, then at the hammock.
It was Pindi who slept there so that she might tend the fire in the night.
The girl placed her hand on the middle hammock, and he managed to slide into it without dumping himself in un-godly fashion onto the ground.

He arranged himself on the hard cords of mesh, stained red from painted bodies, and inhaled the Indian smell, the strange sour grassy smell; it was not unpleasant but it startled him, and feeling trapped, he lurched wildly in the hammock before easing down again.
He was dimly aware that the Indians were still standing there, contemplating the spectacle that he presented, not out of bad manners but because privacy and quiet were not conditions of their sleep.
Giggling, they pushed at Pindi, anxious that
she get into the hammock with him.
The girl was frightened, and refused.

When he awoke some hours later, he was given to eat what must have been, to judge from the Indians’ delight on his behalf, the finest cut of the dead orange dog.

I
N
the daytime he went naked; at night he wore his shirt and pants against the humid cold.
The savages did not consider this a weakness, but a proof of his superiority.
He was already used to the night cold, the biting insects, the mild chronic malaria; though the food—mostly half-cooked fish and manioc—had given him dysentery, Boronai had cured him quickly with some seeds from the greenheart tree.
The insects were no problem except at twilight and at night, when they were checked by the smudge fires under the hammocks; the smoke, in fact, brought him more discomfort than the mosquitoes, for he soon learned to slap the insects as automatically and unthinkingly as the Indians.
Meanwhile, his body had hardened, even his feet, which still fettered him to the ways of his past life.
His fears for them—ants and infections, bone bruises, scorpions, tarantulas and snakes—obsessed him, and yet his most pernicious foe was the common chigger flea.
Every few days Pindi dug at his poor feet with a bone needle, popping into her mouth each small fat mite that she extracted.

It seemed a good sign that a wife of Boronai had been lent to him, though he was not sure how the Indians reconciled his need for women with his spiritual estate.
Observing Pindi, Moon thought out carefully his whole situation, returning over and over to the same question that the Niaruna must have asked themselves: who was he?

As Kisu-Mu, he had been identified with Kisu, the Great Spirit of the Rain; when his sneakers wore out, as they soon would, the Great Spirit would be an invalid.
He struggled to toughen his feet, running barefoot in the village yard and stamping up and down on logs along the river; he hoped the Niaruna would regard his behavior as strange and godlike rather than
pathetic.
As soon as he could make himself understood, he asked Boronai for bits of the tough tapir skin so that he could make moccasins.
Since he knew no better than they how to cure and sew hides—and for this he cursed Alvin Moon “Joe Redcloud” and the whole degraded Indian nation—the moccasins emerged as twists of wood.
By now his feet had toughened, but they still got cut too easily; in the jungle climate, without disinfectant, any cut might be his last.
And in the forest he did not know where to step; not only did he not recognize the shapes and colors that the Indians avoided, but his feet were not as sure as theirs, nor his eyes as sharp.
He spent his whole time staring at the ground.

In those first days he had gone with Tukanu to Huben’s mission, hoping to find a pair of sneakers.
His quest had put him in bad humor—not least of all because he felt grotesque wearing shoes while otherwise naked—and his humor worsened when he did not find the sneakers that he did not wish to wear.
He and Tukanu found nothing useful.
Boronai had told him that his people had taken nothing, and Moon himself had seen no article of civilization in the Niaruna village.
Boronai could only suppose that Huben’s
manso
Niarunas, the people of Yoyo and Kori, had looted the House of God; that, fearing attack, they must have fled to Remate almost as soon as Huben had gone away.
When Boronai had led his people there, planning to kill Kori and his worthless men and to adopt the women and children before some other band took advantage of them, they found the mission ransacked.

On his trip to the mission Moon had asked about the radio set lying in the shallows; Tukanu acknowledged that Boronai’s men had done this.
Tukanu himself had been poking at the radio, hoping to find food in it, when suddenly the spirits of the box had snapped and whined at him.
As far as Moon could piece the strange story together, poor Tukanu, yanking crazily at the controls, had tried to keep the spirits in their box; instead he turned the volume up to a loud blare, at which the whole war party fled into the jungle.
Then Boronai had rallied them, saying that these were demons of the white man, that if the box was destroyed, the demons would have no home in Niaruna land.
Boronai led the
bravest men toward the shed, and from a distance the warriors shot arrows and hurled clubs and lances through the doors and windows.
After a terrific struggle the voices of the demons died, but they kept on snarling and coughing for a long time, until at last Boronai himself rushed in with a club and beat the box to the floor.
Then the box was seized and hurled into the river, but not before biting and cutting two of the warriors who grabbed it.

Tukanu had likened the white man’s Demon House to Kaiwena, the piranha fish, which snapped at fingers even after it was speared and dying.
After the battle with the demons, the Indians were leery of the mission, imagining that it swarmed with vengeful spirits.
They left a feathered club of warning and went away.

Tukanu had fiddled with the radio in the first place because, of all the band, he was the most knowledgeable about the mission; during the period of Huben’s first appearance he had spied on it for some weeks as scout for Boronai.
It was Tukanu, in fact, who had proposed the massacre of Kori’s people.
During the period of his surveillance he had fallen in love with an old woman named Taweeda, whose husband was Kori’s brother.
He had met with her often in the forest, and she encouraged him to come back with her to the mission, saying that if he got down on his knees and spoke to Huben as she instructed him, he would be given food and presents and could wear the same bandages on his sores that had attracted him to her own person.
Tukanu was enthusiastic about this idea and took several praying lessons from Taweeda, but his conversion was thwarted when Boronai forbade him to show himself.
As an alternative to salvation, Tukanu had hit upon a massacre, from which his friend Taweeda would be spared.

At one time or another Tukanu had wished to marry every woman in his own village, and he had actually contrived to marry Pindi.
First, he had gone around for many moons chanting incantations and clutching aphrodisiac charms and talismans of love, all to no avail.
Second, he had killed a tapir and dumped the entire animal at Pindi’s feet.
Finally he had seized her up and bore her off into the weeds to work his way with her, whereupon, out
of indifference, she permitted him to marry her.

In the few months of their marriage Pindi was so unfaithful that Tukanu replaced his talismans of love with fetishes to control her lust.
Moreover, she refused to work for him no matter how often he beat her; her failure to do her share in the communal work caused dissension throughout the village, until the whole band became ill and began to waste away.
Finally Boronai invited Pindi into his own household in the role of wife.
She came gladly, and henceforth did her share, and Boronai made no objection when she slept sometimes with Aeore.
Tukanu let her go without rancor, declaiming loudly that gay and pretty girls made the worst wives, and that a woman of wide back and sour mien would suit his purposes far better.
But in the village there was no one of this description who had not already refused him, which accounted for the joy he felt when, one day in the forest by the mission, he surprised the surly, broad-backed old Taweeda and mounted her forthwith, without resistance.