At Play in the Fields of the Lord (27 page)

“I don’t know,” he said.
“But they always do.”
He turned and gazed into the shed where his son lay on his side, eyes wide, observing them.
Then he seized Hazel by the arm.
“Hazel, listen.
This thing runs its course in twenty-four hours.
We can’t get him to a hospital before that, and even if we could, it would be too late.”
Still gripping her arm, he said, “Billy is dying.
You know it as well as I do.
We must help each other.”

She tried to speak, but she could not.
He left her standing there.
From behind her, across the compound, the voice of an old woman had commenced a funeral wail.

In the shed the boy said weakly, “Pa?”

Quarrier took him in his arms again and squeezed him, and stared down into the small, scared face.

“Are you crying, Pa?”

“Yes, Bill, I am.”

“I’ve never seen you cry.”

“No.”

A little later he said, “Pa.”

“Billy, honey …”

“Why did God … You won’t get mad at me?”

“No, Bill, I won’t get mad at you.”

“Then why did God have to go and make mosquitoes?”

“I don’t know,” Quarrier said.
“I surely wish I knew.”

Toward twilight Leslie Huben came, alone in his long canoe.
Quarrier was grateful that Huben had come, but he was not glad of it, for he did not feel up to the effort of conversation, and he had reason to think that Huben’s was less an errand of mercy than an inspection trip.
In the eyes of the new Regional Supervisor of the Far Tribes Mission, Leslie Huben, Martin Quarrier was doubtless doing badly.
As he walked down toward the river he saw that Huben, already on the bank, had assumed that arms-akimbo stance of his as he looked about him.
But the smile on his face was not a bold, swashbuckling smile; it could scarcely be called a smile at all.

Boronai and his men appeared out of the jungle from downriver; they had been stalking Huben.
The Indian women gathered on the bank.
Though Kori’s Indians knew Huben, they made no move to go to him and take his hand, nor did they answer his hearty call of greeting.
Huben’s expression changed rapidly from puzzlement to annoyance.

“You were foolish to come alone,” Quarrier said, and frowned; he had meant to greet Huben with something more hospitable.

“I see I was,” Huben snapped, his tone accusing.
“What’s turned them against me?”

“Indians aren’t sentimental, Leslie.”

“I know that, Martin, I know that.
I’ve lived with these people too, remember?”
He smiled suddenly and vigorously.
“Well, how are you?”
He sprang forward up the bank.
“Greetings in the name of the Lord!”

When Quarrier took his hand, an old woman shuffled forward, giggling, and also shoved her palm at Huben; though Leslie knew that she was begging, he chose to misunderstand this and took the hand in his own.
With his other hand he roughed her head affectionately, much as he might have greeted an old teammate.

“What’s this one’s name?”
he said.
“I can’t remember.”

“That’s old Taweeda.”

“But why is she naked?”
He looked annoyed again.
“You certainly haven’t done much, Martin, to loosen Satan’s hold.
They all had Christian clothes when I left here, and now they’re just as savage as when I started.”

“I kind of discouraged their use of clothes,” Quarrier said.
“They didn’t have any others to change into.
They wore them even when they were wet, and I lost one old fellow to pneumonia.”

“You mean you encourage them to go naked?”

“I don’t think nakedness is a sin.”

“I see.”
Huben smiled doggedly.
“Well, Martin, we can discuss your progress later.
Now tell me, how is Hazel?
And how is the little patient?”
They walked slowly toward the shelters.

Leslie agreed with Hazel that Billy should be taken out; weren’t there other diseases that discolored urine?
Did Quarrier have faith in the heathen instincts of these savages—and if so, Huben’s tone implied, how did he reconcile that faith with his faith in the Lord God Almighty?

“This has been Billy’s home,” Quarrier said coldly.
“It is the only home he knows.
He will die among people who love him in their way, and he will die in truth, without hypocrisy, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
He stared pointedly at Huben.
“Amen,” he said.

Huben looked discomfited and vexed.
“Home!”
he said, glancing around the muddy yard.
“My goodness!”

Hazel said to her husband, “Leslie has had the kindness and courage to come to us in our time of need, and all alone, and you
are rude to him.
You are a stubborn and willful man and you have taken upon yourself the sin of pride.
May the Lord have mercy on your soul!”

“Amen,” Quarrier said.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” he said to Huben.
“I’m only trying to think clearly.”

“This is a terrible time of trial for you both,” Leslie said, trying to mend things.
“Now let us pray.”

W
HILE
Billy lived, the Indians came to him one by one, paying no attention to his parents; they did not speak to Billy but simply laid a hand on him, in parting, and went away again, expressionless.
Only the old women, chanting their singsong in the huts across the clearing, gave any evidence of grief.
The silent procession filled Hazel with horror; Martin had to restrain her from seizing her broom and driving the naked mourners from the shed.
“They are paying respect,” he said to her, over and over.
“It is their way.”
During the visits, Billy smiled a little in a sleepy way, as if remembering something.

By nightfall Billy was unconscious; he did not wake again.
Hazel and Leslie sat with him throughout the night, but Martin lay down on his bed and stared straight at the ceiling.
He rose only when his son’s breathing broke and faltered; then he hurried to the bedside.
When Billy breathed peacefully again, he turned away.
“Perhaps you would like to watch over your own son,” Hazel whispered, “and give poor Leslie a rest.”

“Watching won’t help him,” Martin said harshly.
“Leslie can sleep whenever he likes.”

Even now, he thought, she’s scoring points in her private war; she can’t restrain herself.
And he thought bitterly about Hazel’s love for Billy, a love that was most lavish and emotional at those times when she felt sorriest for herself.
It was not Billy she embraced but the child Hazel; not Billy whom she cherished but the Hazel who, at Billy’s age, had felt unloved, and whose injury was recalled to her by the smallest rejection or rebuke.
A quarrel sent her running to her child in an excess of crooning love which had nothing to do with the real love she actually felt;
it sickened Quarrier, not because it was insincere but because the true object of it went unrecognized.
He had known his wife to rout their child out of his sleep to bathe them both in her own emotion; the snuffling and wallowing was at times more than he could bear.
Even when still very young, Billy had sniffed out the strangeness of this behavior, and with a vague, dignified expression had searched his father’s face for some sort of explanation.
Once he had tried to question his father, but Quarrier had only hushed him: “Another time,” he said.

Another time, another time.
Ah Christ, who would have thought that time would have run out so very suddenly?
The time to convey his love for his own son before he died, was that so much to ask—this love choked him now for want of a way to shout it out.
But wasn’t this the charge that he had made against his wife?
Martin Quarrier, are you not sorry for yourself?
I am; before God I am.
I am heartily sorry.
Perhaps Hazel knew, perhaps she
knew
 … something I did not know.
The doom and bafflement that came in time to every face—perhaps she had glimpsed this even in Billy’s shining eyes, had anticipated all the wounds to come, and rushed to cover him.
He stared at Hazel’s back, at her bent neck; he felt sick to the heart.

Ah, Hazel, poor dumb suffering brute …

That huge bafflement was the inescapable affliction; he had seen it on every face he knew.
The startled look on Andy’s face when, once or twice, he had seen her lift her head from knitting to stare at Huben:
Who is this man?
Why am I with him?
Or Leslie himself, under God’s new outboard power, roaring up triumphantly to greet his flock, only to be met with a sullenness close to hostility:
But I’ve given you love; why is it you dislike me?
Or that man Wolfie, stunned by the curtness of his partner so soon after he had saved Moon’s life:
How do ya like that?
Well, how do ya like that?
At moments, stunned and groggy at the hands of life, even the hardest face looked innocent:
Where has life gone?
What will become of me?

Another time, another time.

Billy had dignity, all right; he had
integrity
.
He had never
noticed such integrity in a child, though perhaps all children started with it.
One day he had beaten Billy for disobeying Hazel, not because Billy had been bad—since the morning she had hurt the butterfly he had lost his last confidence in his mother and instinctively resisted her—but out of his own frustration with his wife.
Billy had not given way to rage or tears but had remained dry-eyed and silent, craning his head back to stare straight into his father’s eyes, and regarding him in this thoughtful way for some time afterward—not in anger or contempt (he had actually taken his father’s hand after a minute, and had sat with him quietly by the river), but with that same questioning expression, making his father feel inept, unwise.

Later he saw Billy walking alone across the clearing, trying to work everything out.
The little boy was talking to himself; he stopped and raised his arms and let them fall again, walking onward.

Toward dawn, Billy opened his eyes, strained forward, then fell back from life with a look of wonderment, staring ahead of him as at something astonishing, his small face wide-eyed, the clean mouth slightly parted, as if he were about to say, “Hey, Pa!
C’mere, Pa!
Lookit!”

Hazel stiffened like an animal pierced through the spine.
She made a tiny peeping sound, like a baby chick (now how in the world does she make a sound like that?) and Leslie wept, simply and quietly (well, Leslie, please forgive me).
It was Leslie who closed the wide blue eyes (now why is he doing that to Bill?).
Martin got down upon his knees and opened up the eyes again with a gasp of love and stared deep into them, but they were glazing so rapidly that all he could see was a mirror of his own disbelief.
He took the dead boy in his arms.
Billy’s body was so warm, and he still had that soft powdery smell that he had had as a small baby.
“Good-bye, Bill!”
he cried out, clutching him tight.
“Oh Bill, oh Billy, listen—!”
When Leslie touched his shoulder, he eased the body down again.
Leslie closed the eyes a second time, and all three prayed.

“As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we
are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.
Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.…”

I
N
the morning, on the highest ground, Martin and Leslie dug a grave.
Martin made a heavy red cross of mahogany; this was planted as a headstone.
The Indians watched him, but made no effort to assist.
Death was not inevitable; death was unnatural; the failure to name an enemy they saw as cowardice, and the rapidity of the funeral, with the imprisonment of Billy’s spirit in the dark cold earth, was an insult to the dead.

Nevertheless, Kori’s men remained that morning in the village, and so did the wild Niaruna, and though Quarrier spoke the funeral service in English, every Indian was present in a sullen circle, and every one of them stared angrily at Hazel’s stony grief, offended that she did not wail and tear her hair.

“Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.…”