At Play in the Fields of the Lord (41 page)

This address was delivered from the stern of the dugout, from which he refused to budge; then he started up the motor in an attempt at flight, slamming the motor into reverse and churning
backward.
Quarrier, who had leaped for the boat’s liana, was yanked headfirst down the muddy bank into the water, but he held on long enough for Huben and Xantes to rush to his assistance.
For one wild ecumenical moment the three holy men, grunting and thrashing in the mud and water, did violent battle with their maddened convert and his outraged machine.
Then the clutch slipped and the engine’s roar exploded in the jungle morning; the motor belched smoke as Yoyo howled, and the canoe lashed back and forth like a dying dragon.
When the motor stalled, they drew the boat ashore.
Quarrier seized the raging Indian and hauled him out onto the bank and shook him.

The priest was vexed at having soiled his habit, and Huben was enraged that his wife was laughing.
Quarrier too was extremely angry; he was wet and muddy, he had wrenched his knee and was in pain, and worst of all, he had lost his last pair of glasses in the river.
This was such a blow that for the moment he did not even wish to think about it; he stood there blinking, trying to regain his breath.
Andy was laughing, and although he saw precisely why she laughed, and shared every drop of her despair, he could not laugh himself for fear he might not stop.

He still held Yoyo tightly by the arm.
Hatred had drawn the Tiro’s small dark face so taut that Quarrier, startled, released him as he might release a snake.
Yoyo’s hand flicked to his hip; though he did not draw the knife, he did not bother to disguise the gesture.
He simply stood there, half turned, body coiled, not even breathing, in his white-man’s haircut, his Indian tattoos and the red shirt which, exposing his crucifix, was so large for him that it covered the mission shorts and hung on his bare brown legs like a baby’s frock; his yellow eyes were slightly averted, like the eyes of an angry dog expecting to be struck.

Padre Xantes told Yoyo that he was needed to guide Quarrier to the Niaruna, that his was an important mission, that he would be well paid.
Yoyo neither moved nor spoke.
He did not return the priest’s good-bye, or even wince as Padre Xantes, navigating with suspicion and distaste, turned the canoe clumsily about and started downriver.

The skirted forms were soon so indistinct to Quarrier’s poor
vision that he never knew if anyone returned his wave.
This did not matter much, since he himself could not have truly said which of the women he was waving to.

When the boat had gone, he and Huben searched for the glasses in the soft mud along the bank.
Leslie poked vaguely at the mud; at one point he reared up in irritation and ordered the Tiro to come and help them.
This worsened matters; all three stood stiff until Yoyo broke the triangle, coming slowly down the bank like a man entranced.
They hunted together, bent-backed, in the brown slow current of the Espíritu.
Finally Yoyo straightened, followed by Huben.
Quarrier hunted for a little while longer, his bare feet flinching in his fear of stingrays and electric eels as he moved farther from shore; he only hunted to forestall his dread of sightlessness, and soon he too gave up and climbed out on the bank.

“Well, Yoyo!”
He tried to smile.
“I’ll need you all the more now that I’m blind.”

The Tiro gazed at him without expression.

Quarrier changed his clothes and prepared to leave.
Huben grew more irritable each moment.
He began by questioning the priest’s warning; perhaps Guzmán had accepted their assurance that no help was needed.
And what made Quarrier think that Aeore’s men would not kill him the moment he appeared?
Quarrier said nothing.
The presence of Yoyo, Huben pointed out, was no guarantee, but the reverse; the Niaruna had already taken Tiro life and would not hesitate to take another, especially if the Tiro was friendly with the whites.
For Quarrier to go alone and half blind into Niaruna territory was suicidal; far better to wait and see if Guzmán came, to prepare the boats for flight, to stick together.
“We could put up the barbed wire!”
Leslie said.

Finally he pointed at Yoyo.
“Do you give yourself the right to place this man’s life in jeopardy?”

Leslie was afraid to go with Quarrier into the jungle, but he was also afraid of being left alone.
Martin understood this and was sympathetic; in Huben’s place, with everything to hope for—entirely unsustained, that is, by hopelessness—he too would refuse to go.

Leslie was yanking desperately at the balky rolls of wire, and cut his hands; he seized at every straw of solace, following Quarrier a little way into the forest, then darting back quickly to his wire.
“Listen, Martin, you’ll be back today now, without fail?
Martin?
Can you still hear me, Martin?”
He was only a few yards away, a thin silhouette in the light of the clearing.

Quarrier turned.
“If I’m not back by tomorrow morning, you’d better leave.”

“Tomorrow morning!
Before dark, you mean!”

“I don’t know how far it is,” Quarrier called.
“It may be a long way.”

He started off again.
Ahead of him, Yoyo waited.
Behind him he heard Leslie call, then call again, his voice much higher.
Through the jungle gloom, the lost words searched like spirits of the forest: “Martin?”
A pause, a twig, a dry pod falling from the canopy.
“God damn you, Martin Quarrier!
Why don’t you answer me?”

Already Yoyo had picked out the trail, drifting so far ahead that Quarrier kept losing him.
The bright red of Yoyo’s shirt, spinning in the funebrial shades like a huge butterfly, lured him farther and farther from the light; but for the shirt he would scarcely have known that he had a guide at all, for the Indian’s feet and tongue were silent.
Several times he had to shout for him; the huge dead weight of leaves submerged his voice.

The penalty of blindness kept increasing; he hurried along, tripping and stumbling, sinking to his knees in murky holes.
What was there to stop Yoyo from abandoning him, or worse?
And the terror drew tighter each time the Indian reappeared, for he never came from the direction Quarrier expected but would materialize from behind, as if he had followed for some time, listening to the white man shout.
Quarrier could not make out his face, but he could imagine the hard mask through which the thin flat Mongol eyes observed him.

It occurred to him that Yoyo meant to kill him.
Abruptly he would wave the Tiro ahead, though he never knew just where ahead should be.
He had lost all track of time, and all direction, all orientation of any kind with anything he had ever known; he
wanted to pray but was no longer confident that God would hear.
He had lost all sense of things; in the absence of air and space, of light and sky, he circled aimlessly in the dense core of a huge ball.
The feeling that Yoyo meant to kill him grew; he plunged ahead, clambering and falling, pursuing and fleeing the Indian in the same impulse.

The red shirt halted unaccountably, not far ahead.
He caught up, gasping with exhaustion, his ears ringing; it seemed to him that he heard voices.
The Indian moved ahead, muttering crazily; he seemed on the point of bolting.
Soon light appeared, and as they neared the clearing, a loud whooping arose; Quarrier whirled to see three savages who had been escorting them.
Two more drifted in on Yoyo’s flanks, and now the whole group moved out into the sunlight in a blinding din of dogs and sun and macaws.

Yoyo snapped at him, “Son-of-a-whore, they are going to kill us!”

Naked Indians surrounded them.
The air felt charged; he expected to be struck down at any second.
He found his voice and cried out, “Moon!
I wish to speak with Moon!”
But he could not find Moon’s painted face among the savages.

“J
ESU
-M
OON
,” M
OON ANSWERED HIM AT LAST
,
IN A FLAT VOICE
.
H
E
was incensed by Quarrier’s intrusion, by the ugliness of his fright, the blind agonized eyes, the stumbling, the hands outstretched, the muddy rags.

As if goaded, Quarrier plunged forward, his big hands rising up in fists; Tukanu brought him up short by swinging his chonta lance across his shins.
Quarrier grunted in pain.
“So you’ve told them you are Jesus!”

“Yee-zuss!”
Tukanu exclaimed, and laughed.
He seized a lock of the missionary’s hair and yanked it out; when Quarrier fell, the other Indians crowded forward.

Moon sat down and gazed at the sprawled missionary.
He wondered where Aeore had gone.
“No,” he said, after a time.
“They told
me
that I was Kisu.
I didn’t know who Kisu was.”
He explained that Kisu, the bringer of flood, was the most feared of all Niaruna spirits; the benevolent Great Ancestor was named Witu’mai.
Quarrier coughed and shook his head; he had never heard of Witu’mai.
His big head kept on shaking.

Kisu was actually called Kish’tu; probably it was Yoyo who, to ease his labor as interpreter, had identified Kish’tu with the “Jesu” of Padre Xantes, and come up with the “Kisu” adopted by both sides.
When Kish’tu was not treated with respect, he brought the bad floods of certain rainy seasons.

Moon paused, then said almost idly, “Perhaps you understand now why they are resentful of you, why they fear Jesus Christ.”

Quarrier kept nodding.
His face had gone pale and slack, and his large crude head was bent sideways on his neck like the head of a sunflower on a broken stalk.
Moon could not stop; he would have relished telling Quarrier about Kisu all over again in this same remorseless way.
The missionary’s dogged hope was too raw to endure; it was unbearable.
He would flay that unspeakable hope of his, flay the straining pale white hopeful hulk of him—he shivered and ground his teeth.
He felt himself in poor control, and recognized the onset of malaria.

“All this time,” Moon said, “you have taught them that your Jesu was their Kisu.
In other words, you taught them that the white man’s God was an angry and evil spirit; you asked them to love their evil spirit.”
He winced at Quarrier’s expression, and turned away.
Enough, he thought.
Enough, enough.
Yet it was all he could do not to vent his frustration on the wretched missionary by knocking him senseless as he sat there.
Quarrier looked stunned and stupid, like a man hit on the neck.
He was murmuring the news and the warning brought in by the priest; he refrained from pointing out that had Moon stayed away from the mission and from Andy, the epidemic would not have occurred.

Nor did he point out that Moon’s presence in the tribe need never have been known; it would have seemed as if the Niaruna had organized and were negotiating for themselves of their own accord, as Moon had planned.
But now Guzmán had been given the excuse he needed to make the problem of the Niaruna a political and governmental matter rather than a legal and administrative one.
And until the influenza had run its course, the tribe would be in no condition to resist the punitive expedition, which might appear at any time.
Moon could undo all his work by
persuading the Indians to scatter into the jungle; the alternative was an open war in which too many Niaruna would die.

Moon sat in silence.
He had given drugs to all the people in the village, and thought that most would be spared.
But a child whose parents refused the white man’s drugs had died the day before, and many others were very sick.
Furthermore, the germs had been transmitted to the Yuri Maha through the emissaries who had come to the village since the feast; there was not enough medicine to control an epidemic, even if all the tribes could be persuaded to drop their enmities and suspicions long enough to assemble for treatment.
Already the village suspected the Yuri Maha of having poisoned their own allies in the federation.

When Quarrier had delivered his message, he and Moon were silent once again.
Then Quarrier cried, “Do you realize what I have taught these people?
Not only that Jesus Christ is evil, but that the Christian God is identical with one of their many gods—I don’t wonder the poor fellows were confused!”
Turning to Yoyo, who was shoved forward at Moon’s signal, he asked the Tiro why he had never mentioned Witu’mai.

“Hijo de puta!”
the Indian spat.
“Misionero es maricón!”
But seeing Moon’s face, he lost his nerve and began to yell that Huben had wanted the name of the great Niaruna god; was that not Kish’tu?
How could Yoyo know that he meant Witu’mai, who was beneficent but lived so far off in the sky?
Yoyo was naked to the waist because Tukanu had stripped him of his bright red shirt, and Moon ordered the infuriated man placed under guard lest he flee and return again as Guzmán’s guide; the Indian was led away, chattering wildly with fear and hatred, and glaring back over his shoulder at the missionary.

“Well,” Moon said, “you people made things easier for me.
They believed, at least at first, that
I
was Kisu, which is why they did not kill me.”

“It’s hard to know then,” Quarrier said, “in which way I have served them worse.”
He tried to smile, but he could not.

Scratching on the earth with sticks, the two men faced each other.
Then Tukanu came and bellowed in Moon’s ear, and
Moon got slowly to his feet.
“Huben’s run out on you,” Moon said to Quarrier.
He walked away without telling the man what he had learned: that Aeore and his men, without consulting him, had gone to the mission to kill Leslie Huben.
Had not Huben threatened and insulted them?
The Niaruna would not be safe until their enemy was dead.

In the heat and tension of the village, the children seemed to tiptoe; the smallest leaves were still.
Aeore was angry that Huben had fled down the Espíritu before he could be killed; this was a bad omen, and he stared malevolently at Moon.
The void between them opened further, as if the Indian were standing on the far side of a canyon, beyond reach of Moon’s voice.

Moon thought, He will kill Quarrier, and there is nothing I can do to stop him.
Boronai, who might have helped, was dying.

B
ECAUSE
Boronai was the headman, the owner of the maloca, his death would mean that the whole village would have to be abandoned and a new one erected elsewhere, and this at a season when the plantations were still full of manioc and wild food was scarce.
A new planting of manioc could not be made and harvested in less than half a year.
The grief in the village was strident and sincere.

Moon did not dare tell Aeore that the white men were on their way; in his present temper, Aeore would fight them.
Encouraged by the Ocelot, who was still living in the village, he had been advocating not only an attack on the mission but also on the Tiro villages on the Espíritu, all the way to Remate de Males.
Until now Aeore and his men had deferred to Kisu-Mu and Boronai, accepting the theory that the Tiro had guns and would be supported by Green Indians.
But his men were less afraid of guns than of committing themselves irrevocably to Aeore, whom they saw as too eager for command, too arrogant, like the Ocelot, his Yuri Maha clansman.
Their doubt had maddened Aeore the more, for he felt he had lost face; he made no secret of his contempt for the clans of Boronai.
In recent days his
hostility toward Kisu-Mu had grown so overt that Moon now wore his pants continually, to keep his revolver handy in his belt.

In the afternoon Moon paid his last respects to Boronai.
Each Indian stood in line to take the headman’s hand between both of his own: the men first, then the male children, then the women and girls.
They did not exchange words with the dying man, who watched them howl and weep, without expression.
Boronai looked no worse than he had for several days; if anything, his fever had receded and his eyes had cleared.
But after so many seasons with the tribe, Moon did not question the Indian instinct for the presence of death.
Boronai himself had given up the struggle and accepted death, and this quiet resignation of the flesh was instantly apparent to his fellows; from that moment on, the headman was no longer sick but dead, and was so referred to.
“He is dead” meant “he is finished, he has given up.”
By this criterion, Moon reflected, half the people he had known in life could be regarded as defunct.

Quarrier had followed him into the maloca, and his presence there made a bad situation worse.
Moon’s inability to weep for Pindi had already caused resentment, and this time the Indians studied him to see what he would do.
In this closed world, good manners were more crucial than true feelings; those Indians who had visited Boronai, their duty done, stopped howling and weeping the instant they released his hand.
But Kisu-Mu’s silence was a flagrant discourtesy, first to his woman and now to the dying headman.
The Indians watched him as he approached, watched the strange white man who stumbled after him, whispering avid questions; this too was a cause for resentment.

Moon took Boronai’s hand as the others had done, and the old man, who only the year before had been a strong Indian of middle age, gazed peacefully into his face.
According to Tukanu, the dying man felt that Kisu-Mu had caused his death; yet a spirit was not necessarily an enemy.
The mild eyes seemed to know that Kisu-Mu was fond of him, despite the failure to weep and howl.
But when Moon, too guilt-ridden to give up Boronai in silence, said to him, “Good-bye, my friend,” the headman
frowned at this breach of custom and withdrew his hand.
To Quarrier, coming next, he refused his hand entirely, and when the missionary, not understanding, groped for it, Boronai muttered angrily and swung his arm away.
The onlookers groaned in disapproval, and Quarrier retreated, following Moon into the yard.

When the last infant had been held up and its hand placed on that of Boronai, Aeore painted the older man with fresh streaks of achote and placed on his head a crown of feathers from the harpy eagle, to give dignity to his departure; after this he was left alone in his hammock.
Though he seemed alert, he was not offered food or water, nor did he ask for any.
The cooking and breast-feeding and the scraping of manioc on the thorn boards went on about him; because the plantations would have to be abandoned, the women had harvested as many tubers as they could, drying the surplus in the sun to make a coarse farina they could take away with them.
Dressed in his eagle crown, Boronai observed their preparations, ignored because already dead.

But at Boronai’s death the next afternoon, a cry rose as it had for Pindi.
The women and children, forbidden to look upon the body, ran into the jungle.
As the children’s cries rang among the trees, the men came trotting to the maloca in somber files.
Moon helped them lay out a reed mat in which Boronai was rolled up with his bows and arrows, his shell strings and his paddle; his canoe was brought and the wrapped body laid in it.
Then Aeore chanted a eulogy and a promise of revenge.
He invoked the Ancestors and the Great Spirit Witu’mai; he spoke of the gentle soul of Boronai which was the soul of Tukituk, the tanager, and as he did so, some of the others wept without ceremony.
Then the canoe was carried to the river.
It would drift for many moons toward the East, toward the Ocean River Amazonas, toward the Great Sea of Life.
There, in the bright morning where the Sun was born, the canoe would sink, and Boronai’s spirit would return into that sky from which, as a star, it had first descended.