At Play in the Fields of the Lord (47 page)

A
T
T
WO
-B
ENDS
-
IN
-
THE
-R
IVER
,
HE CAME TO THE FIRST RAPIDS
.
T
HE
canoe met the rapids broadside, slopping in so much water that when it came again into an open stretch it spun in a slow circle, like a derelict tree.
An eddy carried it across a submerged sand bar, and here he found footing and hauled the prow onto the bank, so that the water sloshed into the stern.
The malaria was gaining on him, sending advance parties into his brain and body; to warm himself, he tore a large rubbery leaf from a wild fig and with this bailed the canoe, hoisting the water out with both arms.
He found hard sap to caulk a split near the canoe’s water line; one bullet had lodged itself in the dead body.
The matting had unwound, exposing the face with its open eyes in sun-flecked shadow; Boronai retained a dignity which ants and flies and two days’ tropic heat had not been able to undo.

Well, he thought, seeing the wound, your bleeding days are over.

When he went ashore, his plan had been to jettison the body,
the smell of which was strong on the soft airs.
But now the canoe was bailed and caulked, he had taken the dead man’s paddle from the mat and was ready to set off, and still the body lay there.
He did not want to touch it.
He took the canoe by the gunwale to tip it over, then stopped and let it down again.

He was hungry and cold, and felt afraid.
When strong and well, with most at stake, he had often risked death as a part of life; how strange it was that the less alive he felt, the more he was afraid to die.
Dismayed by his loss of nerve, he took hold of the canoe again and dumped Boronai into the water.
He forced himself to meet the flat gaze of the corpse, which revolved once and sank away into the current.

The malaria was draining him of strength; he felt poisoned.
The ache in his arms had spread throughout his limbs, and now it seeped into his lungs.
He reviled his superstitions, tried to gag, but the bad feeling filled his chest like a huge stone and would not pass.

Below the next rapids, on his left hand, was the creek mouth known as Pariu; up those shadowy streams lay the high ground where Tukanu had led the remnants of his people.
This stretch of river, walled with flowering lianas, was sewn in quiet harmonies by the bright arcs of barbets bounding across the bends and eddies and the gold bronze of the open water; small fish dozed in sunny pools under the banks, and a green
jesuchristo
lizard on a low branch caught the sun on its bright eye and signaled him.
As he neared, the basilisk dropped from its limb, legs flying, and ran miraculously across the water surface into the undergrowth.

He found no peace in the still river; he had the sense of light and death.
In the country of the Ocelot he was not safe; he crouched low as an animal in the canoe.
He was scarcely below the Pariu when canoes appeared along the bank.
It was too late to slip ashore.
He forced himself to slide under Boronai’s mat and lie there wide-eyed like the body of the dead man.

From the forest edge a moan went up, like wind:
“Wai-Boronai!
Wai-Boronai!”
The savages had crowded forward; he could see them as he passed, without raising his head.
They were a war party, in macaw-and-monkey headdresses and paint, with
white clay drawn like snakes on their brown legs; there were more than twenty warriors, with three canoes like a flotilla in the shadows.
Aeore was there and so was the Ocelot, and the Ocelot was wearing Tukanu’s red shirt.

With Tukanu one bright river morning he had watched a huge pirarucu in the copper water.
Kisu-Mu?
Kin-wee?
Kin-wee?
—he tried to blot out that heavy face of brutal innocence.
Tukanu was squatting on the sun-warmed sand, his broad feet strong as roots.
Ho, Kisu-Mu?

Where was New Person?
He longed to rear up in the death canoe and threaten them, longed to charge the bank and rip that cheap shirt from the Indian’s back and tear it into bits.

Behind him a fresh jabbering arose.
Fear and malaria together shook him; he struggled to hold still.
The voices faded; he listened for the soft stroke of a paddle.
But there was only the whisper of the river, a lone raucous note of some disgruntled bird.
Then, as the current turned him in slow circles, he saw behind him, through the branches of the river bend, a kneeling Indian in a black canoe.

He grabbed Boronai’s paddle and dug viciously at the water.
But he could not hope to outdistance his pursuer, and a moment later he put down the paddle and took out his revolver.
The bad feeling filled his chest again, and he shook his head; he gave a great shudder, and the trembling stopped.
Screw him, he thought.

Screw it all.

Aeore made no attempt to hide himself; as the river widened and its stretches lengthened, he was constantly in view, in upright silhouette against the western sun.
He closed the distance quickly, without haste.
Moon yelled at him across the silence to come no closer; the kneeling figure placed his bow in readiness across the thwarts, and then came on again.

One moment Aeore’s black silhouette loomed enormous, like the spirit of the Great Ancestor Witu’mai, and in the next it was shadowy and indistinct.
Fighting his dizziness, Moon pointed the revolver and blinked to clear his sight.
“O Riri’an!”
he roared.
But he knew that the Indian was steadfast, and did not call out
to him again.
Leaning back into the stern and steadying both wrists on the gunwale, he braced his gun hand with the other and sighted the weapon on the green stone cylinder that now hung on Aeore’s breast.
The Indian’s outline blurred and broke apart; when it reassembled, it was taking up the bow and arrows.
Moon took a deep breath, held it, and squeezed slowly on the trigger.

The crash of gunfire in the wild trees awakened him.
Aeore’s bow arm had relaxed and the arrow fell into the flood, and Aeore sprawled sideways in the first clumsiness of his life.

The lean canoe, still moving on the impetus of the Indian’s final stroke, coasted alongside.

“Ai Kisu,”
the Indian’s voice said vaguely.
“Ai Kisu hai miniti u.”

The painted boy was shot through the chest, below the heart.
Head on the gunwale, eyes staring out across the water, he was breathing steadily, his mouth parted like the mouth of a child about to witness something marvelous.
“Ai Kisu, nepa miniti u.
Ai Kisu hai miniti u.
Ai Kisu hai u perai’na Riri’an.”

O Kisu, I did not believe.
O Kisu, hear me; I believe.
O Kisu, hear the Child-Star calling.

He climbed into Aeore’s canoe, letting his own drift alongside.
He touched the revolver to Aeore’s temple, but could not bring himself to pull the trigger.
What was happening?
Something of himself was dying; his mind zigzagged like a fly, alighting everywhere and zipping away in the same instant; his ears were ringing, and his heart shriveled with an intense cold.

He stared up at the sky as he pulled the trigger, and the light pierced his own skull in a burst of crystal.
He screamed, hurling the revolver from him; it wobbled clumsily through the air and struck a gash in the soft, silent current.

H
E
lifted the head of the dead warrior, and taking achote and genipa from the net of fetishes and decorations at Aeore’s feet, renewed on the warm face the streaks of red and black.
Already a glaze had come to the hungry eyes.
He left them unclosed, as Boronai’s eyes had been, so that the spirit might
guide the canoe on the journey eastward to the sun.
He rolled the body and belongings into Aeore’s reed mat, pausing each moment to conserve his strength.
Then he propped the whole bundle, face up, in the stern of the canoe.

Since he did not know the sacramental phrases, he simply raised his arms toward the sky and summoned the attention of the Great Ancestor.
“O Witu’mai!”
Afterward he held his arms raised and his gaze heavenward for a long time, his mind blank and dead.

B
ORONAI
’
S
canoe, freed of his weight, had been rescued by the wind from the main current, and now turned peacefully in the side eddies upriver.
Too weak to swim or paddle to the bank and drag himself back upstream, he considered dumping Aeore into the torrent and taking the black canoe.

He listened uneasily to the stillness of the river, peered at the encircling green battlements and at the sky.
Aeore’s face made him more uneasy still; he crept forward and dragged the mat over the face, then fell back again into the bow.
They would travel east together.

A
T
twilight the thick tired leaves turned limp and the night creatures stirred.
They passed down chasms of dark trees into an underworld.

That first night it rained.
The dugout slid past one Yuri Maha village, then another, without incident.
In the gray dawn of the next morning, on a roiled river that had widened and grown slow, he saw a derelict craft snared on the bank.
He stroked toward shore, but reached the bank well below it.
Pulling at branches so violently that his hands bled, he hauled himself far back upstream before he saw that the canoe contained an Indian corpse.

That morning there were several death canoes, trailing and bobbing under the banks.
How many others had slipped past unseen during the night; how many had foundered or were still
ahead of him, turning slowly in the eddies; how many more, before the influenza ran its course, would drift away from the villages on the Tuaremi …

With a wind and rain of evening his fever rose anew.
He quaked so that he knew he must disintegrate; the pouring water was his blood.
The wind sent the ugly river chop scudding upstream, and on the shore the undergrowth lashed wildly, as if chained to earth; moaning and straining, it reached out at him.
He crouched in the stern, shrunk up like a wet spider; behind the mat at the far end of the canoe, the rotting eyes attended him.
Enough, enough: he gripped the gunwales until his forearms ached, and watched the rain pour down his fingers.

The canoe descended the mad river in wild turnings, striking the banks in long slow caroms; the mat slipped and the corpse rose a little, half afloat, to watch him.
And Boronai—in the deep mud currents far below, Boronai’s body accompanied them, bumping soundlessly past sunken trees.
Across the wind came the toll of the white bellbird; he thrashed to free the canoe from a dragging bush and fell back again, head spinning.

Then the world flew to pieces in waste and profusion, and did not reassemble.

H
EAT
.
The lunatic ringing of cicadas, like rusty gears of an old universe.

Overhead, a creak of wings, and water feeding greedily upon itself beneath the branches.
An insect gnawed gently at his temple, seeking access to his brain.
The stink of putrefaction—whose?
Was God so dead?
He laughed.
He coughed.
The insects reconvened.

The sun killed the tree and pierced its skeleton; on black branches, silhouetted by the sun’s dead yellow eye, black fossil birds creaked brittle feathers.
The dead birds craned and peered, through a foul mist.
“What do you see?”
he whispered.
“What is it that you
see?
”