At Play in the Fields of the Lord (21 page)

Finally, Quarrier disliked the presence in the camp of four Quechua soldiers, with their dim notions of Catholicism—not that the Quechuas and Kori’s Niaruna mixed, for the soldiers, given their heads, would have shot down their compatriots at a moment’s notice.
But he felt certain that the wild bands would not come in so long as the soldiers were in camp; he asked Leslie to take the Quechuas away.
He felt perfectly safe without the soldiers, he said; if the mission had not been attacked in the first month, the chances were that it would not be attacked at all.
Kori, when asked by Huben if he agreed, nodded vigorously, for it was his principle to agree with everything the gringo said and with nothing said by his own people, of whom he was deeply ashamed.

Quarrier felt well-nigh omnipotent at the prospect of his own calling.
Even the jungle excited him, especially in those mysteries of early day, with the huge trees shifting in the sun and vapors like tattered masts, the dense smell of flowers from the river walls, the cool clear bells of the forest voices and the thunder of red howler monkeys, like oncoming storm.
Hunting along the river, he and Leslie and Billy had started wild pig and capybara from the banks and sand bars, and had glimpsed an ocelot and a shy tapir.
The birds like jewels, the kaleidoscopic butterflies, the banks of pink mimosa and purple tonka bean astonished him; the jungle seemed a kind of Eden.
Billy was so excited that his happy voice seemed part of the clear forest triumph, absorbed and refracted, echoing back.

Then the rains came crashing down, and in the humid spells between, Quarrier knew what Hazel dreaded: the oppression of the jungle, the poisonous green flesh and weight of it.
Its latent violence crawled on his skin like fever, causing him to shake and sweat.

The rains had scarcely ceased when the Hubens left, taking the soldiers with them.
In his doubts about this day, Quarrier had all but put it from his mind, and he found himself unprepared
to see them off.
He still had need of Huben’s experience and assistance, and most of all of Huben’s faith.
Staring down into Andy’s wistful face as she smiled up at him from the canoe, he knew that she was going off with part of him attached to her, as if his body would be subtly torn, as if he would now slowly bleed to death.
To hide his agony from his wife, he played the fool, taking the risk that Hazel would interpret his noisy cheer as last-minute doubt about the advisability of sending back the soldiers.
The Quechuas yawned at him from the canoe, unmoved by his wave of parting.

Leslie cried, “God bless the Mart Quarrier Family!
You have the Almighty command to
go!
” Andy Huben called, “God bless you.”
Her face was still misted by her parting with Billy, who was so hurt and disappointed by her desertion that he had spoken rudely and was now throwing mud balls out into the river, close to her canoe.

Quarrier knew what his son was feeling; he felt like throwing mud balls of his own.
Himself in need, he could not help his wife, whose emotion was causing her to pant.
Red hands clasped white, she stood flat-footed in her best black shoes and dress of hearts and roses, staring at all of them as if they were a pack of hostile strangers.
What’s happening?
her wild eyes seemed to cry.

Leslie gunned his motor, and the overloaded dugout turned downstream.
Even after the Hubens had disappeared, the river was watched by the Mart Quarrier Family.
Standing there as the silence grew, they could not look at one another, and hardly spoke for the remainder of that day.

The jungle walls had crowded in much closer.
Kori looked furtive; the mission might be under scrutiny at this very moment.
The wild men were right there behind the trees, doubtless plotting an attack now that the soldiers had departed.
For the first time in days Quarrier remembered the fate of poor Fuentes, in this very place.
So nervous was he that he had to force himself to check the gift racks, and he felt exhausted by his effort to show calm for Hazel’s benefit.
But his wife’s morale had risen with the departure of the Hubens; she worked busily, almost cheerfully.
And while he was grateful for this change, he found it strange—was this the cheerfulness, he wondered, of the Christian martyrs?
Watching Billy, he was racked with doubt about his decision to dismiss the soldiers, and prayed twice during the day for Divine counsel.

H
E
was awakened a few days later by a high whining angry singsong from the clearing.
Kori, facing the jungle wall, was speaking too rapidly for Martin to follow.
When the old man finished, a voice came back out of the jungle, also in rapid singsong and also angry; this voice was not whining.
Dressing clumsily, in haste, Quarrier came out into the clearing, holding his hands clear of his sides to show that he was unarmed.

A naked man stepped forth out of the shadows.
He was a strong, stolid Indian of middle age, in a crown of monkey fur and toucan feathers, arm bands of fiber and hide ankle thongs, with a necklace of two jaguar incisors set back to back, tips to each side, and a fiber band strapping his penis upright to his belly.
His rectangular face was streaked with red
achote
, and twin serpents were painted on his legs.
He was followed a moment later by two younger men.
The savages carried short lances and bows and arrows, and all three gazed unrelentingly at Quarrier as he walked forward.

In a thick voice he called out, “Welcome!
Welcome to the Niaruna people!
Welcome, friends!”
He had rehearsed this greeting many times, but now it resounded in his ears as false and frightened.
Kori gesticulated angrily, then folded his arms on his chest; his people chattered nervously among themselves.
In the half-dressed state imposed upon them by the missionaries, Kori’s people lacked any dignity: the eight men in ragged trousers fell back before the three wild Niaruna from the jungle, who showed their contempt by disregarding them.
The savages did not respond to Quarrier’s greeting, but neither did they retreat as he walked toward them.

Over his shoulder Quarrier called to Billy to bring three machetes and a mirror; the boy came flying, barefoot and unbuttoned.
When Quarrier took the gifts from him, the man in the monkey crown grunted and snapped his head, chattering rapidly at Kori; Kori yelled out in his dreadful Spanish that Boronai wished to receive the gifts from the child.
Billy retrieved the three machetes, which he carried against his chest like logs of wood, and his father laid the mirror on top of them, instructing him to give the mirror to the man wearing the crown.
In this instant the vulnerability and beauty of his little boy, mouth wide, eyes shining with good will and expectation, took Quarrier’s breath away; he wished to say something to his son, but there was nothing to be said.

Billy ran forward, and unable to see the ground, sprawled on his face; the Indians in both groups laughed.
But when Quarrier approached to make sure that Billy had not cut himself, the naked men raised their bows.
Quarrier stopped.
Then, ignoring a shout from Kori, he moved forward again, holding his arms wide, and helped Billy to his feet; the latter, unhurt, had gathered the gifts while still on his knees, but could not rise under the load.

The Indians lowered their bows.
When the mirror and machetes were delivered, the man removed the monkey crown from his own head and placed it on the head of Billy.
The child fled back toward his father, leaping like a goat.
But Boronai stopped smiling when the white man extended his hand toward the Indians; again Kori called,
“Gringo, no vengas.”

Hazel came out with a large bowl of rice.
She walked without a tremor, and Quarrier smiled at her in a flood of gratitude and admiration.
She did not flinch when one of the younger savages pointed at her and then at Quarrier, and resting his weapons on his shoulder, jammed one forefinger back and forth through the fingers of his other hand, nudging his companion as he did so.
She placed the bowl upon the ground, between her husband and the Indians, then retired out of sight.

Quarrier sat down before the bowl, his son beside him.
Pointing at it, he made an eating motion with his fingertips.
The three savages came forward and squatted on their haunches; one shifted sideways to keep an eye on Kori’s men.
When Kori himself
approached the feast, this young warrior raised his lance as to a dog.
Kori yelled at him, but came no farther.

Quarrier was dry-mouthed with excitement, and a vast relief poured through his body.
Exultantly he said to Billy, “The Lord be praised, Bill—oh, the Lord be praised!”
Billy whispered, “These are real ones, you found the
real
ones—that’s more than Mr.
Huben did!”
The child’s words made him laugh aloud; he recognized the happiest moment of his life.

Then the hard-faced young Indian who had driven Kori from the feast reached forward with his new machete and jabbed Quarrier sharply in the chest; Boronai and the other man, who had stopped eating, grunted in angry approval.
For in his excitement, in his conviction that the Lord had blessed his decision to dismiss the soldiers, that for the first time in his ten years of mission work he had actually accomplished something in Jesus’ name, Quarrier had so forgotten his own knowledge of Indian ways as to reach into the bowl of rice; he had had some vague idea of demonstrating that the food was not poisoned.
When the Indian jabbed the steel into his chest, he dropped the rice slowly back into the bowl and despite his pain tried to smile; at the same time he grasped Billy’s arm, for the child had reached to stop the blade.

The Indian’s face was taut with a hostility beyond anything that Quarrier had ever seen—a flat hard squint between the fierce bands of charcoal and livid paint that made the wild eyes vibrate.
The gaze horrified Quarrier; he sat there, faint and stupid in the sunlight, feeling the warm blood trickle down his chest.

H
E DRIFTED DOWN A VAST BLUE SKY TOWARD THE MORNING
.

The empty plane slid peacefully away, back toward the west.
He mourned it: a derelict ship could be commandeered, but a derelict plane was irredeemable, droning blindly toward oblivion.
It was as if such a machine would never strike the ground, but must vanish soundlessly in some far corner of the heavens, in a burst of sun.
He was still a mile above the ground when the engine sputtered, coughed, sputtered again and failed, and in the enormous silence of the sky he watched his plane fall off the edge of life into its final glide.
The spectacle gave him a turn of vague uneasiness; the machine had only come alive as it was about to die.

The rush of silence in the wake of the dead engine left him face to face with his own apprehension; his remarkable plight startled him so that he cleared his throat to assure himself of his reality.
A few hours before, he could not have distinguished reality
from hallucination, and the one thing that persuaded him that he could do so now was his awareness that were he not still under the effects of
ayahuasca
, his lack of regret at this very moment could only be insane.
For here he was, on this fine morning, coming down from the sky in a parachute into which he was not even strapped, with a mile to go on the strength of arms already in such pain that they felt broken; unless he bound them more securely in the back harness, he was not sure they would hold out, and if he did bind them, he would be unable to work the shrouds to steer the parachute and would lose his chance, already remote, of landing in the Niaruna clearing.

High in the sun-white and whirling blue, he struggled to work a loop of harness over his shoulders and up under his arms.
A twisted shroud bound the revolver tight against his ribs, and the metal hurt him; he wished he had thrown it away.
Spurts of fear robbed him of strength.
He rested a moment, then brought his knees up to his chin and got one leg through a second loop, an arrangement which turned him on his side, like a trussed chicken.
This freed his arms to seize the shrouds; he was now able to haul himself upward to a better angle.
In this way, tied in knots, he continued his descent.

The airplane, still visible, was dropping as lightly as a leaf; it would disappear into the forest without a sound.

He hauled mightily on the shrouds nearest the clearing.
The day was windless, but there had been currents in the upper air that he had not gauged; he would fall short.
He slacked off on the near shrouds and hauled hard on the back ones, for if he had to fall short, he had better fall far enough away to give himself a little time; dangling from trees at the clearing edge while the Niaruna shot arrows at him was only the most unpleasant of the variations on his own death which now confronted him.

This much was in his favor: the Niaruna were in awe of the plane and therefore of the man who came to them out of the sky; if this coming were accompanied by the explosion of the plane, by the only loud sound they could ever have heard on a clear day, so much the better.
And the mere sight of the parachute’s
great white canopy should insure a respectful welcome; if he comported himself properly, they would have to accept him as some sort of deity.

At the same time, his safety now or later was so uncertain that the calm he felt must spring from another source.
Was it the
ayahuasca
then?
He did not think so, for the shock of the jump, with the struggles of the descent, had sobered him to the bone.

Swaying down out of the sun, with the calls of strange birds and the faint shreds of savage voices rising to meet him, he watched the plane crash as he had prophesied, in silence, in the distance, leaving the canopy through which it plunged all but unscarred, as if it had dived beneath the sea.
There was only a thin plume of smoke, invisible to the Indians, for with the wing tanks empty, the explosives had survived the crash.
And this was bad luck, for the plane had banked in its descent and had come down no more than a mile beyond the village.

By rough estimate he would strike perhaps a quarter-mile short of the clearing, near the river; there was a pocket in the trees on his line of drift, and he steered for that.
The Indians were still in view, running and howling like goblins; two men started across the clearing in his direction, then ran back again.

First the river, then the clearing disappeared.
He saw the far wall of the clearing, then the rolling greens, still sparkling with dew—green leaves, blue sky, a bright red bird.
He worked his leg out of the strap before the trees rushed up to seize him; he dropped through the canopy into the shadows.
His knees were bent for the roll and tumble when the chute caught on the middle tiers and stopped him short; stunned by the jolt, he swung helplessly in the forest gloom, some thirty feet above the ground.

In the seconds that he hung there, straining to hear if the shrieking and jabbering were coming closer, the explosives in the airplane ignited.
Though the roar was muted by the weight of vegetation, a thunder rumbled through the forest, stirring the leaves and echoing dully in the naves and somber avenues.
When it had passed, there came a silence so complete that a faint rain of
twig fragments on leaves a hundred feet above his head was clearly audible.

He was delighted, like a little boy astonished that his plan has worked; high in the air he cheered.
But a moment later he was shocked by the irrelevance of his own voice in this huge and awesome silence.
A wood moth with large eyes on its wings danced past his face as if he did not exist, and down the forest came the
tee-tee-too
of a cotinga; its live green flicked between dark trunks and was swallowed up again.

He worked quickly to free himself.
Then he was hanging from the harness by his hands.
He raised his knees in order to strike the ground with his legs bent, winced in advance, and dropped.
He hit and rolled in the soft humus of the forest floor, clambering to his feet in the same instant and pitching toward a shelter of high buttressed roots.
He crouched there, his heart pounding, the revolver in his hand.

In the first awareness of the object in his hand, he came close to panic.
Far from reassuring him, the revolver reminded him of his helplessness; its cold touch had broken through some vague protective spell.
He pressed back against the roots.
Alone in this darkness, with nowhere to hide, nowhere to flee, he felt like a creature fallen down a well; his fear would strangle him or stop his heart.
Even now the Niaruna, bows taut, on quick silent feet, were circling in upon him, and though he raged at himself that the Indians must not find him helpless, he could not move.

Be frightened then, but keep your mouth shut.
Sinking back, he let his limbs splay drunkenly.
In a few minutes the terror subsided and he was able to breathe freely and stand up.

He peeped over the root walls; for all he knew, a Niaruna warrior might be crouched on the far side of his own tree.
Then he straightened and shoved the revolver back into his belt.
He must not crouch or peep again, but must brazen it out like an immortal.

Except in rain, the great force in this nether world was silence; his first footsteps did not make a sound.
The forest was still as quiet as it had been since the explosion.
There was no air to stir the leaves, and no bird called.
Filtered through the tiers of
branches and the white silk of the parachute above, the morning light was vague and luminous, sepulchral, like the light in a dark cathedral; the brown-greeniness of the atmosphere was so tactile that he could rub it between his fingertips.
The forest life went on far overhead, in the green galleries; it was only in the sun space cleared by death and fall that new life could rise out of the forest floor.
Beneath his feet the ground was not ground at all, but a dark compost of slow seepings and rotted leaves which, starved of sun, reared nothing but low fungi; it gave off a thick, bitter smell of acid.

He sensed that he was still alone, but this feeling he did not trust, nor did he cling to it as a good omen.
Possibly the explosion had put the Indians to flight, but he could not count on this.
Any movement he made might be provocative and therefore dangerous, but he had the initiative and he must keep it.
He started toward the village.

Ahead of him a dog was barking; there was no sound of human voice.
He moved slowly, picking his way around the monstrous root masses of fallen trees, climbing over the dead trunks.
Far over his head, at the edge of light, loomed strange parasitic ropes and shapes, and hanging air plants and lianas, red bromelia, huge ant nests like excrescences on the high columns.
The enormous tree trunks, smooth and pale, disappeared into this riotous world, supporting it.

The bark of the dog, tentative at first, was now turned toward him, and was steady.
He was filled with rage against this dog, whose outcry tore his nerves; no matter how he chose to meet the Indians, its mindless yapping might weaken the aura of the supernatural that could save his life.
Perhaps he should signal his arrival by shooting it down with the revolver, but this thought was scarcely concluded when its barking rose to a high fit of shrieks and then subsided.
The silence sifted down again, like shifting vapor.

He was too tense now to reflect on this event, which only reminded him of human presence; at least one Indian had not run off in panic.
His hand strayed wistfully toward the revolver.
But except as a last resort, this was not his weapon: he had already
gauged his arsenal, which consisted of—in order of importance—the Descent from the Sky, the Explosion and the Initiative.
The first two were already spent, and the last was risky.

The quality of light had changed, and lianas entwined the lower trunks, and undergrowth, a wall of leaves—the jungle edge.
He was right on top of the Niaruna village.
He dropped to his hands and knees, then slid forward and a little to the right; he moved by inches, careful not to commit his hands without checking first for biting ants or worse.
There was a passage through the leaves, and a broken glimpse of the Indian clearing.
Through the coarse odors of the foliage, he caught faint smells of human excrement and wood smoke.
He wriggled forward, stretched close to the ground; a hunting wasp, night-blue in color, flicked back and forth before his face, then fretted, hard wings clicking, on a leaf.

A high-peaked maloca, perhaps eighty feet by twenty, occupied the back of the clearing, parallel to the river, with several round huts placed at random on the two remaining sides; the round huts were dilapidated, their doorways rank with weeds.
All of these structures were thatched with palm fronds, and camouflaged by ground and forest, like huge oven nests of birds.
Each had a single entry facing eastward.
The clearing itself was a bare ground littered with small fires and half-burned logs, rotting palm-leaf baskets, old torn matting, broken clay pots, wood mortars and pestles, an old dugout canoe used as a trough, a half-completed dugout, and near one of the fires, some coils of fresh clay for new pottery.
A vegetable patch half overgrown with passion-flower vines was visible behind the maloca, and behind this patch the manioc plantations, rude broken clearings of burned tree trunks and piled undergrowth, stretched inland from the river.

At the near edge of the clearing, not ten yards from his face, an orange dog lay in the sunlight, flanks twitching and dirt clotted on its tongue.
A long cane arrow with bright blue-and-yellow feathering protruded from its body just behind the upper forelegs.

To the left of the dog, on a stump beside a hut, sat a blue-and-yellow
macaw; the bird’s wings and tail were virtually denuded.
Its head was cocked, and it rolled its white eyelid up and down in a slow heavy blinking that was almost audible, as if to bring its bald eye into better focus; it shifted white fleshy feet upon the stump, but did not cry out.
In the silence the bird uttered one soft gargle of apprehension and was still.