At Play in the Fields of the Lord (33 page)

“In that pit of Satan they’ll be drunk day and night, cursing and blaspheming; that’s the Opposition for you!”
Leslie smote his fist into his palm.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll take them back tomorrow.
But from now on, Martin, try to remember which of us is Regional Director.”

Quarrier nodded.
“With your permission, I’ll check the gift racks.”

“Go ahead,” said Leslie Huben, patting him on the shoulder.

Each of the racks held a new machete, a steel ax head and a jar of salt.
At first Quarrier had checked them every morning, noon and twilight, but after a time he visited the racks only once a day, for fear that he might be scaring off the Indians.
He would move slowly from one rack to the next, saving until last the one on the jungle trail; this one would give him the first clue of Indian presence.
He could not get over a painful dread that his first clue might be a silent arrow, tipped with poison.

A
NDY
saw the second Indian, and the third and fourth.
One man appeared out of the forest by the river, standing clear of the tangle in plain view, only a few yards from her.
The Indian watched her calmly until, gathering up her wash, she got up off her knees; then he turned and disappeared.
The next day she saw another one, and perhaps two, a mere shifting of shadows in the trees.
Her husband attributed this latter sighting to her nerves, but Quarrier said that he had heard the Indians whistle, a sound like a cricket that they made with a small signal flute hung from the neck.
After that, although all three searched the jungle wall from dawn to dusk—the soldiers had been returned to Remate, and Hazel was oblivious—the Indians did not show themselves again for several days, nor were the gift racks touched.

The missionaries’ tension grew like fever.
Their suspense and fear were made still worse by Hazel, who spoke wildly of the jungle and could talk of nothing else, describing obscenely the obscenity of the flowering and rot, the pale phallic trunks and dark soft caverns, the rampant hair, the slime and infestations.
Once she ran naked from the hut at noon to sprawl and roll in the center of the clearing, writhing and howling, her arms extended to the forest, shivering as in a fit.
“He is here,” she cried, “Satan is in this place, and He will take me!”
Quarrier reached her first and took off his shirt to cover her; she was sweating so in the terrible humidity that she was covered with dirt and bits of leaf and humus.

Huben came forth and preached to them of demons.
His rantings penetrated Hazel’s shock; she cried out,
“Eloi, Eloi, lama sabach-thani!”
and her eyes rolled in her head.
When he realized that she was saying what Christ Himself was said to have uttered
in extremis
, he castigated her the more, until Quarrier gave Hazel to Andy to lead away, and went to Huben and shook him violently, saying, “Stop that, stop it, do you hear!
She cannot help it!”

Their faces were inches apart.

“She has a demon,” Huben muttered.
“The demon must be exorcised!”

“My wife is sick.
I am going to send her home.”

“You can’t do that!
You can’t leave us here alone!
My wife should leave here too!
We’ll all go!”
When Quarrier said nothing, Huben said, “It’s very obvious that the Lord has not worked things out to open His doors to this tribe.
He is warning us of our peril, Martin.
We must go.”

“I’m not going.
If you are taking Andy out, I’ll send Hazel with you.
Otherwise I’ll radio and have her picked up at Remate.”

“You mean to say you wouldn’t accompany your wife, in her condition?
Don’t you recall your marriage vows—in sickness and in health?
I won’t permit it.
We’re
all
going.”

Quarrier wished to see to Hazel, but he turned back.
“There’s nothing I can do for her, and you know it; I only make her worse.
Leslie, I’m not leaving, no matter what you say.
My work is here.”

“I tell you, I won’t leave you here alone!”

At dinner nobody but Hazel spoke; she was cheerful, and ate her canned tuna fish with appetite.
Quarrier had told her she was going home, and like a child, wide-eyed and excited, she told them all about the farm in North Dakota; the silos and corncribs, the grain elevators shining in the distance, the blue sky and the golden plain without a tree.

In the morning there was a broken arrow on each of the three racks around the clearing, with the presents still untouched; on the rack in the forest the presents were also untouched, and coiled on top of them was a fer-de-lance.
It was a big one, at least six feet long, its head crooked neatly on the blotchy pattern of the topmost coil; it seemed to stir.
Quarrier was close enough when he first saw it to find himself transfixed by its flat eye, and for a moment he did not realize it was dead.
A file of huge black ants moved up and down the pole, and others swarmed upon the snake; in the dim light it shivered as they devoured it.
Peering closer, he could smell the jungle flesh, sense the snip and clicking of a million pincers, the red-toothed struggle for food and space and light, the strangler figs and probing root, the silent hunters and devourers, the broadcasting of cells and seeds and energy in mindless waste.
And he saw for a moment what his deranged wife
had seen in her agony of the day before, that in this place they were forsaken; then there swept over him the significance of the snake, and he groaned aloud and sank to his knees and prayed.

“Almighty God,” he began in a half-whisper, “show us the true way to these people, for I have failed to find the path—” He rose suddenly with a cry of pain and jumped about, slapping at his pants and kicking, for the ants on the ground underneath the pole had rushed to the attack.
Once again he thought, Can God be laughing at us?

From the edge of the forest he could just make out the weak glint of the machete, overflowing with cold scaly coils.
Already the machete blade was coarse with rust, and before long the termites would eat away the wooden haft and the cross carved upon it.

O
N
this same day, in the late afternoon, Andy sought him out.
She was very upset.
At first he thought that she was still shaken by Hazel’s breakdown, by the growing dread, the stifled panic, which had infected all of them.
She did not have to say that she could not entrust what had just happened to her husband’s nerves.

Upstream from the camp, cut off by a thick underbrush, there was an oxbow where the river bent around an island of massed driftwood, and here Andy had gone to bathe alone.
All had agreed that they would bathe out of pails of water, less because of caimans or piranhas—the caimans this far upstream were very small, and the piranhas, so long as one had no open wounds, were harmless—than because both the whereabouts and attitude of the savages were still uncertain.
But the longing to feel clean and private, if only for a few minutes, had eroded Andy’s morale, and finally she had disobeyed the rule.
Taking a cake of soap, she had slipped away behind the huts and made her way to the deep pool.
She was nervous about the creatures of the river, but after peering into the water for a long time, she had taken off everything but her sneakers, and slipped in.

After her bath, having no towel, she sat down on a log to dry herself in the pale sun.
In her private world of leaves and warm wood and clear water, she felt happy and relieved for the first time in weeks.
Sabalo trout were drifting in the shallows, and she could see bright shells of the fresh-water mussel.
A sandpiper came and teetered cheerfully along the margin, and a tiny emerald hummingbird perched near her head.

But while she sat there, absolutely still, the birds took wing; when she turned her head, she saw a Niaruna.
He was standing in the opening at the jungle edge, a tall warrior with a crown of fur and bright red feathers, and two red snakes curling around his legs.
His arms above the biceps were bound in strips of bark; his face was masked in black and crimson streaks.
She tried to scream, but she could not.
He put down his bow and arrows and came toward her.

“Why didn’t you scream?”
Quarrier demanded, more resentful than horrified.

“I don’t know,” she said.
“I was too afraid.
I just don’t know.
I started toward my clothes, but then … he … he stopped me.
He put his hands on me.”

“And you were both … You didn’t have any clothes on!”

“No, you
know
that,” she cried out.
“What are you trying to do to me?”
Until now she had not faced him, but had stared nervously at the ground.
When she raised her head, her cheeks looked feverish.
“No, I didn’t scream!
After that first second I wasn’t afraid; I knew he wouldn’t hurt me!”

“But you were naked!”

“Oh, you’re just like Leslie!
That’s why I didn’t tell Leslie, because he’d be so angry, just like you are!”
When Quarrier only grunted miserably and dropped his eyes, she said bitterly, “I’ll tell you something else.
I
was
naked, and I wasn’t ashamed.
Am I a sinner, Martin?
Am I a
sinner
then?”
More quietly she said, “Maybe it was because he was naked too, because he belonged there where he was, with the fish and leaves and sun, with that emerald bird.
For the first time the jungle seemed like paradise, bugs, heat, mud, and all, and he was part of the jungle, he was
beautiful.
And
I
was beautiful.”
She looked away, bewildered.
“What have we done to ourselves, Martin?
Oh, I saw something right then—”

Before he could ask her what she meant, she smiled in an exultant way that frightened him.
“He wanted me”—her mouth hardened—“really
wanted
me.”

“You mean you—”

“No, I didn’t.”

When she spoke again, her voice was strange.
“Don’t you think that religion comes less naturally to women?”
She shrugged.
“Women like me who don’t have children—we probably have too much time to think.
Lately I’ve been thinking quite a lot.”
She paused for a deep breath.
“I think women get more religious as they get older, or when they begin to fear life, or suppress it in themselves.
Or in great disappointment.
Especially then.”

Rudely, Quarrier cried out,
“What?”
He knew that his feelings were totally unreasonable, yet he felt that she had been unfaithful to him, had betrayed him.

“Especially in disappointment,” Andy said, staring at nothing.
“Then they think,
There must be something else
.
And the church holds out the only hope.”

He burst out, “You said he … he stopped you!”

“Yes.
He put his hands on me, he touched me, very gently.
As if he were blind.”

“I’m astonished he didn’t—you know,
assault
you.
I mean, an
Indian!
They aren’t romantic.
And you say he wanted you!
You
know
he wanted you!”

“Why do you question me—oh, don’t be such a child!”
She moved away from him, angry again.
Her voice was hoarse.
“You might as well know this, Martin, because it’s true: I wanted
him
.
When he touched me, I almost burst.
I wish he
had
assaulted me, how do you like that?”
Her eyes were too bright and she was jeering.
“How do you like
that
, Martin?
I’ve never wanted anything so badly in all my life.
But you, you’re such a
good
man, you’ll say I’m possessed—”

“No, Andy.
Please.”

“But I pushed him away.
And then he went.
And my immortal soul was saved.”
She coughed repeatedly.

They sat in silence for a time, watching the twilight birds; a woodpecker tocked on hollow wood, far back in the forest.

Quarrier said, “You look kind of feverish.
Do you feel all right?”