At Play in the Fields of the Lord (40 page)

“Well, I must say it’s very good, whosever food it is,” the priest remarked; he passed his plate to Andy for a second helping.
“Thank you so much, señora.”
They watched him fill his mouth again—he ate methodically, moving from one item to another, like a man packing a bag—and after a time, when no one spoke, he said, “As to the matter of cynicism, Señor Huben, would you not agree that it is cynical to bribe a simple Indian from a rival faith?”

“I did not—”

“To suggest to him that his fidelity would be rewarded by permission to … sell slaves, for example?”
The priest set down his knife and fork.
“If I recall my history correctly, one reason behind the Protestant revolt and the Reformation was the practice among the clergy of selling indulgences.”

“You are making a very serious charge,” Quarrier said, raising his hand to forestall Huben’s outburst.

“I make it in all seriousness,” the priest said.

“I’m sure Mr.
Huben would deny it just as seriously,” Quarrier said coldly.
“And needless to say, I would believe him.”

He spoke with more conviction than he felt.
He had the unhappy feeling that he agreed with every point the little man had made; at the same time he was ever more irritated by Xantes’ smug urbanity, by his smiling assumption that his serenity in the face of Huben’s boorishness had won the latter’s companions to his side.
It annoyed him that in his accented, elaborate way the Spaniard used their own language more skillfully than they did; he was even annoyed by the priest’s ability to eat so heartily and calmly on the enemy’s own ground, whereas the enemy itself was so upset that it could scarcely eat at all.
And while he did not question Padre Xantes’ motive in coming here, he wondered if this opportunity to debate, to subtly deride their efforts, was not more important to him than his concern for the Niaruna.
So now he said, “And anyway, it seems a strange matter to bring up when you have come here to co-operate with us in trying to spare the Niaruna.”

“Sí, claro.”
Xantes, frowning, put down his fork with a neat click.
“I have abused your hospitality disgracefully.”
He made a short bow to Huben.
“My apologies, señor.
Our differences of opinion have no importance here this evening.”

Even to Huben, the priest’s skilled candor was disarming.
He grunted doubtfully.

“And you believe,” Quarrier asked, “that your church would support you in co-operating with us?”

“I did not ask their permission lest they refuse me.
Seven centuries ago Pope Innocent III instructed our Dominican Order ‘to extirpate heresy’; as you people are heretics, I have no business among you.”
He smiled.
“I am quite a renegade, you see.
I am perhaps the only Spaniard on this continent who supports the idea of a single Christian Church, a reuniting of Catholic and Protestant.”

“We do not support that idea here.
In fact,” Quarrier said, and this time he smiled himself, “we are tempted to believe in some past union of the Catholic Church and Satan.”

The priest laughed heartily.
“So I gather, so I gather,” he said, delighted, and helped himself to pickles.
“And the two have met from time to time.
They have been seen in company, I assure you.
The Inquisition—why, I doubt if even your fundamentalist Lord of hellfire and damnation would have approved the Inquisition!”
He crunched loudly on his pickle.
“Our Christian—that is,
Western
—outlook is rather lugubrious, do you not think?
We have persuaded ourselves that abnegation”—and he touched his cassock, not without irony—“and self-sacrifice are superior to joyous self-expression, to the emotions—to simple
being?
Now … if we could just take time from our teaching of our poor Indians, we might
learn
something from them.
After all, the Indians come out of Asia, theirs is essentially an Eastern culture; they do not seek for meaning: they
are
.
They are not
heavy
the way we are, they are light as the air; their being is a mere particle of the universe, like a leaf or wing of dragonfly or wisp of cloud.
Unlike ourselves, they are eternal.”

“This conversation is all very sophisticated, I’m sure, but aren’t we forgetting something, Martin?”
Leslie stared in an accusing way at all the others, one by one, mouth open in self-righteous injury.
With his long blond hair and callow face, his sport shirt and shorts, he looked like a young boy who, confronted with injustice, takes himself too seriously.
Andy watched
him; when she caught Quarrier regarding her, she turned away.

“Yes, Leslie’s right,” Quarrier said.
“We must decide about the Niaruna.”

There was little to decide.
Yoyo, who could follow a trail, would lead Quarrier to the Niaruna the next morning, for time was running out; Guzmán and his soldiers might appear at any time.
According to the priest, El Comandante had arranged with Moon’s partner, El Lobo, to bomb and strafe Boronai’s village; they were only awaiting a shipment of small bombs.

Without Moon’s leadership, Xantes said, Wolfie had gradually come apart; drunken and lonely, he had now been threatened with extradition by the playful Comandante unless he made an honest woman of fat Mercedes, who was with child.
On the other hand, if he bombed as he was told, he would be given his passport and airplane passage west, across the mountains.

“To the Land of the Dead,” Andy murmured.
She looked down at her hands when the men gazed at her.
These were her only words during the meal, for she merely shrugged when her husband requested an explanation.

Padre Xantes did not want Yoyo to return with him, for fear that Guzmán might learn too soon that the Niaruna had been warned.
He had already told Guzmán of his feelings about the massacre, which El Comandante—not having to pay them heed—had accepted in good grace.
On the other hand, once Guzmán learned that his plan had been betrayed, the padre’s future would be uncertain.
He shrugged philosophically.
“It appears I must defend myself with blackmail,” he remarked.
“After all, it can be proven that Guzmán knew that there was but one raid on the Tiro and that the Niaruna are not—in
fected?
—with foreign criminal elements as he claimed in his report, but only by a pilot he had sent in, without authority, to kill them.”
He shrugged again.
“It is all so sordid, no?”
he said, with an odd kind of satisfaction.

Huben stared at the little priest with open loathing.
While Quarrier sat in morose silence, the two soon fell to bickering again.
Intent on what Xantes had called the “fine distinctions,” Huben derided the Catholic exaltation of the Virgin Mary, while
the padre, less angry than amused, called all Protestant teachers “outlaw priests,” since they had not been ordained by the true clergy—those on whose shoulders had been laid, across the centuries, the hands of the apostles.
Huben referred him to Acts 8, in the first verse of which the Christians
were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judaea and Samaria, except the apostles
.
The fourth verse read,
Therefore they that were scattered abroad went every where preaching the word
.

“Those were
not
apostles,” Huben crowed, “They were simple Christians!”

Xantes sat forward, not quite smiling.
He was less discomfited than gratified that Huben was putting up some sort of fight.
They passed on to a dispute over the Eucharist.
So it went, back and forth, back and forth, more and more petty, more ludicrous.
Should there be water in the wine?
Should the service be in Latin?

Thus you would haggle and nag each other, Quarrier thought, until Heaven crashed about your ears.
He got up, unnoticed, and retired to his room.

On his knees, he prayed for the soul of Billy Quarrier, dead at nine of blackwater fever in the uttermost part of the earth—and now Hazel sat up and stared at him.
The hanks of stiff black hair had fallen forward past her eyes like horse blinders, so that her ears stuck out.
Her gray-green eyes were bright, her mouth was big and her nose and teeth were small; he glimpsed a savage animal, mad with the suffering twisted and crammed into her big racked body.
At one moment he saw the apparition of a girl once lovely to him, and in the next all human ugliness, red-eyed and cornered and swollen, although her outward face was set, her green eyes dry as pebbles in a desert river.

He had scarcely talked with Hazel since the death of Billy; they could no longer communicate, and preferred not to talk at all.
Quite apart from her grief, Hazel was torn in half by loyalty to her marriage vows on the one hand, and by a vengeful resentment, a lack of respect for him, on the other; she would leave him if she had the courage, if she didn’t feel that search for happiness on earth must be immoral.
He would leave her
too, as perhaps Andy might leave Leslie, but all of them were pinned like butterflies to the frame of their own morality, and that was that.
Kneeling there in the dark, observing her, Martin shrugged.
They must try to hold together what was left, and stumble on.

Then Hazel said, “Make love to me.”

She was sweaty and feverish, and gave off heat, and when he took her in his arms, seeking to calm her, he found himself caught up in a death struggle.
They writhed together, soaking wet.
Though he went with her, a part of him stayed behind to watch and listen, like a man uneasy at the edge of the night jungle, to cries of ecstasy which were more like howls, and obscene howls at that; they shook the hut.
He clapped his hand upon her mouth.
She bit it hard.
She gasped, “Oh Jesus, make love to me, screw me, cruel Jesus, damn you Jesus.”
He reared back in terror and slapped her pale avid face.
Hazel lay back on her pillow, her hair crumpled, and gazed at him peacefully for the first time since the death of Billy, and went to sleep as sweetly as a child.

He lay awake for a long time.
Asleep, he dreamed that he was peering up into the highest steeple of a great cathedral; through the steeple’s translucent skin he could see the night stars of the heavens.
A star came down, like a wand of God, and touched the steeple’s point; the cathedral dissolved in a burst of ethereal light.
All the churches of the world were gathered around this greatest of cathedrals, and they, too, dissolved in showers of light, one by one, as they were touched.
But the fragments did not descend to earth; instead they were drawn gently upward, into the starry universe, as if their time on earth had ended—as if God, more rueful than angry, had withdrawn his sanction of man’s churches and mankind, saying, No, you have not learned the Way.

With the loss of Heaven, Martin awoke and did not sleep again; he stared at a dull low ceiling of thatch and mud.
By morning his eyes were dry and taut, and his every organ ached; lying there on his back, he felt split open, like a dressed animal.
A dank fog had settled on him in the night; he lay there helpless in
its shroud.
The prospect of his journey to the savages filled him with terror, but the journey, with faith or without, had to be made.

Q
UARRIER
asked the priest to take Hazel to Madre de Dios; Andy would accompany her, and would put her on a plane and send her home on leave to North Dakota.
Hazel offered no resistance to this plan; she had even forgotten that Padre Xantes was a Catholic.
She had withdrawn to the asylum of her past, and would have departed with this same serenity for the moon.

Quarrier took her clumsily into his arms and said good-bye to her as to a stranger; she giggled loudly, blushing, and he found himself in tears.
“Good-bye, good-bye,” called Hazel, to no one in particular; standing there in the early mist, her black shoes square and sensible, she looked like a head nurse on her day off, bound for a nice excursion on the river.

Andy was to wait in Madre de Dios until notified by radio that the Niaruna situation had been resolved; if there was any mission to return to, she would then be flown back to Remate, and Huben would fetch her in the boat.

The only person hostile to these plans was Yoyo.
The priest tried to explain to the Indian why he was being left behind, but no one could possibly have made him understand why it was that the white people could commandeer his boat—for though both boat and motor actually belonged to Guzmán, the prestige that went with them on the rivers had adhered to Yoyo, and he regarded them as his own.
In his torment he shouted rudely that Padre Xantes did not know how to run the motor, that the priest would surely overturn the boat at the first bend and drown the lot; they would all be eaten by piranhas!
Unless he, Yoyo, was there to protect them, the Tiros would foully violate the women!
El Comandante would be very angry and would punish
evangélico
and
católico
without distinction!