Beneath a Southern Sky (16 page)

“Uh, it’s June fifteenth,” he said in his soft, matter-of-fact “taping” voice. “We’ve been here almost five months now, and we’re adjusting well to the climate. It’s been raining for almost three days straight, but we’re staying pretty dry in the hut…”

At those words, Daria recognized the sound she’d mistaken for static as one of the torrential downpours they’d had that first rainy season in Timoné. Over the rain and Nate’s quiet voice, a bird squawked. She closed her eyes, transported.

Nate’s voice droned on. “Daria’s been making some progress with the kids here, just getting to know them mostly, learning their names, but she has plans to start formal lessons soon. They really seem to have taken a liking to her and follow her all over the village. I’ve been calling her the Pied Piper.” He chuckled, then cleared his throat and continued, his voice serious again. “I’m working with Anazu, trying to get a feel for the best way to reach the other villagers. I’m still far from fluent in Timoné, but from what I can make out he thinks they—”

Daria jumped up and turned off the stereo. She couldn’t stand to hear any more. It hurt too much, hearing Nate’s voice so clearly, hearing his laughter and the jungle sounds that had been such a familiar part of their lives together. She had forgotten about him calling her the Pied Piper.

Dry eyed, she opened the tape deck and removed the cassette, dropping it back in the box with the others. She went to the desk, took out a label and sturdy strapping tape, crumpled an old newspaper, and packed it around the cassette tapes. At the last minute, she removed the tape she had just listened to from the box and slipped it into an envelope. She wrote Natalie’s name on the front, sealed the flap, and put it in the bottom drawer of the desk. Then she taped the lid securely on the box that held the remaining cassettes, took Evangeline Magrit’s letter from the trash, and copied her address onto a mailing label, which she pasted onto the box. She would mail it from the clinic on Monday morning.

She threw the letter back in the wastebasket without reading it again, then grabbed some old magazines and threw them in on top of the letter so she wouldn’t have to see the guilt-inducing missive anymore. She shook her head back and forth as though she could cast out the thoughts that were churning in her brain. Then, before she could change her mind, she pulled the white plastic garbage bag out of the basket, tied it tightly, and grabbed a book of matches from the drawer beside the stove. She lugged the trash down the stairs and out to the incinerator behind the house.

Unless it was windy, which it often was in Kansas, Kirk Janek burned the trash every day. Daria had rarely lit it herself, but this time she struck a match and threw it on top. It flared, melted a tiny hole in the plastic, and fizzled out. She lit another match with the same results. Feeling agitated, she tore a hole in the bag and lit a corner of a newspaper that protruded from it. The flame grew and quickly engulfed the contents. Daria closed the door of the incinerator and walked back to the house with a heavy heart.

C
RUX
:
T
HE
C
ROSS

Sixteen

T
he flames were hot…so hot. He ran to the east side of the hut where the doorway should have been, but it was gone. Everywhere he looked, on all four sides, only walls of flame rose around him. He sucked in a breath and immediately choked on the thick smoke that filled the air.

He could hear screaming all around him. He had to find the children. They were too weak to get out by themselves. But the smoke obscured his vision. Stretching his arms in front of him, he connected with the rope of a hammock. It swung heavily under his touch, still occupied. Fumbling blindly, he managed to lift the frail body from the sling. He cradled it in his arms and ducked his head. If he ran into the flames, surely he would run through into fresh air. Then miraculously an opening appeared in front of him, a way out. He raced into the light and placed the child on the damp forest floor, gulping oxygen like a drowning man. He knelt over the limp body, and though his eyes were swollen and watering, he saw that it was little Miguel he had carried out. It was too late. The boy was gone.

The terrible screams had stopped now, but he ran back into the burning hut, groping desperately for another heavy hammock. A loud crack split the air, and a wall of the hut fell outward, admitting fresh air, exposing the rows of smoldering cots and mats, but also fanning the flames higher. He had to get the rest of them out! He lifted a body from a mat. Then everything went black.

Nathan Camfield opened his eyes and sat up on one elbow. His heart was beating violently in his chest. He had dreamed the dream again. And as they had so many times before, the tears came. For the dream was real. It had happened. And no matter how he tried, he couldn’t escape the horrifying visions being replayed over and over and over again. Day after day, night after night. Every time he closed his eyes the fire raged anew.

He shaded his eyes and looked up. The sun burned brightly through the narrow gap in the roof of his tiny hut. He knew that the light would soon move on, and he would be left in the grey-green shadows that had colored his existence for what seemed an eternity.

But for now, the sunshine was blinding—and he welcomed it. He struggled to pull himself to a sitting position. He knew from experience that the ropes of vine that bound his feet were loosely tied, affording him reasonable movement, but he also knew—again from experience—that the ropes that lashed the door of the cagelike hut were expertly knotted and closely guarded.

He sucked in a breath of the heavy jungle air, scarcely aware of the searing pain in his lungs, pain that had been with him now for as long as he could remember—since the fire, since his nightmare had begun.

Too quickly, the sun crawled lower, leaving him in the shadows once again. He felt his spirits sink with it, and he forced himself to think of hopeful things.
Sing the songs, recite the lists, say the prayers
. He’d played the games for so long that they came almost automatically.

“
A
is for
air
.” He would never again take even one breath for granted.

“
B
is for
bananas. C
is for
coffee
.” The two staples had sustained him day after day.

“
D
is for
Daria
.”
Oh, Daria. Are you safe? You must be sick with worry. Why haven’t you been able to get help? Has something happened to you, too? Surely the men from this village hadn’t followed Tados and Quimico to Timoné. No! Stop it. Stop it!
he silently chided himself.

“Go on now,” he said aloud.

“
E
is for
elms
.” Thoughts of his childhood tree house in an ancient elm cooled him on sticky tropical afternoons.

“
F
is for
family
.”
Oh, Daria… No!
“Go on…
G
is for
God:
‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’” He continued, picking up
I
through
Q
. Then, “
R
is for
rice
.” Another life-sustaining gift. He went the rest of the way through the alphabet, forcing himself to visualize each blessing as he counted it, not just to recite it by rote.

The Scriptures were next: “ ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…’”

Then the bones in the body: “Mandible, scapula, ulna, radius, tibia, fibula…”

And, finally, the books of the Bible: “Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers…”

The afternoon rains had come and gone when he finished these litanies of sanity. Though he wasn’t sure why, it helped give some purpose to his days to have those tasks before him.

The days and nights melded into one another, and he could not guess if he had been here for weeks or months or years. He remembered picking up little Miguel from the fire, discovering that he was already dead. He remembered going back into the flames, then the wall of the hut falling outward. He remembered moving toward the opening as though in slow motion. Everything was a blank after that. Until he woke up here in this hut, in agonizing pain, burns searing his legs and arms, his lungs on fire. He wondered now if perhaps he had also contracted the illness he’d come to cure, for he had been delirious, drifting in and out of consciousness for days—or perhaps it was weeks. If that were true, it was a blessing, for when he’d begun to regain consciousness for short periods of time, the pain from the burns was excruciating. He was ashamed to remember that he had prayed to die—he had screamed in agony for death to come. In his anguish, he’d cared nothing for Daria’s grief, for the safety of Tados and Quimico, for the Timoné people he’d been called to serve. He’d wanted only to be released from the unbearable, torturous pain.

Though he had no memories of being cared for during the time immediately after the fire, at some point food had begun to appear at the door of his hut and eventually a drink that he suspected contained something that eased the pain and caused him to sleep deeply. As time went on, his delirium ceased and his wounds began to scar over. His were second-degree burns, and he knew if he could stave off infection, they would heal completely. Then he would find a way to get home.

But where were Tados and Quimico? Since the fire, he had not seen them. When they’d first arrived in Chicoro, his guides were careful to keep a wide berth of the sick hut he’d set up, lest they, too, contract the deadly fever. For that reason, he felt certain they hadn’t perished in the fire with the others. He assumed they had gone back to Timoné for help. Surely they’d had time to get there and back by now.

When he had begun to remain conscious for longer periods, he had tried to mark the passage of time by scratching marks in the dirt floor of the hut. But he’d soon become confused. There were too many marks. He must have forgotten and tallied more than one mark for each day. Finally he had given up, certain that any day now the Timoné would come for him and the marks would not matter any more.

The first day he had felt strong enough to leave the hut, he walked several hundred yards, into the village, looking for the chief. The children saw him first and ran away into their homes, obviously frightened of him. Alerted, the village leaders met him near the center of the compound and began to motion wildly for him to leave. He tried to speak with them, but they made it clear that they would not allow him to remain inside the village. At first he guessed that they were still afraid they would contract the disease from him. But as the days went by and he lived in exile in his hut outside the village, he noticed that some of the older Chicoro boys sneaked away and came to peer at him. They kept their distance, but from what little of their dialect he had picked up, he was horrified to realize that their superstitious beliefs had made him into some kind of a god or good luck charm in their eyes. The Chicoro were a very superstitious people, and they apparently held him in awe because he had escaped not only the deadly illness to which he had been exposed again and again, but he had also walked through fire. He had defied the flames of a deadly inferno that had killed twenty-eight people in the sick hut. Of course, he himself believed his escape from the fire to be miraculous. But it was certainly no miracle of his own doing.

A million times he had gone back in his memory to the day of the fire, wishing he could have had a chance to do things differently. When he and Tados and Quimico had first come to Chicoro, the fever continued to devastate the village, taking ten more lives in the first two days he was there. Nate could not positively diagnose the illness, but he believed it to be a strain of influenza to which these people were highly susceptible. The only way to stop the spread of the disease was to isolate the ill downriver from the stream that supplied their drinking water. And there had been indications that the measure was working. At the time of the fire, it had been three full days since they’d had to isolate anyone new. But when the chief’s young son died on the fourth day, the village leaders had begun to lose faith in Nate.

Tados and Quimico sensed that the good will of the chief had soured, and they implored Nate to slip away quietly in the night. But he insisted that they remain for a few more days. He should have trusted the judgment of his two guides. They knew the culture, and they understood the malice of the chief toward Nate. But he had not wanted to leave until he knew he had the outbreak under control.

He knew in his heart that his motives hadn’t been totally altruistic. In his mind, he had written a glowing report for the board of Gospel Outreach, telling of his success in putting down a major epidemic. His pride had gotten in the way of his good judgment.

So he had been forced back to the hut outside the village. Night after night he watched the fires from afar and listened to the chatter of the children playing before bedtime. Loneliness overwhelmed him, and he began to make desperate plans to return to Timoné. In his weakened physical state, without a guide, without provisions, he knew it would be suicide to attempt such a journey alone. But every attempt to secure a guide to take him down the river was met with a firm refusal. Finally desperation and the torture of his isolation caused him to toss prudence to the wind.

Early one morning, he had set out along the Rio Guaviare, planning to follow the river to the next village where he hoped to find a more sympathetic response.

He hadn’t been walking more than an hour when he heard the sound of a boat’s motor in the distance. He had almost shouted with joy, but remembering the warnings of the mission in Bogotá about drug traffickers and the paramilitary factions that controlled some parts of the country, he stepped back into the trees to wait and watch.

As the sound grew nearer, Nate peered through the palm leaves. He didn’t recognize the lone occupant of the boat, but he was a bronze-skinned man wearing the traditional garb of the Chicoro. He racked his brain to think of something of value with which he could bribe the boat’s pilot. His gold watch had been lost in the fire—or perhaps stolen from him while he was unconscious. Never had he regretted its loss as much as he did now.

Without anything to offer the man in exchange for passage on his boat, Nate took his chances and showed himself on the riverbank.

“Hollio!”
he shouted. “Hello? Can you help me?”

The man cut the motor and shaded his eyes, trying to locate where the shout had come from. Nate called out again. “
Hollio!
Over here.”

The man seemed surprised to see him. He hesitated a moment before sculling slowly toward the bank.

When the boat touched shore, Nate reached out to hold it steady while the man got out.
“Hollio,”
Nate said, putting up a hand in greeting. “Could I come with you?” he asked in broken Chicoro, motioning toward the boat.

“
Seshu!
Silence!” the man barked. Though he spoke in the Chicoro dialect, his inflection was less nasal, more refined, perhaps that of the Castilian Spanish spoken widely in the country.

The man circled Nate, looking him up and down. Nate pled with him again—in Spanish this time. “
Por favor
, can you help me?”

“Silencio!”
the man roared. To Nate’s horror, he took a pistol from the waist of his loose-fitting trousers and turned it on Nate.

Nate held up his hands in surrender, and the man motioned for him to get into the boat.

Nate did so, and within twenty minutes he was back on the bank of the Chicoro village, not a hundred yards from the hut he had left an hour ago. His captor led him up the trail toward the village at gunpoint. As they rounded a sharp curve in the trail, they came face to face with Vidalé, one of the young men who often brought Nate’s meals. He was carrying gourds of rice and fruit, presumably not realizing yet that Nate had tried to leave.

Vidalé appeared surprised to see Nate coming toward the village, but when he saw the man behind Nate, his eyes grew wide and he stopped short. “Juan Mocoa!” he whispered, obviously recognizing the stranger.

Mocoa spoke to Vidalé, gesturing toward Nate.

Nate could not understand all of their exchange, but the man seemed to wield an unexplained power over Vidalé. The young man answered him, speaking rapidly, his eyes darting nervously, his dialogue peppered with the word
Americano
.

Juan Mocoa motioned for Vidalé to continue on the trail, and, still holding his gun on Nate, he followed the young native back to Nathan’s hut. Shoving Nathan inside, he motioned for Vidalé to give Nate the food, then he took a length of vine rope from the pouch he wore on a string around his waist. Vidalé set the food on the floor and went outside with Mocoa. Nate could hear them tying the door securely with the rope. When he was finished, Mocoa spoke harshly to Vidalé as the door jiggled from the outside—no doubt being tested by Mocoa for security.

Nate watched them through a narrow crack in the bamboo wall of the hut. Vidalé cowered, but suddenly, Mocoa gave the knot a final tug, smiled, and put a friendly arm around the young man’s shoulders. He took something shiny from his pouch and put it in Vidalé’s hand. He lowered his voice, and Nate could no longer hear their exchange.