Five Wives Read online

  Map

  Dedication

  For my loving father, Ralph Thomas

  Epigraph

  There is no point at which the story ends and life begins.

  —TIM INGOLD, LINES: A BRIEF HISTORY

  Contents

  Cover

  Map

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Ready Yourselves

  Chapter 1

  Abby Is Called

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Olive Opens the Door

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  The Auca Scale

  Chapter 8

  Who Is Rachel Saint?

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Singing in Tongues

  Chapter 14

  Marj’s Mission

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Locations

  Chapter 19

  Cornell in the Jungle

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  We Sorrow Not

  Chapter 23

  O God, Save Betty

  Chapter 24

  Fear of Flying

  Chapter 25

  The Intangible Zone

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  David Saint, This Is Your Life

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Immortal, Invisible

  Chapter 30

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by Joan Thomas

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Ready Yourselves

  1

  THE WIVES SPENT THE EVENING putting the story together. Kids finally asleep, so the women could talk uninterrupted in the lounge, mugs of cocoa cooling on the floor beside their chairs. They were hoping for photographs soon, but in the meantime they had the letters the pilot had carried out on his supply runs, and the journals the doctor brought them at the end. Everything scrawled in pencil, but the women were good at deciphering their husbands’ handwriting and also at reading between the lines; it was amazing what they were able to piece together.

  The site where the men set up camp was a white sand beach, a sandbar really, because the river was so low just then. An open and airy vestibule to the rainforest, dotted with palms; imagine the grounds of a swanky tropical hotel. At its edge grew a giant ironwood tree, perfect for a tree house, and the men built on one of the massive limbs. They’d prefabbed the scrap-lumber floors and walls and flown them in, strapped to the undercarriage of the small yellow plane. The beach was just long enough to serve as an airstrip. Eventually the pilot was confident in his landings, but the sand was very soft and for takeoffs he counted on a little extra lift from the Lord.

  The men were excited, almost giddy at being there at last. They had no idea how long this adventure would last, and they cherished discipline, they thrived on it. They all had designated tasks. Every morning one of them surveyed the beach for strange footprints. Every hour on the hour somebody got out the binoculars and systematically scanned the forest wall. Somebody carried clear water from a spring. Somebody dug a latrine and covered it with a board. They worked together to cook proper meals in a stove improvised from a hacked-open iron drum.

  An iron drum?

  Roger carried it in, one of the women said. He thought it would be useful as body armour.

  Oh.

  Mornings were spent in the shade of the ironwood tree, reading and writing, and afternoons relaxing at the river. It was hot, hot, hot, and the bugs were bad—tiny gnats and those red-brown sweat bees with furry bodies. The men built a second fire by the water and threw termite nests on it, the way the Quichua do, draping themselves in acrid smoke. They waded into a deep pool and killed the hours fooling around in water up to their necks; you put that gang together and the jokes and teasing never stopped. When it was cooler, they waded out and got their fishing rods, and they ate their catch for supper. This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.

  But the nights—they were scarier. The sudden darkness, and the way it transformed the clearing into a place you’d never seen before, and the unfamiliar sounds. Once the sun dropped below the canopy, they’d clean up the campsite and use the latrine and climb the wooden ladder to the shelter in the ironwood tree. A rope ladder! one of the wives said, still planning. Why didn’t we think of that? Something you could pull up after you. But the men had a hand-crank two-way radio and they had the guns, all loaded. The idea had been to keep watch in two-hour shifts, using the gaps intentionally left in each wall, but once they were cozily ensconced high up off the ground—well, it seemed a little silly. Stretched out on the floor, they arranged their mosquito nets and talked and prayed and eventually turned off the lantern. Think of what the stars must have been like, that far back in the forest. No, the moon was full those nights—but think of how big and how bright, pouring silver light onto the palm fronds and the white sand. Think of the noises all around, the howler monkeys, the puma. Think of their husbands, together and alone, lying on their backs on their sleeping bags and listening until sleep overcame them.

  Mornings they woke to the realization that God had delivered them safely to a new day. Their surprise at this was less as time went by. You could say the glamour was wearing off just a little. It was cloudy and the bugs were worse and the things the men enjoyed about each other began to grate. What exactly was the point of a designated latrine-hole in the vast, ravenous compost pit of the Amazon basin? How many hours a day could one man whistle the same tune? Each wife frowned over the pages in front of her and pictured her husband on a bad day—restless, testy, needy, petulant, silent, et cetera.

  By the fourth day, the men’s fears had begun to prey on them and they got the distinct impression they were being watched. The pilot’s mate said it first and the others agreed. Silence fell over the camp. But silence was counterproductive; they wanted to be found! They were bait in a trap, you might say. The battery-powered megaphone came to mind and one of the men climbed the tree house to fetch it. He knew a handful of phrases, and all afternoon he stood by the river and shouted them into the forest. After he went to bed that night, the phrases knit themselves together into a sermon in his mind, and the morning of the fifth day he stood in the river preaching it. Friday, it was the Friday when his congregation revealed itself. A voice rang across the water, a strong male voice, and a figure stepped out of the forest—a naked brown-skinned man. A girl joined him. Farther up the bank, the men spied a second female. Right out in the open, they stood in the open, their arms at their sides.

  The preacher was the first to react. He tossed his megaphone onto the sand and waded across. On the other side, he reached out a hand, and said words he had taken great pains to acquire: Welcome, I want to be your friend. The naked man stepped forward and took his hand. They strode into the water and the women followed, and all of them waded calmly across the river to the camp.

  Three, it was astonishing! And no spears, no weapons at all. The fellow they judged to be in his early twenties, one of the females a girl in her late teens, the other a woman of maybe forty. They looked just as the men had been led to expect: long hair with bangs cut short over their ears, big balsa plugs in stretched-out earlobes. All naked except for a band of fibre around their bellies and lianas tied around their wrists and ankles. No body paint. They looked healthy and well-fed, although the older woman’s breasts were long and flat, like inner tubes empty of air. The young man— his g
ear was pinned by the foreskin into his bellyband, one of the wives read out in a soft voice.

  Having meticulously planned against failure, the husbands found they had no immediate plan for success. Eagerly they set about being hospitable hosts. They had been frying hamburgers for lunch, and they saw there would be enough if they held back a little. And so the forest people were served grape Kool-Aid and hamburgers on buns with mustard. They squatted easily beside the stove and the men demonstrated prayer to them, bowing their heads and thanking God for the meal and for their new friendship, gesturing to the heavens to make it clear who they were talking to. The three forest people ignored the prayer, but they scarfed down the hamburgers, and the young fellow, especially, seemed to love his.

  The husbands relaxed and began to joke around. The pilot dug out his camera and they shot off a roll of film. George, they took to calling the young fellow. The girl they named Delilah. If this delegation had a spokesman, it was Delilah. She was desperate to tell the men something. She said the same thing over and over, getting more and more frustrated, speaking in sounds the men had never heard and could not begin to approximate. I wonder why they called her Delilah? one of the wives said. I guess she was pretty, someone suggested. No, it’s because they thought George had seen white men on the beach and had brought her along as a gift. Or in trade. For them. This theory was recorded in two of the diaries. A very good thing their husbands were decent men.

  As for George, well, they saw him eyeballing the plane, reacting when occasionally the two-way radio in the instrument panel came to life and blasted out static and human voices. So the pilot buckled him in and took him up for a ride. Apparently he loved it, he hollered the whole way. The pilot knew where their longhouses were, and he flew over and buzzed them. When he banked to fly back, people on the ground caught sight of their fellow tribesman in the cockpit, and oh, their expressions were a thing to behold!

  After they landed back on the beach, George was unresponsive to anything they offered. The husband who had done the preaching got out his bag of tricks, his yoyo, his harmonica. They blew up balloons and batted them around. They showed photographs. They had a yellow model plane with them, and they tried to demonstrate how the forest people should clear an airstrip close to their longhouses so the men could visit. They stuck sticks into the sand to represent trees, and showed how the plane would crash into the trees and flip. They acted out their distress at this catastrophe. The three seemed baffled by these theatrics. There was a moment of mutual resentment, there must have been. The men, after all this effort—had they ever pictured the forest people as so incurious, so uncommunicative, so indifferent to all they were offered? So small?

  Towards evening, the young pair slipped back into the forest, and the pilot took off on a supply run. The older woman stayed. She sat on a log, feeding the fire they had built close to the water, and when darkness fell, she began to chant. It was like nothing they had ever heard, and at first they were curious. But it went on and on and on, and soon the bugs drove the men to the tree house. Except for the husband who had hauled in the body armour; he sat and listened to her. Finally he too had had enough and he went to bed. In the morning, embers still glowed on the beach, but the forest woman was gone.

  That was the end of the story. If you could call it a story, given its unsatisfying plot and lack of obvious meaning. Nevertheless, the women found they could not stop talking about it—those gleaming, heart-stopping days when their husbands were separated from them but still inhabited this earth. A child started wailing down the hall and the mothers avoided each other’s eyes, disavowing ownership.

  “He says the tree house was thirty-five feet up,” one of them said, indicating the page she was reading. “Can that be right?”

  “It was a catfish they caught the first day.”

  “They put a shirt on George for the plane ride. Oh, that was thoughtful. It’s always so cold in the plane.”

  This was just a chapter, of course, not the whole story. The question was how this chapter led to the next. And then, of course, to the next—to their unthinkable lives.

  The children, oh, the children.

  One of the wives was eight months pregnant and her ankles were terribly swollen. “Put your feet up here, Marilou,” Olive said, slipping down to the linoleum floor to make room.

  Abby Is Called

  2

  HE SPIES ABBY AS SOON as he steps into the foyer of the chapel, and feels a rush of pleasure and pride. Her hair is partly up and partly down, and she’s wearing her best dress, a colour he thinks of as Pontiac blue.

  He edges over to her. She’s staying with friends in the college dorm and he hasn’t had a private word since they landed in Chicago. “All good, honey?”

  “All good, Dad.”

  She’s got her speech rolled up in her hand. As Betty’s only grandchild, she’s been asked to share a personal memory. David’s been suggesting Scripture passages that might be suitable, just as a way of driving her reflections home. Now we see through a glass darkly, but then, face to face. “Dad, I’m good,” she keeps saying. She is in fact a terrific public speaker.

  Abby is going to be seated on the stage, and an usher leads David to the side room reserved for family. It was David who suggested earlier in the day that they define family loosely and include all the Operation Auca offspring and their kids, the McCullys, the Saints, and the Youderians. So it’s quite a gang. Sean Youderian’s parents slide over to make room for him. He hasn’t seen them since Abby and Sean broke up. “I’m so sorry,” Martha says, squeezing his fingers briefly, and he says, “Well, you never know with kids,” before he gets that she’s offering condolences on the death of his mother-in-law. But her face is so vacant that he decides to let it ride.

  “Did Sean come?”

  Mike Youderian shakes his head.

  David’s asked to accompany Betty’s husband, Stan, at the front of the line. They walk into the chapel to “Jesu.” He’s calling up Sharon in his mind, trying to feel her hand on his arm. This chapel was built after he and Sharon were students together at Wheaton College. It’s a fine space, panelled with blond wood in different grains, all fitted cunningly together to create a subtle pattern. The chandeliers are rings with lit candles fixed to them. An image rises of long-haired girls balancing affairs like that on their heads; can that be an actual thing? Probably not, the hot wax. He’s ushered to the front row, between Stan and the Youderians, and sitting down, he steals a peek at the audience. The “formerly young” (as he’s started to call them) have turned out in droves, but they’re by no means the majority. It’s a pretty impressive assembly. It’s not for Betty alone; this crowd is here because of Operation Auca. Betty died at the home she and Stan shared in Massachusetts, but Wheaton College is the de facto headquarters of the mission. Decades after it all happened, when David and Sharon arrived on the Wheaton campus, they discovered that they were already known and loved. Even now, when David visits, people murmur to each other as he walks by, or come up and introduce themselves. You’re the spitting image, they say—and it strikes him sometimes that his father, Nate, is more vivid in other people’s imaginations than he is in David’s.

  They stand and sing with full hearts, “We rest on Thee, our Shield and our Defender!” The melody is beautiful and old. Finlandia. Five wonderful young men stood beside his dad’s plane and sang this hymn that fateful day in early 1956 when they flew into the camp on the Curaray River. Five who knew the terms of their mission. They knew, and still they went. “When passing through the gates of pearly splendour, Victors, we rest with Thee through endless days.”

  A formal eulogy from the dean of Wheaton College, way too long—but in point of fact, Elisabeth Elliot accomplished enough in her lifetime for any three lives. Martha shifts on the pew and her elbow touches David’s and again Sharon is beside him, leaning on him slightly as she always did. At least she was spared the ordeal of her mother’s terrible decline. The last time David and Abby went to Massach
usetts, they were horrified at how Betty had changed. Could that silent goblin hunched in a wheelchair be his brisk, articulate, clever mother-in-law? Aphasia, it was called, but how could a woman so gifted in words lose them entirely?

  A Scripture reading (In my father’s house are many mansions), a rendition of “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace,” a song Abby happens to hate, and as the soprano struggles with that monotone melody line, his daughter’s eyes begin to glitter and search out his from the stage. She’s nineteen, but what is nineteen? They’re either twenty-four or they’re fourteen, a mom at the church said to him. You get whiplash trying to keep up. He and the mom had a long conversation about why it’s such a challenge for Christian parents to raise a faithful child: there’s no drama connected to their conversion. He remembers Abby saying to him once, her face wistful, “I wish I remembered what it was like before I was saved.” She was maybe ten, and they had been on a hike and were sitting at the picnic table in the backyard scraping mud off their shoes with (if he remembers correctly) the barbecue spatula. “Abby,” he was inspired to answer, “you don’t have to remember the sunrise to know that the sun is up.”

  Then it’s Abby’s turn, and she stands poised and graceful at the podium, a tall basket of white flowers on either side, her hair a bright cascade over one shoulder.

  “Thank you for coming to honour and celebrate Elisabeth Elliot’s life. It’s a joy to speak to you about my wonderful grandmother. I have to start by telling you something amazing that happened yesterday while my dad and I were flying here from Portland. I was trapped in a middle seat beside a very large gentleman reading a massive newspaper. For a while I tried to peer around his paper, and under it, and over it, and then I just gave in and started reading along with him. And do you know what he was reading? An article about my grandmother! In the Sunday New York Times. I can’t tell you how proud I felt. I was pretty inspired just now, too, hearing Dean Morrow’s account of all Betty accomplished in her life. But I’ve been asked to share something different, something you might not know. The private side of Elisabeth Elliot—and here’s the thing. I’m not sure I can give you much insight, because my grandmother lived her ministry every minute of every day, whether she was on a public stage or behind closed doors.”