Three
Where is Nate?” She looked past the two guides, her eyes wild. “Nate? Where is Nathan?” She ran toward Quimico and Tados, screaming his name over and over again until it came out as a hoarse croak. Yet somewhere deep inside herself she knew the answer to her panicked question.
Quimico held up a hand as she came to stand before him. The stocky, brown-skinned native placed his arms across his chest and shook his head solemnly—a gesture that was startlingly like Nathan Camfield. Turning to Anazu, who had pushed his way through the other villagers, Quimico spoke rapidly in a low voice.
She separated two words from the jumble that poured from Quimico’s lips. Fogorio. Fire. Defuerto. Dead.
And Nate’s name. Dr. Nate. Medicine Doctor.
“No!” Daria sank to her knees, her heart in her throat, her head throbbing. “Oh, dear God, no! Not Nathan! Please, God! No…” she moaned.
She felt an arm go around her and glanced up to see Anazu’s wife, Paita. The woman knelt beside her and began cooing soft words in Daria’s ear, rocking her gently back and forth.
Daria was numb. She couldn’t understand the words Quimico and Tados were spewing now to the gathered crowd, but she knew the only thing that had meaning for her. Nathan was dead.
The strength went from her, and she would have slumped in a heap on the ground if Paita had not held her against her strong, thick body. Paita held Daria upright until the men finished talking, then she beckoned for her daughter. Casmé came quickly to Daria’s side, and the two women helped her to her feet and ushered her across the stream to her hut.
They helped her lie down on the grass mat in the corner. Paita poured a mug half-full of strong coffee from the thermos, and Casmé held it to Daria’s lips while she sipped.
As the horror of the truth sank its teeth into her, Daria allowed the women to wash her body, submitting willingly to the Timoné ritual for widows in mourning.
As they silently sponged the cool water over her neck and limbs, she felt removed from her body, as though she watched herself from someplace above. They combed Daria’s long, heavy, blond hair and fastened it, as she always wore it, into a braid that hung down her back. When they were finished with their ministrations, mother and daughter arranged the mosquito netting around her and then sat beside her, watching her closely. Several times Daria attempted to speak, but she could not make herself remember the Timoné words for what she wanted to ask. Finally she slept.
The sounds of the afternoon rains awoke her, and the hut was dark from the overcast sky, but she could see the silhouettes of Paita and Casmé through the gauzy film of the mosquito net. She reached underneath the netting for Paita’s hand, and suddenly the words were there.
“Que aconté? What happened?” she asked.
She strained to hear the words as Paita began to answer. It was so important that she understand.
“Dr. Nate—the Medicine Doctor—put all those who were sick together in one hut outside the far village,” Paita told her, speaking slowly in her own tongue. She used her expressive hands to illustrate her words, repeating the important phrases again for Daria’s sake, waiting to see that she understood before continuing. “The medicine he brought was not enough for the many people, so they continued to die. The chief’s young son died, and the chief grew angry with Dr. Nate. The chief feared the sickness would destroy all the village, so he sent men to the sick hut to set a fire and destroy the evil spirits that lived in the people. Nathan was inside the hut. Quimico and Tados were in the village, but they saw the fire. They knew Dr. Nate was inside. They ran to save him, but the flames were too high. They called to Dr. Nate, but they could hear only the screams of the burning people. No one lived. All burned. All. They took their boat and ran away. They ran to the north. Away from Timoné. They hid in the forest for many days until it was safe for them to come back.”
Paita finished the story and once more pushed back the net and wiped a cool damp cloth over Daria’s forehead. “You sleep now,” she said. “I will be here when you wake, and I will tell you the story once more.”
It seemed to Daria that she slept for a week. When she opened her eyes again, the sun was climbing in the eastern sky and Casmé was gone. But true to her word, Paita was there, and she recounted the story again. This time Daria could not succumb to the drug of sleep to deaden the pain of the truth.
She sat up on the mat and took the cup Paita offered. She sipped carefully and stood on wobbly legs, fighting the nausea that swept over her. Walking stiffly to the corner, she sat down at the table and tried to coax the radio to life. Miraculously her call was answered within minutes, and she sobbed the news to Bob Warrington.
“You get to San José del Guaviare, Daria.” Bob’s voice filled the room. “Bring everything you can with you. Tell Anazu you must leave tomorrow.”
“He’d already agreed, Bob, before… His nephews will take me. I trust them.”
“Good. Someone will be waiting for you there. Daria…I am so sorry.”
Numb, she copied down his instructions, signed off, and went to the doorway of the hut. She looked across the stream and saw that life was back to normal for the villagers. Children laughed and splashed at the water’s edge, and the women worked outside their huts, talking quietly together.
Stepping outside, Daria sat down on the stoop and waited in silence while Paita fixed her something to eat.
She spotted Tados coming down the forest path with a basket of fresh fish, and the truth washed over her as though for the first time.
My husband is dead.
No! It can’t be true! How was it possible that Nathan could have been dead so many days without her sensing it in her spirit? Without God letting her know?
Boldly she cried out to Tados. “Ceju na. Come here.” It was a command, one the young man was not accustomed to heeding when it came from a woman. He remained where he was.
“Kopaku,” she pled, making her voice appropriately submissive.
Tados waded across the shallow stream and walked slowly toward her, stopping at a distance.
“Tados—” She swallowed hard, trying to think of the words. She wasn’t sure she wanted the answer to the question she was about to ask, and yet an ember of hope ignited in her as she entertained the possibility that Tados and Quimico were mistaken.
Tados waited patiently.
“Did…did you see Dr. Nate? Defuerto? Dead? Did you see his…his body?” She stumbled clumsily over the alien words.
He slid the basket to the ground by his feet but did not reply.
She repeated the question, enunciating carefully, not sure if she had phrased it properly.
A shadow of emotion clouded his eyes. He nodded and surprised her by answering in English. He motioned wildly with his arms. “Everybody burn. Everybody die… All the hut,” he said emphatically. “A big fire. Very big.” Again his arms painted a wide arc. “I run to help Dr. Nate. I see only many body. Quimico see also. Nobody come out.”
She was aware of Paita standing in the doorway behind her, but she needed no interpreter this time. Daria understood his halting words perfectly.
Now Tados held up a hand. “You wait,” he commanded. Leaving his basket on the ground, he crossed over the stream and strode toward his own hut. A few minutes later he returned, holding something out to her in his upturned palm. “You take.”
She descended the steps and took the object from his hand. Her breath caught as she recognized Nathan’s watch—the expensive gold watch his parents had given him upon his graduation from medical school. Nathan never removed it except to bathe. She turned it over in her hand. Its face was black with soot, and though she tried to clean the crystal, rubbing it hard with her thumb, the Roman numerals on the face had been obliterated.
She looked up at the young native, a question in her eyes.
“You take,” he repeated.
She thanked him. With a single, silent nod, he turned, retrieved his basket, and crossed back to the other side of the stream.
She heard Paita go inside. Climbing the steps, she sank down on the stoop again, and sat there staring at Nathan’s watch, numb. She knew she must get word to Nate’s parents and hers. Perhaps Bob Warrington had already taken care of that. She hadn’t thought to ask him. There was a place in San José del Guaviare where they could sometimes get through by telephone or perhaps send e-mail—if the paramilitary groups hadn’t commandeered it.
She could not see herself remaining here without Nathan, but neither could she imagine going anywhere else. Her life in the States seemed like a story she had read long ago, one she remembered fondly but that had no bearing on reality for her. She pressed her fingers to her temples and tried to stop the flow of thoughts.
For now she wanted only one thing—to weep. Nate was dead, and she needed to mourn him.
Daria merely went through the motions the rest of the day. She felt removed from her surroundings, as though she hovered in a different dimension. She folded the few items of clothing Nathan had not taken with him to the far village. They were heavy with his scent, and she held them longingly to her face before placing them in one of their small duffel bags. She packed her own belongings next to his, and she allowed herself to remember Nathan Camfield.
She thought of his hands. Skilled hands, strong and able and roughened because he wasn’t afraid to work alongside the men in the village when he was needed there. Yet his hands were gentle when he examined a sick child, and sublimely tender when he loved her, when he caressed her face, her body. She saw his lanky figure. Nathan had run cross-country in high school and college, and he had a runner’s body, full of energy, like a wire spring, never static. And his wit. He delighted in good-natured teasing. He loved to make her laugh. In her mind she heard his laughter now—a musical, contagious, uninhibited crow. Just conjuring it in her memory made her laugh out loud.
The sound of her own laughter shocked her. Reality struck—a spasm in the pit of her stomach—and her voice caught in her throat, suspending her breath in that strangling place between laughter and tears. She gasped for air, frightened at the depth and the conflict of her emotions. Near panic, a moan exploded from her. She wept then, her body racked with sobs for this loss of a very part of herself.
Her heart would never again thrill at the sight of Nate’s lean, tan body hurrying across the stream, anxious to be with her after a day away from the village. He would never again make her laugh as he teased her about her cooking or babbled in her ear in his own silly made-up language, poking fun at her first feeble attempts at the Timoné dialect. She would never again lie in his arms, sleepy and wholly satisfied as his lover and his wife. Weak with grief, she fell upon the sweet-smelling mat—the bed where he had made sweet love to her.
She remembered how he had hauled the previous missionary Evangeline Magrit’s narrow single bed out of the hut the night they’d first arrived. He had proudly brought in the native-woven mat where she lay now. Nate’s only concession to her comfort had been the extra padding their sleeping bags afforded and the thick mosquito netting that was knotted above her head now. She felt ashamed that she’d ever complained about this hard bed. It should have been enough that she shared it with him. Her sobs rose to strangle her, and the wails that issued from her throat now came out exactly as the keening cries of a grieving Timoné woman. In this nuance of the ancient language, she was fluent.
The weeping was cleansing, and, when the worst was past, a familiar peace began to fill the emptiness. A bittersweet realization flooded over her: Nathan was in heaven. This very minute, he was looking into the face of Jesus. It filled her with joy as she remembered how much he had longed for that moment.
She offered a prayer of thanksgiving for the years she had been allowed with her husband, for the precious love they had shared, and for the hope she had in Christ. And she remembered then that this was the reason she and Nathan had come to Colombia—to share that hope.
She must be strong and show these people how her God comforted her, how he made sense of the senseless. Yet how could she do that when she struggled for it to make sense to her?
Nightmares breached her sleep that night. In her dreams she saw Nate, badly burned. He staggered toward her from across the stream, but when he crossed over to their hut he metamorphosed into a skeletal body, only his smile remaining.
She started awake, and each time she fell back asleep, the dreams plagued her. Twice she actually thought she saw Nathan standing beside her mat, but when she reached out for him, the specter faded like a vapor, leaving her bereft and trembling with fear. She lay in the darkness, shivering in spite of the heat, unable to wipe away the terrifying visions.
She sat up in bed, trembling. Suddenly in her mind she saw clearly the column of smoke that had risen in the north sixteen days earlier. The blood rushed to her head, and she felt her heart beating violently in her chest as she realized for the first time that she had actually witnessed Nathan’s funeral pyre. The thought chilled her, and then, strangely, it began to comfort her. In God’s incomprehensible way, had he allowed her to be present at Nate’s death? To see his entrance into eternity?
“Oh, God, give me your peace. Please, Father. Take these dreams away,” she begged.
Finally she slept, and when the sun came up, she went into the forest where she cut thick bamboo stalks and tied them with vines, fashioning a crude cross. She didn’t know where the idea had come from, but she planted the cross near a tree behind their hut. Then sitting cross-legged in the moss beneath the tree, she carefully etched Nathan’s name and the dates of his short life into the trunk. Though it was an empty grave, it seemed important to mark Nathan’s passing in this way. As she carved, she prayed, pouring her heart out to God. Finally she quoted the Twenty-third Psalm from memory. The ancient words and the ceremony of her actions comforted her. And though she still did not understand the why of Nate’s death, God took away her need for understanding, and she felt the tiny ember of peace flicker.
As Daria tidied the hut, she set aside Nathan’s books to give to Anazu, Tados, and Quimico. Her own books and other supplies she gave to the children. They seemed to understand that Daria was still in mourning. They did not come for morning lessons, did not follow her around the village as they had before. Instead, they waited, tentative, for her to approach them. She craved their chattering and their easy way with her. She wanted back the life she’d known here before.
But even as she craved her old life, she saw the boat that would take her away sitting ready at the water’s edge.
As she returned from washing at the river, she came upon Tommi, hand fishing in a fast-running tributary beside the pathway.
“Catching any fish?” she asked him in Timoné.
With a fresh shyness in her presence, he held out a basket with five or six small trout in it.
She smiled at him and spread her hands wide. “You catch a big one for me, okay?”
“Okay,” he grinned, using his favorite English word.
She walked on silently, bidding the little boy a final goodbye in her heart. She followed the path back to the village, committing the jungle to memory as she went. Several times along the way, she stopped and closed her eyes, listening to the soothing sounds of the rain forest, recording them in her mind. After today, she might never return, but she would hold this place in her heart, forever entwined with her memories of Nathan Camfield.
Anazu’s boat sat ready at the trail’s edge. It was time to go, and now she felt an urgency to carry the tragic news to Nate’s family and to her own.
In an inspired moment, she made a gift of their hut to Anazu and his family. There was no Timoné word for church, but she explained as best she could that she would like them to use it as a place to pray and to seek God.
“It would make Dr. Nate very happy to know that you remember him here, and that you always pray to the one true God,” she said in her halting attempt at the dialect.
Anazu thanked her for her gift. Paita embraced Daria, while Anazu’s nephews loaded the small bundles that held her belongings into the boat. Then they hoisted the craft onto their shoulders and, without a word, turned toward the forest pathway that led to the river.
Daria followed, gulping back tears as she walked away from the cherished memories she had lived here with her husband. She remembered the day Nathan had disappeared down this same trail. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
Overhead the birds of the rain forest squawked and sang in a harsh cacophony. The sun burned down on her back, its scorching rays a comfort simply because it was something she could feel.
As she followed her guides along the trail, she turned several times and drank in the scene, trying to sear the picture in her memory.
Finally, as the village disappeared from sight behind a curtain of thick vegetation, Daria turned back to the trail. Forging ahead, she wrapped her hands protectively over the small mound of her stomach, cradling the only part of Nathan Camfield she had left—the child she was now certain grew within her womb.