25

KAREN, THE CHURCH SECRETARY, INSISTS on driving David to the airport. She’s more excited than he is. “So they couldn’t find a job for Abby?”

“Oh, you know, things are a little rough with Sean,” he says vaguely, because Karen will go crazy if she gets wind of a possible acting role. They turn onto Wilkes, where the traffic is bumper to bumper. Karen is a fearless driver and she nimbly overtakes two semis trying to shut her out of the turn lane. All Dave feels is a sense of heaviness about leaving Abby. Your grandfathers killed my uncle. It makes him a little sick to think that this is the path she’s following. Mi tío. Who in the world is she talking to that would put it to her that way? He sees an airport sign and the wild idea pops into his mind that she’s gone to Ecuador. He’ll roll into Shell Mera and she’ll be there. It’s nuts. But then, how fervently he wishes he’d thought to check her top drawer! He knows where she keeps her passport, tucked under a jewellery box.

Karen brakes to a stop outside Departures and pops the trunk and jumps out to say goodbye. “See you in the movies,” she says. She’s sweet and funny and she’s still looking for Mr. Right. David is cautious with his hugs, because there’s no point getting her hopes up.

On his own at the check-in terminal, his jitters begin. What is this questionnaire, firearms, surfboards, explosives, knives—some sort of perjury trap? We weren’t meant to fly (is the realization that always wallops him the minute he gets a boarding pass in his hand), it’s not in the Bible. So if you’re going to let yourself be tossed into the upper atmosphere in a steel capsule, it better be for a sacred and important purpose. A lot of the people lined up in security are going to a country music concert in Houston.

He sinks into a chair in the boarding lounge and surveys his fellow passengers. There they sit in rows, gazing stupefied at their phones. Strangers in a secret cohort who’ll soon be hurtling together towards the annihilation of their earthly bodies. Some of them going joyfully home, some facing judgment and eternal damnation. Stop already. To distract himself, he pulls out his phone. Another text from Sean. Why did the search and rescue party only find four bodies? It’s becoming clear that this movie is pretty much in David’s hands. He tried the other day to put it to Abby that she would be Betty’s natural heir, but really he’s been the guardian of the story for a long time.

It was a new story when he was growing up in Quito. There were still things they were putting together. At a certain age he became passionate about it. When he was eleven, his mother married Abe, a widower who ran HCJB in Quito, and they left the mission school and moved to his house in a Quito suburb. Fatherless kids, they’d felt entirely normal at the boarding school, where nobody had parents. In fact they were luckier than most: they had their mother. So the adjustment to Abe’s house was hard, dealing with three step-siblings who had a father and who were calling Marj “Mom.” Benjy and Debbie would tell stories from Shell Mera, seizing every opportunity to conjure up their real father (a hero and martyr) in the presence of Abraham Van Der Puy with his funny name and his suspenders and his bushy eyebrows and the coiffed waves of his hair. Benjy still had the yellow model airplane their dad had given him that last Christmas, and Debbie remembered their father making her a dollhouse and the two of them painting it together. Whereas David had nothing. You would think some little thing would have pressed itself into his infantile brain. Instead, he became an avid student of Operation Auca, reading his dad’s journal and Betty Elliot’s memoir as if they were books of the Bible.

As with the Bible, there were many gaps. It was possible for him, in fact, to know more about what had happened than Nate did. The three Auca who visited the missionaries on the beach—no one knew how to understand it at first, but eventually they did, and one night when he asked, his mother told him. He remembers being on a top bunk in the room they now shared with their stepbrothers, and Marj, with her private new happiness, perched on a chair for a bedtime chat.

“They were from the same clan as the men who killed your dad,” she said. “The young man we call George, he took the girl into the jungle because he liked her and he wanted to be alone with her. Apparently he’d been spying on the Americans, and he offered to take her over to see.”

“Who was the older lady?”

“She was the girl’s auntie. Someone told her that the two young people had slipped away to be alone, so she followed, hoping to stop them and bring the girl back. When they got to the Curaray, George stepped out into the open because he thought it would impress Delilah. So then they had this peaceful picnic on the beach with your dad and the others. And I guess it did impress Delilah, because late in the afternoon the pair of them shook off the auntie and slipped on their own into the jungle. The next morning, members of their clan found them, and they were in big trouble.”

Benjy had been pretending he wasn’t listening, but at that point in the story his man’s voice issued from the cave of the lower bunk. “So they had sex in the jungle?”

“They probably did,” Marj said with a little frown. “Yes, I guess they did. And so they were ashamed. And they were frightened because Delilah was spoken for, she was supposed to be marrying someone else. So George made up a story that they had been taken captive by some white men. He said that the white men were cannibals, that they had already killed and eaten Delilah’s sister—Dayuma, you know?—and that he and Delilah had barely escaped with their lives and were on their way home.”

“Cannibals. Why would he say that?”

“I don’t know. But he did, and it was enough to set off a war party. The Auca got busy making spears. The old auntie arrived on the scene and tried to tell them she had been treated kindly by the missionaries, but by then their blood was up.”

David remembers the horror he felt. It was worse than the actual killing, this sordid suggestion that his father was murdered because of a stupid lie. This story in which the missionaries had only incidental roles, in which, even after enjoying their Christian hospitality, the guy they called George was only after one thing.

At times it is better to know less.

His mother must have noticed his distress. “Think about this, Davey,” she said. “Your dad and the others made peaceful contact with the Auca before God took them home. They had that satisfaction. Think how generous the Lord was, in giving them that.”

It is not an easy thing, being guardian of a story. He later learned (from Betty, who learned it in Tiwaeno) that when the visitors arrived at the camp on the Curaray, the young woman (whose name was actually Gimari) was eager to talk to outsiders, to ask whether they had seen her sister Dayuma. She kept asking the same question over and over: Have you seen Dayuma? Of course, they couldn’t understand her. They didn’t even pick up the word Dayuma. But as it happened, Jim had a photo of Dayuma with him. He had taken it at the hacienda, and he carried it in because he thought, if the people he encountered happened to know her, it might reassure them to find out that she was still alive. At one point he took that snapshot out of his pocket and showed it to them.

This seemed to thrill Betty. That in the vast jungle of eastern Ecuador, it was Dayuma’s sister who came to the beach asking about Dayuma, and that Jim—without even understanding what she was saying—pulled out a picture of Dayuma. Betty saw it as powerful evidence of God’s working. It had the opposite effect on David. In Quito he had met an anthropologist at a government reception. The guy talked about trophy collecting, about the way some Indigenous peoples shrank down the heads of their conquered enemies and hung them at the doorway of their houses. And then David found himself imagining the scene on the Curaray, Gimari asking about Dayuma, and this strange white man reaching into his pocket and taking out a flat, grey image of Dayuma’s head, shrunk down to the size of the tiny photographs they printed in those days.

His flight’s been called. People are starting to line up. He tips his head back, closing his eyes. You have an image of the men in your mind, and you have a vision of the mission, and this had the fingerprints of a screw-up all over it.