Since he did not know the sacramental phrases, he simply raised his arms toward the sky and summoned the attention of the Great Ancestor. “O Witu’mai!” Afterward he held his arms raised and his gaze heavenward for a long time, his mind blank and dead.
BORONAI’S canoe, freed of his weight, had been rescued by the wind from the main current, and now turned peacefully in the side eddies upriver. Too weak to swim or paddle to the bank and drag himself back upstream, he considered dumping Aeore into the torrent and taking the black canoe.
He listened uneasily to the stillness of the river, peered at the encircling green battlements and at the sky. Aeore’s face made him more uneasy still; he crept forward and dragged the mat over the face, then fell back again into the bow. They would travel east together.
AT twilight the thick tired leaves turned limp and the night creatures stirred. They passed down chasms of dark trees into an underworld.
That first night it rained. The dugout slid past one Yuri Maha village, then another, without incident. In the gray dawn of the next morning, on a roiled river that had widened and grown slow, he saw a derelict craft snared on the bank. He stroked toward shore, but reached the bank well below it. Pulling at branches so violently that his hands bled, he hauled himself far back upstream before he saw that the canoe contained an Indian corpse.
That morning there were several death canoes, trailing and bobbing under the banks. How many others had slipped past unseen during the night; how many had foundered or were still ahead of him, turning slowly in the eddies; how many more, before the influenza ran its course, would drift away from the villages on the Tuaremi …
With a wind and rain of evening his fever rose anew. He quaked so that he knew he must disintegrate; the pouring water was his blood. The wind sent the ugly river chop scudding upstream, and on the shore the undergrowth lashed wildly, as if chained to earth; moaning and straining, it reached out at him. He crouched in the stern, shrunk up like a wet spider; behind the mat at the far end of the canoe, the rotting eyes attended him. Enough, enough: he gripped the gunwales until his forearms ached, and watched the rain pour down his fingers.
The canoe descended the mad river in wild turnings, striking the banks in long slow caroms; the mat slipped and the corpse rose a little, half afloat, to watch him. And Boronai—in the deep mud currents far below, Boronai’s body accompanied them, bumping soundlessly past sunken trees. Across the wind came the toll of the white bellbird; he thrashed to free the canoe from a dragging bush and fell back again, head spinning.
Then the world flew to pieces in waste and profusion, and did not reassemble.
HEAT. The lunatic ringing of cicadas, like rusty gears of an old universe.
Overhead, a creak of wings, and water feeding greedily upon itself beneath the branches. An insect gnawed gently at his temple, seeking access to his brain. The stink of putrefaction—whose? Was God so dead? He laughed. He coughed. The insects reconvened.
The sun killed the tree and pierced its skeleton; on black branches, silhouetted by the sun’s dead yellow eye, black fossil birds creaked brittle feathers. The dead birds craned and peered, through a foul mist. “What do you see?” he whispered. “What is it that you see?”
He felt beneath the mat for the long arrows and the bow. He raised the dead man’s bow, and the arrow shriveled in the sun, and the dead birds craned and peered. The shaft skittered through the branches toward the sun. But the curassows sat oblivious, and he tried again. Each attempt brought the birds closer, craning and peering. At the fifth shot, a bird fell from the tree onto his chest and squatted there, amazed, the arrow quills bright on its burnished breast, the wet point high in the air, catching the sun. The bird bounced, blinking, as he laughed; at the tip of its bill, a drop of blood grew fat.
“It’s not you I’m laughing at,” he told the being in the bird’s round eye. “It’s your surprise at what has happened to you.”
The white bellbird reappeared, flicking across his vision like a sun spot. Its remorselessness dismayed him, but he could not raise his head. Why not, why not—one might as well as not.
Not what? He had forgotten. He shot idly at the bellbird, and it flew. Well, then … He watched his bare foot pushing at the branches, weak and thin. Still twitching, are you? The canoe swung outward and resumed its journey.
The world turned on its endless circle, and the corpse lay downstream, to windward; he could taste it. He coughed weakly and angrily. “God damn you.” He spat. “God damn you. Enough!” He shook his head; who would have thought that a wild creature so magnificent could have such stink in it? Of the far clear mornings on the Tuaremi, of the first fine days of the great federation, there was nothing left but smell.
He waved at the accumulating sky: We smell, right? Can you smell us?
They drifted onward. A vulture, high as a hole in the sky, attended them but did not move. As the sun rolled toward the earth, they passed a canoe caught on a snag, but even as he tried to act they drifted past.
Midafternoon. The vulture flop-flapped down, discreet, onto the dead man’s brow. He yelled at it, scaring himself in the almighty silence. The matting had fallen back, baring the corpse. Breathing hard through his mouth, he covered Aeore again, but in the narrow canoe their naked legs embraced. He shook with horror. They were one, a single flesh. All the cold and rot and smell were seeping into him; flies trapped beneath the rotten matting hummed angrily at his belly. Recoiling, he sobbed once, aloud; his breathing rasped his ears like something tearing.
Well, dump him then.
Damned if I will.
Damned if you don’t.
The river slowed. From the river reeds, a rude head surfaced. The manatee blinked and puffed like a huge black bald old outraged man. He yelled in fright at the insensible old eyes, then whirled lest Aeore catch him off guard—
He returned Aeore’s pitiless gaze.
Don’t look the sun straight in the face, Joe Redcloud said, for the sun will blind you. And the last old men of the Cheyenne nation grunted and nodded.
He stared straight upward. Kill me or spare me as you like, but either way, expect no thanks for it.
His head split, and he closed his eyes and saw the blood in his own head. How red it was!
Bright red: did they stand over him, imagining him dead? They had caught him then—so much the better. The red shirt had followed like a germ: Uyuyu, Tukanu, the Ocelot, and eastward. His ears rang.
If I knew how, I would ask forgiveness, but of whom? Of Aeore? The Sky? Myself?
Who else?
Are you afraid?
Not of death.
Of what?
Of that enormous sky.
You’re going to die.
Well, kill me then, says I.
You’re going to die then.
Lewis Meriwether Moon: die soon.
He dozed.
You’re going to die then.
Well I said kill me then or else be quiet.
• • •
AEORE’S face twitched with ants and flies. Aeore whined.
Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.
STILL HERE, STILL HERE, he howled; he howled at Aeore, but sometimes Aeore was God, sometimes the sun, sometimes himself; and he knew, and remembered afterward, that all of this was true.
So never whine, he said.
He said, Be content with howling.
NIGHT and cold. He was so cold, so cramped, so tired, so weak that he could not get a fire going. Curled tight as a fetus on his naked self, he prayed for the return of the fever that for Christ knew how many nights had kept him warm on his bed of soggy reeds. He shuddered, and reviled his own endurance.
Daybreak.
A country of low forest and savanna.
A strange dugout lay turned turtle on a bend. In silhouette in the eastern light, it looked like a black log. He dared not notice it for fear that his eye betrayed him; he was almost abreast of it when he looked again. Scrambling to h
is knees, he paddled and splashed ashore and pitched back up along the bank, crashing through the arrow grass, while Aeore’s canoe turned once and drifted onward.
The hulk surged mutely in the flood wrack, like a carcass. In his weakness he miscalculated, and fell short when he leaped; he caught hold of a submerged branch before the current took him, and hauled himself whimpering across the hulk and kissed it, panting like a dog.
When his strength returned, he worked the canoe free and guided it down to a break in the bank where he dragged it out and turned it right side up. After resting again, he floated it and got into it and sat in it like a small baby. Then he sailed downstream to the massive pile of flotsam where Aeore’s canoe had caught and hung; there he retrieved his paddle and the dead curassow. The last remnants of his pants were gone; he stripped off the belt that had constricted him so faithfully for so long and flung it away after the rest.
Gaunt and naked, leaning on his paddle, he stared at the face in the canoe. Except he willed it so, it was no longer Aeore, and a well of sadness for things irredeemable and gone flowed over him. The Indian nation had grown old; he knelt down like a penitent and wept. He wept for Aeore and the doomed people of the jungle, and he wept for the last old leatherfaces of the Plains. He wept for New Person and Pindi, and he wept for Alvin Moon “Joe Redcloud” and the seventeen thousand volunteers. And he wept for Quarrier, and for himself, who had never wept in twenty years. He wept and wept, and though toward the end he began to smile, he kept on weeping until at last he breathed a tremendous sigh and laughed quietly, without tears.
Aeore said, We are naked and have nothing! Therefore we must decorate ourselves, for if we did not, how are we to be told from animals?
He took up Aeore’s achote and on his own chest drew the sun as a child would draw it, rough and bold, with violent rays; he threw his chest out. Then his brain was drowned in blackness, and he fell.
When he opened his eyes, the sky was ringing, and the mist on the east horizon bulged with light; he rose awe-struck to his feet. A wind of dawn had turned the death canoe back to the current; it passed on down the somber flood between high swords of grass. On a wide bend far away where wind and the light of the rising sun had turned the water gold, the canoe of the Child-Star hung a moment in the brilliant mist and then, as the sun appeared, went up in fire.
HUNCHED on the earth’s face as the night came, he contemplated the dead curassow. The thought came: die or eat. He turned the dead thing in his hand, peered at it curiously; how mysteriously it was made! He opened its breast and ate it in small bites, raw.
The dark was crossed by star fire and heat lightning. He stared outward, upward; the Southern Cross and Sagittarius climbed the sky, as if to immolate themselves in the full moon. Silver night-hawks, crisscrossing the pale surface of the river like night swallows, joined the evening hunt; a jaguar coughed from the far bank, downriver. Somewhere a great tree gave way and crashed into the flood with a noise like thunder.
At morning the wind was cold again and brought a brown chop to the river. The river was wide and slow, without tight bends or rapids. The land had flattened, and great tracts of flooded savanna broke the ramparts of the rain forest. In the shelter of the drift wrack, a mud beach had been strained from the brown water. All that day he squatted on this scrap of earth, mouth open: a dead fish beside him on the strand, lone bony trees across the reaches of pale swamp, black circling birds, a gaunt cormorant on the snag of a drowned tree, a dead snake, belly up, in the driven water. There was no sign of man. Under the raining banks, unknown antediluvians gasped and swirled.
He felt bereft, though of what he did not know. He was neither white nor Indian, man nor animal, but some mute, naked strand of protoplasm. He groaned with the ache of his own transience under this sky, as if, breathing too deeply, he might rise on the wind as lightly as a seed, without control or intimation of his fate. He was the nameless beetle probing the pores of his own toe; he twitched in the wind like the dull scale that loosened on the flank of the rotten fish. His was the bald eye of the vulture forming its halo over the mute landscape; far beneath, he saw the solitary man on the humble mud.
On every side there stretched away a vast world without a sun. The savanna was beaten flat by wind and rain, and the sky was so huge that the weight of the whole hemisphere oppressed him. He did not know within a thousand miles where he might be, nor on what river, nor in what country. How close, how far stood the nearest being under this same sky?
A COLD sun loomed through the pall and peered at him. He raised both arms to it; the sun withdrew.
He drifted eastward.
The sky turned heavily, battered by wind.
He drifted eastward, eastward, past long sand bars bare of tracks.
He thought, Am I the first man on the earth; am I the last?
On an island shared with swift white birds, he trapped some small fish in a pool; he clutched the live quicksilver things, triumphant. The pool reflected his hunched form against the sky. In a face bare with privation the wide eyes were clear, and behind the face the clouds of heaven rolled majestically across the world.
At noon the sun returned again, resplendent. He entered its sparkle on the water and opened his mouth and drank. The flood was mineral and cold as a prairie river. It coursed his throat, his lungs, the inside of his skin; it bathed his heart. He let the water pour across him, wash in and out of his clean mouth; he rolled in the warm shallows like an otter and washed his skin with sand.
He assembled a fire of dry precious sticks, coaxing a small transparent flame with a makeshift drill; the sun flowed softly in his hands. Clean as the silvered driftwood, strong as wind, he broiled the brilliant fish on sticks, exultant.
The wind was bright. Laid naked to the sun and sky, he felt himself open like a flower. Soon he slept. At dark he built an enormous fire, in celebration of the only man beneath the eye of Heaven.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Matthiessen was born in New York City in 1927 and had already begun his writing career by the time he was graduated from Yale University in 1950. The following year, he was a founder of The Paris Review. Besides At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which was nominated for the National Book Award, he has published five other novels, including Far Tortuga and Killing Mr. Watson, as well as the collection On the River Styx and Other Stories. Mr. Matthiessen’s parallel career as a naturalist and explorer has resulted in numerous works of nonfiction, among them The Tree Where Man Was Born, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and The Snow Leopard, which won it. His other works of nonfiction include The Cloud Forest and Under the Mountain Wall (which together received an Award of Merit from the National Institute of Arts and Letters), The Wind Birds, Blue Meridian, Sal Si Puedes, Sand Rivers, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Indian Country, Nine-Headed Dragon River, Men’s Lives, and African Silences.
ALSO BY PETER MATTHIESSEN
THE PETER MATTHIESSEN READER
edited by McKay Jenkins
In this single-volume collection of the distinguished author’s nonfiction are essays and excerpts that highlight the spiritual, literary, and political daring so crucial to Matthiessen’s vision. Comprehensive and engrossing, The Peter Matthiessen Reader celebrates an American voice unequaled in its commitment to literature’s noblest aspiration: to challenge us to perceive our world—as well as ourselves—truthfully and clearly.
Nonfiction
LOST MAN’S RIVER
In Lost Man’s River Matthiessen returns to the primeval landscape of the Florida Everglades, the setting of his bestseller Killing Mister Watson. In 1910 a sugarcane planter named E. J. Watson was gunned down by a group of his neighbors, perhaps in cold blood, perhaps in self defense. Years later, E. J.’s son Lucius tries to discover the truth of his father’s life and death. And even as Lucius tries to redeem his half-lost life by gathering the testimony (and braving the threats) of poachers and renegades, he struggles for the future of the remote country in which they live
.
Fiction/Literature
AFRICAN SILENCES
A powerful and sobering account of the cataclysmic depredation of the African landscape and its wildlife. Through Peter Matthiessen’s eyes we see elephants, white rhinos, gorillas, and other endangered creatures of the wild. We share the drama of the journeys themselves, including a hazardous crossing of the continent in a light plane. And along the way, we learn of the human lives oppressed by bankrupt political regimes and economies.
Current Events/Travel
AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD
In a malarial outpost in South America two misplaced gringos converge and clash. Martin Quarrier has come to convert the elusive Niaruna Indians to his brand of Christianity. Lewis Moon, a stateless mercenary who is himself part Indian, has come to kill them on behalf of the local comandante. Out of their struggle Peter Matthiessen has created a novel of Conradian richness that explores both the varieties of spiritual existence and the politics of cultural genocide.
Fiction/Literature
ON THE RIVER STYX
And Other Stories
“Mr. Matthiessen proves himself here to be a connoisseur of coiled tensions, between men and women, between people of different social classes, and, repeatedly, between races.… There is something almost mysterious about his achievement … qualities for which one can think of only classical or old-fashioned words: gravitas, grandeur, beauty.”
—The New York Times
Fiction/Literature
KILLING MISTER WATSON
Killing Mister Watson is a fictional masterpiece, the first novel of the Watson trilogy, written at the peak of Peter Matthiessen’s powers as a novelist. Drawn from fragments of historical fact, it brilliantly depicts the fortunes and misfortunes of Edgar J. Watson, a real-life entrepreneur and outlaw who appeared in the lawless Florida Everglades around the turn of the century.