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Chapter One
Inside the railway car there was a vacuum of stillness which seemed to shut in the passengers, making us acutely conscious of the slightest sound or movement. For no good reason, I was listening, hardly drawing breath. It was not quite six o’clock in the morning. Everyone else was half-asleep and thoroughly chilled, for the sun had not yet risen, but they waited with for more patience than I for the train to begin its journey up into the western cordillera of the Andes and down to the coast. It had been scheduled to leave at half past five, and although I had been in Ecuador long enough to learn to expect delays, I was especially eager to begin the last leg of what had been a very long journey, a whole life’s preparation for missionary work among mountain Indians.
The door opened, relieving the vacuum, and a timid voice spoke. Little suitcases. Toys. One sucre.”
A woman in a plaid shawl and long wool skirt came in, steering a basket in front of her between the closely set seats. She saw me as soon as I turned. A foreigner was always a likely customer.
“Only one sucre, señorita.” She stopped by my seat, proffering the basket with a look of humility and hope.
One sucre. About five cents. I took one of the tiny valises from the basket. It was made of layers of newspaper, pasted together and covered with an imitation leather paper. There were a little handle and a strap with a gold-colored buckle to fasten it shut. The valise measured perhaps two inches across.
“Did you make it?” I asked.
“Si, señorita. I made it myself.”
“But what a lot of work! One sucre, did you say?”
“Si, señorita, one sucre, no more. It is not very expensive, señorita. Look at how nicely it is made. It is very pretty. Just one sucre.”
“Oh no, it is not very expensive,” I agreed. “I don’t see how you can make money on it at all.”
“Well, I don’t make much, señorita, but it is something. I have six children. I try to care for them. Sometimes my daughter helps me. She is twelve. She can paste the paper for me. Don’t you want one, señorita?”
“Yes, I want one.” I put the sucre into her hand and took the little suitcase. I would find some child to give it to. An Indian child, perhaps. The MacDonalds, who were to meet me at the end of the train trip, were older. Their children were grown.
It would be nice to be met this time by experienced missionaries, and to stay in their home. My arrival in Guayaquil, six months before, had been quite different. The thin line of shore that I could see when the ship dropped anchor was like a line drawn to mark off a section of my life. When I crossed it, everything would change. The days aboard ship had given me a taste of a world I had never known and would not know again, a world of luxuries such as Camembert cheese, deft waiters, soft music at dinner. Standing on deck during the last moments before disembarking I felt a feint wind stir my hair and I turned to face it, closed my eyes, and tried to see the far off shore with its palm trees and thatched huts, the brown children running on the sand where the wind came from. It would not be long. Unaccountably, I wished that it would be. The door opened behind me, giving forth the breath of the little world within—cooled air, smelling of perfumes, cigarette smoke, steaks, alcohol. I wanted to prolong, not just indefinitely but forever, those timeless days of the voyage, when I was no longer preparing to be a missionary nor had yet become one. The irresponsibility was intoxicating. Now I would have to cross the line.
I went below and put a few last things into my suitcase. My leather-bound Bible lay on the dresser and I reached toward it for reassurance. “Fear thou not, for I am with thee.” The Bible had opened easily at that passage, for it was a favorite of mine and it was to me now the voice of God. I left the ship, and then there had been the trip upriver by launch and my first night in an Ecuadorian hotel, with its smell of plaster, mold, cheap soap and floor wax; the smothering heat, the short bed and unyielding pillow, the sounds of coughing and spitting in the hall, of dogs barking in the streets. A clock had boomed out the hour and the half hour, a mosquito sang his thin song close to my ear, and a trumpet in a nearby dance hall had hooted and shrilled. The place of God’s choice for me, I had reflected, so little discomforts, little sacrifices, were to be welcomed.
“Toys, sir? Suitcases, señora? Toys for your children. Only one sucre.” The poor woman was back, making another attempt to sell her trinkets. Small chance that anyone in the next car had bought one—it was second class, with long wooden benches facing the center on which huddled Indians in ponchos and women with great cloth bundles and baskets. The toy vendor’s voice was drowned much of the time by the strident cries of white-aproned women on the platform who were selling plates of cooked food.
In front of me sat a man in a black hat and a dark red poncho, cradling a burlap-wrapped package on his lap; the smell of the damp wool of his poncho was mixed with the heavy sweet smell of brilliantine with which his wife had slicked her black braid. Across the aisle were two men in black suits and black ties, reading newspapers. Three children a little ahead of them had turned one of the seats around to make a cubicle of privacy. With their mother they made a small cosmos, squirming and twisting in the seats as they arranged themselves and their bundles, looking at last with satisfaction at one another. There was no one else in the train, so far as they were concerned. Yes, there was. One of them spied me. Three other feces turned toward me. La gringa! Look at the gringuita! There was that word again—the foreigner—but I was used to it now. I had heard it a hundred times in the streets of Guayaquil, and later in Ambato, where I studied Spanish. They turned back and looked solemnly at their mother as though their security had been jeopardized. The two who faced me shifted their eyes quickly toward me now and then, and I tried to meet their glances with a smile. I wouldn’t hurt you. Really, I am not dangerous, even if I am a gringa. They pretended they hadn’t seen.
“Eggs! Fresh-cooked eggs!” A woman stuck her head in the car, and behind her another pushed in and shrieked, “Eggs! Potatoes! Tender corn!”
A whistle screamed, the train suddenly hissed and jerked, the two vendors lurched against the doorway and scrambled for the platform. Poor things! How much could they make in that business? I looked out the window and saw the woman pass with her little suitcases, the supply apparently undiminished.
“Now we are going!” cried the children.
“Shut up!” said the mother.
Another tremendous crash, a great grinding and clatter, and the train began to move.
I should have bought ten of those toy valises, I thought. At least ten. I could have done that for the poor woman. I twisted my neck to see if I could still see her. Yes. There she stood with her basket. I felt that she was looking at me, though we had moved too far away to be sure. She was still standing there as a curve in the track put us out of sight.
I was on my way. Not yet a bona fide missionary, not quite yet. But soon. . .
It was impossible to arrange my knees comfortably in the short space between the seats, for they had been built for Ecuadorians. I had never thought of myself as tall—I was of average height in my own country—until I rode in Ecuadorian buses where I could not stand up straight. A cold draft blew up from the floorboards of the squeaking, creaking train and I tried to twine my legs together to keep them warm. Once a position was found, the effort of changing it was too great, and my lower extremities were soon numb. I decided to ignore this, and turned my attention to the passing scenery.
The track wound through cobblestone streets lined with whitewashed adobe walls and stone-block buildings much like those of Ambato and other sierra towns. I would be glad to leave cities behind now, and reach at last the limitless freedom and purity of the high Andes.
When the train reached the outskirts of the city the dusty dirt roads, lined with mud walls which seemed to have grown out of them, depressed me, as the vast slum areas which circled the city of Guayaquil had depressed me. But somehow, Riobamba’s poor did not seem quite so poor, nor its squalor quite so squalid as Guayaquil’s. There were garbage heaps in doorways here, there were half-clad, filthy-faced children, some of them boys with shoulder-length hair (for, an Ecuadorian had told me, “If you cut their hair before they learn to talk, they’ll never talk”), there were the same rows of windowless houses with tiny shops squeezed into the doorways and strange things floating in great copper basins of boiling oil set on charcoal braziers on the street, there were the blaring radios and, in even less prosperous districts, the empty stillness, as though a plague had carried off all the inhabitants. But as the train crept hesitantly toward the countryside, through the widening streets and more sparsely scattered hovels, I wondered whether I had become so accustomed to poverty that it no longer seemed deplorable to me, or whether it was perhaps the clearness of the mountain air with its blue sky and sunshine and absence of vultures that made Guayaquil’s poverty seem, in retrospect, extreme.
For days I had waited in the port city for my baggage to be unloaded from the barges which lay at anchor in the Guayas River. I had nothing at all to do. The days melted into one another, a long, monotonous succession of almost unendurably hot mornings, afternoons and evenings. One day I had seen a man with no eyes and no feet who sat on the pavement with his back against a building, holding a hat to the passersby, his head lolling back on his neck. Two holes where his eyes had been were directed toward me. A girl of about eight lay in his lap, emaciated and limp, with immense black eyes rimmed with shadows and shining with fever. She gazed up into my face without a sound. Her lips were dry, her mouth hung slightly open, and flies crawled around the edges of her hair. I stopped, stunned by the sight, and tried to think what to do. The Bible story of Peter and John and the lame man came to mind. The man had asked for money and been healed instead. If only I could give the man his sight, the child her health! I couldn’t, so, like Peter and John, I said, “Such as I have give I thee,” and dropping a few coins into the greasy hat turned away.
And what of the woman this morning, selling toy suitcases? I could still see her face, turned toward me as the train had taken me out of sight. I could, of course, have bought the whole lot of toys. Then, I argued with myself, where would she have been? Not very far ahead. And next week? What could I have done to be of any lasting use? Physical help for the man and child in Guayaquil, economic help for the woman in Riobamba (and for the dozens of beggars I had met in the intervening time), always the same problem: what to do? Witness to them! came the answer. Missionary reports were always full of such cases, but the aim was supposed to be spiritual work. I found it hard to acknowledge that spiritual need was not somehow correlative to physical, and when confronted with especially pitiful individuals I struggled consciously with the mandate to tell them of Christ. Was it the voice of God, the voice of a dozen preachers I had heard, the voice of an enlightened conscience—or were these voices synonymous? In a dusty, high-ceilinged Sunday-school room with worn red carpets and a picture of the Good Shepherd at the front I had learned the Westminster Shorter Catechism: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” Then, in a missionary service in another church years later I heard that the chief end of man is to stop as many as possible of the millions from perishing. “Witness to them! Speak to at least one soul a day—remember, they are headed for blackness of darkness”—and here the preacher shook his jowls—“FOREVER!” I was so appalled that I had not stopped to sort out the confusions the two ideas had brought to my mind. I had gone through life with a vague but constant consciousness of having left undone the most vital of things I ought to have done. Others did them, and told about them triumphantly: how they had spoken to a seatmate on a bus, a gasoline station operator, a hairdresser or a ticket agent. Whenever I determined to lay hold of such an opportunity it seemed to evaporate. But when I reached my destination things would be different.
A cinder blew into my eye and I turned from the train, window to find my handkerchief.
“She is crying,” I heard one of the three children say. I looked to find them all staring enthralled at the gringa. How long had they been watching me? I smiled, but again they pretended not to see. Their mother turned then and gazed directly at me, her curiosity undisguised. It was unsettling enough to have a foreigner on the train. It was unbearable that the foreigner should be crying. She saw, however, that I was not crying, and spoke in a whisper to the children, who stopped staring. Soon one of them, a charming five- or six-year-old with a flayed pink ribbon in her luxuriant black curls, came over to where I sat.
“Good morning, señorita,” she began. “You are crying, aren’t you?”
“Oh no! Something got in my eye. What is your name?”
“Felicita. And yours?”
“Margarita. Are you going to the coast?”
“Why is your hair red?” she asked, paying no attention to my question.
“Red? Do you think my hair is red?”
“Yes. Very red. Why is it red?”
My hair, I thought, was brown—perhaps it had a few reddish lights in it at times, but certainly no one had ever called it red. I had wished it were. Anything but this nondescript brown.
“Your hair is a beautiful black, Felicita. How lucky you are!”
“Why do you wear glasses?”
“Felicita!” Her mother had overheard the question. “Come here.”
I smiled at the wide-eyed child. “Go quickly, but come back if your mother says you may.”
She went back to her seat, on which she knelt, her chin resting on two small hands placed on the back of the seat. She continued to gaze earnestly at me, pondering the strangeness of this stranger. She was crying, and her hair is red, and she thinks mine is beautiful and why does she wear those glasses and that ugly coat? (I had on a trenchcoat belted at the waist bulky with a sweater underneath.) Why does the gringa keep smiling at me? She doesn’t know me.
Yes, Felicita, I thought, I am an oddity to you. You would never understand what I am doing here.
There was only honest puzzlement in her face. In a child in Guayaquil I had seen, I thought, resentment. Was it I who had changed? Perhaps I had been overly sensitive to being an alien. There was a woman selling empanadas—a kind of turnover—on the sidewalk under an umbrella-covered stand. She had a child hung in a cloth from her shoulder, a long legged thin boy of at least two who was pulling noisily on her pale breast. She fried the pastries on a tiny stove, turning them with a great perforated ladle, shouting “Empanadas!” as she lifted the flaky things from their immersion in the reeking oil and dropped them onto the pile in a washbasin. She took me in at a glance, swiftly comprehending all she wanted to know of me, from head to toe. She had her black hair fastened in a braid with a bit of brown wool entwined in it, and wore a faded cotton dress with the snaps open down the front, a stained apron of heavy duck, black scuffs on her short, wide feet and the look of knowing all on her hard free. The child’s hair nearly covered his eyes as he peeked up sideways at me from the source of nourishment “This is mine,” he seemed to be saying to me, “and my mother is mine and we belong here in the center of the whole world, and who are you?”
A displaced person, I had felt—neither at home, nor yet in my appointed niche—but just as I was recalling the uneasiness of that moment I saw from the train a group of Indians trotting by on their way to market in the city, each with a lumpy shawl on his back stuffed with wares to sell. There, I thought to myself, goes my reason for being here. “Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature. . . .” You would never believe it, Felicita, but I belong here. I am under orders.
A low ceiling of mist still lay over the city, and the smoke from the little mud houses spread itself under the mist. Sunlight slanted through in places, exposing an unmade bed through an open doorway here, a cluttered counter in a shop there. Then the railroad track began to rise slightly. For a few seconds we were closed in cloud. Thus blinded I became aware of the sound of the train wheels on the track. They clattered and thumped, thumped and clattered. Suddenly we emerged into sunlight again. There, to the north of us, rose Chimborazo, glittering pure and proud in the morning sun, its tremendous shoulders smooth with snow, the deep ravines blue with shadow against them. The lower slopes, covered with brown grass, spread and spread and spread, out onto the misty paramo, patches of brown in varying shades showing where Indians had cultivated. The motion and the noise of the train faded again from my awareness and the city receded behind us. The maguey-lined roads we were passing, with eucalyptus groves and tile-roofed shacks, were blurred. I saw only the peak, that clear peak, radiant, towering, full of strength and peace. It drew me as it had never drawn me in the months when I saw it from Ambato. I felt magnetized, yet its cold brilliance and total inaccessibility cowed me at the same time that it drew me. The winding of the railroad track took me out of range again and once more I smelled the damp wool in front of me, the banana peels on the floor, the smoke of the engine.
“Here I am,” I thought, with a muffled kind of excitement, wanting to savor every part. God knew the whole picture when He called me here, but I would have to find it out little by little. He knew the beginning and the ending and everything that fitted in between. For me, the beginning had been six years before. I was nineteen then, and had just finished my sophomore year in Bible college. A missionary from Africa was to speak and show slides at church. It was a very warm night, and a week night too, not a Sunday. Going to church would necessitate washing my hair and ironing a dress and it was too hot to do either, but the man was a friend of the family, my father was a pillar of the church and a great supporter of missions, and it was unthinkable for the Sparhawks not to attend, en masse, such a meeting.
He spoke on averse from the Bible, “I the Lord have called thee.” He emphasized the word “thee.” I had heard a hundred missionaries speak, I had looked at thousands of slides, of which a large percentage showed natives of one color or another lined up with smiles on their faces before thatched church buildings. There was nothing distinctive about either the man or the message on that July evening, but there was something peculiarly personal—I could neither explain nor ignore it—about the way those words sounded to me then. “I the Lord have called thee.”
Not that the idea of being a missionary was new to me. Not by any means. I had talked about the possibility since I was a small child. My aunt was a missionary in India and she sent me little brass bells and brought me a cobra-skin purse when she came home on furlough. She always stayed at our house for several months out of a year’s furlough, and we had a picture of her in an elaborate brass frame—she was dressed in a sari and had a little brown baby in her arms—on the living-room table. I think my father, who almost worshiped her, secretly hoped that I would feel called to join her in the orphanage work. He was a construction engineer who tithed his income very carefully. He had wanted to be a missionary, he said, or at least go into what he called “full-time Christian work,” but the Lord had showed him that He could use businessmen too, and He wanted my father to support missionaries rather than to be one. So he taught a Sunday-school class, belonged to a group of businessmen dedicated to winning their colleagues to Christ, and brought his children up in the fear of the Lord. One of my brothers had gone into the construction business on his own, and the other was in seminary preparing to be a minister. My father could not take issue with either choice, but he still hoped most fervidly that one of his children would go to the foreign field for the Lord. My little sister, four years younger than I, was the darling of the family, and although she talked about being a missionary nurse I felt that my parents were not really eager to see her leave her native shores.
Once, when I was about eleven, a visiting preacher had thundered about the unwillingness of Christians to “sell out” for God. We sang for the closing hymn “Is your all on the altar?” and he moved from the pulpit down to the altar rail and asked those of us who “really meant business” to come forward.
You cannot have rest, and be perfectly blest,
Until all on the altar is laid,
sang the congregation. I knew that I wanted to be blessed, I meant business with God, so whatever it was that needed to be laid on the altar I was determined to lay. I went forward.
There had been other times, too. In missionary meetings when volunteers were called for, I had never been sure enough to stand up, but usually an invitation was given for those who would be willing to go if the Lord should call. I stood up for that one. Now, it seemed to me, He had called. But the missionary from Africa did not ask anyone to stand or come forward. He did not even ask for a show of hands. For a moment I felt cheated, but then I was glad, for when I went home and knelt down alone in my room to pray I was confident that I had not been merely the victim of an emotional appeal, a public altar demonstration, but that I had indeed heard the call of the Lord, commissioning me to be His ambassador in some far-off place. India, perhaps, but that was not important to me just then. “Lord,” I prayed, “I think You meant me tonight, and if I am not mistaken that it is You that have called, give me one more sign—tomorrow morning—to confirm it”
Next morning when I went to breakfast there was a copy of Mary Slessor of Calabar at my place. I found an inscription in the flyleaf: “To Margaret, with the prayer that this great missionary’s life may inspire you, and that the Lord may lead you to the place of His choice. Love, Mother.” How had she known? I had said nothing to her or anyone else. Clearly, this was the sign I had prayed for. I ate my toast and drank my coffee with a sense of wonder at the destiny that had been shown me. Only my sister was at the table—the others had eaten earlier—but I said nothing to her.
I went into the living room afterward and stood looking at the carved wood motto which hung over the mantelpiece: “Fear thou not, for I am with thee.” This, too, was the voice of God. The motto had hung there for as long as I could remember—sometimes partly hidden by a vase of flowers or by Christmas cards or family pictures or missionary curios which were later relegated to the attic—and I had looked at it without seeing it, but today it spoke to me, and the words “thou” and “thee” were in italics.
Now the train was passing through a desert area. Tall cactus, thick with dust, lined the railroad track. Sand was banked along the road which ran beside us and the wind blew it through the cracks of the windows and along the floor of the carriage. The sun was high now, shining on the dry landscape, and it seemed that it ought to be hot, but the cold wind kept wrapping around my legs. The snowcap was hidden from view by a hill now. A woman hurried alone up a stony path, her shawl pulled tightly across her mouth, her head pushing into the wind. No other human being was in sight.
I began to feel sleepy, and tried to lean my head against the window. The vibration was too much and my head dropped and snapped miserably, but I could not hold it erect. I slept a little and dreamed I was riding a subway on a snowy night returning to Bible school with fellow students.
There was the sudden woof-woof of a whistle. The brakes screamed. Had we reached a station? I lifted my head. A flock of sheep was tumbling across the tracks, followed by a frantic woman waving a stick. Spread out on all sides was a valley, green and brown and gray, dotted with hundreds of grass-roofed huts, scored with earthen walls and maguey-plant fences, rows of dark-green, stiff-pointed clusters. The mountains swept up on both sides in vast easy slopes as though some huge hand had smoothed them back from the floor of the valley, in which lay a great sheet of water, feathered with reeds and flecked with white birds. A field of tall wheat breathed in the wind, gently rising and sinking like a living thing in the sunlight. The sky was wide and brilliant blue, an immense canopy flung from the points of the mountains over this paradise beneath. The size of the valley made the speed of the train seem to diminish almost to a crawl. As we rounded the shore of the lake I could see Indians sitting astride their rush rafts in the water. They were gathering something in the reeds-perhaps it was the reeds themselves. No doubt that was it, I thought, for I had seen the mats they sold in the markets of Ambato, and had heard they were made from lake grass.
The little mud houses were everywhere. Nowhere in Ecuador had I seen so many. They seemed to peep suspiciously at me from under the shaggy, steeply-pitched roofs, like the child who had peeped at me so smugly from his mother’s breast.
“Look on the fields, for they are white already unto harvest. . . Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest that He would send forth labourers into his harvest. . .”
I had come. Here were the fields, teeming and ready.