17
Chapter Seventeen
One day I took a new route home from Pedro’s house, going farther up the hill to the north, making a great circle, through the fields, and coming down to the valley again to the east. The sun shone brilliantly and the air was still and warm, even on the highest fields. It was so unusual to breathe dust-free air and to walk without being buffeted by a cold wind that I went slowly, letting my eyes sweep over the beautiful patchwork of the fields, reveling in the world’s loveliness as one does in the springtime after a long bleak winter. High above the mountaintop nearest me I saw a condor. I had never seen one before, but I knew him from his likeness on the seal of Ecuador. His great wings seemed to rest on the blueness and his head was bent over the valley below him. A bird of incredible size, he wheeled gently, tipping his wings almost imperceptibly, floating, floating. I stood and watched him sail in the sky, the bereaved lover of the Quichua legend, but I thought of the Spirit of God brooding over the face of the waters at the creation of the world. And as He brooded above that formless, empty darkness, He thought of light and He said, “Let there be light”
Here it was. A glorious brilliance of light all about me—on the snowcaps glistening in the distance, on the clouds that floated with the condor, on the white sheep that grazed a little way off.
God is light, and in Him is not any darkness at all. In the world He made, though, I thought as I walked along, there is plenty of it still—a great deal of darkness which does not seem to change very much. I had come here as a messenger of light, and for a long time had looked forward to the day when that light would begin to shine in Quichua souls. It occurred to me now that there was really nothing to mark the point at which I became an active missionary. Whatever transition there might have been between being helpless and helpful I had passed over without noticing. All that concern for preparation—what was it for? Perhaps there was, after all, no difference. If I had not noticed it, certainly the Indians hadn’t. Had it made any difference to God?
The condor still floated in the sky. I could not see that he had changed his position at all.
I came presently to a hut where a girl was kneeling in the dooryard, grinding corn on a flat stone. Beside her on the ground stood a basket filled with ears of corn, and a great flat clay plate with toasted kernels. She looked up at me, her black eyes wide with surprise at finding a white woman in her yard. She paused in her grinding, two small brown hands resting, on the loaf-shaped grinding stone.
“Buenos díets,” I said. “I am on my way home to the town.”
“Buenos días,” she answered timidly. “To the town?”
“Yes. I live in Indi Urcu.”
“You are the señorita that lives there.”
“Yes. My name is Margarita.”
“Mm.”
“Your name? What is your name?”
“I am Manuela.” The ease with which she told me, without giggling or hedging as so many of the women did, drew me to her. I wanted to talk some more.
“I come from Pedro Chimbu’s house, where we have been translating God’s word,” I explained.
“God’s word?”
“Yes. Did you know that God gave us a word?”
“No, señorita.”
“Would you like to hear some of it, Manuela? I will read a little.”
“Yes, señorita.”
I sat down on the doorstep and she began again with her grinding. I read to her from the fifth chapter of Mark the story of the ruler of the synagogue, Jairus, whose little daughter was dying, and of how Jesus went to the house and found her dead and took her by the hand and said, “Little girl, I say to you, arise.” And immediately the girl got up and walked.
“That child got up?” The stone came to an abrupt halt as the young woman asked the question.
“Yes.”
“You said she was dead.”
“Yes. She was dead. But Jesus, God’s Son, came and caused her to get up.”
“She got up alive?”
“Yes. Alive. Jesus can raise the dead, He can heal sick ones, He can do anything He wants.”
“Where is He?”
“With His Father, God. He lives with God. But He wants to help us, too. He can help us if we trust Him.”
“How can He help us? Where is He?”
This was more interest on the part of a woman than I had met with for a long time, and we talked at some length about Jesus and what He wanted to do for any who would trust Him. I had a hard time explaining what trust meant, for the word I had to use was a Spanish corruption. Quichua had no such expression.
“You can trust Jesus. His word is a true word. You know that He will do what He says.”
Manuela sat in silence, as though pondering whether there were such a person—one who would do what he says. I wondered if she understood the kind of faith I was talking about. She said she did. She began to wonder if Jesus could help her too. I did not jump at this as I once might have, aware now that her meaning could be any one of a thousand, and not necessarily indicative of the birth of saving faith. She went on grinding for a long time without speaking. Then she stopped pushing the stone and said, “My children are dead.”
My heart sank. Did she want them back? I waited to hear.
“One child died when he was this size.” She held her hand about three feet above the ground, fingers extended as though to shake hands, to show his size. “And the other miscarried. Now I am with child. Two months are yet lacking before he will see the light. Who will help me when he is born? He will perhaps die, too.”
“I would be glad to come and help you if you wish.”
“Can you make him live?”
“I don’t know, but I will come and try.”
“Can Jesus make him live?”
“Yes, Jesus can make him live if He wants to.”
“Will He want to?”
“Perhaps He will want to. I will come if you call me, and I will do whatever I can to help you. I will ask Jesus, too, to help you and to make your child live.”
Leaning her weight on the grinding stone, Manuela searched my face. She had probably tried the witch doctor and the medicines. Whether she thought I could do no worse, or whether something gave her faith in me or even in God I could not tell, but she said, “I will call you, señorita.”
Two months later I was awakened from sleep before dawn by a sharp rapping on my door. A child’s voice called, “Señorita! Señorita Gringa!” I opened it, and found a boy of ten or twelve and a girl perhaps a year younger. “Manuela is giving birth,” they announced. “She says come.”
I asked them in, got dressed and collected what midwifery equipment I had and we started out.
The street was perfectly quiet at that hour, and the bare feet of the children padded softly on the cobblestones. The sharp night air cut into my lungs. A dog was barking far across the village, answered by others here and there.
As we climbed the hillside the great peaks of the Andes stood like black paper cutouts against the faintly paling sky. Two or three bright planets pierced the deep blue, and the moon, a half disk, floated above Chimborazo. Tufts of grass in the road crackled with frost as we walked.
We reached the hut to find Manuela on her knees feeing the wall, her hands pulling on a rope which was strung from the rafters. Her husband, Victor, knelt behind her, lifting her under the arms as she rose and panted with pain. Several women stood about, and her mother, a toothless old Indian with a blue cloth on her head, squatted on the floor beside Victor, instructing him in an urgent whisper to keep lifting, keep lifting. Then she turned to Manuela and said, “Hard now. As hard as you can. Do not stop. Hard.” The old woman moved over and tightened the woven belt around the girl’s waist. This, I learned later, was to keep the child from coming out the mother’s mouth.
I asked if everything was all right. Yes, they said, but—someone thought to add, quite casually—perhaps the baby would come feet first. One of the women then insisted that she was sure it would, for Manuela had sheared a ewe that had died during the new moon, and this, all women knew, was taboo during pregnancy.
“I tried to get her to light a candle for our saint, but she would not hear,” said the old mother. “Now the child will be born head up and will die.”
I went over in my mind all that Lynn had taught me about the procedure for delivering a breech. Only the simplest measures would be possible under these circumstances, but they might be life-saving. I asked that some water be heated and cloths collected. The Indians listened solemnly to my requests but no one hastened to carry them out. They argued among themselves as to who should do it and whether it was worth the trouble.
“What will she do?” they asked one another. “She will not make it live, will she? How can she make it live?”
I found a place on a pile of sheepskins and sat down to wait, since neither Victor nor his mother-in-law seemed willing to relinquish his place to me. Lynn had told me it was useless to insist that a woman in labor lie down unless there was an emergency, since the Indians believed that birth took place by sheer gravity, with a good deal of squeezing and shaking by the husband when the mother’s strength ebbed.
It was a long day. I sat through the rest of the morning, as the sun climbed above the valley and threw its rays into the courtyard between the mud walls, and then as it passed, in the afternoon, toward the Pacific and left the little house in darkness once more. At intervals Victor gave up his task of jerking and jiggling and sat down on another pile of skins to drink his corn soup or chew a mouthful of machica. No one thought of offering Manuela any sustenance until I asked Victor if she might not have some machica, too. He went over and pushed a spoonful of the dry, toasted barley flour under her tongue.
The women sat gossiping, recalling other births they had witnessed wherein mother and baby lived, or the mother died, or the baby died, and they told the details of birth and death with equal relish, while Manuela knelt and sweated by the wall, rising and sinking, crying out in a small voice once or twice, silent the rest of the time. I sat and prayed, listened to the women, tried to talk to Manuela to encourage her, played a little with the two children who had fetched me, and prayed again.
“God save Manuela. O Lord, help her, let her live.” But she’ll live, I told myself. Nothing wrong, probably. Birth is a normal process.
I looked at Victor, gulping his soup in the corner. He was obviously not worried. Even the old mother, though she urged Manuela intermittently to keep working, was placid enough about it. I had learned a lot from the Indians about accepting life calmly, and the lesson had given me a cooler view of my own hardships and even of my own importance. If my alarm at what had originally seemed the deplorable condition of the Indian had diminished, my sense of being needed by them had diminished correspondingly. Manuela will be all right. No need for any desperate praying yet.
But, Lord, You must have brought me here for some reason. Show me what it is. Show me that I am needed for something.
Manuela let go the rope and sank back on her heels, letting her head drop into her hands. “Aylla,” she said in a whisper, a Quichua expression of woe.
“What’s the matter with you?” her mother asked sharply. “Get up there. It’s no good sitting down. Get up.”
Manuela wiped the sweat from her forehead with a corner of her shawl, rose to her knees again and pulled on the rope. I could not imagine how she had an ounce of strength left. The lack of concern on the part of all present disturbed me. It was all very well to accept life and its conditions without complaining—I had been pleased to find that the crises need not be turned over to the professionals as I had been taught to think. Birth, marriage, accidents, old age, death—all these things were dealt with by the people themselves, in the sanctuary of home as a part of the course of life, not to be interfered with by outsiders, and whatever might be said for the other side, the Indian way seemed laudably humane and in harmony with nature.
But as soon as I heard another cry from Manuela, my philosophizing stopped and I began to think that something must surely be amiss or the baby would have been born by now. Perhaps the women were right—the baby was right side up, and Manuela was in trouble. Something ought to be done. Someone at the very least should be concerned about her.
Lord, give me wisdom. If something ought to be done, show me what it is. Should I do it now? Suppose I delay too long? On the other hand, the Indians are all calm enough. I must not make a fool of myself by declaring an emergency where none exists—I could alienate them.
Manuela sat back once more. “Not yet,’ she said.
“Not yet?” said the old woman.
“Not yet”.
I felt as though everyone drew a slight breath of relief. Perhaps it was only I. How foolish of me to become so agitated by physical suffering when it was the spiritual needs I should have been most deeply concerned about. Had my sense of the Indians’ spiritual plight been dulled by familiarity? Probably it had. But whose fault was that? How can the human spirit be held taut for years? Are we not created with resiliency so that we can support the tensions of life? God had given me a task to do in the translation work at least, if not in the area of evangelism. As for the latter, perhaps I had not appropriated the power of God as I ought to have, or perhaps I was never intended for that job, and the sooner my definition of my task was pared down to the size God meant it to be, the better. I hoped with all my soul that I was not to blame, but admitted the possibility that I was, and the burden of guilt became intolerable when I thought that not only was I to be cast aside as unusable, but the millions of Quichuas whom I had taken upon my heart were now without an intercessor. God could do nothing with me, and there was no other.
I was not allowed to resolve the hopeless tangle of reasonings. Victor had left the house to get water from the aqueduct half a mile away when Manuela suddenly said, “Shamun! It is coming!” and reached for the rope.
Things worked better than my highest hopes. The baby was indeed head up as the women had predicted, but I prayed, “Lord help me now—let me do this much for them,” and then I did what Lynn had taught me, the baby’s life was saved, Manuela lay back exhausted and grateful, the women looked at me in wonder. Breech babies never, they said, survived. The pulling and hauling they did would have killed the child, I supposed, if the delay had not first suffocated it, so this to them was a miracle.
Nothing had been prepared for the child, for even if everything had gone smoothly the chances for survival were about equal with the chances of death, so the Indians had hardly thought it worthwhile to take any trouble beforehand. Better to wait and see what the results were. So now they had to rummage through the piles of rags, blankets, and skins to find something to wrap the baby in. Some cloths were finally found, the child was wrapped and then bound round and round with fain belting, its little arms pinned firmly to its sides, its legs straightened and pressed together. Then it was laid on the sheepskins like a tiny mummy next to its mother.