Still the paddles gurgled through the water. Still the canoe surged forward.
Grief and exhaustion finally coaxed me to sleep and only then did I find any peace.
I dreamed that I was back in Georgia, a young girl playing tag around the large cottonwood in our backyard, chasing my sisters, who squealed with the certain knowledge that I would catch one of them, because I had always been the fastest runner. A spring breeze sweet with the scent of peach blossoms rustled through the tree. The grass was cool under my bare feet. We were joined by Betsy, the eleven-year-old colored daughter of our maid, who could outrun even me. She became it and then I joined my delighted cries with my sisters’.
I was in church Sunday morning, wearing my favorite yellow dress, holding the microphone with a white-gloved hand, singing a solo of “Amazing Grace,” my mother’s favorite hymn. The enraptured congregation of two hundred faithful watched me, awed by my pure, angelic voice.
“She’s even better than her mother,” they whispered. “And she’s got the looks. She’s going to be a star one day, you just watch.”
We were on the south porch, Stephen and I, he cooing while birds chirped in the cottonwoods, I sipping a cup of hot tea with my mother, who had died before Stephen’s birth. Dreams could not hold the dead in their graves. Father sat across from us, smiling around his pipe.
I was lying in the bottom of a dugout canoe driving deep into the jungle, but in my mind I was in Georgia, eating peaches and singing like a bird and holding my baby as he stared into my eyes, both of us lost in a world of wonder and love.
It was all that I’d ever wanted.
The next time I opened my eyes it was raining. We had stopped and I was being pulled from the canoe. I jerked against my restraints in a sudden panic.
A gentle, low male voice spoke in a language that sounded garbled. Even so, its fluidity struck me as perfectly mathematical, like that of a master percussionist’s drum roll. I could not mistake his tone—he did not want me to struggle.
A soft chuckle from the others reached me. They dragged me up a muddy bank by my ankles, then dropped my legs onto marshy ground.
The bag was removed from my head and I blinked up at pouring rain. Lightning slashed through the sky and for a stuttering moment I caught a glimpse of my new world.
The jungle rose in jagged angles on all sides, crawling with vines, and leaves a hundred times the size of any I’d seen before. We were at the bend of a muddy river. Rain poured from the sky in long unbroken strings. A tall, dark-skinned man stood over me, his scarred chest bulging, arms limp by his sides.
It was a staggering canvas, here on the edge of the world that tested the bounds of human sanity. And then the lightning was gone and I was in darkness once again.
The form remained still for a moment, then squatted, pulled the gag from my mouth, and tilted a gourd to my lips. Cool water flooded my mouth. I choked and sputtered, then lifted my head and gulped.
When he thought I’d had enough, he removed the gourd, replaced the gag, and dribbled water on it so I could suck at it. Then he pulled the bag back over my head and threw a covering over me. At the time I thought it might be plastic, but later I learned it was thatched palm leaves. Rain pelted the hood over my face.
They made no attempt to feed me. If they had, I doubt I would have eaten. I was too heartbroken, too exhausted, too ill to eat. There was nothing I could do but lie still in the steady downpour and cry, mind filled with thoughts of my son.
I knew that Stephen hadn’t been found by these men, at least not alive. I would have heard his cry by now. There was no way to silence such a young child indefinitely. The image of his limp body, bound up in one of their bags, haunted me for a long while, but I finally reasoned that they would have no use for a dead baby. In this I found a sliver of comfort. I much preferred him returned to nature than seized by cruel hands.
I, on the other hand, was alive and worth their taking. To what end, my imagination knew no bounds. I begged God to save me, but he remained utterly silent. I felt betrayed, abandoned, and a fool for having thought a dream could be more than wild fantasy. My sisters had been right. And now my son was dead.
And yet I clung to the barest hope that God would somehow rescue me.
Little sleep came to me that first night. I replayed the dream in my head, desperate to find the beauty of that song that had lured me from safety into the jaws of death. But each time I recalled the dream, the once-enthralling and -haunting tones sounded more and more like a mocking melody.
Calls and howls from unseen creatures in the jungle replaced that song, and I soon found myself hating, even cursing the once-loved call in my dreams. I could not stop imagining leeches and snakes crawling over my legs and belly. My captors had wrapped me like a mummy, but slippery creatures could surely find a way in through the seams.
I had just slipped into an exhausted and thankfully dreamless sleep when I felt the wrapping on my legs being unwound. The rain had stopped. Daylight dotted the tiny holes in the bag over my head. Words were mumbled, melodic and low. The man caring for me began to prod my legs with a hot stick. But the hiss of burning, wet flesh wasn’t of my own. It took me a few minutes to realize that he was burning leeches off my skin.
When I was twelve I tried out my mother’s razor on my legs. The blade was loose and I managed to scrape a strip of skin off my shin before pain convinced me to jerk the razor away. By then it was too late, and blood seeped out of a two-inch wound. After firmly scolding me, my mother took the greatest care of my wound.
Now I was at the mercy of a native jabbing at my beautiful legs to burn off engorged leeches. The thought of it nauseated me.
My caretaker pulled the worms off one by one, and despite being burned they did not come off easily. I could feel their tenacious grip on my skin. Leeches do not squeal, but in my mind they put up a horrid fuss when forced to let go. I imagined that each took a chunk of my flesh with it. When the man dug into one on my inner thigh, a full foot above my knee, I felt I might pass out.
Job completed, he coated my arms and legs with a cool mud and bound me up again. He was only protecting his possession, but to the extent that a Southern belle from Atlanta was able to appreciate such generosity, I suppose I did. Somehow I got it into my head that the mud’s awful odor might keep carnivores larger than leeches from taking a bite out of me.
Hood still over my head, I was hauled back into the canoe and we pushed off the bank. Then we were sliding through the river once again.
I could hear the steady breathing of the two men on the canoe that carried me, otherwise only an occasional cough or the sound of spitting betrayed our journey through the infested jungle. I guessed that they saw no need to advertise their passage along this river, perhaps because it was enemy territory.
It’s interesting how the mind can dredge up the most hidden bits of knowledge when left to itself for long stretches. I knew next to nothing about Irian Jaya, because the missionary who’d first spoken of the island had come from New Guinea proper, the tamer, eastern half of an island the size of California.
That night the bag was again removed from my head in a heavy downpour. Again a gourd of water was tilted to my lips, and again I sucked at the water in long, deep drafts. For the second time since my capture I was able to see the leader, who tended to me. It was he who first gave me food.
I say food, but at the time I wondered if it was the mud scraped off the bottoms of his feet. The gray paste that he held in his fingers and pushed into my mouth tasted like a flour glue that had started to rot. Something squishy was mixed with the starchy compound. I know now that it was a sago grub—a thick white worm half the length of a finger that feeds on the pith of the sago palm.