At Play in the Fields of the Lord

Disregarding this, Padre Xantes said, “Is it true that Moon is still alive? Amazing! Do you know, I was certain that this man must die even before he disappeared”—he puckered his thin mouth, musing—“because he makes bold to fly into the sun, into the face of God, one might almost say! What a fellow!” He laughed with admiration. “His friend, the mag

“I’m at play in the fields of the Lord,” Moon said; he removed his earphones. “Repeat, at play in the fields of the Lord.”

He glimpsed a hard light lucid region of his mind like a lone comet, wandering far out across the long night of the universe.

The numerals of the watch face, reading five-fifteen, glowed with chinks of light, as if time burning had been forced into the casing; its metal swelled and shimmered with constraint. At this, his chest began to tighten, and his breathing hurt the cold wound in his heart; he removed the watch, and holding it by one end of the strap, rapped it sharp

The missionaries’ tension grew like fever. Their suspense and fear were made still worse by Hazel, who spoke wildly of the jungle and could talk of nothing else, describing obscenely the obscenity of the flowering and rot, the pale phallic trunks and dark soft caverns, the rampant hair, the slime and infestations. Once she ran naked from the hut at

“I’m surprised you holy people talk to me,” Wolfie said suddenly, “after what I done.” He swayed there a moment, frowning. “As a Catholic priest, I must accept men’s frailty. And as a European I am too old and tired to expend emotion upon matters I can do nothing about.”

The weakest and most opportunistic people in a wild tribe were those who prospered under the white man—a fact no less true because Lewis Moon, in their conversation that night in Madre de Dios, had made this point.

How easily, in the absence of children, the whole experience of life became abstracted, a pattern of words and daydreams. Because the life in Billy was so fresh and immediate, he had served as a reminder of reality.

“I’ll tell you something else. I was naked, and I wasn’t ashamed. Am I a sinner, Martin? Am I a sinner then?” More quietly she said, “Maybe it was because he was naked too, because he belonged there where he was, with the fish and leaves and sun, with that emerald bird. For the first time the jungle seemed like paradise, bugs, heat, mud, and all, a