Into the Jungle (ARC) by Erica Ferencik

Author:Erica Ferencik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery, Threshold, Pocket Books
Published: 2019-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

“She wouldn’t go by ‘Hattie,’ ” HarryB said. The big woman gestured at the gaunt figure of HarryA, who sat bent over her intricate task, squinting through smudged granny glasses. “Way too stubborn for that.”

At an antique children’s chair and desk joined by rusted metal workings, HarryA stitched the words to a psalm into a burlap placemat. Thin gray wisps escaped her tight, small bun and stuck to her damp neck. The palm thatch chapel where she sat was open to the jungle on three sides; a crotched sapling supporting its eave pole, from which HarryA’s wooden Christ statue hung motionless. A black chalkboard made up its one wall, the alphabet neatly written across the top in capital letters, small ones just below. Another half-dozen torn-up chairs and desks faced the board. Perched on a lectern, a two-foot-tall parrot missing most of the feathers on its chest clutched a six-volt battery in one talon, its gray, trapezoidal tongue nudging off the white corrosive powder as it tried to take a bite out of the silver metal.

“But we couldn’t both be Harriet. Lord knows these Indians are confused enough.”

Seated high on a tall stool that looked too spidery for her weight, HarryB tapped off a thick length of cigar ash before drawing and holding in another lungful. A few more cigars, courtesy of For God’s Sake, poked out of her shirt pocket. Her pale green eyes squinted, assessing me.

“But really, I ask you, what are the chances? Two missionaries named Harriet, one from Massachusetts, one from Georgia—that would be me, as if you couldn’t tell—” She poured on an extra syrupy drawl here. “Both decide to spread the Lord’s Word in the middle of this godforsaken devil’s workshop—this end-of-the-world snake pit . . .” She gestured at their tiny homestead, the spare church, the vines I could almost watch growing around Christ’s scrawny hips.

“Think on it: two puny one-engine Cessnas flying low over the jungle, going on twelve years ago now, on the very same week, both of us spreading the Word of God over a loudspeaker from the plane, as if they could understand us! Both of us dropping gifts from the sky—mirrors, silverware, and so on—on the heads of these heathen Tatinga . . .” She shook her head and spat out a piece of tobacco, grinning at some being just beyond my head, as if to meet my eye would have admitted some small defeat. “I have to laugh sometimes at the mysterious ways He works. And to think we—she mostly—refused to meet at first, both of us being so dang bullheaded. Like there weren’t enough godless ones to spread the word of God to. Like there wasn’t enough of God’s work for a hundred of us—for thousands! We had to crash into each other, isn’t that right, A?”

HarryA ignored her, sweating over her task, fingers shaking with effort at the detailed work. I noticed a faint trail of scars on the back of her neck near the trace bumps of her spine, and wondered.

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