After the Rains (38 page)

Alone in her
utta
for the first night, sleep did not come easily. She tossed on the grass
mittah
under the gauzy netting and made a mental list of all the Timoné words she knew. It wasn’t very impressive. And when she thought of how few of those words in her meager vocabulary could be strung together to make an intelligible sentence, she almost despaired. She certainly hadn’t realized how much she liked to talk. Though she and Sara had had their share of all-night chats, she’d never seen herself as a typical gabby female. But now the thought of not being able to communicate on a level deeper than grunts and hand gestures—for who knew how long—overwhelmed her.

She threw back the mosquito netting from around her mat and rose to her feet, padding barefoot across the small room and back, then back again. She clenched and unclenched her fists. She wished Evan were here. He would know what to do. No, Evan wouldn’t have let things go this far in the first place. He would have stood up to David’s ridiculous rule.

Well, she would show him. She would study the Timoné language and learn more quickly than even the precious David Chambers.

David came into the mission office the following morning low on sleep and even lower on patience. He looked again at the damage that had been done to his desk, and with a plea heavenward for self-control, he began to try to sort through the mess.

He had just located his misplaced dictionaries when Nate made his usual morning appearance at the office.

“Whoa!” Nate exclaimed lightheartedly after taking one look at David’s desk. “Are my eyes deceiving me, or did you actually clean off your desk?”

“No, I did not,” David answered. He tried to keep the resentment from his voice, but apparently without success.

“Ohhh, I see. You had some help?”

He shook his head and bent over his work, hoping Nathan would catch the hint that he wasn’t in a mood to talk about it.

“Did Natalie do that?” Camfield asked.

“I assume so,” David replied, busying himself sorting through the papers she’d desecrated.

“I’m sorry, Dave. I’ll have a word with her.”

“No!” It came out more stridently than he intended. He deliberately softened his tone before speaking again. “It’s all right. I’m sure she meant well.”

“Yes, I’m sure she did. But if I don’t say something, she might make this a weekly habit. I’d better speak with her.”

“Please … don’t say anything. I’ll talk to her myself.”

He felt Nathan’s eyes looking down on him. After a minute, he glanced up and met the older man’s thoughtful gaze.

“Go easy on her, will you, Dave?” Nate said softly. “I’m sure she thought she was doing you a favor.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be nice.” He went back to sorting through the mess on his desk. When he left for San José, there had been carefully indexed books laid out in precise order on his desktop, pages of word lists and definitions organized by category. Scraps of important notes had been strategically placed where he could easily find them. Natalie might as well have been a Kansas tornado. He could not find one thing he needed. The word lists were a jumbled mess. He was beginning to fear she’d thrown some pages away.

After a while Nate stood and headed for the door. “Well, I think I’ve done about all the damage I can do,” Nate said. “I need to get over to the clinic. If you want to take a look at that radio later on and see if you can fix it, be my guest.”

David grunted.
Wrong thing to say, buster
, he thought. He would be doing well if his desk was “fixed” by this time next week. He sure wouldn’t have time to work on that piece-of-junk radio.

He sorted and reorganized for another hour, and the steam began to subside. All his papers did seem to be here after all, and once he figured out that the books had been filed in alphabetical order by title, he realized that it was actually kind of nice to have them off the desk and out of the way. Still, that was no excuse for her to take it upon herself to clean off his work area. He was lucky she hadn’t tried to clean out his desk drawers. If she’d gone that far, he would have personally escorted her to the dock to wait for the next boat out.

“Hollio,”
Natalie said, coming into the office. Then, with almost perfect inflection, she said in Timoné, “Dad said you wanted to see me?”

“Yes.” He leaned over the desk and cleared off a chair for her. “Please, sit down.”

She smiled and actually shook a finger at him.
“Ni. Timoné,”
she scolded, taking a seat.

Why that impudent little …
He couldn’t help himself. He leapt from his chair and launched into a diatribe like he hadn’t delivered since his best Spanish student had told him he was dropping out of college. “What
makes you think you can come in here and rearrange my things?” he said, arms spread wide, fingers splayed. “Every single book on my desk was exactly where I needed it to be. I have passages marked for my reference in every one of those books.” He strode back and forth, his words gathering steam. “Now I can’t find one thing I’m looking for. You have set my work back weeks. I might as well be starting from scratch! What were you thinking, girl? Well, let me tell you. You
weren’t
thinking.”

He ranted and paced behind his desk, saying everything aloud that he’d muttered under his breath since he’d first realized the damage her little cleaning spree had inflicted. When he’d finally run out of words, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead, realizing how foolish he must appear to her.

He looked at Natalie, who sat in front of him with her mouth hanging open in stunned silence. And he realized that it was only by God’s grace that he had delivered his entire speech in the Timoné dialect.

Natalie looked at him for a long minute.
“Excusez, ni comprendé,”
she said with a shrug. Her words were a jumble—more Spanish than Timoné—but he got her drift. And then he realized that she had got him—and got him good. He started laughing. Which was apparently the wrong thing to do.

The girl burst into tears, pushed the chair back, and made for the door.

“Wait!” he shouted.

She struggled with the latch, still trying to escape.

“Natalie, please. Just a minute.” He spoke clear English as he came from behind the desk and went to where she stood. Haltingly he put his hand on her arm. “Natalie, I’m sorry.”

She turned toward him but kept her eyes on the floor.

He felt like a fool—the scholarly linguist, suddenly tongue-tied. He was disgusted with himself for letting a mere girl get to him like this. He put his fingers under her chin and gently raised her head, forcing her to look at him. “Natalie, please forgive me. I know when you—when you cleaned off my desk, you were only trying to help. I shouldn’t have yelled at you—in any language.”

He thought he saw a hint of a smile play at the corners of her shapely
mouth. He knew he should say something more. Explain to her why he’d been so upset. But looking at her lovely face, the thoughts that pelted his brain frightened him. Suddenly he realized that her chin still rested on his hand, the warmth of her skin searing his fingers. He dropped his hand as though burned and took a step backward.

What was he thinking? He’d been down this road before. He thought he had escaped temptation’s clutches long ago, and now—completely without warning—it stood mere inches from him. With her pale, silky hair and her sun-kissed complexion, Natalie Camfield was as opposite from Lily’s dark beauty as she could be. Yet something about her—the emotion that sparked in her eyes, the vulnerability in the tilt of her head—caused memories of Lily to swirl around him. Memories of the good times. Before—

He yanked his thoughts back to the present and turned away from Natalie, muttering a few more feeble words of apology.

“It’s all right, David,” she said quietly, swiping at a tear-stained cheek. “I was trying to help when I cleaned off your desk. But I see now that what I did wasn’t helpful at all. I … I wasn’t thinking. Please forgive me.”

He stroked his beard, chastened. “No, I’m the one who needs to ask forgiveness. I know you meant well. I let my temper get completely out of control … I acted like a complete
brihacho
. There was no excuse for that.”

“Brihacho?”
Her inquisitive smile was a gift.

“I’m sorry. I sometimes lapse into Timoné without even realizing. It means ‘idiot’ or ‘jerk.’ ”

“Oh,” she said, her grin widening. “I’ll remember that.”

Thirty–Two

R
ain pelted the ground, and thunder rumbled in the distance. The rainy season had begun in Timoné, and the work of each day was now determined by the weather. Natalie grabbed an umbrella and headed for the village commons. She could think of plenty of things she’d rather be doing today than helping her father vaccinate dozens of screaming babies and toddlers. But this particular vaccine had been hard to come by, and now that he had it, Dad was anxious to get it into the Timoné children. He had even asked David to set aside his translating work for the morning to help with the task.

When Natalie arrived at the commons, David and her father were dragging the decrepit examination table from the clinic into the center of the gazebo. They were both soaked to the skin.

“Hollio,”
she called out cheerily.

David lifted his hand in a greeting.

“Oh, good, you’re here,” Dad said, obviously preoccupied. “Could you go to the clinic, Nattie, and bring that box of supplies from the bottom of the cabinet in the exam room?” He described the box to her—in English. He apparently didn’t have time or patience for language lessons this morning. “Be sure and wrap it in plastic so it doesn’t get wet on the way over here. David, I think I’m going to need that small table from the clinic after all. Could you bring that over too, please?”

David nodded and turned in the direction of the clinic.

“David?” Natalie said, holding her umbrella high, and offering a spot underneath for his six-foot-five frame.

“Oh …” He looked at her as though she’d presented him with a decision that required careful consideration.

“We’re going the same way,” she explained lamely.

“Um, thanks,” he said finally, speaking English, “but I’m already so
wet I don’t know what good it would do.” He ducked from under the thatched roof of the pavilion and made a dash for the clinic.

“Okay,” she said to the empty air. She shrugged and followed behind him, dodging the puddles that pockmarked the trail. He soon disappeared into the dense foliage ahead of her.

When she got to the clinic a minute later, David was moving the supplies off the table onto a nearby countertop.

“Here, let me help,” she offered, picking up a glass canister of longhandled cotton swabs.

“It’s okay. I’ve got it,” he said without looking at her.

“Okay …” she said, putting the canister back and holding her palms out in surrender. He was obviously in a lovely mood this morning. She left him to himself and went into the exam room to find the supplies Dad needed. The cabinet she thought he had been talking about was full of bottled water, towels, and paper goods. She opened a few other doors, but none yielded the box she was looking for.

“Hey, David,” she called into the outer room.

He appeared in the doorway. “Yeah?”

“Didn’t Dad say that box was in here?”

“I thought he said right there.” He pointed to the first cupboard Natalie had looked in.

She wrinkled her nose. “That’s what I thought too. But I’m not finding it.”

David grunted, came into the room, and started opening and slamming shut the same cabinet doors she’d just looked behind. Trying to stay out of his way, Natalie went to the other side of the room, double-checking places she’d already searched.

When they met in the middle of a row of cupboard doors, David took a step back, tucked his hands in the pockets of his khakis, and panned the room. “Hmm, I sure
thought
he said they were in here.”

“Me too.” Natalie nodded.

“I’ll check the other room,” he volunteered.

Natalie searched the exam room again, but David’s “aha!” interrupted her from the next room.

She went to the doorway. “You found them?”

He held up a cardboard box in triumph. “They were in the bottom of
this
cabinet,” he said, cocking his head toward one wall. “I think your dad just misspoke.” For the first time this morning, he actually looked her in the eye, and his mood seemed to lighten a bit.

Natalie crossed the room and took the box from him. “Thanks,” she said. “I think Dad’s kind of worked up about this morning.”

David returned her smile. “He gets that way sometimes. He’ll be fine once the villagers start coming. And this weather isn’t helping matters any.” He lifted one end of the table with a grunt. “This is heavier than it looks.”

“Here.” She set the box down on the table. “This box is light. I’ll just set it in the middle and carry one end.” She lifted her side of the table.

He hesitated. “Well, we can try it, I guess. Is there anything breakable in there?”