Outlaw (3 page)

I treasured my baby more than my own life. He was, in more ways than one, the only life I had: my only true identity as a daughter, a wife, a woman.

And yet, apart from my child, I still felt an emptiness. I was aware of my longing to be accepted and loved for myself, not for my place in society or for what I could offer.

It was during this time that my church attendance grew from a cultural obligation to an honest search for meaning. As an unloved wife and a mother to a small child, I found myself reconsidering what I’d learned about God in my early years. I can’t say that my faith was profound—it was simple and childlike. But I took great comfort in believing that I was being watched over by a loving God.

It was during this time that my recurring dream of the jungle, which still came to me every few nights, began to take on new significance. Rather than thinking of the song coming from my son, I began to think of it as the voice of an angel calling out to me. And I started to wonder if the notes held specific meaning that would one day become clear to me. The dream was always with me, if only in my distant awareness.

I began to share the dream with those in my immediate circle—my sisters and my pastor. They smiled graciously, but I saw only dismissal in their eyes. I was not, after all, the Virgin Mary. Dreams were flights of fancy. Naturally I agreed, but secretly I wondered. Even hoped.

For his part, Neil paid no more attention to religion than he did to me or Stephen, and when I finally told him about the dream one evening, he only offered me a blank stare. He spent more and more time on long trips and remained totally detached when he was at home, preferring to spend most of his evenings at the local bar.

His disdain for God only pushed me closer to the church. As my love of religion grew, I felt less attached to the rest of my life in Georgia. Except where Stephen was concerned, it had brought me no fulfillment. And always there was the dream with its haunting song, beckoning me.

In the summer of 1962 a missionary visited our church and spoke of a land far away called New Guinea, where life was both pure and lost at once. I didn’t think much until he began a slide show. When I saw the jungle and the images of the natives on the south coast of that island, my heart leaped. Could the figure in my dream be one of these natives?

I sat in the pew, sure that I was staring into a corner of my own dream. Surely I was only making wild associations, but I couldn’t shake them all that afternoon or into the evening.

That night, when I dreamed of the jungle again, I was sure there had to be a connection. Was this God’s way of calling me to a land far away? But this too must be my overactive imagination, I thought, and I dared not tell a soul about my feelings. I was too young to cross the ocean, surely, and I had a child. I’d been brought up on a diet of tea and crumpets, not coconut milk and grubs. The idea terrified a large part of me.

But the call of those dreams refused to leave me.

In the fall of 1962 my husband’s dealings in oil exploration took him to Indonesia for what was to be a two-week trip. He was still in a deep place of depression, and I was grateful to see him go, as much for his own sake as for my own.

He never returned. One week after his departure I received word that he’d been found shot dead in Jakarta. A terrible tragedy. They said that bandits had mugged and killed him. I have my doubts, but it’s not for me to say.

I was surprised at the grief his death brought me. He was my son’s father, after all, and for that alone I think I loved him. I felt as if a cord that tethered me to ordinary life had somehow been severed.

I was a single mother.

But it wasn’t until February 1963, when my father died of a heart attack, that my world was finally torn in two. If my sorrow at having lost my husband surprised me, the profound sense of abandonment that swallowed me at my father’s passing shook me to the core. I felt like a lost little girl. My mother, my husband, and now my father were all gone, leaving me alone with my son.

For a week I sat and rocked my child, feeling hollow, sure that I could never offer Stephen the kind of love I wanted to give him, having never experienced it myself. My father’s, my mother’s, and my husband’s failures were sure to became my own. I may have appeared strong to the other mourners, who all shed their appropriate tears, but inside I was in free fall without a line to anchor me to any solid rock above.

The only constant in my life besides little Stephen was my dream. The same dream, over and over. The same jungle, which I now associated with the images I’d seen of New Guinea. The same figure, singing to me without words or melody.

I begged God to show me more, if this was his way, but I had only that same dream. Only that long, low, high, beautiful note reaching down the valley to me as I rushed toward it with the wind in my hair.

Come to me. Find me. Join me. Save me…

The haunting call would not leave me. The dream became my hidden obsession, calling to me without reprieve every few nights. I made no attempt to silence it. Instead I began to look forward to it each night, to soak in its promise and long for its fulfillment.

Three months after my father’s death, the call of that distant land became too loud for me to ignore. Many said that I was only looking to run away, to cast off all the suffering of my former life, and to find a new one. Perhaps there was some truth to that.

But those same people did not know how real my dreams felt. And I didn’t try to make them understand. They only would have branded me a lunatic.

My sisters thought I was losing my mind when I first spoke of my interest in becoming a missionary. Did I want to be celibate?, they wanted to know. Wasn’t I just chasing wild imaginations of distant paradise in the wake of hardship? Didn’t I have an obligation to raise Stephen on the estate left by Father? I had a good life in Atlanta, they insisted. Why throw it away?

But in my way of thinking, it was Atlanta that had become nothing.

Soon I could think of nothing other than leaving Georgia. At the very least, I reasoned, I should visit that far part of the world to see for myself if my dreams were more than flights of fancy.

As it turned out, mission agencies rarely accepted single mothers for service in the field abroad, so after much consideration and numerous discussions with various experts in such matters, I made the decision to take a trip to see for myself what the possibilities were. I certainly had no shortage of resources, having received a sizable inheritance.

A World War II veteran at our church had served on Thursday Island, off the northern tip of Queensland, Australia, just south of New Guinea. He spoke of the island in such endearing terms and with such assurance that there was no danger there that I decided I would visit. Perhaps I might then venture north into New Guinea. Just an exploratory trip, you see? I had to know for myself, and I would take the journey cautiously, one step at a time, just in case my sisters were right about my state of mind.

I packed two large suitcases for me and an even larger one for Stephen. Everything but his crib went into that elephant-size bag. I remember laying out half of my own wardrobe on my bed before figuring out a way to squeeze all of it into my two cases.

All the talk of Queensland being paradise notwithstanding, I prepared for every eventuality. Pants for any jungle trek. Shorts for the beach, more pants in case the others got soiled or eaten by cockroaches. Blouses of all varieties, dresses for the casual stroll and for any dinner party. And shoes. Shoes for the dance floor, shoes for the beach, shoes for walking around town, shoes for traveling home, and shoes for blazing trails through the tropics. The shoes alone took up half of one bag.

Then there were my lingerie, toiletries, makeup, jewelry, and books. I packed enough clothing, diapers, and formula to last Stephen a week. The airline had a weight limit for each passenger, but paying the fines posed no problem. Stephen and I flew into Sydney on a Pan American flight and then up to Horn Island on a twin-engine airplane. There we boarded a boat for a fifteen-minute hop to Thursday Island.

If you look on a map of the world, you will see that Australia looks rather like a small pig without feet—snout on the left looking down at the Indian Ocean. On its back is one spike above the large territory called Queensland. Just north of this spike is a string of tiny islands, and a hundred some-odd miles north of those islands is the huge island called New Guinea, which looks something like a bird.

Thursday Island was a tiny jewel in the Coral Sea roughly one mile wide by two miles long. Aqua waters gently lapped white-sand beaches frequented by adventurous vacationers from all over the world. For a week I took it all in, nearly delirious with the notion that I had found paradise. The people were extraordinarily friendly and welcoming and I quickly made friends, both among the locals and at the mission that I visited on several occasions. Here was a world that was color-blind, filled with cheery voices and wide smiles.

It wasn’t the same as my dream, but I felt as though I was finding myself.

On the seventh day I worked up the courage to venture out to sea, a prospect that was both exhilarating and a bit frightening, seeing as how I had never actually been on a boat before this trip.

Following the recommendations of Father Reuben at the Catholic mission, I contacted a local captain named Moses, who agreed to take me out the next afternoon for a reasonable price.

So it was that I boarded that little white sailboat with my two-year-old son and headed out to sea on that fateful day.

I chided myself relentlessly in the hull of that battered boat. I begged God to put me back in the safety of my home in Atlanta. I felt like Jonah in the belly of a whale, having made an error of my calling, which was surely to anywhere but there. Or, more likely, I had naively made absurd dreams out to be more than they were.

But I now know that there was also perfect reason to what seemed madness in the belly of that whale. If my mother had not died when she did, my father would not have gone into a depression and demanded I marry. If I had not married Neil, I would not have given birth to Stephen. If I hadn’t given birth to Stephen, I might have never dreamed of that distant jungle. If both Neil and my father had not died when they did, I might not have been predisposed to pursue that dream across the ocean.

And if I had not visited Thursday Island and gone under with that white sailboat, the harrowing events that followed would not have allowed me to see what I was meant to see.

Which, as it turned out, was a place of terrible loss and death.

IT WAS dark when I awoke in the sea. Pitch-black. For several seconds I hung limp, lost to any understanding of where I was or what had happened to me. My head throbbed. Slowly details filtered into my mind.

I was floating on my back, staring up at a vast empty space. Or I was dead. But no, I could feel something pressing into my back, keeping me from sinking into the water. I was alive.

Other details drifted into my mind. I had been on a boat. A white sailboat. We had sailed into a storm. The captain, Moses, had been swept overboard. The boat had capsized.

Stephen had been in the boat with me.

I jerked up and tried to steady myself by kicking my legs and flailing my arms. My feet found nothing but water beneath me. My head, however, struck something solid only a foot or so above me. I was under the hull?

I spun, searching for my baby, but I could see nothing.

“Stephen!”

My scream sounded hollow in the body of the overturned sailboat. The sea was calm, which meant I had been under this bubble long enough for the gale to subside.

“Stephen!”

Visions of my baby being lost in those towering waves immobilized me. He’d been dragged into the depths. Consumed by sharks.

Then I remembered that I’d secured him to the seat with a strap so that he wouldn’t be thrown about. I sucked in a lungful of air and dived, straining my stinging eyes.

I could see nothing below but dark water. I twisted back and up and saw the surface—green water filtering daylight around the dark hull of the boat, most of which was nowhere to be seen. Air trapped in the bow had kept afloat the section that saved my life.

But there was no sign of my Stephen.

In my panic I sucked in a mouthful of salt water. It burned my lungs and I was immediately aware that I might drown. I struck out toward the lighter water, cleared the edge of the jagged hull, then surged straight up.

My head broke the surface and I coughed up the water, desperate for oxygen. But my mind was on Stephen, and even as I gasped for air, I twisted back and forth, looking for my baby.

I saw that I was in a glass sea in early dawn light. A thin layer of fog perhaps six inches deep drifted over the water.

“Stephen!”

But how could any baby have survived such a pounding? He’d been tied to the bench seat. Unless that cushion had come free of its frame, he’d surely been dragged under and drowned.

If Stephen had drowned, then I too was dead, lifeless in my mind and soul, because he was my life. I spun around and screamed his name again.

“Stephen!”

The morning sea swallowed my cry. I twisted and yelled at the top of my lungs.

“Stephen!”

I first set eyes on them then. The seven tall dark figures towering over the fog twenty feet from the broken hull looked like wraiths. Black vultures watching me with unblinking eyes, waiting for their turn at my carcass.

Then I saw the dugout canoe beneath them, and the sharpened paddles in their hands, and I knew they were human. They were naked from head to foot, without any covering except for bright yellow and red bands woven from some kind of palm bark, then wound around their muscled arms and thighs. Their skin was as black as midnight. Each wore a head covering made from the face and snout of a brown furry animal unknown to me.

They stood in stoic formation, silent and unmoving, without a hint of emotion. Behind the canoe floated a second, this one holding only two men and cargo heaped in the space between them.

I might have experienced some relief in being found, even if by savages such as these. They were in long canoes scarcely two feet deep; surely they had come from land nearby. But I was still in a state of dread. My mind could not process relief.

“My baby!” I cried. I doubted they could understand my words, but such considerations weren’t at the forefront of my mind. “We have to find him.”

The canoes were slowly drifting my way, I realized. I trod water close enough now to see the whites of the warriors’ eyes. Several wore curved bones through their nostrils. All of them watched me with the same expressionless stare.

Not a shred of concern. No fear. No aggression. No hint of either amusement or sorrow. They might have been dead.

But one look into their steady eyes and I saw that the beings before me were pillars of life. Like gods watching a lesser being at their feet. A new kind of fear edged into my mind.

The first dugout canoe slid forward like a serpent, parting the blanket of fog in silence. I had seen photographs of natives before, certainly. But the man who stood on the bow of that canoe filled me with an awe and dread I had never experienced. I knew immediately that this man was their leader.

Part of my reaction was to his unabashed stance—his perfect form, his boldness and unwavering confidence as he stared directly into my eyes. He was a tower of brute strength and poise, void of emotion at having found a woman alone in the sea. By the set of his jaw and his bearing, I knew that in his world he was master and I the humblest slave.

A long thin scar ran down his left side, from his chest all the way to his hip bone. He’d survived someone’s attempt to gut him and looked no worse for the wear.

Two of the men behind him gently lowered their paddles into the water to slow their drift. Water gurgled over the carved blades. It was the only sound beyond my own breathing as I continued kicking and clawing at the water to stay afloat.

They came within arm’s reach of me, looming above the fog with brazen dignity. I cannot possibly do justice to that first encounter with the gods of the earth, as I quickly came to think of them. Tears swam in my eyes. I opened my mouth, desperate for their help, but only a whimper came out.

The warrior on the bow lifted his eyes and gazed at the horizon, perhaps to a distant shore, though I could not see one. The men behind him dipped their paddles beneath the water again, as if responding to an unspoken order made by the single shift of his eyes. The sleek dugout slid past me, floating through the fog. Not one of the seven men in the canoe gave me another glance. Their eyes were fixed on the horizon.

I stared after them, confused by their indifference. I was a white woman from an important family, flailing in the ocean next to a capsized sailboat, and they had shrugged me off as a bull might shake off a fly.

The object that struck my head then could only have been a paddle, swung by the first of the two men in the second canoe as I stared after the first. Sharp pain flashed down my neck, and I felt myself falling beneath the sea once again.