Contents ( 49)
- PROLOGUE
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- FORTY-THREE
- FORTY-FOUR
- FORTY-FIVE
- EPILOGUE
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
By late morning, it was time to meet For God’s Sake at the dock. He made sure baby Omar and I were settled comfortably under the palm canopy that tented his well-loved dugout canoe for the journey to San Solidad. As I watched the last hut disappear behind the towering wall of trees, a wave of loss crashed over me—for Omar, for the people who had cared for me, for the child-self I would never be again. My face must have said it all: For God’s Sake kept quiet as we chugged our way upriver.
Finally I said, “What’s the real reason you came back?”
He laughed and took off his scratched aviator sunglasses. “Well, you know, Lily, ca’ah is not a simple thing. I am making peace with complicated ca’ah. Do you know what I’m talking about? How that is? How sometimes you think you know something, and you are quite sure it is the truth, and there is only one truth, but then, the next day even, you wake up and realize, How can I be so stupid? You say, what about this, or what about that, over?”
I had to laugh at that, at my own shifting beliefs about what was true and what wasn’t.
“I said to myself, okay, For God’s Sake, this is not your God, this skinny man on a cross, but I can still help, you know, I can still bring the people of Ayachero foods and medicines, I can still be on this river and be Tatinga in my heart, and that will have to be enough for me. But also I was afraid, Lily. I will tell you that truth. Those men the Tatinga killed would have killed me to know about the grove. And it’s not over, this bad story no one can get away from. There will be other poachers. This is not the end of those bad men, of these terrible times. So I am sorry to be a coward, I’m ashamed to be a coward, and I am sorry about Omar, because I loved him like my own brother, over.”
“I know you did.”
“But there is also the good things, too, you know? We forget those things. We are in a big rush to go on to the next thing that makes us afraid, that makes us sad. Beya is with the Tatinga again. She is home. After all these years, Tatinga saying no, Ayachero people being afraid of her, but then accepting her gifts when she gave them. That is all over. And the Tatinga have killed the jaguar. She was a man eater, there was no doubt. They will use every part, nothing goes to waste. That is how it is there, over.”
He paused as he paddled hard now, urging the dugout toward the black waters of a much wider tributary, so much larger in volume than any part of the Amazon I’d ever seen. This was the mighty river itself—no strangled creek—its far bank just a watercolor smudge of green and brown in the distance.