The Cloud Atlas

It sounds funny, I know, to be so fascinated with another man, let alone his hands, but it has something to do with being a priest. No, not in that sense, thank you, but more of a professional interest. A good priest is sensitive to his hands the way a pianist might be to his. They are essential to his work-praying, celebrating the sacrifice of the Mass, offering communion, the sign of peace. It's well known, at least among missionaries, certainly among Jesuits, how Isaac Jogues, Jesuit missionary to Canada in the 1600s, had to later receive special dispensation from the Vatican to say Mass. His hands had been mutilated during his tenure in North America, fingers frozen or eaten, and without the pope's express permission, he would have been considered unfit to serve at the altar. (Jogues's later plea to return to Canada was reluctantly granted, but his arrival coincided with sickness and blight. The Mohawks took this as evidence of sorcery and cut off his head.)

I think the real reason I admired Ronnie, or those hands of his, was that he clearly had never used his hands the way I had mine. He was a drunk, a failure, a grifter, but the earth was no worse for his being on it. If Saint Isaac Jogues had ever descended from the sky during one of those trips in the bush, he would have reached for Ronnie's hand first, and Ronnie would have taken it, whatever condition Saint Isaac's hand was in, and shook it firmly. Ronnie had a grudge against missionaries but admired men who, like him, had survived.

More to the point, if Jogues ever dropped down, Ronnie would have been the first to see him. Ronnie was always looking up, especially in summer, especially out in the delta. He had a theory that if you sat in one spot long enough, stared at the sky carefully and remembered all you'd seen, you would be the wisest man in the world. All the knowledge of the world was contained in the skies, he said. He was going to write it all down one day, he swore, a book ofamirlut, an atlas of clouds, and it would sell better than any bible. I asked him how he'd ever manage to chart on paper something that was always changing. He shook his head at my stupidity. “Not a map of where things are now,” he said. “No: where they will be.”

I WONDER IF RONNIE'S right, though. That staring at the sky will give you a better sense of what's to come. After the morning reconnaissance flight, for example, I was back out at Todd Field, searching the skies for some sign of the C-47 Gurley said he'd be on. And when I finally caught sight of one, I followed it all the way down to the ground, half thinking that, if I concentrated hard enough, I'd be able to see if Lily was inside.

But Gurley could have had Saint Isaac or Saint Nicholas aboard; staring revealed nothing. It wasn't until I saw them emerge that I knew.

They'd taxied to a stop some distance from the terminal, and a pair of jeeps raced out to meet them. I couldn't make out faces, but the first man at the opened door was certainly Gurley, whose preening I could have spotted from the moon.

And the second person: no hat, no uniform. Just long black hair, black trousers, and a knee-length, Native-style shirtdress I've since learned is called a kuspuk. Though I could see well enough that I saw her turn to face my direction briefly before continuing down the stairs, I could not see her features. I couldn't be sure, but I was. Military men are trained, after all, to recognize the silhouettes of aircraft and ships, friendly and foreign. And Lily had trained me to believe in what I knew, what I knew because I was certain of it, not because I had evidence.

So it was Lily. Gurley hadn't sent me to Bethel just to get rid of me; the three of us really were going to journey into the bush. But then something happened that shook my faith a bit. Gurley and Lily exchanged words, it seemed, and then Gurley stepped back. The MPs took Lily by both arms, placed her in the jeep, and sped off toward some buildings at the other end of the field.

Gurley watched them go, then turned and began to walk toward me.

GURLEY HAD A NEW name for Lily: Sacagawea. We were discussing their arrival in an office he'd commandeered. I interrupted to ask him where she was. He said she'd been taken to Todd Field's “VIP quarters,” and then pressed on with his monologue.

“I introduced her this way, as ‘our very own Miss Sacagawea,’ thinking that a rather clever shorthand introduction-to wit, our Native companion and guide-when, to my slowly building horror and delight, I realized that the good men of this forgotten outpost were assuming that that was her actual name. Sacagawea. Tell me, Sergeant, of the many subjects no longer taught in school-is American history among them?”

Gurley seemed hurt when I did not reply.