When the rain began to fall heavily, the search party pulled sheets of aluminum from the roof of the tree house and balanced them over their heads for shelter. There was a huge crack of thunder just as the bodies were being lowered into the common grave. Frank Drown said aloud a short prayer. He stood beside the grave, brokenhearted at the death of five faithful friends. He had no idea that one day he would be the only person able to give his grandchildren an eyewitness account of the funeral of their other grandfather.
As soon as the men were buried, the search team had its own safety to be concerned about. Carefully, alert to the crack of even a twig, the men made their way, mile by mile, out of Auca territory. Two and a half days later, they were back at Shell Mera, where six women waited to hear the final news. Five of the women wondered whether they were wives or widows. The sixth, Rachel Saint, wondered if she had lost the little brother she had helped to raise. Major Nurnberg, who had first spotted the bodies from the helicopter before landing on Palm Beach, tried to tell the women what he’d seen as gently as possible. But there was no easy way to say it; all of the men were dead. The wives were now widows, and their nine children, one of them still unborn, were fatherless.
That night, the people who knew and loved Nate Saint, Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Roger Youderian, and Pete Fleming gathered in the living room of Shell Merita. Mt. Sangay, clearly visible in the distance, glowed red. Marilou McCully, who was ready to give birth within days, sat at the piano and began to play the melody to the hymn the men had sung with such high hopes the morning they had left for Palm Beach. Betty Elliot sang the words:
We rest on Thee, our Shield and our Defender,
We go not forth alone against the foe.
Strong in Thy strength, safe in Thy keeping tender,
We rest in the Thee, and in Thy name we go.
Frank Drown opened his well-worn Bible and read the verse: “Be ye faithful until death, and I will give you a crown of life.”
Chapter 16
The Legacy
While Nate was deeply missed by those who knew him, and especially by Marj and the children, his death was not the end of the Auca story or of the work of MAF in the Oriente.
Marj stayed on at Shell Mera for six months after Nate’s death. She faithfully manned the radio for Johnny Keenan as he continued to serve the missionaries working in the jungle. At the end of six months, Hobey Lowrance and his family arrived as permanent MAF replacements for Nate and Marj.
Marj moved from Shell Mera up to Quito, where she took over running the HCJB guest house, the same guest house she had stayed in when she first arrived in Ecuador pregnant with Kathy.
Back in Shell Mera, Johnny Keenan and Hobey Lowrance continued to fly over the Auca village near the Curaray River. They carried on using Nate’s bucket drop system to drop gifts to the villagers. Oddly enough, the Aucas still accepted the gifts, and even returned gifts of their own. Sometimes as he flew over their territory, Johnny would catch a glimpse of bright yellow strips of fabric decorating rooftops. The fabric was from Nate’s Piper Cruiser.
Meanwhile, on Palm Beach, the remains of the Piper Cruiser sank into the mud beside the Curaray River and was soon completely covered.
Rachel Saint continued her work learning the Auca language from Dayuma, who, in the process, became the first Auca Christian. Together, Dayuma and Rachel prayed that God would open up a way for the two of them to bring the gospel message to the rest of Dayuma’s people.
In 1958, two years after the deaths at Palm Beach, two Auca women, Mankamu and Mintaka (the older woman who had come with George and Delilah to visit the missionaries at Palm Beach), walked out of the jungle. With hand gestures, they made the Quichua Indians understand they wanted to make contact with white people. The Quichuas took them to Elisabeth Elliot, who was still a missionary in the area.
Eventually Mankamu and Mintaka invited Rachel Saint and Elisabeth Elliot and Dayuma to return with them to their village and live. Rachel and Elisabeth and Dayuma accepted the invitation and were welcomed into the tribe. Of course, there were those members of the tribe who were suspicious of the two women. They wondered why no one had ever tried to avenge the deaths of the five men. Perhaps the two women had come to spy on them and tell other cowodi where to find them and kill them. Dayuma, Rachel, and Elisabeth tried to calm their fears. They told them they had come in peace and that there was another way besides killing to deal with what had happened at Palm Beach. Slowly, as the three women lived among the Auca, the fog of generations of hatred and killing began to lift, and many in the tribe came to understand there would be no revenge for the killings. A new concept, one which they had no word for in their language, began to take root in their hearts. That concept was forgiveness.
In 1961, Rachel and Elisabeth watched as the first group of Waorani (Auca) Christians was baptized by Dr. Ev. Fuller from the mission hospital at Shell Mera. Shortly afterwards, Elisabeth Elliot returned to live in the United States. Rachel remained in Ecuador and lived among the Waorani for the rest of her life. She died in 1994. Thirty-eight years after her brother had been buried in Auca soil, Rachel, too, was buried there.
Forty-three years had passed since Nate Saint first pointed out Auca territory to Rachel and said, “Sis, those are your people.” How right he had been. He never dreamed, however, that it would be his own death and the deaths of the other four men on Palm Beach that would help the Auca to understand the meaning of forgiveness and set the stage for his sister to introduce the greatest story of forgiveness ever told.
The legacy of the two Saint siblings, buried not far from each other in Auca territory, is that today approximately one out of ten Aucas is a Christian. And those believers are sharing a message with the rest of their tribe. It is the same message that Nate’s death and Rachel’s life among them so clearly illustrated. It is God’s message of hope, love, and forgiveness.
Epilogue
In 1967, Marj Saint married Abe Van Der Puy, who had become the head of HBCJ in Quito. Abe’s first wife died of cancer. Between the two of them, they have six children.
In 1970, Kathy Saint married Ross Drown, the son of Frank Drown, Nate’s good friend who led the expedition to recover and bury the bodies of the five men at Palm Beach. And so it is that Frank and Nate share the same grandchildren, two boys, Brent and Darron, who are both graduates of the Air Force Academy. Flying seems to run in the family!
In 1994, a Waorani (Auca) man found a strange metal object in the sand beside the Curaray River. It turned out to be the remains of Nate’s Piper Cruiser airplane, brought to the surface by flood waters after thirty-eight years of being buried. Steve Saint, also a pilot, organized a team to recover the remains, which now stand at MAF’s headquarters in Redlands, California, as a silent witness to early missionary aviation.
That same year, Steve Saint helped the Waorani bury his Aunt Rachel. After the funeral, Waorani Christians asked him to come and take Rachel’s place. At first the idea seemed laughable. Steve had a wife, four teenage children, and a business to run in Florida. But as he prayed, he stopped laughing and started packing. God had called him, like He had called his parents and his aunt before him, to the Ecuadoran jungle.
In 1995, Steve, his wife Ginny, and their four children moved to Ecuador to live among the Waorani. Together they are looking for ways to enable the Waorani to take responsibility for the spiritual and physical needs of the tribe so they can protect their territory, identity, and way of life. With Steve’s help and encouragement, they have carved a tribal center from the virgin jungle and built an airstrip, a medical and dental clinic, and a school. The growing Waorani church is playing an important role in the development of their tribe. Members of the church are building a small airplane, which they will use to transport patients and medicine to and from the clinic and take church elders to share the gospel message in those Waorani villages that have not yet heard it. Nate Saint would have been pleased.
