Fieldwork: A Novel (10 page)

A moment later, Mrs. Walker came into the study and with hardly more than a look made it clear that it was time for Mr. Walker to take his rest. I thanked the Walkers and went outside. The black cat was dozing on the stoop of the house, and the tuk-tuk driver was still snoozing under the banyan tree.

THERE WAS SIMPLY NO TELLING
what would come out of a Walker mouth at any time. Anna Walker, Judith Walker's cousin, told me that before the Flood, it had
never
rained. We ended up having a long conversation about whether this was possible, because wouldn't you need rain after the Fall but before the Flood when Man was forced to plow the Earth? I'm not entirely sure I got the better of the argument. Ruth-Marie Walker was not the only Walker to refer to biblical characters in precisely the same tone of voice that one might use to describe the neighbors who let their dog run loose: "I can't talk about Saul, he just gets me so frustrated." She was referring to
that
Saul, mighty king of Israel. James Walker, David Walker's brainy cousin, used in a single sentence the words "eschatological" and "dispensationalist," and I had to ask him what they meant. I asked Sarah Walker, Thomas Walker's sister, what she might have done with her life had she not been a missionary. She paused a second, and, wrinkling her nose, told me that she always had regretted turning down a position once while on home furlough working at a perfume counter in the mall. She said she thought she had a really good sense of smell. Thomas Walker told me that he expected the world to end within a generation. "Those living close to the Light, close to the Lord, will be saved," he said. He did not even bother to ask whether I was living close to the Light, close to the Lord.

Over the course of the next several weeks, I ran from one Walker to the next. I met in their homes with Walkers who lived in Chiang Mai, and ran up a big phone bill calling other Walkers who lived in the States. It was a large family, in continual motion: there was always another cousin stopping by the big pink house, or a sister coming in from China, or a granddaughter from the border of Laos and Vietnam introducing the new baby to her grandparents, or an uncle in Terre Haute whom nobody had bothered to mention before but
of course
I should get in touch with. I introduced myself to each of the newcomers, and proposed that we spend a few minutes talking. I felt the collector's passion: I wanted to talk at least a little with as many of the Walkers as I could.

In my notebook I made a genealogical table to keep track of the Walkers. At the top of the table were Raymond Walker, the family patriarch, and his wife, Laura: they were the first generation of Walkers to hear the call from God and head east; and then, arranged in neat boxes below, were Thomas Walker and his brother, Samuel, and their two sisters, Sarah and Helena. This was the generation born in China. Each of these was connected by a wavy line to a spouse; beside Mr. Walker, I wrote in Nomie's name. Then vertical lines led down to what Nomie always called the "kids," her children and her nieces and her nephews. This was the generation born in northern Burma, for the most part, and almost everyone in this generation, too, was married, wavy lines again joining Walker blood to the newcomers. This was David Walker's generation, and I marked his box in red. He was the third of Nomie and Thomas Walker's five children. He was at the very center of my chart. Then below the "kids" were Raymond and Laura Walker's thirty-four great-grandchildren, where David Walker's children would have been— Judith Walker's generation. David Walker died at thirty; had he lived, he would now have been middle-aged, with a family of his own.

Nomie showed me a photo from the last family reunion. They had held it right in the compound, and there must have been sixty or seventy Walkers gathered there. In the photograph, the Walkers were arranged on risers in massed ranks, and I recognized in the background the pink cement Walker house. The lawn, which now was mud, was greener then. "That's Mr. Walker's daddy—the Lord called him Home, oh, six, seven years ago," Nomie Walker said, pointing to Raymond Walker, a very slight old man at the center of the frame. He was leaning on a cane. "Laura was already gone at the time. And there's Mr. Walker's brother, Samuel, who was here in Thailand until he passed on two years ago, and his sister Helena, who lives just down in Hang Dong, and his other sister Sarah—she was just here visiting last year, we had such a good time." Her finger skimmed quickly over the photograph, hovering over each face as she spoke. "And then there are the kids …" Everyone was wearing T-shirts with the family motto "Jesus Wins All," written in English and the Dyalo script that Raymond Walker invented. I spotted Judith Walker in the photo, and her brother and sisters and cousins— handsome, clean-cut children and adolescents, the kind of kids who say "Yes, ma'am" and "No, sir." The family spilled out over the borders of the photograph, so that at the far margins of the frame, some of the Walkers leaned back in to be included in the shot. Only David was missing.

The Walkers were unfailingly helpful, even Nomie, who, so long as I didn't mention Martiya, was happy to tell me stories about what it was like in the old days; but as so often happens, it was an outsider, Big Tom Riley, who told me most of the story in the end.
*
The linguist from Tennessee was my translator out of Walkerese into something I could understand. The Walkers tended to dwell obsessively on details: an afternoon with Nomie and Thomas could devolve into endless bickering over whether the house in Xian-Hu had a thatch or wattle roof, and whether the big flood was in '33 or '34. But Tom Riley knew the Walker story well, having passed many long evenings in the company of one or another of the Walkers as they went from lonely Dyalo village to lonely Dyalo village, preaching—and in preaching, like war, you get to know folks.

Tom and I took to meeting in the mornings at an American-style diner in the center of Chiang Mai specializing in big breakfasts. The place was air-conditioned, with large plate-glass windows, hanging ferns, pink vinyl booths, and neat, uniformed waitresses with name tags in English and Thai, who would sidle up to our table and be shocked to find

Tom address them fluently in the vernacular. He was, after all, a professional linguist. He'd order himself four eggs, double bacon, hash browns, and a pot of hot coffee, which by Thai standards is simply a mountain of food, and I would order a short stack of pancakes. The restaurant was filled by nine with the expat retirees, who left their young Thai wives at home and spent the long mornings lingering over coffee and the
Bangkok Times
, contemplating how to pass another long day of self-imposed Oriental exile. Sometimes Tom and I would stay talking all through the morning, until the lunch hour arrived and the place filled up with hip young Thais who thought of an American-style diner as ethnic dining, a taste of the exotic West.

In 1934, the Salween River, which tumbles down in white water out of the high mountains of Tibet, overflowed her boundaries, together with her tributaries, and the river valley where the Walker family lived and tended to the spiritual needs of the Dyalo people was flooded. The great river rose in only hours, and everything was lost but what the Walkers had on their backs. The first and only dictionary of the Dyalo language was carried off downstream, floating beside Raymond Walker's first translation of the gospels into Dyalo and the family Bible in which the Walker genealogy had been recorded. So when I asked about the family before old Raymond Walker, the Walkers of today just shrugged and waved their hands: the past was downstream, lost in the flood.

What they knew was this: they were of Scotch and Irish stock and maybe a little German—nobody really knew anymore—and they had always been wanderers. Raymond Walker was only five when his family left Sayre, Oklahoma, in 1901 and staked a claim in the Indian Territory near Tulsa, but his parents hadn't been born in Sayre, and his grandparents had been born only God Himself knew where to the east, the generations one after another in constant motion westward. The Walkers had drifted all through the nineteenth century, all across a huge continent, and probably would have kept drifting if first they hadn't run out of empty country, or if the Great War hadn't come. But the war
did
come, and Raymond Walker was the first Walker in a very long time to go eastward, to northern France, where he served as a medic, and when he came back to Oklahoma, he no longer wanted to teach school, which had been his childhood ambition.

Raymond Walker's first idea when he came home after the war was to start a business breeding registered, pedigreed Dalmatians. But an epidemic of distemper made the dogs weak and trembling in their paws and thin, and they had to be shot, and Raymond lost all the money he had invested in a beautiful bitch and stud. Raymond figured that the animals' deaths were a sign from God lest Raymond grow distracted from the plan that he had formulated in northern France. Then Raymond proposed to take his new wife, a pretty nurse named Laura, on a mission to convert the Tibetans. Nobody in Tulsa thought this a particularly fine idea: of course the Tibetans needed saving, same as everyone else, but Raymond and Laura had responsibilities in Tulsa. Raymond's father, who ran a grocery store, was ailing, his mother was always in tears, and his brother drank. And round-faced, giggling Laura Walker, they said she wouldn't last a month in China: she was pale and sickly as a child, and couldn't tolerate even a feather out of place. They asked: Why would Raymond Walker of all people want to be a missionary, anyway? It was true that when he was eleven he had won a medal for having memorized more Scripture than any other boy in town, but someone in town won that medal every year, and you didn't see the others heading off to
China
. The people in Tulsa wondered if Raymond had got religion along with Laura, but at the wedding Laura's folks were mystified too:
they
had thought it was all Raymond's fault and were shocked to find that the Walkers seemed like such normal people, if maybe a little high-strung. But Raymond and Laura were of age, no one could stop them from heading off— in truth, no one really tried—and Raymond's experience as a medic and Laura's experience as a nurse made them attractive as volunteer missionaries. Their applications to the United Missionary Society were accepted, and they left for China in the fall of 1921, as very junior members of a missionary expedition to the Sino-Tibetan border, under the leadership of the celebrated Dr. Morris Chester, member of the National Geographic Society and one of the very few white men to have penetrated the interior of the closed kingdom of Tibet. Not long after the steamship
Maiden of the East
left San Francisco for Yokohama, the first stage in what would be a six-month voyage to the Tibetan frontier, Raymond and Laura Walker conceived their son Thomas.

Every morning on the
Maiden of the East
, Raymond and Laura, habituated to country hours, rose at dawn and sang hymns together, a pleasure they would indulge through good times and terrible until separated by Laura's death at the age of eighty-six; then, closing the hymnal, they picked up the Bible and read together, book by book, as the screws of the ship took them farther and farther from Tulsa. Dr. Chester prepared them for the hardships of inner China, delivering long lectures in his stateroom which emphasized equally the majesty of Chinese culture and the savagery of Chinese life; Mrs. Chester, a large, almost square woman dressed in the Victorian style with pince-nez and a hat embroidered with silk flowers, took Laura Walker aside every morning to discuss the particular problems of feminine hygiene and etiquette in a tropical climate. Dr. Chester then spent an hour offering rudimentary instruction in the Chinese language, and then another hour in Tibetan, so that after twenty-three days at sea Raymond and Laura could recite the Lord's Prayer in both tongues. Dr. Chester remarked to Mrs. Chester that the Walkers had an excellent ear for the tones. Every night, Raymond and Laura danced in the ship's ballroom. When the ship stopped in Japan, the Walkers ate in a restaurant where they sat on the floor, and they visited a Buddhist temple where they saw people worship idols for the first time. Dr. Chester explained that this was only a foretaste of the darkness of spiritual life on the Tibetan border. The
Maiden of the East
stopped in Shanghai, and the Walkers saw the junks on the Yangtze River, so many hundreds with their sails unfurled, each manned by hundreds of coolies, and Raymond calculated that the
floating
population alone in Shanghai Harbor was greater than the population of Tulsa, perhaps more than all the American men dead in the war.

"And none of these people are Christian?" Raymond asked Dr. Chester, standing on the deck of the ocean liner. "None of them know?" The idea staggered the imagination. He imagined the population of the entire world spread out along the length of a teetering balance. Before, he had supposed that the job of the missionary was to hunt out the unsaved remnants of humanity awaiting salvation; now he realized that the balance tilted heavily toward universal damnation. It was an awesome thought. To Raymond, heathenism was like some terrible but easily cured disease, and the notion that the healing medicine was warehoused in his own land, stored away in huge forgotten boxes, crates, and vials sufficient to change the lives of millions, while here, no one even
knew
there was a cure—this was a thought so disturbing that Raymond had to pace along the deck.

Dr. Chester found Raymond's excitement to spread the Gospel touching, and reminiscent of his own passion as a young man. He laughed. "None of them know," Dr. Chester said.

Then the party changed ships and went by small French coastal steamer to Haiphong in northern French Indochina. The food on the steamer was unfortunately rather rich, with buttery French sauces, which combined with Laura's pregnancy and the rocking motion of the vessel to make her more than a touch queasy, so that she was very glad to arrive in Haiphong, where there was so much to do. Mrs. Chester, with her formidable talents for organization and her ability to command the respect of even the most cunning merchant, took charge of the provisioning. They needed to buy supplies sufficient for a mission of five years, and although the
secteur français
, where the missionaries stayed, was lovely, with its café-lined boulevards and shady banyan trees, it was better to buy from the Chinese merchants in the squalid harbor, which they visited in a rickshaw pulled by a swaybacked coolie. They bought sugar, paper, lead pencils, Bibles and hymnals by the dozen, medicines of every sort, canned meats, sardines, canned vegetables, canned pears, peaches, apricots, nectarines, and tangerines, wool blankets, bolts of cotton and wool, and thousands of tapered wax candles.