Fieldwork: A Novel (11 page)

When the provisions had been acquired and safely stowed in two dozen large steamer trunks, the missionaries traveled four days by narrow-gauge railway into the southern heart of China's Yunnan Province. The lower-class carriages of the train had no toilets, and the Chesters instructed the Walkers that it was best not to look up and down the tracks when the train came to a halt. For the first time, the Walkers saw the emerald-green rice paddies and the banana trees and the palms: in the heat of the day, steam rose from the fields and the roofs of houses.

The party arrived after the long train journey in the Chinese provincial capital of Kunming, where, in order to accommodate Laura's pregnancy, Dr. Chester ordered the construction of a large sedan chair to be carried by six coolies. When Laura's pregnancy had been revealed to the entire traveling party, Dr. Chester and Mrs. Chester had smiled knowingly at one another. "It always happens first thing when a young couple gets out in the Mission Field," said Mrs. Chester.

"Usually happens shipboard," added Dr. Chester with a wink.

"God gives you a gift because you gave your life to Him," said Mrs. Chester, thoughtfully. "He gave us our first one just like you, the day we set sail for the Orient, more than forty years ago."

For the next two months, Laura was carried westward in the sedan chair, along narrow mountain paths. Because of the dangers of brigands, it was necessary for the missionaries to travel accompanied by a retinue of mercenary soldiers. Since the coolies who carried Laura's chair were opium addicts, every few hours they insisted that the caravan stop so that they could lie by the side of the road on their straw mats, pull out long bamboo pipes from their satchels, and smoke. The opium tended to make them hardy walkers but inattentive, and Laura was frightened, as her bearers sometimes closed their eyes and like packhorses dozed even as they marched along. Whenever they arrived at a small inn for the night, Laura thanked God for having delivered her safely this far.

The caravan mounted higher into the mountains, and stealthily the soldiers defected back toward China, leaving the party more and more isolated. The days grew colder, and Laura was grateful to Dr. Chester for the shearling coats he had insisted they have made for the ladies in Kunming. Along the road as they approached Tibet, they passed elaborately enrobed Buddhist lamas with enormous hats on their heads, chanting over and over,
"Om mani padme hom."
Laura asked Dr. Chester what they were saying, and Dr. Chester replied that the prayer, although widely used, was meaningless and sadly futile, but a demonstration of both the deep spiritual desire and capacity of the people, if only they knew to Whom they ought to direct their prayers. Raymond, for his part as he rode along toward Tibet, passed his days reciting in his own head sermon after sermon in which he told whoever would listen about the glorious vision he had had in France. With every footstep, Raymond was more moved by his own preaching.

Dr. Chester rode on his horse at the head of the caravan. To amuse himself along the journey he read the scores of symphonies, which he positioned under the pommel of the saddle, trusting his horse to know the route. While in the flatlands leading out of Kunming, the habit had struck the Walkers as innocuous, but when they approached the mountainous country of the headwaters of the Mekong and Yangtze rivers, both Raymond and Laura began to fear for Dr. Chester, as the rocky path grew narrower and the cliff alongside fell away more steeply. In many places the road itself, hardly wide enough for a horse under the best of conditions, had fallen away and the path was maintained only by the careful positioning of a rotting wooden board. Under ideal circumstances, every such makeshift bridge would have necessitated a stop and a careful examination of the soundness of the passage. But Dr. Chester seemed oblivious to the dangers, and indeed his excitement at the music he was reading seemed only to increase as the road narrowed. Then the Walkers began to fear for themselves, for Dr. Chester, by virtue of his position as rider of the lead horse, determined the pace of the entire caravan, and Dr. Chester's speed was largely governed by the subtle, unconscious signals he gave his horse in response to the tempo of the music that he studied. Nothing could distract him from his music, and the caravan flew heedlessly along those rocky heights. When they arrived at the squalid Chinese inn to spend the night, Mrs. Chester confronted her husband: "Mr. Chester, I insist for the sake of those that we have in our care, as well for my own safety, that tomorrow you pass your time with something
adagio
."

For two months, Laura's world was the inside of her sedan chair. She grew accustomed to the sway of the chair up on the men's shoulders as they trudged along like beasts; and she memorized every detail of the thin wood floor and walls of woven bamboo. The windows were covered with thick woven curtains which she raised and lowered to protect herself from the harsh mountain rains and wind. After a week of travel, she was sufficiently habituated to the rhythmic motions of the chair that she was even able to take pen in hand and write letters to her sister. Laura had always been close to her sister, only three years younger than she, but now, separated by half a world, the last barriers of sisterly reticence tumbled and the letters became a clear reflection of her thoughts.
*
Laura wrote that as a young girl she had fantasized idly about the life of a princess, and now she was being toted across China princess-style. Yet after a week or two the novelty of the experience diminished, and she reflected that to the men carrying her she was merely baggage. The thought bothered her, and she discussed the matter one evening with Dr. Chester. "Are you not, my dear, carrying your baby just as these men carry you?" he asked. Laura admitted that she was, although she was uncertain precisely what Dr. Chester's point was: Dr. Chester had a way of making you see things in a new light without explaining anything. In the afternoons, with the heavy curtains closed, the sedan chair grew warm and the swaying made Laura sleepy. Travel, Laura wrote, seemed to be a matter of submission to an endless series of rocking and swaying motions: the ship on the ocean, the train passing through the endless tunnels of northern Indochina and over the high bridges with their views of the deep jungle gorges, and now being carried toward Bantang, the city on the Tibetan border where Dr. Chester had promised that the traveling, for the moment, would end, where she could wait for her baby to arrive. What a strange place to be born! thought Laura. By the time you read this, she wrote to her sister, I will probably have
had
a baby, and then it will be many more months before I can read
your
letters telling me how happy you are for me. So I better accept your congratulations now! she added, and then, overcome by a superstitious chill, knocked three times on the bamboo walls of the sedan, and wondered if bamboo was a kind of wood.

Sometimes Laura thought about Bantang. It would be, she imagined, a grand white city, with gold trim, and crisp triangular flags flapping in the mountain breezes along the outer ramparts, against a sky whose blueness made her eyes ache; and after the monotonous foods of the caravan, she dreamed also of the delicious foods she would try when invited, as she surely would be, to the governor's palace. There, seated on a silk

cushion, she would explain her mission to the governor (Dr. Chester gallantly translating) and sip the delicately spiced mutton soup, dip a piece of barley bread in the sauce of the boiled pheasant, and with a very straight proud back recount to the wide-eyed foreigners the very many wonders of life in Oklahoma and the glories of the God who inspired their travels.

The caravan had traveled on foot for almost two months, and it had been five months since the party had made their departure from America, when Dr. Chester announced to the traveling missionaries that, God willing, they would arrive that day at Bantang. They arrived in Bantang that night, God having been willing, and were warmly welcomed by the other permanent missionaries at the station, the MacLyons of Nebraska, who would both be dead of typhoid within a year.

The Walkers had been in Bantang for almost a week when Raymond asked Laura if she was happy there. This was one of the things she liked about Raymond: so many men didn't even know to ask such simple, sensitive questions. She wanted to tell Raymond about the overwhelming strangeness of the place, and about how the size of the mountains scared her and made her feel small and worried for their baby. She didn't complain about Bantang, although it had been something of a disappointment: nowhere near as big and glamorous as Tulsa even, this place was like the Indian country, with its dun-colored clay houses and narrow alleyways in which could be found the occasional corpse of a dog, a cat, or even a donkey. One thought consoled Laura: the women around here were unlikely, she reckoned, to catch Raymond's eye, as their faces were smeared black with honey and dirt, as was the Tibetan custom, and their hair reeked with the smell of rancid butter. She didn't tell Raymond any of these things, reserving her complaints for her sister. She only told Raymond that usually when she prayed at night, she felt a calm come over her and she knew that Jesus was listening to her; but here she had been praying harder the last week than she had ever prayed before, and the sweet sensation hadn't come. This sweet sensation was Christianity to Laura. It was, she thought, the sweetness of being loved. She adored the sweet sensation, and the notion that there were those in the world who did not know that sweetness kept her awake at night, as if she heard the cries of motherless children. This was why when Raymond had proposed a mission to China, she had accepted. Raymond assured her that the sweetness would return, and he was right.

The Walkers had been in Bantang a little over three months when Laura gave birth to Thomas Walker. She had been secretly afraid that the place where he was born would influence the appearance of her child, and that he would be small, with an Asiatic aspect; but he was of a normal size, and pink. Dr. Chester, an amateur phrenologist, studied the boy's skull and said that he would be intelligent and of a passionate nature, a brave servant of Christ. To celebrate the birth, the missionaries of Bantang made strawberry ice cream with ice brought down from the mountains.

Every family tells stories of origins and beginnings, and the story that the Walkers tell of themselves begins here, with the long voyage to the Orient, the caravan ride from Kunming, and the Mission Station at Bantang. Although the great flood of 1934 wiped out the written record of family history, the decisive psychological break had been made already, the day the
Maiden of the East
pulled leisurely out of the harbor into the Pacific and set sail in the direction of the evening sun.

If the folks in Tulsa really didn't know why Raymond Walker was heading off to China to save souls, it was because they weren't listening, for if there was one thing Raymond Walker liked to do, it was witness the Gospel. You couldn't stop the man. For the rest of his life, he told anyone who wanted to listen, and plenty who didn't, the story of how he got right with God. He told the story in sermons, in speeches, and in friendly informal discourses, which he delivered in stone churches, wooden chapels, and on the slopes of tall mountains, where with his own hands he had cleared an open field of rocks so the people could come and listen. Raymond felt that if all the moments of his life were to be listed in order of importance, that moment in France when he cleared his books with God would stand undisputed at the head.

This was the story that he told.

In the war, a moment had come when he had been in a trench and left for dead: his unit had retreated, and when he awoke, he was alone with glistening, gray corpses on either side of him. It was a clear, cold night lit by a harvest moon, and Raymond lost all hope of living. Even his fear retreated under the certainty of death. And then the miracle happened, and what else could it be called but a miracle? He heard the angels singing. They sang to him
a cappella
, welcoming him to Heaven, the most pure and lovely sound he had ever heard. They were singing a hymn that he knew from childhood, a tender hymn that he had heard on his mother's lips and many times had sung himself. The angels were singing in four-part harmony. The deep, throaty bass angels sang like the Negro choir he had heard in Tulsa one time, the fundament, the support, the rainbow and reliable anchor that is the promise of God; the tenor angels, hovering above the basses, augmenting, enriching, offering an open hand if only one will accept it; the altos, lovely, incandescent, and maternal; and above all the soprano angels, whose voices were as pure and piercing as morning light. They sang:

Raymond thought he was being welcomed to Heaven. The angels sang to him for hours as he lay immobile in a bloody trench, his limp hand lying in the remains of another man's gut, and when he woke up sometime later, very much alive, he could not deny that he had heard the angels singing and he understood the meaning of their song.

No, if the folks in Tulsa found Raymond's motivations for becoming a missionary mysterious, it certainly wasn't for lack of effort on his part to explain things: when Raymond tried to explain to his father that he was a changed man, his father asked if he wanted to get himself involved in real estate, because he knew a man in Oklahoma City who was looking for a junior partner; and when Raymond talked about things with his mother, she gave him a strange pained look. It was a frustrating time. The only one who had really listened was the pretty nurse with the round cheeks at the VA hospital where Raymond went twice weekly to treat his injured shoulder, and the two of them sat talking for hours in the hospital's rose garden. When he had told her about the angels, her eyes had grown misty, and Laura had smiled and said, "That must have been lovely. I wish I had heard the angels."
Lovely
—that was just the word Raymond had been looking for. He said, "It was. It was lovely." Then they got to talking more, and Raymond told her what he hadn't told anybody else: that he had been turning things over in his head, slowly thinking it through, and the only explanation he could come up with for everything he'd seen was that the world was in the midst of the Final Battle. The end was coming, just like in prophecy, and it wouldn't be long now before God judged each and every man. He admitted that the spectacle of the nations turning upon each other in this awful combat had shaken him to his core: the combatants were men who had been given the gift of the Gospel and then squandered it. He had gone back and read Daniel and Revelation, and things were just so clear to him, what was coming, the terrible Day when every man would be judged fairly. He hadn't been living right, he confessed to Laura. He hadn't been living right at all, he said, and by the things he had seen, the giant explosions, he knew that the world
could
end. It was a distinct possibility. And Laura said that when you saw a cyclone coming, you closed the blinds, put the family in the root cellar, and warned the neighbors.