Fieldwork: A Novel (13 page)

The most frustrating thing for the Walkers about their life in Bantang was that the size of the Christian community there held steady. Those who would be converted in this small city, it seemed, had been converted. Later in life, Raymond Walker would say that there was no better preparation for missionary life than to be assigned the task of tilling a stony mission field, but at the time the effort did not amuse him at all—the long wearisome unproductive days in which he wandered the streets of Bantang, cornering everyone who would listen. It bothered Raymond intensely that everywhere around him were souls to be won for Christ and that he did not possess the means to win them. Dr. Chester did not seem to care, or to realize the profound urgency of the moment.

One night Raymond had a dream. He was in a train station, and enormous queues of Chinamen streamed past him to board an old steam train. Raymond stopped one of them and asked him the destination of the train. The Chinaman, old and wizened, replied that it was the train to Hell. The destination was confirmed by the cry of a huge Negro porter: "Hell Express! All aboard!" Raymond tried to hold the old Chinaman back, but in his dream his limbs lost force and the man slithered easily from Raymond's hand. Raymond grasped at an old woman headed for the platform, and she, too, slipped from his hands and climbed aboard the train, which bulged with humanity, limbs protruding from the windows and doors. Then the terrible thing happened. In the great shuffling crowd, Raymond himself was swept aboard. "This is the train to Hell!" he cried. "Let me down!" But Raymond could not pass through the crowds, and he awoke in a sweat just before the train steamed out of the station.

The next morning, Raymond told Dr. Chester that he was ready to leave Bantang. He wanted to travel to the faraway tribal villages to spread the Word—the trip he had planned with Stan MacLyon. Dr. Chester, hardly bothering to look up from the page of Tibetan characters he was proofreading, forbade the expedition: with a wave of his soft, pink hand, he explained that the roads and hills were filled with robbers, brigands, and warring factions, and he would not allow the young father to take such risks, not when he was performing valuable service to God in the Mission itself. Something in Dr. Chester's response provoked the younger man, who remembered the way his father had looked past him when he had explained the angelic choir.

"You
forbid
me?" His voice was tight, and he plucked at a cuff link to keep his hands from sweeping all of Dr. Chester's papers—his translation of the Bible, his mountain of correspondence, his notes for
National Geographic
—off his desk.

"I must," said Dr. Chester, taking off his round spectacles, then wearily rubbing the bridge of his nose. "You leave me no choice. I will not have a widow and orphan here at Bantang station to suit your wandering fancy."

"You mean that you will not have your correspondence unanswered, that the Gospel might be spread," replied Raymond.

Raymond stormed out of Dr. Chester's small office and plunged himself into the tumult of the market. That evening the merchants and traders remarked to one another that the white man had been even more agitated than usual.

For almost a week, Raymond did not bother with his usual duties at the Mission. Dr. Chester's papers lay in a muddle, and the younger missionary, in open defiance, set about putting together a small caravan to tour the neighboring villages. He took his morning tea at the market and spent his days in town. Dr. Chester, for his part, was furious also— furious that the authority he had veritably built with his own hands at the Mission Station was denied. Dr. Chester was not a large man, and he was no longer young, but when angry in his past he had confronted other men larger than himself and frightened them. Now, late at night, Dr. Chester imagined confronting Raymond Walker.

It was the wives who finally eased the tensions, as so often in these cases.
With Thomas so very little, did Raymond really want to leave her just now?
Laura asked her husband.
Wasn't Dr. Chester himself equally impatient as a young man?
Mrs. Chester asked the doctor.
Dr. Chester was obviously unsettled by the zeal of a younger man,
consoled Laura.
Think how difficult it must be to enter the Mission field in the shadow of a giant
, soothed Mrs. Chester. Then in the subtle way of wives, each commanded her mate to make peace. One afternoon Dr. Chester found Raymond in the market, and that evening the foursome ate dinner together again. The next day, Raymond returned to the typewriter.

All winter, a tenuous peace held at the Mission. Raymond did not renew his demands, and Laura held her tongue as Mrs. Chester explained the proper way to fold a sheet or soothe a fevered brow. But the underlying tensions remained: neither Walker admitting it to the other (but both admitting it to their grandchildren many years later, who in turn told me), both Raymond and Laura began to pray for deliverance from the Mission at Bantang. They asked God to allow them to be of greater use to Him and His Kingdom, and God answered their prayers in His terrible ironic fashion.

Half a year after Raymond Walker and Dr. Chester quarreled, the Grand Tigi of Gartok, the lord of eastern Tibet, invited the Walkers and the Chesters to preach the Word at his court. The Tigi had heard rumors of the fascinating work in which the missionaries were engaged; now he wished to discuss these vital spiritual matters with the foreigners himself.

Such an invitation was of the most extraordinary and rare nature. Bantang lay on the Tibetan frontier, but the interior of Tibet was a closed nation. The last white man to visit Lhassa had been Dr. Chester, almost ten years earlier, and as far as anyone knew, Laura would be only the second white woman to enter the kingdom at all, following in Mrs. Chester's footsteps. Thomas's visit would be unique. Dr. Chester organized the preparations: the appropriate gifts for the Grand Tigi, the retinue of guards to shepherd the group safely across the border, the hardy ponies, and of course early versions of the Tibetan New Testament to distribute to the curious. (These books had only recently arrived from the printer in Shanghai, and the fortuitous coincidence of their arrival and the invitation to the interior of Tibet, the missionaries agreed, was surely proof of the Lord's desire that His Word be spread.) For several weeks, the Mission was in high excitement as the work approached. But only two days before the party was supposed to set out from Bantang, Dr. Chester received a message by courier: Père Antoine, the Catholic missionary who worked to the southwest, was desperately ill with influenza. Normally this would have been a job for Raymond, as the junior missionary at the station, but Dr. Chester offered in his typical gallant fashion to tend Père Antoine in Raymond's place. Dr. Chester insisted that the Walkers travel on as planned, lest the missionary party, setting out too late in the year, find itself unable to reach Tibet, hidden behind the great wall erected annually by the first of the Himalayan snowfalls.

Only Mrs. Chester did not support this arrangement.

"Dr. Chester," she said, "don't you perhaps think that Raymond ought to accompany you on your visit to Père Antoine? The hills, you know …"

She brought up the subject over the breakfast shared by the four missionaries, and this was her mistake: had she been alone with Dr. Chester, perhaps she might have found a small hole in the iron wall of his pride; in front of Raymond, any admission of weakness was unthinkable. Dr. Chester looked up from his bowl of rice, his round spectacles steamed over. "I do believe, Mrs. Chester, that I
will
have some of that excellent chutney after all," he said.

"I'm quite serious, Dr. Chester. I heard just last week from one of the ladies at the—"

"That chutney, if you please."

"Dr. Chester!"

Dr. Chester sat up straight in his chair. He was still in his pale silk dressing gown. "Mrs. Chester," he said finally, "I do believe we must recall that we are here to spread the Gospel. Raymond is not here to keep track of these old bones"—he patted his sternum—"but to make sure that the Word is spread."

Mrs. Chester knew that there was no appeal to this decision. She shot a distressed glance at the end of the table, where Raymond seemed quite fascinated by the oily swirls of his tea and Laura was much occupied suddenly with feeding Thomas, who was himself quite busy with a piece of toast. The matter was settled. The next morning, with little Thomas holding on tight to the pommel of Raymond's saddle and Laura secure on her mule, the party set out for Tibet as planned.

Now for the first time the Walkers would be alone in the Orient, in Tibet!—that most mysterious of lands, with the opportunity to spread their faith in the manner of their own choosing. From the start it was a journey of miracles. The most dangerous portion of the voyage was certainly the four-day journey from Bantang to the Tibetan border: this was, as Dr. Chester had said, a land of brigands and robbers. Here in this wild mountainous country, the Shang Chen Tibetan tribe fought furious guerrilla battles with the Druwasa; and the Tibetans under the lama Ra Nah fought with the Chinese. Missionaries were generally accorded safe passage through these dangerous internecine skirmishes, but overexcited warriors had been known to attack even women and children. It was Laura who noticed the mysterious retinue of soldiers in white accompanying the Walkers' party, and she pointed them out to her husband, who explained to his wife that these dim shadowy warriors were certainly an angelic host sent by God in answer to their prayers for safe travel. The Walkers crossed the frontier without incident.

On the road to the sacred Kawa Gabo Mountains they saw pilgrims prostrating themselves hand and foot, mile after mile, to their demon gods, and the Walkers were reminded of what Dr. Chester had told them of the exceptional spiritual desires of the Tibetan people. If only they knew to Whom to turn their prayers! Scores of antelope protected from the poacher's arrow by order of the Dalai Lama himself flashed down the slopes of piney mountains in advance of the tiny caravan. Sullen, massive China with its heathen multitudes was behind them, and ahead a kingdom commensurate in grandeur, in beauty, and in suffering with His ambitions. These were the days when the great missionary rallying cry "Onward to Lhassa!" was heard from every evangelical pulpit in America, and for the first time the Walkers understood the charismatic attraction of Tibet to all those who earnestly wished to see the world in Light. They passed caves in which were entombed living hermits, men determined to sit in darkened silence until enlightenment or death arrived, and the Walkers would have stopped at each and every cave and explained the simple, sublime Good News which would have liberated these spiritual isolates from their self-imposed prisons, had not their rendezvous with the Tigi awaited. The Tibetans, too, for their part, were fascinated by the handsome white man, his smiling woman, and their charming child. The Walkers spent a night in a forest lamasery where the monks had taken a vow of poverty so extreme that the abbot's drinking bowl was made from a desiccated human skull: when the Walkers explained their faith, the lamas insisted on reading Dr. Chester's Bible immediately. The fertile valleys teemed with yak and sheep, and the gentle breezes made the barley fields quiver like velvet brushed back by His hand. Here the headwaters of the terrible Salween, the raging Mekong, and the endless Yangtze were just gentle rivulets. What cruel irony that He Who made this magnificent land entombed its occupants in spiritual darkness! Raymond and Laura had never felt so alive.

Swift messengers on horseback had alerted the Grand Tigi to the missionaries' arrival, and showing them the hospitality for which he was renowned, he sent out his army to greet them. The Walkers had stopped for the night in a simple peasant home, where with typical Tibetan generosity they had been offered a mud floor and barley bread. Awakening in the morning, they found a grand army clad in silver and gold saluting them with the music of trumpets. Burned pines flashed in copper pans to perfume the dry mountain air.
This
was the welcome the Tigi offered his friends. Two days' further journey brought the party to the palace at Gartok, where the Tigi himself greeted the Walkers of Oklahoma as the emissaries of a great nation and a greater faith.

A month in the palace passed in the timeless manner of dreams: the Walkers slept at night in a room whose floors were covered in sumptuous rugs, and awoke in the morning with the pale light of the mountain sun breaking through the colored-glass windows. The Tigi had once summoned the greatest artisans of Gartok to decorate his palace, and the great masters had covered the walls of the Walkers' quarters in elaborate depictions of the animals, flowers, and myths of Tibet, which first frightened, then enchanted, young Thomas. The Walkers feasted, danced, hunted with falcons, and explained their faith to a fascinated and receptive audience.

One afternoon, for his amusement, the Tigi clothed Raymond in the finest silken robes from his wardrobe, while his wife and her servants dressed Laura. Raymond had brought his camera with him on the expedition and insisted on taking photographs. All of these photographs were lost in the flood of 1934 but one, which survived because Raymond sent it to his mother, who kept it on her Tulsa mantelpiece to show to the ladies of the Church Society. They never failed to stare in wonder. The photograph shows the Grand Tigi and his son, mustachioed and fierce, standing side by side, each fingering Tibetan prayer beads. They are wearing Raymond Walker's clothes, dark woolen suits and pressed white shirts with high collars, and on the Tigi's large head, Raymond's cowboy hat. Handsome Raymond Walker is beside them, wearing an ankle-length silk gown. A vague smile, almost a smirk, breaks over his clean-shaven face. Laura Walker is the only seated member of the party. Her hair has been plaited by the Tigi's handmaidens into long tresses, as is the Tibetan style, and held in place with gold and turquoise combs: the dark sleeves of her robe descend into flared white cuffs, and her hands are settled in her lap. Swathed thus in embroidered silk and rare jewels, she looks up at her husband with an expression on her pretty face that even the most jaded observer would admit was love.