Fieldwork: A Novel (15 page)

The last piece in the puzzle of Laura's contentment was Thomas. How complicated her son was! She hardly knew him nowadays. When the Walkers left China, only Thomas did not escape in time: he spent almost a year and a half in a Communist jail. The experience changed him: he was stricter now, and sterner, and just a little less tolerant of weakness and sin than the boy she had raised. About two years after the Walkers arrived in Eden Valley, some of the Dyalo at the head of the valley had started growing opium. Once Thomas might not have taken it so very seriously. In the old days he had always said that he preferred to convert ten new Dyalo than to convert the same man twice. But now he stormed up to the poppy fields, and bare-chested and bathed in sweat, he laid into the waist-high flowers with his machete. When one of the Dyalo men protested, Thomas turned on him. There were other villages, Thomas said, and other valleys, other places. But not here.

Laura worried because Thomas drove himself so very hard. Raymond, Samuel, Paul, Jesse—all the men still went out and preached in the villages, went out on foot into the other valleys, looking for souls to be saved. But only Thomas went out for weeks on end, a bag of rice slung over his shoulder, and when he came home from these long trips, he was moody and distant. Laura sensed that he did not approve of her house, or Raymond's garden, or Samuel's books. Only Thomas had not bothered to build himself a home. He slept at night in Samuel's old tent, and bathed in the river. His body, always long and lean, looked haggard to her eyes. A year passed, and then another, Thomas saying nothing, scowling, coming and going on his long trips. In the end, he drove himself so hard that, just as Laura had feared, he got sick. Virginia the nurse said that it was hepatitis, and possibly dengue fever in addition. He turned the most horrible yellow color, and burned under Laura's hand; he passed several delirious nights, and Laura was certain that only the intervention of the Great Physician kept him alive.

When the fever broke, Laura sat nervously on the edge of his sickbed and asked whether he wouldn't like to spend some time at home, some quiet time back in Oklahoma, because if he stayed here much longer, living like this, she was sure that he would die.

"Mother, this
is
home," Thomas said, his voice weak but firm. "This
is
my home, and I have work to do."

Laura trembled. Since her son had first set out in the hills alone, she had deferred to him, as she had deferred to Raymond and, but for her decision to serve the Lord, had always deferred to her own father. So many others had told her that she was a strong woman, living the way she did in these savage desolate lands, but she knew the truth.

"No," she said. "I am your mother, and you
owe
me this. The Dyalo can wait. They are not your mother. I am, and you will not make me watch you die, not so long as you love me, just to show the world what a goddamn good Christian you are."

This was the first and only time in Laura's life that she would ever take the Lord's name in vain. The curse lingered in the humid air of the sickroom like the sound of a resonating bell. Thomas stared at his mother. The long muscles of her neck strained hard, and her jaw was set. Four children and thirty years of frontier living, hauling buckets of water, riding on muleback, nights outdoors, and long windy days had robbed her of her beauty. Her hair had turned a steel gray, and for convenience she now cut it herself with her old shears, barely even bothering with a mirror just so long as it was out of her eyes and off her neck—this, the woman who in her youth had ordered by mail from Chicago a book entitled
One Hundred Hair Arrangements for the Modern Lady
. On her last home furlough, Laura, sitting with her own mother, had realized with a start that they could now be sisters. They shared the same web of lines around the eyes, the same grooved cheeks and old yellowed teeth. Laura had lived a harder life than her mother, who had been a pioneer on the plains. Once she had considered old Mrs. Chester dour for wearing the same black gowns day after day. Now Laura had only three dark dresses in her closet—but that, she thought, was the life she had chosen, and every life, even a life of Service, was bound to have regrets. Now her son proposed to multiply her regrets a thousand-fold, and Laura didn't know why.

When Thomas was a boy out preaching with his daddy, Laura recalled, Raymond was accustomed mid-sermon to pick his young son up, swing the child over his head, and sit him down on his shoulders.
My boy will never be as big as me,
Raymond would thunder from the makeshift podium.
That's how soon God will call us all to judgment!
Other children might have been terrified (Laura would have been), but Raymond had patiently explained to Thomas that the Apocalypse was a joyful fact rather than a cause for lamentation, and Thomas loved his moment of glory, when all those sad Dyalo eyes met his over the crest of his father's slicked-back hair.

Thomas grew bigger than his father waiting, and his father picked up Samuel and thundered, then Samuel grew heavy and Raymond picked up Sarah, who made the crowds laugh by playing with her father's glasses, then little Helena, who howled in fear; but even as he grew into young manhood, the sense that daily life was inconsequential stayed with Thomas, this wonderful sense that it just didn't matter, the "it" being
anything
but getting right with God.

Late in the afternoon, cold wet rain falling, long way from home, long way to there, Raymond to Thomas, dawdling on the trail: "Do you have a tail, son? Let me see your tail."

"Dad, I don't have a tail."

"You sure? I think I see one growing. You're old enough now for a tail."

Thomas bent and twisted his seven-year-old body in a fruitless effort to spot the nascent tail which he was sure was this time miraculously sprouting from just above his coccyx. "Dad, I don't think I have a tail yet."

"Then
don't drag it
! God wants you moving. You can rest later."

Both father and son knew "later" meant much later, after the end of the world.

Thomas's parents had told him, as a child, that he was here, on Earth, in China, in this-here Dyalo village, to witness the Gospel, witness some
more
, witness
again
, witness it
better, tell
the Good News, and his testimony as a boy never failed to thrill his audience or produce converts.
That
was what mattered, and that was the
only
thing that mattered. Conversion was the great game at which he as a child naturally excelled, and with every baptism, Raymond and Laura, after thanking God, showered their boy with praise. Thomas was thirteen years old before he fully realized that there were other white people who were
not
missionaries. By his middle teens, Thomas had begun to preach alone, and he singlehandedly won whole valleys to Christ, liberating thousands from the bondage and cruelty of demon worship. He told the people that they could be free, that they need not live like beasts in chains. When he preached, the Dyalo listened, and when he got back to the Mission and reported to his parents that there had been over seventy baptisms on this swing through Sound of Water Valley alone, Laura told him:
You are God's gift to the Dyalo. God Himself has sent you to help these people.

During the war, Thomas worked with the Army Air Force, organizing search-and-rescue missions among the tribal peoples for flyers downed over northern Burma. The work was dangerous, because the front lines of the Japanese armies in Burma crossed the region to which he had been assigned—but there was no one else, literally no one else in all the world, who could speak Dyalo well enough to organize the peoples. Even in uniform, Thomas Walker did not stop preaching the Gospel. He convinced his military superiors that the conversion of the tribal peoples was necessary to military goals, and air force pilots flew low over the jungle, spotted the huge crosses the Walkers burned in the jungle, and dropped down parachute-loads of freshly printed Dyalo Bibles, a spectacle of such unprecedented wonder that numerous Dyalo tribesmen were inevitably won to Christ simply by the manner in which the Book arrived.

After the war, Thomas went back to the States on furlough, where a half-year spent touring congregations of like-minded believers reinforced his growing sense that to the general patterns of life he was the exception: he and his siblings alone had been raised in China; he and his siblings alone in all the world of white people spoke Chinese, Tibetan, and Dyalo like natives; and among the Walker children, he was the undisputed leader. The girls, Sarah and Helena, both worshipped their handsome older brother; Samuel, absorbed in his books and translations, deferred to Thomas on everything Thomas considered important. Even Raymond and Laura Walker listened when he spoke: they had passed half a lifetime in Dyalo country, but he had passed his whole life there. When he told them that the people of a certain village were ready to hear the Word, and that the people of another village were wicked and would never listen, his parents knew that he was almost always right, in the way that a canny politician knows every nook and cranny of his district.

Sometimes he even
looked
Dyalo, his mother thought. The Dyalo had a facial habit, a way of tilting the head to the side and rolling up the eyes, a gesture that meant resigned confusion. When Thomas Walker got lost on the trail, he tilted his blondish head to the side and his facial features went slack, and his mother would say with a confused sigh, "I've given birth to the only green-eyed, blond-haired Dyalo boy in all the country."

In the fall of 1951, in the last days before the revolution drove the Walkers out of China, Thomas was summoned by the Christian residents of the isolated Himalayan hamlet of Leopard Roar.

There the village headman explained the problem to Thomas: the handsome son of the village's wealthiest Christian family was proposing to marry a heathen girl from Squirrel Mountain village, two days' walk over the hills. This violated the clear commandment laid down in Corinthians, "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers," and the headman, who was also the pastor of the fledgling church, saw no ambiguity in the situation. But the Fish family remained defiant. Reasonable persuasion had devolved into heated argument, then threats. Neighbors no longer walked to the fields together. Now, the headman said, the church elders were on the verge of refusing fellowship to the offending family. The young church of Leopard Roar was foundering, and the elders had summoned Thomas to set the sinking ship aright.

So Thomas went to Squirrel Mountain village, thinking to convert the bride. But that day God did not give Thomas the gift of preaching, not at all. She had just come from bathing with her sisters when he first saw her, and on her hip she still balanced the clay bathing jug. He thought of Scripture, "But it came to pass in an evening-tide, that David arose from his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king's house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon." Her damp sarong exposed her slender shoulders. This is how he would always remember her.

Thomas spoke for a long time that evening, but, entranced by the girl's liquid stare, he could persuade her of absolutely nothing. Thomas thought she was bored. But Thomas had no sure idea at all what she was thinking. He reckoned himself a sensitive man—this was the key to his success as an evangelist—and for certain sensitive men, an inscrutable woman is as terrible a provocation as red lips is to another. He went outside. It was a clear night. He could see a thousand stars, and behind these stars, he knew, lay heaven. It seemed a faraway place, and cold.

Thomas went back to Leopard Roar village, where he spent a week trapped by late-season rains. There was little to do but listen to the splash of heavy waters against the bamboo tiles of the headman's roof, occasionally stirring the ashes of the fire pit back into life to warm the iron teapot.

The groom was a young man named Tanzay. Tanzay had met Anye at the New Year's Festival in Squirrel Mountain, and they had danced together, she in one direction around the fire, he in the other, their fingertips grazing with every pass. Anye had assented to the match: no Dyalo maiden marries against her will. The headman's hut, where Thomas was staying, was snug and well built, but there were seven of them in there, the headman and his wife, the headman's mother, and the children, and at night between the pounding of the rain, the headman's snores, the children's dreamy cries, and the old woman's mutterings, Thomas could hardly breathe. Leopard Roar and Squirrel Mountain were only two days' trek apart, and Thomas was sure that the moment the rains abated Tanzay would leave for Squirrel Mountain, where he would find Anye and understand her and know her.

It wasn't in the end a very difficult thing to convince the Fish clan to send Tanzay off. Thomas was, after all, almost Dyalo, and this time God gave him a honeyed tongue. On the northern fork of the Salween River, there was an entire precinct of Dyalo who knew nothing of Christ's love. When the hard rains tapered down, Thomas went back to the Mission at Abaze, and Tanzay set off to preach the Word in the north country, where the Dyalo still lived as slaves.

A month passed, and Thomas decided to return to Squirrel Mountain village. When he saw Anye again, he knew that he had done the right thing. He took her into the garden, and had the Dyalo language had a word for "love," Thomas would certainly have employed it; but, given the constraints of the language, the most he could say was that he wanted her. "I knew you would come back," Anye said. "I want you too." Returning to the family gathering, with an almost imperceptible nod of her head Anye indicated to her parents that she would accept what Thomas had proposed, that she wanted this man more than the other. Then Anye, a well-brought-up daughter, retired from the room and allowed her parents to negotiate with Thomas for her bride-price.