Fieldwork: A Novel (27 page)

That night, Martiya slept in her own hut with the door closed. She had a lot of work to do in Dan Loi, but now she was sure that she could do it. She lay on her mat and read by the light of her hurricane lamp for a long time. When she finally grew sleepy, she closed her book and blew out the yellow flame.

She had never felt so happy in all her life.

SO MUCH OF LIFE
consists of long puttering spells: when I look over
my
letters from those first few weeks of the rainy season, I find e-mails to and from my editor at the
Bangkok Times
, who asked me to write about the artist-in-residence at the University of Chiang Mai. To my mother, I wrote that Rachel and I took a class one Saturday afternoon in Thai cooking, and another in Thai massage. There was a letter to my grandmother, in which I told the story of the fourth-grade teacher at Rachel's school, a quiet Burmese woman, who broke her wrist in a tuk-tuk accident. Mr. Tim, I continued, asked me to take over her class while she convalesced, and for a week I taught school, an experience so exhausting that I didn't think once of anthropologists or missionaries, just savages.

None of these e-mails was exciting, but the events they depict were the real events that made up my days. Not one e-mail mentions Martiya or the Walkers; but not a day in that early monsoon passed when I didn't rifle through Martiya's letters (which ended shortly after her arrival in her new hut), or look through the extensive notes of my conversations with the Walkers. But as it happened, almost a month passed in which I made no progress, until I ran into Thomas Walker in the parking lot of the supermarket on the Chiang Mai–Lamphun Road.

I had never before seen Mr. Walker outside of the big pink house, and the sight of him in those waist-high slacks staring at the steel sky from under the supermarket awning took me aback: I was used to seeing him putter in a narrow triangle between the living room, his study, and the dining room; and although I had heard stories of him in China, in Tibet, in Burma, in Oklahoma; although Mrs. Walker had told me he was headed off to Mandalay—I hadn't really believed that he existed outside that house. Now he held a large bag of groceries in his left hand and was looking for his car keys, the man who in his youth had stolen sweets from the pockets of the future Tigi of Gartok.

I waved as I walked across the lot, but he seemed not to recognize me until I was right upon him; then he smiled and said, "Well hello, young man! I was telling Nomie just the other night that she must have scared you away!"

"Not at all," I said, and suddenly I could think of nothing else whatsoever to say. Judging by Mr. Walker's silence, he was in the same position. The two of us stood there for a moment bobbing our heads, and I think that if it hadn't started to rain at that moment, Mr. Walker would have excused himself a second later and retreated to his car, and I would have gone to buy my coffee and bananas.

But it did start to rain. There were three huge cracks of thunder like the sound of the giant wooden blocks that the Thai slam together to frighten crows in the rice field. Then, with no transitional drizzle, rain so fierce that I could not see the other side of the parking lot.

We stood for a few moments watching the downpour. Mr. Walker had done his shopping but was going nowhere, not in this weather. He said something to me, but the rain was too loud for me to hear him, and he shouted it over again. I finally understood that he was saying, "Let's go get a Coca-Cola." Mr. Walker's long fingers gestured in the direction of the tarpaulin-covered noodle stand abutting the supermarket, where long pale ducks hung on hooks above vats of boiling water.

We sat under the plastic tarpaulin drinking our Cokes. I asked about Judith and Tom Riley, and whether he and Mrs. Walker had had a good trip, but Mr. Walker just smiled back at me in mute incomprehension. The rain was that loud. Soon, the parking lot began to flood, and by the time we were done with our Cokes and the rain had dwindled to a last few furious drops, the water in the lot was nearly knee-high, every car in the lot submerged to just under the headlights.

Mr. Walker snorted through his nose. "Ever seen rain like this?"

"Yesterday," I said, but Mr. Walker hardly seemed to notice.

"Rains like the dickens here four months out of every twelve. Every day it'll rain here until September. Parking lot here gets flooded, I've been seeing it now some twenty years. It's not a mystery what you need to do to prevent this flooding, let the customers get home. All you have to do is build the lot on an incline, dig out a drainage ditch, and cement in that hillside. But they've got a different mentality here.
That's
the difference between a Christian and everyone else, you see. Only Christianity tells a man you've got to take precautions and come in from the rain, build a solid home, because the rains are coming."

I could have been any vague acquaintance who had met Mr. Walker by chance in that parking lot and drunk a Coke with him, and he would have been delivering the same speech, which I could only hear through David Walker's bored adolescent ears: "Is Dad giving the Flooded Parking Lot Speech
again
?" Not that I entirely disagreed with Mr. Walker: a parking lot
shouldn't
flood every time it rains.

"You see, your animist or your Buddhist—they don't believe they have a
relationship
with God. They don't know how to
find
Him. So their fundamental point of view on life, you see, is powerless. It doesn't occur to them that they can change things, make things better. Dyalo knew we could help them, though. Right from the start. Back when we first came, family after family asked us, ‘Two thousand years! Why did it take you so long to come with God's word?' And we—"

Mr. Walker stopped talking, and his eyes looked past me out into the parking lot. He rattled the ice cubes in his glass of Coca-Cola.

"I'm sorry?" I said, thinking that he had asked me a question which I had failed to hear.

He sat silently for long enough that I thought of telling him it was nice to see him again and going into the store to do my shopping. But then Mr. Walker, with a note of absolutely uncharacteristic nervousness in his voice, said, "So did you find out anything about that woman?"

For a moment I wondered why he was so nervous. Then I realized that it was Norma. He was nervous that Norma might even
suspect
that he was discussing Martiya. I had never spoken to him without his wife in the next room, or without wandering into his study unexpectedly. But that's why, when he had seen me, he had asked me to have a Coke with him—so he could talk about the woman who had murdered his son without his wife nearby. I felt a sudden surge of sympathy for the man: a lifetime of outstanding bravery, and in his old age, Thomas Walker lived in fear of his wife.

And then I realized something else: the answer that he had given me when I asked why Martiya had killed David hadn't satisfied him either. He had told me that the devils and demons had made her do it—but he wasn't convinced. Like those Melanesian Islanders who interpreted the cargo planes of the United States Navy as benevolent deities descending from heaven and built their own landing strips to attract the generous bird gods, he had fit David's death into his own system of the universe. But no
schema mundi
was big enough to accommodate this sorrow. Mr. Walker was hoping that I could tell him something he didn't know.

"A friend of Martiya's sent me a pile of her old letters," I said.

"And?"

"I don't think they have much to do with your son." I told him about the letters, about Martiya's hut, and Pell.

"I knew old Farts-a-Lot," he said.

"You did?"

"Biggest pain in the backside you ever met. Last saw him a few years back. He was a Christian for a while, backslid. Couldn't keep away from the
lao-kao
." He used the Thai word for rice whiskey. "Did you know she used to come by the house?"

"When?"

"Back in the early days here in Thailand. Back in the 1970s."

Back when David was alive
. Before David went away on Dead Tour. "Did she come by the house often?" I asked.

"Oh, yes sir, she used to come by the house all the time. She used to come to our house and ask us questions, and we'd tell her about the Dyalo as best we could. I met her at the bank."

"The bank?" These little prompts kept Mr. Walker talking. I think they were a psychological device by which, should the necessity arise, he would be able to justify the conversation to Norma: "Why, honey, I was just answering the young man's questions. Curious little guy."

"Yep. I was standing in line with my daughter Linda-Lee, we were chatting in Dyalo like we do, and this woman starts staring at us.
Farang
woman, and she says to us, not in the best Dyalo, but we could understand, she says, ‘You are Dyalo speakers too!' I could hear her American accent, so I said back to her in English, ‘Of course!' We got to talking, and when we heard about her work we invited her back to the house for dinner."

After David's death, all of the Walkers would say that they saw something rotten or malicious in Martiya when she first showed up at the house in the fall of 1977, but in truth only Norma said anything at the time.

The other Walkers, when they sat around talking about her after she left, decided in the collective fashion of large families that they liked her, probably in the same kind of way they more or less liked me: the Walkers could never really be at ease with anyone who hadn't vigorously accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior—that was simply too big a chasm in understanding to overcome—but they found her lively and interesting, with an odd take on the Dyalo, as when she described them as "strictly exogamous from the clan." Laura Walker, who despite a lifetime of acquaintanceship with the Dyalo had always found them a foreign people, was especially taken with the confusions of the young anthropologist, and sent her home with a freshly baked loaf of banana bread. Raymond Walker remarked on Martiya's beautiful green-gray eyes. The younger Walkers—David, his siblings, his cousins—liked Martiya too: they had never met anyone like her, somebody so clearly of their generation but not of their world. When they said grace before dinner, twelve-year-old Margaret noticed that Martiya did not close her eyes. Seeing Margaret and catching her staring, Martiya had smiled—an expression so inappropriate to prayer time that Margaret wondered whether God would still bother to bless the meal. If God didn't bless the meal, Margaret later asked her mother, would it still be worth eating, with protein and calories and stuff? Margaret also noticed that Martiya wore dark red lipstick, which interested her intensely.

All that evening Martiya peppered the Walkers with questions.

"You mean that you think the spirits are actually—I don't know— what's the word?
Real?
They're not just something that the Dyalo invented?" she asked, in response to some remark which began, no doubt, "Two thousand years!"

"Absolutely real," Thomas said. "No question about it."

"Have you
seen
a spirit?" Martiya asked.

"Never seen Africa but I'd bet that it's there. The Dyalo aren't the first, not by any means, to be oppressed by such devils. In the first six chapters of the Gospel of Mark alone, there are ten references—ten!—to the casting out of devils. The New Testament is just chockablock with devils, demons. Now think about that a moment. The Jews in ancient Israel, the Dyalo in the eastern Himalayas, thinking the same way, with the same beliefs—that's a mighty strange coincidence. People in every corner of the world believe in spirits, ghosts, what have you. It's not a coincidence."

"And these spirits are
enslaving
the Dyalo?"

Thomas sighed at the simplification of the complicated relationship between the Dyalo and the spirits who controlled them. "I'd certainly say the spirits are bullies and brutes. They're ugly creatures, no doubt about it. And the Dyalo are sick and tired of being told by these ugly creatures what to do. When someone who's bigger than you and meaner than you and stronger than you tells you what to do—wouldn't you call that slavery?"

Martiya thought for a moment. "In the village where I'm staying, the people say that Old Grandfather spirit
protects
them. And they have ancestor spirits. They don't talk about being enslaved by them."

Thomas snorted. "First, according to the Bible, which is quite clear on this point, human spirits don't linger on the Earth, but only those unclean demon spirits which occupy the body
before
death. That's one of God's promises to us, that when we're done here, he'll take us Home or send us to our punishment. So I think that's a confusion the Dyalo are making. Those aren't the spirits of the ancestors the Dyaloare worshipping but
deceivers
—spirits taking human form to confuse the Dyalo. Now, about Old Grandfather.
Hah!
When I was a kid, there used to be a Chinese warlord, came by the mission every few weeks. Said he'd protect us. We asked him, ‘What happens if you don't protect us?' He said, ‘My soldiers will cut off your heads.' That's how Old Grandfather protects the Dyalo."

"What did you do?" asked Martiya.

"Do?"

"About the warlord."

"Oh, yes. Dad here"—Thomas gestured toward his father, who sat at the head of the table, smiling gently—"well, Dad here told that warlord, ‘Go on and cut off our heads. Cut off anything you like. God sent us this money so we can work with the people, not to give to you. But if you want, I'll give you something worth much, much more than gold.' Well, that warlord, he wasn't happy about that, not one bit, let me tell you. What is he going to do with our heads? The next day, the warlord came back, and Dad said the same thing. We
knew
the Lord would protect us. Day after that, the warlord came back and asked to be baptized in the name of Christ."