Fieldwork: A Novel (28 page)

Like me, I imagine, Martiya was not quite sure how to respond to the Walkers' more extraordinary stories. "Did the warlord explain what happened, why he changed?"

"The man was filled in the night with the Holy Spirit. He said that any God which made people so courageous must be worth believing in. We've seen things like that happen more times than you can count." The table fell silent a moment. Raymond cleared his throat. "You're asking very important questions, young lady. And let me tell you, when we first came to China in 1920, a very long time ago—"

Laura interrupted, "Oh my, yes."

"—I had an attitude very similar to yours, I thought that spirits were only something you read about in the Bible, something that only bothered people in biblical times. I certainly didn't realize the
magnitude
of the problem. It took me a considerable period to realize that defeating the spirits
in our day and age
, right here, defeating them through the aid of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was the significant spiritual challenge of our time. But Grandma Walker and myself, we saw case after case of it, wandering through those villages, until we finally had to put aside our white colonial master attitude and admit that these people might know something about something. We arrived in village after village and were told when we tried to set up our tent, ‘Oh no! Don't put up your tent near that rock! There's a nasty spirit who lives there, he'll get angry with you.' Or, ‘Don't talk too loud in the rice field. The rice spirit
hates
loud noises.' We learned."

Laura Walker shook her head. "Oh yes, it was
terrifying
for them in those days," she said. "For us too! When the spirits saw us coming to baptize somebody, they would be furious. They would fight back with everything they had. Somebody would come to us and say, ‘Yes! I want to be free of the demons, I want to be baptized in the name of a God who loves me,' and we would make an appointment for the morning to baptize them, and in the night they'd be attacked by the spirits, they'd come to us in the morning with bite marks, bruises, bleeding. ‘What happened to you?' I'd say. ‘Spirits attacked us in the night,' they'd say. After all that we couldn't deny the
severity
of the problem."

"I can see that," said Martiya, having sought, and found, a neutral phrase. "What do you think the spirits
are
?"

It was Thomas's brother Samuel who took up the bait—Samuel now in his early fifties, balding, a round face and spectacles, Samuel who had passed the better part of his life quietly reading and translating the Bible into Dyalo, verse by verse. He said, "Miss van der Leun—"

"Martiya. Call me Martiya. Please …"

"Miss Martiya, we're not anthropologists. We're practical people. We see a problem and we're trying to fix it, if we can. We're certainly not experts like you."

"I'm not an expert!" said Martiya.

"Well, compared to us, you certainly are. Nobody knows what the spirits really are—maybe they're fallen angels, that's certainly a possibility, or maybe some other being created in the spiritual realm. The biblical evidence certainly associates the spirits with Satan. But you know how I've always thought of the Dyalo spirits? They're like a bureaucracy. Like a giant powerful bureaucracy, which imposes a million and one rules on the Dyalo. Fines them a pig or a chicken or something worse when they do something wrong. Punishes them, kicks them around, treats them like dirt. You ever try and get a residency permit here in Thailand? Go from office to office, lose two whole days? It's like that
all the time
for the Dyalo. If the spirit of the big rock makes your kid sick, ask the spirit of your ancestor to protect you. So you slip him a bribe, a chicken, a pig. Maybe he'll help you, maybe not. If not, you go to another spirit, try and bribe
him
. So it goes."

"Exactly!" said Thomas. "Exactly! And then we come along and we say, ‘Folks, we know the Man at the top! You want to plow that new field? You don't need to sacrifice a pig or say this ritual—just talk to the Boss! Who loves you! Who
wants
to help you! We'll teach you how to talk to Wu-pa-sha directly!' "

Wu-pa-sha was the creator of rice, rain, life, and thunder, at the very summit of the Dyalo spiritual hierarchy.

By the end of the evening, when Norma served her pineapple upside-down cake, the group was prepared to laugh together.

"So I move into the place, I take a deep breath—and I get about exactly five minutes of solitude, no more," Martiya said.

"Yep!" said Raymond. "They're not a people to leave you alone!"

"First, it's the kids who show up. All of them. Every kid in the village thinks the place is his."

"That means they like you," said Laura.

"First morning in my new hut, one kid is crawling up the mosquito net, another is on my desk—right on top of it!—and a week later, one of the little twerps comes tumbling in right down
through the roof
. Kid looks up at me, doesn't say one word, picks himself up with a kind of shocked look on his face"—Martiya imitated the child's face, raising her eyebrows and sucking in her lips—"and walks out of the place. Big hole in my roof."

"Oh no!" said Laura.

"But the kids aren't the only thing. I bought myself a mirror here in Chiang Mai. I thought one morning, ‘You know, I better check everything is still in place.' "

"Yes!" said Norma. "That used to drive me insane in Eden Valley. No mirror, not one in six years, I just wanted once in a while to
see myself
!" Norma turned to her husband. "You see, it's not only vanity."

"In my case it is, actually," Martiya said. Everybody laughed.

"Well," she continued, "I should have guessed, but that mirror has attracted every teenage girl in a ten-mile radius. ‘Martiya, may I use your see-myself square?' That's what they call it, the
tai-tin mah
."

"The what?" said Thomas.

"The
tai-tin mah
."

"Oh! The
tai-tin mah
!" corrected Thomas, changing the tone of the final syllable from flat to rising.

"
Tai-tin mah
," Martiya repeated.

"It's hard!" said Norma. "You'll get the hang of it. Believe me, it was years before I could say ‘Hello, my name is Norma and that water buffalo there is my husband' in Dyalo."

Martiya laughed. "In any case, from morning until night that hut is
filled
with girls. ‘Oh, you look so pretty!' I told them all that the thing would steal their souls, it's
danger, danger, stay away
, but they just giggled. But that's not the worst of it—no sir—it's the boys. They're like flies on—" Martiya stopped herself, recalling suddenly that she was in the company of missionaries. "They can't keep away. One day I come home from a day of interviewing the shaman about Dyalo magic, and there must have been fifteen teenagers in my little place, hormones so thick I needed to wipe the place down with a sponge.

"That's not enough, there's
also
the drinking men. Nobody told me, but my place is the local tavern. Lately, half of the village men have decided that my hut is the place to meet for drinks in the evening. I walk in, any time of day, half a dozen men are seated on the floor around one of those pots of rice whiskey—you know, with the big straws? Smoking those smelly cigars and drinking whiskey. So I'd say that the new-hut thing hasn't worked out all that well."

Thomas explained to Martiya that the attraction of her hut was almost certainly that it was associated with no clan. "Have you ever had a dog, young lady?" he asked.

"Growing up, yes."

"He ever bark at the other dogs?"

"Sure."

"Same for spirits. That's why those men are in your house. You take your dog for a walk in the neighborhood, he barks at some dogs, sniffs some other dogs, lies down on his back and pretends he's dying for other dogs. You have an aggressive, mean dog, better to leave him at home. The Dyalo think that your clan is the pack of spirits which follow you around like a dog
all the time
, fight with the other spirits. Over the years, the Dyalo have figured out that you just can't introduce some of these spirits into another spirit's house. Dangerous stuff. But your new hut, young lady, it's neutral territory. That's why they're coming to your place. You best take care, though. Those spirits can be dangerous."

"I'll be on my guard."

"I'm quite serious. You're a long ways from home, and there are things in those hills you don't understand."

Martiya came by the house regularly her last year in Dan Loi, Mr. Walker said: once a month, every six weeks, the doorbell would ring and there she'd be, smiling, full of questions, lively as all heck—who wouldn't like her? Sometimes of course the Walkers were busy, as folks will be, but Mr. Walker always tried to make time for Martiya and would sit with her for hours in his study.

Mr. Walker proved himself among the very best of Martiya's informants on the Dyalo. Sitting with me in the parking lot of the supermarket, he made a list of the things that he had discussed with Martiya. I copied them down with a stub of pencil on the back of a receipt. That Mr. Walker remembered these interviews in such detail suggested to me both the excellence of the man's memory and the considerable time he had spent privately reconstructing the chain of events that had led to David's death.

There was a question about iron knives: "Do you guys have any insight at all into the business about pregnant women and knives? Why can they use bamboo but not iron knives? It's driving me insane." And a question about the Dyalo calendar: "I'm confused by the calendar … It's a lunar calendar? But it forms a
solar
year?" "Sure, because you've got the New Year's feast days at the end." Martiya asked about rice planting and how the fields were distributed; about Dyalo marriage (which inevitably digressed into discussion of the difference between a heathen marriage and a true, Christian marriage); bride-price, and the conflict in the missionary community about whether bride-price was to be suppressed, the Bible being largely silent on this crucial issue (Mr. Walker: "We like to let them do what they think is best, but we discourage the bride-price. Christians shouldn't buy and sell each other, that's just what I think"); sex and eating taboos, of which there were at least one zillion; Dyalo notions of village, jungle, and field, where one ended and the other began, who lived in each, and why the Vampire clan at the foot of the village were considered jungle people and not village people; the New Year's feast; the magical rites associated with hunting, gardening, rice planting, and opium growing; and conflict in the village and its resolution.

Martiya inquired about how rice was distributed in the village after planting, and the proceeds of the opium planting; what roles men and women played in the household economy—

"But why don't you ask the people in
your
village these questions?" Norma asked her once.

"I've got notebooks full of answers from them. But it's always so interesting to hear your responses. You guys are almost Dyalo, you know."

"Four generations, you do get to know folks."

—and the Dyalo names for trees, stars, flowers, plants, and animals, the last being particularly useful, what with the Dyalo's trouble understanding photographs and drawings; the history of the Dyalo, all the way back to the complicated Dyalo origin story, when Wu-pa-sha made the first Dyalo man and his sister, as well as the Dyalo story of the flood, which confirmed in the Walkers' eyes what they had known all along, that the Bible was perfect and true; the ways in which the Dyalo buried their dead; where the Dyalo believed the spirits of their ancestors went; how the Dyalo treated malaria; the precise recipe for the poultice used in treating broken bones; and the superiority of the Dyalo treatment for lumbago to its Western analogue.

But most of all, Mr. Walker told me, Martiya asked about the
dyal
, the rice-planting ritual for which the Dyalo were named. Her interest in the
dyal
, Mr. Walker told me, was almost an obsession.

Mr. Walker stared at his Coke bottle. Now the rain was just a soft mist.

"So you see," he said, "that's why Norma never liked that woman."

I didn't see at all. "She didn't? Not even then?"

"No."

"Did she ever say anything about her? Was there ever an incident or anything? Or was it just a feeling on her part?"

Mr. Walker stayed quiet a little while. "When you live with a woman a long time, you get to know what she's thinking, and I've lived with Norma for a long time. I always tell the people, the bond between a man and a woman, I always say it's not just a transaction or a partnership or what have you, it's the basis of a Christian life. The love of man and wife, it's a reflection of God's love. That what I always say. But it's a strange thing, though, because the firmer the bond is, the more united a man is to his wife, the more fragile that bond becomes. Do you see what I'm trying to tell you, son?"

I nodded. "What did Mrs. Walker say about her?"

"Sometimes I'd invite Martiya to stay in Ruth-Marie's room, now that Ruth-Marie was out of the house, if Martiya stayed late talking and she didn't want to drive in the dark or go to a guest house. Norma didn't like that at all, she always thought that Martiya was maybe a little superior. You know women, son, they have their territories. I always tell the people …"