Fieldwork: A Novel

by Mischa Berlinski

  When the men had cleaned out the valley, the women arrived, and one by one the Walkers built homes, carved out fields for the rice, and planted fruit trees. In the Walkers' wake, long ropy streams of Dyalo followed, crossing single file over the mountains. They carried all their worldly goods in bamboo baskets: the crowing roosters and the squealing piglets, the sharply honed knives, and rice to last until the next crop was harvested. Exciting times, with friends old and new arriving daily, the villages going up, the whole valley a beehive of energy and industry! Helena Walker told me that the water had been so sweet in the river which meandered gently through the valley floor, and Sarah Walker told me that this was a place where she woke in the morning and could pull from trees three steps from her door and in bloom eight months a year peaches, mangoes, oranges, and jackfruit, which her children ate for breakfast, the juice dribbling down their little chins. It was as lonely and as isolated and as perfect a place as you could find on the face of this earth, the Walkers said, this valley of theirs—and of course they knew it wouldn't last. They, too, had read Genesis.

  Raymond was a gardener, and when he was forced to leave China, having to leave behind his orchard at the Mission in Abaze had been a bitter blow. For almost thirty years, Raymond had included a brief note at the end of his reports to the churches back home asking for seeds and clippings from fruit trees. Every month the postman had brought him another bulky package, and whatever he received, he had planted behind the house in Abaze. A Chinese horticulturalist from the China Inland University had once visited the orchard and pronounced it certainly the widest variety of fruit trees anywhere in the Salween River valley: a half-dozen varieties of apples, some for eating straight off the tree, others for pies, green and red; four types of oranges and three lemons; peaches; pears; apricots; plums; guava; nectarines; mangoes; starfruit and jackfruit—and hybrids and crossbreeds too, including one which Raymond suspected was unique, a mango-guava cross. Visitors to the Mission in Abaze hardly had time to catch their breath before Raymond had them by the arm and was showing them the carefully tended acres. Whatever grew here, Raymond told his visitors, he clipped and gave to the Dyalo, so that now there were Dyalo villages on those high mountain slopes growing their own oranges and lemons where once for lack of vitamins there wasn't a man over forty with a tooth still in his head. Raymond had come to Eden Valley with a huge box of clippings from his most successful experiments. While the other Walkers loved the beauty and isolation of Eden Valley, Raymond was passionate about the dark, rich, loamy earth, from which was springing up a new orchard faster than he could have imagined, row after row of healthy, solid trees.

  Eden also was the answer to Laura's prayers. The thirty years in China had seen the Walkers occupy a dozen houses, all of them drafty, dreary places, with dirt floors and sod walls; and Laura had lived in them prepared to leave at a moment's notice should the good Lord need the Walkers elsewhere. She had lived the last fifteen years in the Mission House in Abaze, which was filled with spiders and simply did not get clean no matter how she scrubbed it. Laura never complained about her choices in life, but for thirty years now she had read letters from her sister, who had married a large-animal veterinarian named Marvin and stayed in Kansas all her life, about wallpapering the parlor and sitting at night on the swing porch. Raymond and Laura almost never fought during those years, except over the subject of a home: Raymond maintained that to invest energy now in a house—energy which, he said, rightly ought to go toward saving the Dyalo while there was still time—was just plain silliness. "And you are not a woman, Raymond," said Laura. Faced with this incontrovertible truth, Raymond, who hated to see his wife unhappy, promised Laura when they left Abaze that wherever they went next, she would have the home she yearned for.

  Laura never wanted a fancy house. She just wanted a large parlor with plenty of light where during the rainy season the grandchildren had space to play; and she wanted a good solid floor, so that if she woke up in the night and went downstairs, she didn't have to worry about snakes. She wanted two floors, even if she and Raymond would soon be getting older, because she had grown up in a house with two floors, and it just wasn't a home unless you went upstairs at night. The Dyalo, who used communal cooking areas in the center of the village, considered the idea crazy and a touch antisocial, but she wanted a kitchen of her own: for almost thirty years she'd had to walk outside every time she wanted an afternoon snack, and she'd had enough.

  It was her son-in-law Paul, Sarah's husband, who built a home for Laura. Paul Kingston was a young missionary, originally from Texas, who had come to China just after the war to work in the Walkers' district with another of the hill tribes, the Lisu. Samuel Walker met Paul in Kunming—at the dentist's office, oddly enough, where both were having the same rear molar pulled, still odder—and invited Paul to the Walkers' annual Christmas conference. The tall, gangly Texan proposed to Sarah before the New Year. They were married a month later. Paul's grandfather in Austin had been an architect, and before Paul got the Calling, he himself had considered the profession: when he and Sarah got to Eden Valley, he took his mother-in-law aside and told her that he thought maybe he could help to build her a house to her liking, a pretty little place. No Walker man ever used phrases like "exposure to the morning light," and Laura, with real tears of gratitude in her eyes, accepted Paul's offer.

  Paul had noticed a stand of teak only a half-day's trek from the valley, and the Dyalo were experienced woodworkers. They taught him how to cut teak and plane it into long boards, then how to temper the wood over smoky fires to protect the house from termites. But no Dyalo had ever thought to build a house with wooden walls—a Dyalo home had thin walls of thatch and woven bamboo—and organizing the labor in this wild country was a difficult job. Everything that came into the valley from Fort Hertz or Putao came by mule: the circular saw and band saw, the keg of iron nails, the stucco, the glazed tiles for the roof, the varnish, the enameling. During the rainy season, no caravan could pass in or out of the valley, but it was only during the rainy season that Dyalo men were at their leisure to help with the woodwork. The Dyalo wouldn't even consider the idea of working for wages; and if a man gives you his time as a gift, Laura felt, she really couldn't complain if he decided to take a week off. The Dyalo frequently decided to take a week off. As a result, Laura ended up learning a lot more about woodwork than she ever thought she could. She was more than fifty years old, and although everyone helped, in the end, Raymond, Paul, and Laura built most of that house themselves. It took them almost a year, in a country where homes went up in a matter of days.

  Laura's house had two stories, just as she'd asked for, and six rooms, which she filled with flowers from her garden. She built a study for Raymond, so he could spread out his papers and read prophecy and help them all understand God's word, and she built that big living room, which was soon filled, just as she had hoped, with rowdy grandkids. From the windows, which were shuttered but of course did not have glass, there was a view over the whole valley; and if Laura woke up early, she could sit in the living room sipping a cup of tea—wild tea leaves grew not far from Eden Valley—which she had brewed in her own kitchen, and watch the sun coming up between the cleft rocks due east.

  The house was on the slopes of a small hill, from whose summit the whole of Eden Valley was exposed. Seeing the valley always made Laura's heart beat fast: dark-green jungle nuzzled up against the silver-tipped fields; huge, huge clouds, the biggest she'd ever seen, floated serenely over the river, which flashed like liquefied lightning through the mossy rocks; and a family of hawks played on the thermal currents, riding high above the gorges. When she stood there watching Creation, her heart pounding away, Laura sometimes felt that as big as the whole world was, it could all fit into her palm. Laura and Raymond had agreed that if they died before the Rapture, this was the place where they would be buried, right here on the top of this hill.

  Thomas, although the oldest, was the last of Laura's children to marry. Sarah had ma
rried Paul Kingston, and little Helena had married a Kachin preacher named Jesse Myang. It was the first time a Walker had married an Oriental, and Laura had been nervous about the match. But in truth, you couldn't ask for a better man than Jesse. You certainly couldn't ask for a harder worker or a more dedicated evangelist. The biggest surprise, though, had been Samuel, who to everyone's shock and delight had married two years after the family came to Eden Valley, winning the hand of a gloriously beautiful English nurse named Virginia whom he had met in Mandalay, where he had been shopping for books. Samuel was chubby and asthmatic and never had his big brother's charm—and look how God had taken care of him! When Samuel turned twenty-five, Laura had started to wonder if he would ever find a woman, as shy as he was, until Virginia came along, a statuesque blonde, buxom, with pale skin and bright-green eyes. Sometimes Laura wondered precisely what Virginia saw in Samuel, but this pale girl in her sundresses and floppy hats certainly saw something: she married Samuel after hardly more than a month of courting, and once she told Laura something about Samuel that Laura found terribly touching and, if she was honest with herself, a little improbable—that Samuel was the most interesting man Virginia had ever met, that she and Samuel could spend hours talking. The only thing that troubled Laura about Virginia was a certain lingering doubt about the intensity of Virginia's faith. Virginia ran a medical clinic for the Dyalo of the valley, and she went to the church services on Sunday, but Laura had the sensation occasionally that Virginia did not weep for the lost tribesmen as she and Raymond wept. Also, one time Laura had visited Samuel and Virginia unannounced, and on the veranda of the house which Samuel had built on an isolated bend of the river, she had seen her daughter-in-law lying quite naked in the tropical sun, her pubic hair the very same pretty blond as the curls which cascaded over her shoulders. Laura did not mention the incident to her husband, but she wondered in a letter to her sister whether lying in the sun like that was a Christian act or not. She just wasn't sure.

  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.