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.
Perhaps if Thomas had not been so caught up in the bargaining, he might have heard the news that Yunnan Province had fallen to the Communists and realized that the time in which a foreigner might safely leave China had passed: when he returned to Abaze to buy the oxen, pigs, rice, and silver he had offered to give for Anye's hand, he was arrested at gunpoint and accused of being an American spy. Thomas spent a year and six months in a Communist prison and was then expelled from China. He had been denounced by the villagers of Leopard Roar.
Thomas never again saw any of the Dyalo villages on the nearly vertical slopes of the canyons formed by the lower reaches of the Salween River. Every so often, when Thomas and his family were settled in Eden Valley, gaunt refugees from China would come staggering across the mountain passes with terrible stories of Communist oppression. From one such refugee, the second cousin of the headman of Leopard Roar village, Thomas learned that Tanzay never came back from the Wa country. No one ever was able to tell him what happened to Anye, although for years and years he asked everyone he met.
Thomas followed his mother's advice and went back to Oklahoma for a year to recover his health. He lived with his grandparents there, and at the age of thirty-four acquired a driver's license and a library card. Laura had been right: this was the place for him to get strong. Although he found it strange to eat eggs, potatoes, and bacon for breakfast in the mornings, every morning that's what his grandmother gave him, and his weight and color returned. Thomas's lifelong obsession with current events began in his grandparents' house, with long careful morning readings of the Oklahoma Sun. His father had always said that they were living in the End Times, but this had been a feeling in his bones rather than something founded on hard facts and reason. Now Thomas could see, reading the newspaper and then studying in the library, that there was real, solid evidence that the time of judgment would be soon. The Seven Churches had come and gone, the Seven Seals would soon be broken, and the Seven Trumpets would sound. The Seven Vials of Judgment had been opened—and now he read in the newspaper that a new Israel had been born and a war was brewing in the Holy Land, just as Prophecy had said. The more time he spent in the library studying these matters, the more he respected his father's good judgment and sound common sense.
Thomas came back from his home furlough twenty pounds heavier and a married man. When he introduced his new bride, Norma, to the family, Laura took a liking to her instinctively, immediately. She was no delicate
fainting flower, that was for sure. Norma was pregnant, just as Laura had been, by the time her ship had pulled out of San Francisco Harbor, and Thomas had offered to wait with her in Rangoon until the baby was born. But Norma insisted that they go straight to Eden Valley. She was too excited to wait. "Whither thou goest, I will go; and where though lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall by my people, and thy God my God," Norma said.
When Norma arrived in Eden Valley, the first thing Laura thought when she saw her was that Thomas had married himself a tomato woman: Norma had a huge frizz of bright-red hair, the kind which in the humidity seemed to stick out in absolutely every direction; her round cheeks and forehead were red from exertion; even her fleshy arms and hands were a bright pink. The first thing Norma said when she was introduced to the family was, "You must be Laura! Thomas loves you so much!" The second thing she said was, "And you must be Raymond! You are Thomas's absolute hero." The third thing she said was, "Have you folks got any bug spray?"
That night, at her Welcome to Our Home dinner, Laura had never seen her son look quite so adorably uncomfortable, as if he was praying extra-special hard to be Raptured up into Heaven right this minute. Now, Thomas had told her all about Eden Valley, Norma said, he had told her all about China and Burma and the Dyalo and the tribal life, about the way the light looked at dawn over the mountains with the roar of the tigers and panthers and elephants in the hills—that man could sell sand in Sinai, she told her new in-laws, like she had told her friend Evangeline after that magic night talking to Thomas on the porch of her parents' home in Wheaton, Illinois; but Thomas had never mentioned, not even one itty-bitty little time, the extraordinarily horrific superabundance of bug life here in the jungles of northern Burma. Not that she was complaining, mind you, but you people have some crazy bugs around here. There were big bugs, little bugs, and bugs that you didn't notice when they bit you but itched up something fierce later with these huge red welts that Thomas kept telling you "Don't rub," which was as silly a thing to say as she had ever heard—
"But you can't scratch those! They'll just get worse," Thomas protested.
"Well, what the Sam Hill am I supposed to do, then? They itch."
—and bugs that you didn't see in the day or hear, but sure made a racket at night when you were trying to sleep and which Thomas here didn't seem to notice at all; and bugs which didn't ever want to duke it out with her one-on-one like an honorable bug ought to, but would come at her like an army, everywhere, just one big black cloud of swarming bugginess, until all she could do was flail her arms helplessly and cry in frustration. Oh! And another little thing you forgot to tell me about, yes, you, don't look down at your feet, they're not going anywhere, YOU! I don't remember you telling me about the enormous snakes, the poisonous little guys or the pythons or the boa constrictors so big they could eat me up like I was a little mouse. Don't remember one word about that! Didn't'cha think I'd notice 'em when I got here?
A little thing like a python crawling up my skirt?
And Raymond and Laura, listening to Norma, they laughed so hard they could bust, those big Walker hands pounding on their knobby knees, because if ever there was a woman who should be out here in the jungle with the Dyalo, Norma Walker, née Smith, of Wheaton was she. Norma was great. She treated the jungle that had nearly broken so hardy an explorer as John Hanbury-Tracy as nothing more than summer camp. She was five months pregnant and spent half her days laughing and half her days crying, but she was always in motion, helping Thomas build their home ("You want me to live in a tent? I—don't—think—so. I'll get eaten by a bear." "Honey, there aren't any bears here." "That's what you said about the snakes. Get moving, mister."), helping Laura make window boxes, going up to the nearest Dyalo village and without knowing one word of Dyalo making friends with every kid there, so that just one week into her tenure in Eden Valley there was a constant stream of children asking at Raymond and Laura's door if Miss Nomie could play with them, "Nomie" being as close as a Dyalo mouth could come to "Norma." Everyone loved Norma. She came with a box of clippings from her father's backyard for Raymond and told him that if they blossomed, she'd make him real apple compote like she used to make back home. Two years later, she did. When Paul made an overnight preaching trip, she spent the night in Sarah's house, just the two of them, and for years to come, the words "rubber gloves" alone were enough to make both of them laugh like schoolgirls passing notes. And above all, she was a natural missionary: that big open smile, the eyes ready to laugh or cry as needed, a gift for listening the equal of her husband's gift for talking— people from all over this valley and the next wanted to tell her their problems, and when she told them that she knew a little secret, you'd have to have had an awful cold heart not to want to hear more.
Laura was so happy that Thomas had found a woman like Norma.
Norma gave birth right on schedule, no problems at all, to a beautiful baby girl named Ruth-Marie Walker, named for Norma's two heroines. Just two years later ("That girl is fertile as a turtle," Raymond said in private to Laura) Linda-Lee was born, named for Norma's mother and grandmother, and then just two years after that, on July 13, 1961, David Luke Walker, after Thomas's heroes. By all accounts, he was a quiet baby, an undemanding toddler, and a charming and inquisitive child. He sang in the valley choir, led by his aunt Sarah, and was an excellent student in the village school, where his grandmother educated Dyalo and Walker children alike. When all of her children were finally married, when the grandkids were rolling on the floor, when she could hear "Jesus Loves Me" sung in Dyalo from the church up the river, Laura thought to herself that until she was called Home, this was as happy as she'd get.
With the accession of General Ne Win's socialist government to power in 1962, the Walkers' happy days in Eden Valley were numbered. By 1965, the Burmese government had ordered the expulsion of all foreign missionaries, and the Walkers, settled in their northern paradise, waited for the day when the eviction orders would arrive. The Walkers prayed for one more day and one more week in Eden Valley, and for a time, God listened to their prayers, and granted them the Visa no general could revoke. Turmoil in Rangoon, civil strife, a sympathetic Christian governor who chose to ignore certain inconvenient orders—for almost five years the Walkers were able to stay in Eden Valley in defiance of the law. In those years, no Walker left by caravan for Putao or Fort Hertz, lest they draw attention to themselves, and they truly lived as Dyalo: the Walkers ate only the rice they themselves planted in their own paddies, and when in the hard winter of 1967 the rice crop was bad, like the Dyalo they scrounged in the jungle for roots. The experience made Eden Valley all the more precious: now that the Walkers could say that unlike all the other missionaries who had ever lived with tribal peoples anywhere, they were of the people they served. Had young David or his siblings or his cousins been stopped on a mountain trail, they would have said that they were Dyalo youths from Eden Valley.
When David was eight, his father found a mewling tiger cub abandoned in the forest behind Eden Valley. Bright eyes, thick golden fur, a cub the size of a Maine coon: a child's delight, a midwestern mother's nightmare. "No, sir, I will not have a wild animal in this house," Norma Walker said, exactly what she had said about all the other strays that Thomas and the kids had previously found in the jungle and proposed to raise under her roof—the civet, the leopard, the monkeys who would eventually steal her grandmother's pearl earrings, the baby deer, and the goral. "No, sir. We are not rearing up tigers. A tiger will eat the baby."
The five children began to wail, producing a polychromatic fugue on the theme of "But, Mom!" Thomas said, "But, Nomie, just look at the little guy!" and the clever tiger cub climbed into her lap and fell sound asleep. Norma fidgeted a moment and relented, as she always did, on the condition that when the thing got just a little older, Thomas would get rid of it, put it back in the jungle, do something with it. To David's other chores was added the task of tiger-mothering, and six times a day and all through the night he fed the cub goat'
s milk from a baby bottle, until the cub was big enough to eat a warm rice-and-milk mash. Against all odds, the cub thrived, and although David's parents had told him that only people could know and love Jesus, David nevertheless secretly baptized the cat when it was six months old.
But tigers grow quickly, and one year after the big cat had joined the household, Thomas agreed with his wife that the tiger was a real and present danger: although in his affectionate behavior Elijah Cat (the name was David's choice) presented himself in every way but size a normal housecat, in recent months he had gone from goat's milk to goats, stalking and killing them as an ordinary housecat might kill mice. Thomas was not entirely sure, however, just how he was to go about evicting the animal, tigers being notoriously resistant to gentle persuasion.
Then, one foggy morning in March 1970, Thomas stepped out of the house he had built to pee off the porch, as was his wont, and noticed foreign men in dark uniforms carrying guns. That was the day the Walkers were cast out of Eden Valley. In the end, the Walkers' eviction from Eden saved Thomas from the necessity of action: Elijah Cat was just another thing lost when the Walkers were forced to leave, missionaries being somewhat more tractable than tigers, and the only Christian tiger in all of northern Burma was left to roam the faraway hills, far from the shelter of the fold.
The last thing Laura saw of Eden Valley as she was led out at gunpoint over the hills with her family was the smoke from her house and Raymond's orchard, which the soldiers had set on fire. She began to cry. Raymond, wearing the last of his surviving wool suits, gathered his wife in her tattered housedress under his long arm and in a clear low voice reminded her that soon they would be living in a Mansion. He stroked her gray hair gently, and with the back of his hand wiped tears from her cheeks, and when she seemed to have calmed enough to listen to the Word of God, he quoted Scripture: "How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!" The notion that others before them had suffered as she did now consoled her somewhat, and with a heavy step Laura left behind the only real home she would ever have.
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