Fieldwork: A Novel (12 page)

And so Raymond found himself standing on those hillsides in Tibet and China and the Dyalo country, staring out at the weathered tribal faces. What hard lives these gentle people faced! He had come, he told them, to tell them the terrible Good News: that they would be judged soon, and judged hard, but judged by a God who delighted to love them and help them. He had come as fast as he could with his wife and his children from the white man's land to tell them to take precautions: the river of time was rising, and their homes would soon be flooded, and their rice fields washed away. But there was a way out, Raymond Walker added. He could lead them to the high ground.

It is an unfortunate fact which every traveler eventually comes to know, but there is no place in this world so exotic, so remote, or so beautiful that boredom does not eventually set in; and the Walkers after two years in Bantang, which although exotic and remote was not beautiful, were bored.

The death of the MacLyons had been a hard blow for the young couple: the MacLyons had been of the Walkers' generation, and the four young missionaries had been great friends, a buoyant counterweight to the staid gravity of the older Chesters. At night, Mary MacLyon had brought out a harmonica and Stan MacLyon a banjo, and the foursome had stomped and hooted their way through a hundred familiar tunes, whereas the Chesters retired early to bed. From the moment the Walkers arrived in Bantang, Stan and Raymond had started to plan an evangelizing tour into the mountain villages, while Mary and Laura discussed re-painting the interior of the gloomy Mission. The foursome had taken to eating their meals together late at night by the light of wax candles, and although the Chesters were, of course, invited to eat with them, the invitation was inevitably declined on account of Dr. Chester's indigestion should he dine late. Stan and Mary were the sort always willing to tell another joke, or stay up an hour longer, or put together a skit, or bring home strangers they found on the streets of Bantang. After Thomas was born, Mary insisted on waking up with the baby as often as Raymond and Laura; Mrs. Chester, by contrast, had no particular skill in dandling a baby, and Thomas tended to cry when she walked into the room. When the MacLyons prayed, they rocked on the balls of their feet, and shouted and wept; they closed the Bible after daily readings bathed in a sheen of sweat. Stan had an odd and wonderful gift: he could see the faces of Old Testament characters in the faces of the people of Bantang. The dissolute tax collector with his anxious hooded eyes fingering his official seal
was
crazy old Saul playing with his javelin, once Stan MacLyon pointed it out. The Walkers found Stan and Mary's wild, passionate, mystical faith exhilarating.

When the Chesters prayed, on the other hand, it was a sober thing: Dr. Chester read passages from Scripture, Mrs. Chester said "Amen," and Dr. Chester in his meticulous way gave commentary. The Chesters of course were wonderful missionaries, but they had been manning this particular Mission Station now for almost thirty years. In their youth, they had had great adventures: as a young man, Mr. Chester had dreamed that he would live his life on muleback, spreading the Gospel, his wife on another mule, their worldly possessions on a third. Mrs. Chester had been wooed by this dream, and for many years they had so lived. Dr. Chester had explained the Gospel to the Dalai Lama himself, and Mrs. Chester had raised four children in this inhospitable and almost savage country, of whom three survived. After Mrs. Chester broke her hip, the Chesters had established the permanent Mission Station at Bantang, and nursed the station through famine, revolution, and civil war. In their day, they had seen two dozen young missionaries come and go through Bantang station, every single one of them devoted Christians, and the Chesters had come to realize that success as a missionary was not so much a question of exuberance as endurance. Sometimes they found themselves slightly wearied by the young people. Something of the mentality of the Chinese Mandarin had worn off on them: Dr. Chester admitted that he was less eager to proselytize as he grew older, although no less eager to see his faith spread, and Mrs. Chester, on her last home furlough, had shocked the ladies of a number of midwestern Christian congregations by saying that in her humble opinion, if lacking, of course, the grandeur of the Christian faith, Tibetan Buddhism nevertheless seemed to contain a number of truths. Dr. Chester looked forward to the completion of his translation of the Bible into Tibetan, which he had promised the Dalai Lama he would personally present to His Holiness in Lhassa, and he harbored a secret hope, a new dream for his old age: that in exchange for this great labor, the Dalai Lama would allow the Chesters to remain as permanent guests in the interior of Tibet. This would be their retirement, which they would pass together in dignified conversation with the Buddhist monks about the meaning of the universe.

The Walkers and MacLyons all had noted how remarkably affectionate the Chesters were. Dr. Chester was silver-haired, with a neatly trimmed silver mustache and round cheeks which turned red in the mountain cold; talking to Laura, Mrs. Chester more than once confessed herself guilty of the sin of pride when she considered her good fortune in being the possessor of this still-handsome man. Mrs. Chester dressed only in the dreariest of black dresses, which covered her completely from her thick neck to her heavy ankles, and yet she never appeared in public in season without the fresh gardenia or lotus in her lapel that Mr. Chester had picked for her that very morning from the flowery little garden he tended behind the Mission. After forty years of marriage, the Chesters still wandered the small city hand in hand, Mrs. Chester's fine hand reaching out of her long robes to find Dr. Chester's heavy paw. Holding hands was considered mildly vulgar in Chinese eyes, but neither member of the couple was willing to forgo this innocent pleasure simply to placate local custom. The Chesters were content chiefly with each other's company: if the stories Dr. Chester repetitively told bored the younger missionaries of the station, in Mrs. Chester's eyes there was no more thrilling raconteur than her husband; and Dr. Chester was deaf to any audience's stifled yawns when his wife pressed him,
Morris, please
, to continue.

The Walkers had been in Bantang a year when the MacLyons died of typhoid, one after the other, the onset of Mary's illness and Stan's death only three weeks apart. They were buried under matched head-stones which read: gone for the glory of christ.

Now the late-night meals by wax candle ended. Everyone agreed that it made more sense to eat together at a reasonable hour; and Laura Walker gave up her attempts to redecorate the Mission, as Raymond was blind to her improvements—the improvised curtains she had sewn from Chinese silk, the fresh vases of lilies and Tibetan roses she set out—and Mrs. Chester was wholly uninterested in her suggestions: having lived in this clay house now so very many years, she declared that she saw little reason to change it. During the long voyage to Bantang and the first year in the Mission, Dr. Chester's lectures on Tibetan life and customs had fascinated the Walkers, but after eighteen months, the Walkers noticed that Dr. Chester had begun to repeat himself. More than once he had talked about the particular way in which a single Tibetan woman might be married at once to several brothers, and more than once Mrs. Chester had made the same mild joke, "Dr. Chester, I should certainly not have liked being married to
your
brothers. That is more than a woman deserves." Laura wondered more than once if she needed to chuckle again. The evenings at the Mission Station grew intolerably long. Dr. Chester for his relaxation read from his pile of musical scores, but when Laura begged him actually to make music, he replied that unless there was a symphony orchestra handy, he was lacking an instrument. Dr. Chester found his own joke intolerably droll. Mrs. Chester was the type of woman who enjoyed novels, which she read slowly and thoughtfully, and then passed on to Laura, who despite her most valiant efforts simply could not see the attraction of the medium: she could never persuade herself that the comings and goings of imaginary characters were worthy of her attention.

The long evenings were not preceded by thrilling days. The Walkers chafed under the daily routine prescribed by Dr. and Mrs. Chester. It was hardly the high drama of saving souls that they had hoped for. Every morning, Raymond and Laura studied the Chinese language for two hours and the Tibetan for another two. This, they admitted, was a necessary duty, and after two years of study, Dr. Chester decided that both members of the couple were competent to deliver their first sermons. Laura chose to preach on "Sin, Salvation, and God's Love," Raymond on "Christian Prayer and Values." Laura had worked hard all her life, but here in Bantang, domestic affairs occupied far less of her time than she was used to, for the Mission employed a number of Chinese and Tibetan helpers who, having given up their families to gain their souls, needed employment, which the tender-hearted Chesters could not refuse them. This legion of servants occupied themselves with the daily household chores—with the goats (the Mission had a flock of over one hundred) and the chickens, the cooking, the clothes, the cleaning, and drawing fresh water from the well. In the afternoons, Laura accompanied Mrs. Chester on a round of the city's Christian charitable institutions: the small hospital, the orphanage, and the school. At the hospital, Laura sat by the bedside of the sick; at the orphanage, she introduced and led the games of her childhood, touch-tag and hide-and-seek; and at the school, she delivered every day a brief lesson on Christian living. These were assignments that she might have accepted happily were it not for Mrs. Chester's constant stream of advice. Laura was not the type of woman who frequently allowed herself the luxury of harsh thoughts, but she did admit shyly to her husband that when Mrs. Chester was stricken with a mild fever and spent three weeks in bed recuperating, the days had passed more easily.

One incident in particular set Laura against Mrs. Chester. It was the Walkers' second spring in Bantang, and on a day when the mountain air was remarkably clear and the sky a deep cobalt blue, Mrs. Chester, enchanted by the season, proposed to Laura that in place of their usual rounds, they visit a village some five or six miles from town where an old Christian woman lived, one of the first Chinese converts of the region. They set out in the early morning, but the village proved farther from Bantang than Mrs. Chester had recalled, and the two women did not arrive until well after noon. They took a long tea with the old Christian woman and did not set out on the road back until late afternoon.

Now, the roads around Bantang were generally safe by daylight but not without danger at night, and the two women walked quickly. They were halfway back to Bantang when they passed a small tribal woman crouched beside the road. The small woman made a cooing sound at them and smiled. Her teeth were stained black with betel nut, and her lips were the color of tar. The woman gestured at Mrs. Chester and Laura. She spoke to them in Chinese with a tribal accent as thick as Laura's midwestern drawl: "The wind has whispered me stories of the white folk in Bantang, but the wind has never told me what you do here."

Laura was not confident in her Chinese, and she deferred to Mrs. Chester, who explained that she and her husband had come from the white man's land across the endless seas to teach the people about Jesus, His Love, Sin, and Salvation.

The tribal woman, still squatting by the road, frowned. "Teach me, then," she said. "If you've come this far, I owe you my ears."

Mrs. Chester looked around. They were on a dark patch of road, and the sun was fast approaching the mountain horizon. There was still another hour's walk to the outskirts of town. Dr. Chester would be anxious. "We don't have the time to teach you just now," she said. "We must teach you another day."

The woman listened with a cocked head, then spat blood-red betel juice on the side of the road. "Don't tell me you've come all this way to teach
me
and then say you don't have time," she replied.

Mrs. Chester and Laura returned home safely that night. Laura recounted the incident to Raymond, and they agreed that Laura should find the tribal woman at once the next morning and explain the Gospel to her. But the next day the road was empty, and Laura couldn't help feeling that a woman of greater faith and integrity than herself would have insisted on teaching the woman by the side of the road, no matter the hour of day or night or the danger.

For his part, Raymond found himself relegated to a position as Dr. Chester's clerical assistant. Great volumes of mail from well-wishers and the inquisitive arrived by the weekly post for Dr. Chester, alerted to the work by his dispatches in
National Geographic
, and he would deposit these with Raymond, asking him to draft replies, so that Dr. Chester could continue work on his translation. Raymond prepared responses which ended either, depending on the formality of the communication and the intended audience: "Yours in the Hope of His Coming" (meant for well-wishers, general curious questions and requests, people with whom Dr. Chester did not have a close personal relationship); "Yours in the Service of Christ" (or, alternatively, "Yours in the Joy of His Service," meant for other missionaries and members of the clergy); or simply "Yours in Christ," a salutation which Dr. Chester felt appropriate to use only with the most intimate of his epistolary partners. At the end of the day, Raymond left the letters for Dr. Chester to sign. The Missionary Society required a lengthy written report every three months, and an accounting of the Mission Station's finances, and pounding these out on the Mission's portable typewriter was also made part of Raymond's responsibilities. Raymond was not a good typist. "Accounting is a part of evangelism," Dr. Chester said, seeing Raymond struggle with the books. "We pray for money to continue our work, and our Lord expects us to husband carefully His gifts." When Raymond took Dr. Chester aside after a year in Bantang and explained his desire to engage in a more
active
evangelism, Dr. Chester proposed that Raymond preach in the afternoons in front of the market. The market in Bantang was not a large one, and very quickly the traders in barley, sheep, yak meat, salt, and tea grew accustomed to the sight in the late afternoons of the lean, handsome American standing on a crate, stammering his way through an incomprehensible speech in poor Tibetan.