Fieldwork: A Novel (26 page)

The shaman was a middle-aged man, slightly stooped, with a distinguished face that resembled nothing so much as a very tanned and Asiatic version of the picture of George Washington on the dollar bill. (Martiya was so struck by the likeness that she had shown a few of the villagers the dollar bill. She was startled to discover, as the Walkers had discovered, that the Dyalo, who had no tradition at all of portraiture, had tremendous trouble interpreting the engraved image. They looked at the bill with no greater level of comprehension than if she had written down the binomial formula, and when she asked them, "Isn't it strange how the shaman looks like the headman of my country?" the villagers looked at her in a way that made it clear the dollar bill wasn't the only thing that was weird. After all, the shaman was so much
larger
. But the resemblance was clearly there: the high forehead, that distinguished Virginia jaw, even the jowls.) She had seen the man just a few day before, in the communal kitchen: he had smiled at her in a friendly, dignified,
presidential
way, had asked Vinai what she was doing here, and then ambled off.

But now he was transformed. He was sweaty, and his limbs—he was standing up—trembled. Martiya heard strange sounds coming from his throat, nothing like the gentle voice of the man she had met just recently. He made odd barking noises, and then again, that full-throated howl which had awakened and terrified her. It was as if a larger, clumsier creature had taken hold of his body and was now manipulating it. Martiya felt the hairs on her arms prickle. The shaman began to speak quickly in a voice a full octave deeper than the man's normal voice, and when Martiya asked what he was saying, Vinai responded in an apologetic hushed whisper that he did not know the shaman-talk. The spooky performance continued for almost an hour, until the shaman suddenly collapsed.

Of all the aspects of village life, just what happened to that man who in the daytime looked like a dead president and in the nighttime was a raving monster most aroused Martiya's curiosity. She wanted to know what had happened to him. She was in no position yet to answer the question, but the fact that she had a question that she was eager to answer was of tremendous psychological importance to her as she struggled with the language, the weather, the ubiquitous strangeness of the people, and particularly her host, whom she hated more intensely than any other human being since the sixth grade, when Alice Wilkerson put gum in her hair.

Not long after Farts-a-Lot vomited on her notebook, Martiya went to town to get her mail. This was something she did every couple of weeks. The Dyalo women, most of whom had only been out of the mountains once or twice in their lives, were stunned at Martiya's bravery, going into the lowlands like this by herself, and even the men, who regularly went down to the plains to buy bullets for their guns, or to sell corn, thought the nonchalant way that Martiya walked out of the village, carrying nothing with her but a small pack, an extraordinarily bold gesture: How did she know that she would find acceptable food and water down there? Lowland rice, the Dyalo felt, was gross, and murky lowland water unreliable. And how did she know that the spirits would be friendly the whole way?

The hike to the highway took Martiya a morning, but in the dry of the cool season, it was a pleasant jaunt. In the mists and fogs of the rainy season, the mountains had been claustrophobic, hemmed in by the gray; but now the skies were blue, and Martiya could see lime-green valleys and jagged hills as she walked, and then more hills beyond, and then, in the far distance, the broad plain of Chiang Rai, which stretched all the way to Burma. She passed through two villages, both Lahu, and by now she had been with the Dyalo long enough that she couldn't help but think as she saw the Lahu that they
did
look just a little like monkeys. The end of the rainy season brought more flowers into bloom than existed in the imagination of the most passionate English gardener: fields of wild roses and jasmine and day lilies, hyacinths and orchids curling off of every rotting log and tree. The villagers led water buffalo along the narrow trails, their hindquarters stained red with dust. Once she got down to the main road, she only had to wait a few minutes by the side of the road before a grizzled Thai farmer in a beat-up old pickup truck gave her a lift into town, and when she told him that she was living in a Dyalo village high in the hills, the farmer spat out the window and said, "Bah! You live with
those
animals?"

Martiya, as was her custom, spent the day in town. Even by Thai standards, it was a little place, nothing more than a post office, a market, a gas station, a noodle stall, a temple, and a few large concrete Chinese shop-houses—and yet, after Dan Loi, it felt like a metropolis. There was ice here, and Coca-Cola, and television. Motorcycles buzzed down the street, and music played on the radio. Martiya collected her mail and sat at the small restaurant on a real chair at a real table, and slowly went through the stack, letter by letter. Her father had written her a long letter describing the latest conference that he had attended—Piers van der Leun was a great lover of academic conferences, and spent a substantial portion of his time traveling from one to the next; and Joseph Atkinson, to tell her that he had received the carbon copies of her field notes, and in his opinion, she needed to consider spending more time in the fields. "Grab a hoe!" he wrote. Karen had written her a long, ecstatic gushing Karen-gram, consisting chiefly of a recital of the details of Karen's dreams. Her former landlady in Berkeley had forwarded a package of bills.

Martiya responded to all of the letters immediately, as she always did. She wrote to her father, telling him proudly how much progress she was making with the language. She wrote to Joseph Atkinson, telling him that the very last thing he ever wanted to see was her with a hoe— there was no saying in which of his orifices that implement might end up. She wrote to Karen, telling her all about
her
dreams. She'd had this one about being in San Francisco but everyone was speaking in Dyalo. Then she wrote a long description of her day, finishing with her sitting in a café in town responding to her correspondence. She was very nervous, she said, because she was about to take a
huge
risk with her fieldwork. The bills she ignored.

Then Martiya wrote herself a letter. The Dyalo wouldn't be able to read it, of course, but putting it all down in black-and-white on the page made the sad news seem more real, more substantial. She inserted the letter into the envelope in which her father had written to her. The postage stamps gave it a nice look, she felt—official and serious. Martiya ate a large lunch, and then, sleepy in the afternoon heat but determined, made her way home to Dan Loi, hitchhiking her way back up into the hills, then walking up the dusty trail.

By the time she got to the village in the late evening, she was a mess: her clothes were covered in dirt, her long hair matted and di-sheveled. This was because several times she had lain down in the path and rolled herself in the mud. She was barely coherent as she stumbled into the hut. Martiya had always had the gift of producing tears on demand; this had won her a number of parts in her high school plays. Now, she had only to enter into the hut, settle herself onto her mat, and allow a few soft tears to tumble from her large eyes to attract Lai-Ma's attention. Lai-Ma could no more resist comforting the evidently distraught Martiya than she would have been able to ignore one of her own children.

"Tell me what has happened," Lai-Ma said, settling herself beside Martiya and running her weathered hand through the anthropologist's wild, mud-streaked hair. The whole hut, from little Ping to Farts-a-Lot, sat watching Martiya, as she stared into the last red coals of the cooling fire.

"He was so young," Martiya said. "Such a young man."

"Who?" Lai-Ma said. "What has the East Wind brought?" For reasons Martiya did not yet know, the Dyalo associated winds from the east with inauspicious tidings.

Martiya buried her face in her hands. Dyalo grief was no restrained affair, she knew, and she decided that it would not be inappropriate to wail. She began to weep and moan. She wasn't quite sure how to rend her garments, but she gave it a try and succeeded in ripping her T-shirt. She pulled out the tattered envelope from her father, opened it up, and in a distraught voice read out in English the terrible news that she had received: the rain-slick road, the car, the long vigil at the hospital, then the most brutal of all blows—and although no one in the hut could understand what she was saying, the awesome display of communication from the white man's land impressed everyone. Finally, with a masterful display of self-possession, Martiya explained in Dyalo what bad fortune had blown in on the bad East Wind.

Even Farts-a-Lot looked moved and sad.

The next day she announced that she would leave Dan Loi immediately to gather up the nine lost souls of her beloved. She left that afternoon.

Pell's wake was held on one of the Andaman Islands. The splendid white beach, the long-tail boats, the swaying palms, the light blue sky: it seemed to Martiya just the kind of place where Pell would have been happy. He had always so loved the ocean. She spent almost three weeks traveling through the south of Thailand, swimming every day, organizing her field notes, and transcribing her dictation. She was pleased and surprised to discover that she looked forward to getting back to village life.

When finally Martiya got back to Dan Loi, the villagers could not have been nicer. The Dyalo to express their sympathies with Martiya's loss brought her fruits and vegetables from their gardens, and George Washington, thinking it might cheer Martiya up, offered to teach her certain magic rites and rituals that he had hitherto thought inappropriate to share with an outsider. Pell's death had brought down some unseen barrier between Martiya and the villagers:
Martiya may be white and weird
, the villagers seemed to say,
but she mourns her dead just like we do. She is a courageous little thing.
Even the headman, who had greeted her arrival in the village with little more than a grunt and had hardly spoken a word to her in six months, took Martiya aside one day to offer his most profound condolences. With restrained dignity, he told Martiya of the death of his first wife, of the days of weeping that had followed, and the comfort given by the absorption of her souls into his own, until finally his wife had found the confidence to depart to the land of the dead. The headman was the possessor of the only clock in Dan Loi, a large silver wristwatch bought in Chiang Mai many years earlier with the proceeds of a particularly felicitous opium harvest. The thing had long since stopped functioning, but the headman, who was only dimly aware of its intended usage, still wore it proudly. It glinted now in the sun as he waved his hand in a broad arc around Martiya's head, as if tracing out a halo. "Don't be afraid," he said. "Don't be afraid at all. Pell is here." Martiya felt herself comforted, and when Martiya explained to the headman that Pell in life never could stand the presence of strong spirits and in death found Farts-a-Lot's bottles of rice whiskey intolerable, the headman paternally offered to see what he could do.

Indeed, Pell's death presented a substantial challenge to Farts-a-Lot's comfortable life. Farts-a-Lot now drank in the days at his cousin's house on the other side of the village, and when he returned late at night, Lai-Ma insisted that they lie side by side without touching: to make love now would insult Pell's spirits. Pell alive had been such a passionate man, Martiya had explained to Lai-Ma, such a vigorous man, and he had not yet accommodated himself to the notion that those pleasures were gone. It was only natural now that the choice bits of meat from the stew pot were offered to Pell, rather than to Farts-a-Lot. Lai-Ma shushed Farts-a-Lot when he began to sing.

In the end, it was Farts-a-Lot himself who offered to build Martiya a private place for her to be alone with her husband. The decision was widely seen in the village as a generous act. A grieving widow ought to have a place to be alone with her husband: this was Dyalo custom; not to do so would anger the spirits of the dead. With unaccustomed vigor, Farts-a-Lot cleared a space sufficiently far from his own house that Pell would have his privacy, then went into the forest to cut down the beams, posts, and poles that would make the frame of the house, then hired an elephant from a nearby Karen village to haul back the heavy boards. Farts-a-Lot insisted that the whole family, including the children, help make the roof from wild cogon grass, and all day long the family sat tying bunches of grass to bamboo strips. It took two days to make the house, and when it was done, George Washington came to inspect it. Martiya could hardly believe that it would soon be hers: she was even more excited than when she moved into her first apartment at college. Just like the hut she would soon be leaving behind, the new hut lay close to the ground on low wooden poles, the thatch walls let in the breeze, and the floors were uneven. But she had the only door in all Dan Loi. She had insisted on that. It was just a few planks roughly bound with heavy twine, with neither a hinge nor a lock, but when the door was closed, she would be on one side and the village on the other.

The hut had only to please Pell and it would be hers. George Washington, with all the dignity he inevitably possessed, entered the hut first and pulled an egg from his pocket. He threw it hard on the wood floor, where it broke, the spilled yolk indicating its acceptability to the unseen forces. Had the egg remained intact, the house would have been rejected and set on fire. Then George Washington called for the chicken. He took the terrified bird by the feet and began to murmur. The chicken's scrawny wings fluttered; small downy feathers floated to the earth. George Washington pulled his machete from his scabbard and with a single stroke sliced off the bird's head. Blood sprayed across the floor and walls, bright red splotches against the brown bamboo. Martiya offered George Washington his customary fee for such services. He refused. "You are our guest here," he said.