Fieldwork: A Novel (8 page)

"I'm so glad! We like it too," she said with a giddy, musical laugh. She had the kind of face one finds smoothing out the virgin sheets of an unruffled bed in an Ikea catalogue, unthreatening to women but nevertheless appealing to men, with short dark hair sensibly cut and light-blue eyes. She sat down on the far couch, then turned toward Nomie. "Grandma, have you seen Tom Riley lately?" she asked.

"I thought
he
was Tom Riley, at first."

"He was supposed to be here ages ago. We were talking about going to the zoo. I wanted to see the monkeys." The young woman turned back to me. "I forgot my manners! Grandpa says I should just put them on a little chain. I'm Judith."

The couches were close enough that by standing up and leaning far forward we could shake hands. Nomie explained that I was there to meet with Mr. Walker.

"But didn't Grandpa go to Burma this morning?" Judith asked.

"No, he's going to Mandalay
tomorrow
, so it's lucky that you came today," Nomie said. "But you can't keep Mr. Walker too long because he needs a rest in the afternoons."

Mandalay! I thought about asking if I could go too. "I hope you don't mind my prying," I said, "but what is Mr. Walker going to do in Mandalay? Does he go often?"

Nomie stopped kneading the ball of yarn.

"Why, he's going to preach, of course!" Nomie said, in the same voice that she might have used to declare that books have pages—or the universe a Maker. It was almost certainly the first time in my life that I had heard anyone use the word "preach" in a wholly literal sense. It was a pleasant shock to discover that these missionaries were, in fact, missionaries, like the first sight of palm trees in the tropics. "We hold a Bible conference there every few months, and if Mr. Walker didn't go …" Her voice drifted off. "I don't go on those trips myself anymore because of the arthritis, but Mr. Walker!"

A gentle knock on the front door interrupted Nomie.

"Tom!" Judith said.

Nomie cleared her throat. "Tom Riley, don't you make me move from this spot one more time," she said. "You just let yourself in."

Tom let himself in. He took a step into the room and closed the door behind him.

"Whew!" he said. "It is …"—he paused, and we all waited— "…
hawt
out there!"

He was a large man, a
very
large man, tall, with immensely broad shoulders and thick legs. He would have been big anywhere, but in Thailand he was mammoth.

"But you should be used to it!" protested Judith. "You're from Tennessee!"

"All I know is that I'm
hawt
."

"Have some Tang," Nomie said.

"I'd love some," Tom said. He bent over and took a glass of Tang from the tray. He righted himself slowly, and I reckoned to myself that the little glass of Tang was going to do nothing to quench this big man's big thirst. But he took a sip with the utmost delicacy, licked his lips, and declared, "That's better."

Tom now noticed me for the first time. "I'm Tom Riley," he said.

His hand swallowed up my own in a surprisingly gentle handshake. "It's really great to meet you," he added, in a voice as soft as his grasp. He took the seat next to me on the couch, sinking deep into the cushions, and as if he had sat in the prow of a canoe in which I occupied the stern, I felt myself rising up.

"Tom is staying with us a little while," Nomie explained. "He's helping Mr. Walker with his Bible."

"Tom's a linguist from Tennessee," Judith added. "He knows more about the Dyalo than pretty much anyone."

Tom's huge face reddened. "Don't believe everything these folks tell you. There's not a heck of a lot I can tell a Walker about the Dyalo."

Judith said, "Really, Tom! Just the other day you were telling us about those … those agglut … aggluttin …"

"Agglutinating pronouns."

"Exactly! They were so interesting. Mischa, you have to ask Tom about them someday. He'll tell you about them for hours. Hours and hours and hours."

Tom looked at his very large bare feet. He said, "I've come here to learn from the Walkers, not the other way around."

The modest declaration hung in the air a moment, until Nomie glanced at her watch and cluck-clucked. "Well, you're surely not going to learn about lunch if we don't get things moving around here," she said. "Judith, honey, why don't you go and hunt down your granddad while we talk? Now that Tom's here, I have a feeling the boys will be wanting to eat soon."

Judith got up and scampered away down the hallway. She was humming. Nomie continued to turn the ball of wool in her hands. "Mr. Walker gets to working, he just loses his sense of time," she said. "And he just loves the Psalms. A peace comes over him when he reads the Psalms."

"I see it in the work," Tom said.

"It's beautiful work," added Nomie.

"Ah-men," Tom said.

"But what exactly is Mr. Walker
doing
with the Psalms?" I asked.

Tom looked at me. "Why, don't you know?"

"Now, Tom!" Nomie said. "Not everyone is in the Mission Community, not
everyone
follows the work." Those people who didn't, her voice implied, were of distinctly marginal importance.

"I suppose, but …"

Nomie looked up from the blue ball of wool. "Mr. Walker is translating the Bible into Dyalo," she said. "Line by line and word by word. It's his life's work. It's his legacy. His father got it All started, and his brother Samuel did so much of the Work, but they've gone Home now, and Mr. Walker is Finishing Up." I have capitalized at my own discretion, but believe me—she really spoke that way. It was something in the way she looked upward as she spoke that offered the emphasis.

"He's doing a beautiful job," Tom added. "He's an artist."

Nomie's mouth opened slightly. "Oh no, Tom. He's Inspired. Like his father and his brother."

"Yes, but Mr. Walker is a great man, and it takes nothing from the Lord to admit it," Tom said defiantly. He turned to me. "The Dyalo didn't even have an alphabet before Mr. Walker's father gave them one. Can you imagine? Mr. Walker's father invented an alphabet for the Dyalo. She's a beauty. Wonderful vowels."

"Tom should know! Alphabets are Tom's specialty," Nomie said.

Tom looked modestly at the ground, and then at his watch. I was on the verge of saying "Oh, really? A specialist in alphabets?" and asking "What brings you here to Thailand?" but was preempted by the strains of "Nearer My God to Thee," coming from the vicinity of Tom's groin. It was his cell phone. "Hey, Bill," he said. Then he stood up from the couch and, covering the mouthpiece, said, "Y'all excuse me? I'll wash up a little before lunch." Tom walked slowly down the hall, still talking to Bill on the phone.

As soon as Tom Riley had left the room and his heavy footsteps could be heard ascending a flight of unseen stairs, Nomie looked at me. "Tom's been with us now, I don't know how long," she said in a low, confidential voice. "Maybe five months, even. He came here to make Fellowship with us, and
he won't leave
. You can't
believe
how much he eats! But we get all types here. He wants to set out on a Mission himself, and he's been here learning. The man has a wonderful way with the languages, but he's just so darn big! He frightens the people. You know how the Dyalo are. I told him that he should make a mission to
Africa
, but he said he had heard about us and he has his heart set on the Dyalo." She chuckled softly. "But he loves Jesus so much, and he's got so much good heart, sometimes God chooses the oddest vehicles."

She paused. I think she expected me to say something like "Amen" or "That He does!" but I stayed silent. Something in my silence encouraged her, and she continued: "The oddest vehicles! Who would have ever thought that He would have chosen me? Why, I remember when I met Mr. Walker for the first time! I was twenty-one years old, and he came to speak in 1956 at the Wheaton Bible College, where I was a student. He was older than me, almost thirty-five, but he was the handsomest man I had ever seen, with the saddest greenest eyes! Mr. Walker started talking about his childhood in Tibet and in China and his family's work with the Dyalo, and I whispered to my girlfriend Evangeline, who was here to visit just last year, I said to her, ‘Evangeline,
that
is the man I am going to love and marry.' I'll bet half the girls in that auditorium were whispering that, but the Lord heard
me
, and now he's
mine
. One year later there I was in Burma, married to Mr. Walker, with a baby on the way! I must say, it is a very good thing the Lord gives us memory but not foresight, because I really don't know if I would have become a Walker if I'd known what was in store! When Mr. Walker came to speak that day, I don't believe that I had ever once
thought
of spending my life in the Orient and Burma and Thailand and places like that. I had never even
heard
of the Dyalo. Now here I am in Thailand with five beautiful Dyalo babies, and fifteen Dyalo grandchildren!"

Nomie's mention of her family reminded me why I was there. I started to construct a sentence around the name "David Walker" and found myself lacking a verb of adequate sensitivity. I debated "murdered," "killed," "passed away," and "died." Later, I learned that the Walkers preferred to say that he had been "called Home." I didn't say anything at all. I imagined Nomie wondered at her unusual guest who had phoned her out of the blue, come to her house, and drunk her Tang in silence! But really, I had no idea at what strange things Nomie wondered: there was some weirdness in the Walker way that made the normal conversational forays seem weak and ineffective, even inappropriate. It was like talking to royalty, or to the very wealthy, or the very beautiful.

The silence was broken by the entrance into the living room of a man who I presumed was Mr. Walker. He was a man of perhaps—who can tell with old people?—eighty?—old, gray, and not entirely steady on his bare feet. Yet tomorrow he was going to Mandalay! He walked slowly to the rocking chair, and with a deliberate motion turned himself in a half circle, gripped the railings of the chair, and hovered himself down. Then, turning to me, he extended his hand across his body, and I rose halfway off the couch to shake it. His large hand was calloused and strong. "Thomas Walker," he murmured in a low voice.

"It's very nice to meet you," I said.

"Glad to have you here," he replied.

Installed comfortably in his rocking chair, Mr. Walker seemed a more solid presence than he was on his feet. His dark-green eyes were the color of drying moss; they flickered alertly behind heavy square-rimmed glasses. His hair was gray but thick, cut short, and held in place with oil. His light-gray skin was very cleanly shaved, and I wondered idly for a second how he shaved the jowls: Did he shave down one side of the jowl, arrive at the cleft, and mount back up the other side, like a mountaineer? Mr. Walker wore a checked buttoned-up shirt and a pair of shiny brown polyester slacks which rode up high on his waist. He had the severe, serious, grave, and melancholy air of the midwestern farming stock from which I later learned he came. He was not a large man, but he dominated the room in a way that big Tom Riley hadn't.

Mr. Walker began to rock. Nomie placed the ball of wool in her lap. Outside the window, the slow thump of construction began from somewhere far away. From down the hall, I heard the clink of metal pans and the sizzle of something frying. I could think of no way at all to introduce the subject of their son and why Martiya might have killed him. I had no excuse for being here except that I was very curious and thought that if the story was good I could sell it: I would summarize their grief in two thousand words, peddle it to the
Bangkok Times
or
Executive
, and then the story of their son's death would line the birdcages of Bangkok's better families. The Walkers sat implacably, organically, rocking slowly, adjusting themselves, as if my presence there were no more notable than one of the dark, buzzing flies that came in from the garden—until finally Mr. Walker asked his wife if Tom Riley would be at home for lunch.

"I
think
so. He's just gone to wash up."

"And Bill? Did you hear from Bill?"

"He called this morning. He's busy as a guy can be, and Margaret is sick. But he's got the hymnals all ready for tomorrow."

"It's a good thing Tom decided to go to Burma. Need somebody to carry those boxes!" Mr. Walker said.

Mr. and Mrs. Walker laughed.

"Is Preacher Matthew going to be taking the jeep?" Mrs. Walker asked.

"Why?" said Mr. Walker. "Why should he take the jeep?"

"Well, honey, if he's going up to Chiang Rai and Dok Rao to witness, he'll need the jeep."

"We'll worry about that when I get back," said Mr. Walker decisively. He turned to me. "And you, young man, what can we do for you? Can we help you with something?"

It was the most natural question in the world.

I hesitated a moment, then told them why I was there. I confessed everything—about Josh O'Connor and his visit with Martiya van der Leun, how I had spoken subsequently with Martiya's family and friends. I told the Walkers that I wanted to know the final pieces of Martiya's story, and I babbled out an apology for the imposition.

When I was done, the room was silent again. Mr. Walker rocked in his chair slowly once or twice. He looked at me, and then at the ground, and then his eyes fell on his wife. Nomie picked up her ball of wool and placed it beside her. Then she stood herself up from the couch.