The caravan mounted higher into the mountains, and stealthily the soldiers defected back toward China, leaving the party more and more isolated. The days grew colder, and Laura was grateful to Dr. Chester for the shearling coats he had insisted they have made for the ladies in Kunming. Along the road as they approached Tibet, they passed elaborately enrobed Buddhist lamas with enormous hats on their heads, chanting over and over, "Om mani padme hom." Laura asked Dr. Chester what they were saying, and Dr. Chester replied that the prayer, although widely used, was meaningless and sadly futile, but a demonstration of both the deep spiritual desire and capacity of the people, if only they knew to Whom they ought to direct their prayers. Raymond, for his part as he rode along toward Tibet, passed his days reciting in his own head sermon after sermon in which he told whoever would listen about the glorious vision he had had in France. With every footstep, Raymond was more moved by his own preaching.
Dr. Chester rode on his horse at the head of the caravan. To amuse himself along the journey he read the scores of symphonies, which he positioned under the pommel of the saddle, trusting his horse to know the route. While in the flatlands leading out of Kunming, the habit had struck the Walkers as innocuous, but when they approached the mountainous country of the headwaters of the Mekong and Yangtze rivers, both Raymond and Laura began to fear for Dr. Chester, as the rocky path grew narrower and the cliff alongside fell away more steeply. In many places the road itself, hardly wide enough for a horse under the best of conditions, had fallen away and the path was maintained only by the careful positioning of a rotting wooden board. Under ideal circumstances, every such makeshift bridge would have necessitated a stop and a careful examination of the soundness of the passage. But Dr. Chester seemed oblivious to the dangers, and indeed his excitement at the music he was reading seemed only to increase as the road narrowed. Then the Walkers began to fear for themselves, for Dr. Chester, by virtue of his position as rider of the lead horse, determined the pace of the entire caravan, and Dr. Chester's speed was largely governed by the subtle, unconscious signals he gave his horse in response to the tempo of the music that he studied. Nothing could distract him from his music, and the caravan flew heedlessly along those rocky heights. When they arrived at the squalid Chinese inn to spend the night, Mrs. Chester confronted her husband: "Mr. Chester, I insist for the sake of those that we have in our care, as well for my own safety, that tomorrow you pass your time with something adagio."
For two months, Laura's world was the inside of her sedan chair. She grew accustomed to the sway of the chair up on the men's shoulders as they trudged along like beasts; and she memorized every detail of the thin wood floor and walls of woven bamboo. The windows were covered with thick woven curtains which she raised and lowered to protect herself from the harsh mountain rains and wind. After a week of travel, she was sufficiently habituated to the rhythmic motions of the chair that she was even able to take pen in hand and write letters to her sister. Laura had always been close to her sister, only three years younger than she, but now, separated by half a world, the last barriers of sisterly reticence tumbled and the letters became a clear reflection of her thoughts.* Laura wrote that as a young girl she had fantasized idly about the life of a princess, and now she was being toted across China princess-style. Yet after a week or two the novelty of the experience diminished, and she reflected that to the men carrying her she was merely baggage. The thought bothered her, and she discussed the matter one evening with Dr. Chester. "Are you not, my dear, carrying your baby just as these men carry you?" he asked. Laura admitted that she was, although she was uncertain precisely what Dr. Chester's point was: Dr. Chester had a way of making you see things in a new light without explaining anything. In the afternoons, with the heavy curtains closed, the sedan chair grew warm and the swaying made Laura sleepy. Travel, Laura wrote, seemed to be a matter of submission to an endless series of rocking and swaying motions: the ship on the ocean, the train passing through the endless tunnels of northern Indochina and over the high bridges with their views of the deep jungle gorges, and now being carried toward Bantang, the city on the Tibetan border where Dr. Chester had promised that the traveling, for the moment, would end, where she could wait for her baby to arrive. What a strange place to be born! thought Laura. By the time you read this, she wrote to her sister, I will probably have had a baby, and then it will be many more months before I can read your letters telling me how happy you are for me. So I better accept your congratulations now! she added, and then, overcome by a superstitious chill, knocked three times on the bamboo walls of the sedan, and wondered if bamboo was a kind of wood.
Sometimes Laura thought about Bantang. It would be, she imagined, a grand white city, with gold trim, and crisp triangular flags flapping in the mountain breezes along the outer ramparts, against a sky whose blueness made her eyes ache; and after the monotonous foods of the caravan, she dreamed also of the delicious foods she would try when invited, as she surely would be, to the governor's palace. There, seated on a silk
*I was able to read these lovely letters thanks to the kindness of the children of Sarah Howard, Laura's sister, of Topeka, Kansas.
cushion, she would explain her mission to the governor (Dr. Chester gallantly translating) and sip the delicately spiced mutton soup, dip a piece of barley bread in the sauce of the boiled pheasant, and with a very straight proud back recount to the wide-eyed foreigners the very many wonders of life in Oklahoma and the glories of the God who inspired their travels.
The caravan had traveled on foot for almost two months, and it had been five months since the party had made their departure from America, when Dr. Chester announced to the traveling missionaries that, God willing, they would arrive that day at Bantang. They arrived in Bantang that night, God having been willing, and were warmly welcomed by the other permanent missionaries at the station, the MacLyons of Nebraska, who would both be dead of typhoid within a year.
The Walkers had been in Bantang for almost a week when Raymond asked Laura if she was happy there. This was one of the things she liked about Raymond: so many men didn't even know to ask such simple, sensitive questions. She wanted to tell Raymond about the overwhelming strangeness of the place, and about how the size of the mountains scared her and made her feel small and worried for their baby. She didn't complain about Bantang, although it had been something of a disappointment: nowhere near as big and glamorous as Tulsa even, this place was like the Indian country, with its dun-colored clay houses and narrow alleyways in which could be found the occasional corpse of a dog, a cat, or even a donkey. One thought consoled Laura: the women around here were unlikely, she reckoned, to catch Raymond's eye, as their faces were smeared black with honey and dirt, as was the Tibetan custom, and their hair reeked with the smell of rancid butter. She didn't tell Raymond any of these things, reserving her complaints for her sister. She only told Raymond that usually when she prayed at night, she felt a calm come over her and she knew that Jesus was listening to her; but here she had been praying harder the last week than she had ever prayed before, and the sweet sensation hadn't come. This sweet sensation was Christianity to Laura. It was, she thought, the sweetness of being loved. She adored the sweet sensation, and the notion that there were those in the world who did not know that sweetness kept her awake at night, as if she heard the cries of motherless children. This was why when Raymond had proposed a mission to China, she had accepted. Raymond assured her that the sweetness would return, and he was right.
The Walkers had been in Bantang a little over three months when Laura gave birth to Thomas Walker. She had been secretly afraid that the place where he was born would influence the appearance of her child, and that he would be small, with an Asiatic aspect; but he was of a normal size, and pink. Dr. Chester, an amateur phrenologist, studied the boy's skull and said that he would be intelligent and of a passionate nature, a brave servant of Christ. To celebrate the birth, the missionaries of Bantang made strawberry ice cream with ice brought down from t
he mountains.
Every family tells stories of origins and beginnings, and the story that the Walkers tell of themselves begins here, with the long voyage to the Orient, the caravan ride from Kunming, and the Mission Station at Bantang. Although the great flood of 1934 wiped out the written record of family history, the decisive psychological break had been made already, the day the Maiden of the East pulled leisurely out of the harbor into the Pacific and set sail in the direction of the evening sun.
If the folks in Tulsa really didn't know why Raymond Walker was heading off to China to save souls, it was because they weren't listening, for if there was one thing Raymond Walker liked to do, it was witness the Gospel. You couldn't stop the man. For the rest of his life, he told anyone who wanted to listen, and plenty who didn't, the story of how he got right with God. He told the story in sermons, in speeches, and in friendly informal discourses, which he delivered in stone churches, wooden chapels, and on the slopes of tall mountains, where with his own hands he had cleared an open field of rocks so the people could come and listen. Raymond felt that if all the moments of his life were to be listed in order of importance, that moment in France when he cleared his books with God would stand undisputed at the head.
This was the story that he told.
In the war, a moment had come when he had been in a trench and left for dead: his unit had retreated, and when he awoke, he was alone with glistening, gray corpses on either side of him. It was a clear, cold night lit by a harvest moon, and Raymond lost all hope of living. Even his fear retreated under the certainty of death. And then the miracle happened, and what else could it be called but a miracle? He heard the angels singing. They sang to him a cappella, welcoming him to Heaven, the most pure and lovely sound he had ever heard. They were singing a hymn that he knew from childhood, a tender hymn that he had heard on his mother's lips and many times had sung himself. The angels were singing in four-part harmony. The deep, throaty bass angels sang like the Negro choir he had heard in Tulsa one time, the fundament, the support, the rainbow and reliable anchor that is the promise of God; the tenor angels, hovering above the basses, augmenting, enriching, offering an open hand if only one will accept it; the altos, lovely, incandescent, and maternal; and above all the soprano angels, whose voices were as pure and piercing as morning light. They sang:
There were ninety-and-nine that safely lay
In the Shelter of the fold.
But one was out on the hills far away,
Far off from the gates of gold.
Away on the mountains wild and bare,
Away from the tender Shepherd's care,
Away from the tender Shepherd's care.
Raymond thought he was being welcomed to Heaven. The angels sang to him for hours as he lay immobile in a bloody trench, his limp hand lying in the remains of another man's gut, and when he woke up sometime later, very much alive, he could not deny that he had heard the angels singing and he understood the meaning of their song.
No, if the folks in Tulsa found Raymond's motivations for becoming a missionary mysterious, it certainly wasn't for lack of effort on his part to explain things: when Raymond tried to explain to his father that he was a changed man, his father asked if he wanted to get himself involved in real estate, because he knew a man in Oklahoma City who was looking for a junior partner; and when Raymond talked about things with his mother, she gave him a strange pained look. It was a frustrating time. The only one who had really listened was the pretty nurse with the round cheeks at the VA hospital where Raymond went twice weekly to treat his injured shoulder, and the two of them sat talking for hours in the hospital's rose garden. When he had told her about the angels, her eyes had grown misty, and Laura had smiled and said, "That must have been lovely. I wish I had heard the angels." Lovely—that was just the word Raymond had been looking for. He said, "It was. It was lovely." Then they got to talking more, and Raymond told her what he hadn't told anybody else: that he had been turning things over in his head, slowly thinking it through, and the only explanation he could come up with for everything he'd seen was that the world was in the midst of the Final Battle. The end was coming, just like in prophecy, and it wouldn't be long now before God judged each and every man. He admitted that the spectacle of the nations turning upon each other in this awful combat had shaken him to his core: the combatants were men who had been given the gift of the Gospel and then squandered it. He had gone back and read Daniel and Revelation, and things were just so clear to him, what was coming, the terrible Day when every man would be judged fairly. He hadn't been living right, he confessed to Laura. He hadn't been living right at all, he said, and by the things he had seen, the giant explosions, he knew that the world could end. It was a distinct possibility. And Laura said that when you saw a cyclone coming, you closed the blinds, put the family in the root cellar, and warned the neighbors.
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. D
r. 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.
Fieldwork Page 10