"Of course not," I said. We sat for a second. I started to worry that my response had been condescending, so I asked, "What did you tell them?"
"Tell who?"
"The Dyalo. The Dyalo who wanted to know why you didn't come faster."
"I always said that we Walkers had come just as quickly as we could, and we didn't know why the others hadn't come sooner. But we were heartbroken, all of us, just heartbroken, that the Word didn't come much earlier, in time for all their forefathers to hear. When we told the Dyalo that they didn't need to be slaves, that they could be free — why! they'd come over to us, whole families, whole villages." Mr. Walker's green eyes were bright. "We warned her, we warned Martiya when she came that the evil spirits in the hills are dangerous, but she didn't believe us. We told her that the Deceiver was in those mountains and she needed to take precautions. We told her it was all right here" — he tapped the Bible. " ‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.' That's in Ephesians, and we read that to her, and she smiled politely, and she wrote in her notebook, and then she shot our boy."
He paused for a moment.
"She pulled the trigger, but make no mistake, it was the demons who killed him," he finally said. "I think she got into those hills and slowly but surely the demons mastered her. I think the demons who wanted, who were desperate, to keep the Dyalo in bondage murdered David." I must have looked at him strangely because he added, "It happens, you know — we've been here a long time and we've seen it."
A moment later, Mrs. Walker came into the study and with hardly more than a look made it clear that it was time for Mr. Walker to take his rest. I thanked the Walkers and went outside. The black cat was dozing on the stoop of the house, and the tuk-tuk driver was still snoozing under the banyan tree.
PART TWO. THE STORY THE WALKERS TOLD OF THEMSELVES
ONE. THE GATES OF GOLD
THERE WAS SIMPLY NO TELLING what would come out of a Walker mouth at any time. Anna Walker, Judith Walker's cousin, told me that before the Flood, it had never rained. We ended up having a long conversation about whether this was possible, because wouldn't you need rain after the Fall but before the Flood when Man was forced to plow the Earth? I'm not entirely sure I got the better of the argument. Ruth-Marie Walker was not the only Walker to refer to biblical characters in precisely the same tone of voice that one might use to describe the neighbors who let their dog run loose: "I can't talk about Saul, he just gets me so frustrated." She was referring to that Saul, mighty king of Israel. James Walker, David Walker's brainy cousin, used in a single sentence the words "eschatological" and "dispensationalist," and I had to ask him what they meant. I asked Sarah Walker, Thomas Walker's sister, what she might have done with her life had she not been a missionary. She paused a second, and, wrinkling her nose, told me that she always had regretted turning down a position once while on home furlough working at a perfume counter in the mall. She said she thought she had a really good sense of smell. Thomas Walker told me that he expected the world to end within a generation. "Those living close to the Light, close to the Lord, will be saved," he said. He did not even bother to ask whether I was living close to the Light, close to the Lord.
Over the course of the next several weeks, I ran from one Walker to the next. I met in their homes with Walkers who lived in Chiang Mai, and ran up a big phone bill calling other Walkers who lived in the States. It was a large family, in continual motion: there was always another cousin stopping by the big pink house, or a sister coming in from China, or a granddaughter from the border of Laos and Vietnam introducing the new baby to her grandparents, or an uncle in Terre Haute whom nobody had bothered to mention before but of course I should get in touch with. I introduced myself to each of the newcomers, and proposed that we spend a few minutes talking. I felt the collector's passion: I wanted to talk at least a little with as many of the Walkers as I could.
In my notebook I made a genealogical table to keep track of the Walkers. At the top of the table were Raymond Walker, the family patriarch, and his wife, Laura: they were the first generation of Walkers to hear the call from God and head east; and then, arranged in neat boxes below, were Thomas Walker and his brother, Samuel, and their two sisters, Sarah and Helena. This was the generation born in China. Each of these was connected by a wavy line to a spouse; beside Mr. Walker, I wrote in Nomie's name. Then vertical lines led down to what Nomie always called the "kids," her children and her nieces and her nephews. This was the generation born in northern Burma, for the most part, and almost everyone in this generation, too, was married, wavy lines again joining Walker blood to the newcomers. This was David Walker's generation, and I marked his box in red. He was the third of Nomie and Thomas Walker's five children. He was at the very center of my chart. Then below the "kids" were Raymond and Laura Walker's thirty-four great-grandchildren, where David Walker's children would have been— Judith Walker's generation. David Walker died at thirty; had he lived, he would now have been middle-aged, with a family of his own.
Nomie showed me a photo from the last family reunion. They had held it right in the compound, and there must have been sixty or seventy Walkers gathered there. In the photograph, the Walkers were arranged on risers in massed ranks, and I recognized in the background the pink cement Walker house. The lawn, which now was mud, was greener then. "That's Mr. Walker's daddy — the Lord called him Home, oh, six, seven years ago," Nomie Walker said, pointing to Raymond Walker, a very slight old man at the center of the frame. He was leaning on a cane. "Laura was already gone at the time. And there's Mr. Walker's brother, Samuel, who was here in Thailand until he passed on two years ago, and his sister Helena, who lives just down in Hang Dong, and his other sister Sarah — she was just here visiting last year, we had such a good time." Her finger skimmed quickly over the photograph, hovering over each face as she spoke. "And then there are the kids …" Everyone was wearing T-shirts with the family motto "Jesus Wins All," written in English and the Dyalo script that Raymond Walker invented. I spotted Judith Walker in the photo, and her brother and sisters and cousins— handsome, clean-cut children and adolescents, the kind of kids who say "Yes, ma'am" and "No, sir." The family spilled out over the borders of the photograph, so that at the far margins of the frame, some of the Walkers leaned back in to be included in the shot. Only David was missing.
The Walkers were unfailingly helpful, even Nomie, who, so long as I didn't mention Martiya, was happy to tell me stories about what it was like in the old days; but as so often happens, it was an outsider, Big Tom Riley, who told me most of the story in the end.* The linguist from Tennessee was my translator out of Walkerese into something I could understand. The Walkers tended to dwell obsessively on details: an afternoon with Nomie and Thomas could devolve into endless bickering over whether the house in Xian-Hu had a thatch or wattle roof, and whether the big flood was in '33 or '34. But Tom Riley knew the Walker story well, having passed many long evenings in the company of one or another of the Walkers as they went from lonely Dyalo village to lonely Dyalo village, preaching — and in preaching, like war, you get to know folks.