Thomas followed his mother's advice and went back to Oklahoma for a year to recover his health. He lived with his grandparents there, and at the age of thirty-four acquired a driver's license and a library card. Laura had been right: this was the place for him to get strong. Although he found it strange to eat eggs, potatoes, and bacon for breakfast in the mornings, every morning that's what his grandmother gave him, and his weight and color returned. Thomas's lifelong obsession with current events began in his grandparents' house, with long careful morning readings of the Oklahoma Sun. His father had always said that they were living in the End Times, but this had been a feeling in his bones rather than something founded on hard facts and reason. Now Thomas could see, reading the newspaper and then studying in the library, that there was real, solid evidence that the time of judgment would be soon. The Seven Churches had come and gone, the Seven Seals would soon be broken, and the Seven Trumpets would sound. The Seven Vials of Judgment had been opened — and now he read in the newspaper that a new Israel had been born and a war was brewing in the Holy Land, just as Prophecy had said. The more time he spent in the library studying these matters, the more he respected his father's good judgment and sound common sense.
Thomas came back from his home furlough twenty pounds heavier and a married man. When he introduced his new bride, Norma, to the family, Laura took a liking to her instinctively, immediately. She was no delicate fainting flower, that was for sure. Norma was pregnant, just as Laura had been, by the time her ship had pulled out of San Francisco Harbor, and Thomas had offered to wait with her in Rangoon until the baby was born. But Norma insisted that they go straight to Eden Valley. She was too excited to wait. "Whither thou goest, I will go; and where though lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall by my people, and thy God my God," Norma said.
When Norma arrived in Eden Valley, the first thing Laura thought when she saw her was that Thomas had married himself a tomato woman: Norma had a huge frizz of bright-red hair, the kind which in the humidity seemed to stick out in absolutely every direction; her round cheeks and forehead were red from exertion; even her fleshy arms and hands were a bright pink. The first thing Norma said when she was introduced to the family was, "You must be Laura! Thomas loves you so much!" The second thing she said was, "And you must be Raymond! You are Thomas's absolute hero." The third thing she said was, "Have you folks got any bug spray?"
That night, at her Welcome to Our Home dinner, Laura had never seen her son look quite so adorably uncomfortable, as if he was praying extra-special hard to be Raptured up into Heaven right this minute. Now, Thomas had told her all about Eden Valley, Norma said, he had told her all about China and Burma and the Dyalo and the tribal life, about the way the light looked at dawn over the mountains with the roar of the tigers and panthers and elephants in the hills — that man could sell sand in Sinai, she told her new in-laws, like she had told her friend Evangeline after that magic night talking to Thomas on the porch of her parents' home in Wheaton, Illinois; but Thomas had never mentioned, not even one itty-bitty little time, the extraordinarily horrific superabundance of bug life here in the jungles of northern Burma. Not that she was complaining, mind you, but you people have some crazy bugs around here. There were big bugs, little bugs, and bugs that you didn't notice when they bit you but itched up something fierce later with these huge red welts that Thomas kept telling you "Don't rub," which was as silly a thing to say as she had ever heard—
"But you can't scratch those! They'll just get worse," Thomas protested.
"Well, what the Sam Hill am I supposed to do, then? They itch."
— and bugs that you didn't see in the day or hear, but sure made a racket at night when you were trying to sleep and which Thomas here didn't seem to notice at all; and bugs which didn't ever want to duke it out with her one-on-one like an honorable bug ought to, but would come at her like an army, everywhere, just one big black cloud of swarming bugginess, until all she could do was flail her arms helplessly and cry in frustration. Oh! And another little thing you forgot to tell me about, yes, you, don't look down at your feet, they're not going anywhere, YOU! I don't remember you telling me about the enormous snakes, the poisonous little guys or the pythons or the boa constrictors so big they could eat me up like I was a little mouse. Don't remember one word about that! Didn't'cha think I'd notice 'em when I got here?
A little thing like a python crawling up my skirt?
And Raymond and Laura, listening to Norma, they laughed so hard they could bust, those big Walker hands pounding on their knobby knees, because if ever there was a woman who should be out here in the jungle with the Dyalo, Norma Walker, née Smith, of Wheaton was she. Norma was great. She treated the jungle that had nearly broken so hardy an explorer as John Hanbury-Tracy as nothing more than summer camp. She was five months pregnant and spent half her days laughing and half her days crying, but she was always in motion, helping Thomas build their home ("You want me to live in a tent? I — don't — think — so. I'll get eaten by a bear." "Honey, there aren't any bears here." "That's what you said about the snakes. Get moving, mister."), helping Laura make window boxes, going up to the nearest Dyalo village and without knowing one word of Dyalo making friends with every kid there, so that just one week into her tenure in Eden Valley there was a constant stream of children asking at Raymond and Laura's door if Miss Nomie could play with them, "Nomie" being as close as a Dyalo mouth could come to "Norma." Everyone loved Norma. She came with a box of clippings from her father's backyard for Raymond and told him that if they blossomed, she'd make him real apple compote like she used to make back home. Two years later, she did. When Paul made an overnight preaching trip, she spent the night in Sarah's house, just the two of them, and for years to come, the words "rubber gloves" alone were enough to make both of them laugh like schoolgirls passing notes. And above all, she was a natural missionary: that big open smile, the eyes ready to laugh or cry as needed, a gift for listening the equal of her husband's gift for talking— people from all over this valley and the next wanted to tell her their problems, and when she told them that she knew a little secret, you'd have to have had an awful cold heart not to want to hear more.
Laura was so happy that Thomas had found a woman like Norma.
Norma gave birth right on schedule, no problems at all, to a beautiful baby girl named Ruth-Marie Walker, named for Norma's two heroines. Just two years later ("That girl is fertile as a turtle," Raymond said in private to Laura) Linda-Lee was born, named for Norma's mother and grandmother, and then just two years after that, on July 13, 1961, David Luke Walker, after Thomas's heroes. By all accounts, he was a quiet baby, an undemanding toddler, and a charming and inquisitive child. He sang in the valley choir, led by his aunt Sarah, and was an excellent student in the village school, where his grandmother educated Dyalo and Walker children alike. When all of her children were finally married, when the grandkids were rolling on the floor, when she could hear "Jesus Loves Me" sung in Dyalo from the church up the river, Laura thought to herself that until she was called Home, this was as happy as she'd get.
With the accession of General Ne Win's socialist government to power in 1962, the Walkers' happy days in Eden Valley were numbered. By 1965, the Burmese government had ordered the expulsion of all foreign missionaries, and the Walkers, settled in their northern paradise, waited for the day when the eviction orders would arrive. The Walkers prayed for one more day and one more week in Eden Valley, and for a time, God listened to their prayers, and granted them the Visa no general could revoke. Turmoil in Rangoon, civil strife, a sympathetic Christian governor who chose to ignore certain inconvenient orders — for almost five years the Walkers were able to stay in Eden Valley in defiance of the law. In those years, no Walker left by caravan for Putao or Fort Hertz, lest they draw attention to themselves, and they truly lived as Dyalo: the Walkers ate only the rice they themselves planted in their own paddies, and when in the hard winter of 1967 the rice crop was bad, like the Dyalo they scrounged in the jungle for roots. The experience made Eden Valley all the more precious: now that the Walkers could say that unlike all the other missionaries who had ever lived with tribal peoples anywhere, they were of the people they served. Had young David or his siblings or his cousins been stopped on a mountain trail, they would have said that they were Dyalo youths from Eden Valley.