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.
That night, Martiya slept in her own hut with the door closed. She had a lot of work to do in Dan Loi, but now she was sure that she could do it. She lay on her mat and read by the light of her hurricane lamp for a long time. When she finally grew sleepy, she closed her book and blew out the yellow flame.
She had never felt so happy in all her life.
FOUR. RAIN
SO MUCH OF LIFE consists of long puttering spells: when I look over my letters from those first few weeks of the rainy season, I find e-mails to and from my editor at the Bangkok Times, who asked me to write about the artist-in-residence at the University of Chiang Mai. To my mother, I wrote that Rachel and I took a class one Saturday afternoon in Thai cooking, and another in Thai massage. There was a letter to my grandmother, in which I told the story of the fourth-grade teacher at Rachel's school, a quiet Burmese woman, who broke her wrist in a tuk-tuk accident. Mr. Tim, I continued, asked me to take over her class while she convalesced, and for a week I taught school, an experience so exhausting that I didn't think once of anthropologists or missionaries, just savages.
None of these e-mails was exciting, but the events they depict were the real events that made up my days. Not one e-mail mentions Martiya or the Walkers; but not a day in that early monsoon passed when I didn't rifle through Martiya's letters (which ended shortly after her arrival in her new hut), or look through the extensive notes of my conversations with the Walkers. But as it happened, almost a month passed in which I made no progress, until I ran into Thomas Walker in the parking lot of the supermarket on the Chiang Mai — Lamphun Road.
I had never before seen Mr. Walker outside of the big pink house, and the sight of him in those waist-high slacks staring at the steel sky from under the supermarket awning took me aback: I was used to seeing him putter in a narrow triangle between the living room, his study, and the dining room; and although I had heard stories of him in China, in Tibet, in Burma, in Oklahoma; although Mrs. Walker had told me he was headed off to Mandalay — I hadn't really believed that he existed outside that house. Now he held a large bag of groceries in his left hand and was looking for his car keys, the man who in his youth had stolen sweets from the pockets of the future Tigi of Gartok.
I waved as I walked across the lot, but he seemed not to recognize me until I was right upon him; then he smiled and said, "Well hello, young man! I was telling Nomie just the other night that she must have scared you away!"