All that evening Martiya peppered the Walkers with questions.
"You mean that you think the spirits are actually — I don't know— what's the word? Real? They're not just something that the Dyalo invented?" she asked, in response to some remark which began, no doubt, "Two thousand years!"
"Absolutely real," Thomas said. "No question about it."
"Have you seen a spirit?" Martiya asked.
"Never seen Africa but I'd bet that it's there. The Dyalo aren't the first, not by any means, to be oppressed by such devils. In the first six chapters of the Gospel of Mark alone, there are ten references — ten! — to the casting out of devils. The New Testament is just chockablock with devils, demons. Now think about that a moment. The Jews in ancient Israel, the Dyalo in the eastern Himalayas, thinking the same way, with the same beliefs — that's a mighty strange coincidence. People in every corner of the world believe in spirits, ghosts, what have you. It's not a coincidence."
"And these spirits are enslaving the Dyalo?"
Thomas sighed at the simplification of the complicated relationship between the Dyalo and the spirits who controlled them. "I'd certainly say the spirits are bullies and brutes. They're ugly creatures, no doubt about it. And the Dyalo are sick and tired of being told by these ugly creatures what to do. When someone who's bigger than you and meaner than you and stronger than you tells you what to do — wouldn't you call that slavery?"
Martiya thought for a moment. "In the village where I'm staying, the people say that Old Grandfather spirit protects them. And they have ancestor spirits. They don't talk about being enslaved by them."
Thomas snorted. "First, according to the Bible, which is quite clear on this point, human spirits don't linger on the Earth, but only those unclean demon spirits which occupy the body before death. That's one of God's promises to us, that when we're done here, he'll take us Home or send us to our punishment. So I think that's a confusion the Dyalo are making. Those aren't the spirits of the ancestors the Dyaloare worshipping but deceivers—spirits taking human form to confuse the Dyalo. Now, about Old Grandfather. Hah! When I was a kid, there used to be a Chinese warlord, came by the mission every few weeks. Said he'd protect us. We asked him, ‘What happens if you don't protect us?' He said, ‘My soldiers will cut off your heads.' That's how Old Grandfather protects the Dyalo."
"What did you do?" asked Martiya.
"Do?"
"About the warlord."
"Oh, yes. Dad here" — Thomas gestured toward his father, who sat at the head of the table, smiling gently—"well, Dad here told that warlord, ‘Go on and cut off our heads. Cut off anything you like. God sent us this money so we can work with the people, not to give to you. But if you want, I'll give you something worth much, much more than gold.' Well, that warlord, he wasn't happy about that, not one bit, let me tell you. What is he going to do with our heads? The next day, the warlord came back, and Dad said the same thing. We knew the Lord would protect us. Day after that, the warlord came back and asked to be baptized in the name of Christ."
Like me, I imagine, Martiya was not quite sure how to respond to the Walkers' more extraordinary stories. "Did the warlord explain what happened, why he changed?"
"The man was filled in the night with the Holy Spirit. He said that any God which made people so courageous must be worth believing in. We've seen things like that happen more times than you can count." The table fell silent a moment. Raymond cleared his throat. "You're asking very important questions, young lady. And let me tell you, when we first came to China in 1920, a very long time ago—"
Laura interrupted, "Oh my, yes."
"— I had an attitude very similar to yours, I thought that spirits were only something you read about in the Bible, something that only bothered people in biblical times. I certainly didn't realize the magnitude of the problem. It took me a considerable period to realize that defeating the spirits in our day and age, right here, defeating them through the aid of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was the significant spiritual challenge of our time. But Grandma Walker and myself, we saw case after case of it, wandering through those villages, until we finally had to put aside our white colonial master attitude and admit that these people might know something about something. We arrived in village after village and were told when we tried to set up our tent, ‘Oh no! Don't put up your tent near that rock! There's a nasty spirit who lives there, he'll get angry with you.' Or, ‘Don't talk too loud in the rice field. The rice spirit hates loud noises.' We learned."
Laura Walker shook her head. "Oh yes, it was terrifying for them in those days," she said. "For us too! When the spirits saw us coming to baptize somebody, they would be furious. They would fight back with everything they had. Somebody would come to us and say, ‘Yes! I want to be free of the demons, I want to be baptized in the name of a God who loves me,' and we would make an appointment for the morning to baptize them, and in the night they'd be attacked by the spirits, they'd come to us in the morning with bite marks, bruises, bleeding. ‘What happened to you?' I'd say. ‘Spirits attacked us in the night,' they'd say. After all that we couldn't deny the severity of the problem."
"I can see that," said Martiya, having sought, and found, a neutral phrase. "What do you think the spirits are?"
It was Thomas's brother Samuel who took up the bait — Samuel now in his early fifties, balding, a round face and spectacles, Samuel who had passed the better part of his life quietly reading and translating the Bible into Dyalo, verse by verse. He said, "Miss van der Leun—"
"Martiya. Call me Martiya. Please …"
"Miss Martiya, we're not anthropologists. We're practical people. We see a problem and we're trying to fix it, if we can. We're certainly not experts like you."
"I'm not an expert!" said Martiya.
"Well, compared to us, you certainly are. Nobody knows what the spirits really are — maybe they're fallen angels, that's certainly a possibility, or maybe some other being created in the spiritual realm. The biblical evidence certainly associates the spirits with Satan. But you know how I've always thought of the Dyalo spirits? They're like a bureaucracy. Like a giant powerful bureaucracy, which imposes a million and one rules on the Dyalo. Fines them a pig or a chicken or something worse when they do something wrong. Punishes them, kicks them around, treats them like dirt. You ever try and get a residency permit here in Thailand? Go from office to office, lose two whole days? It's like that all the time for the Dyalo. If the spirit of the big rock makes your kid sick, ask the spirit of your ancestor to protect you. So you slip him a bribe, a chicken, a pig. Maybe he'll help you, maybe not. If not, you go to another spirit, try and bribe him. So it goes."
"Exactly!" said Thomas. "Exactly! And then we come along and we say, ‘Folks, we know the Man at the top! You want to plow that new field? You don't need to sacrifice a pig or say this ritual — just talk to the Boss! Who loves you! Who wants to help you! We'll teach you how to talk to Wu-pa-sha directly!' "