"And I told her that I had made dyal, and that I was frightened of Rice. And she nodded, and she said that baptism meant I was square with the Lord, but she didn't think I was square with the Lord at all. And I stopped crying, and I said that I needed to be baptized, that's why I had come. I wanted to tell her that whatever she was thinking, it didn't matter now, but she cut me off. She said that she loved her husband, that from the first moment she saw him she'd loved him, he was the most handsome man she'd ever seen. Norma told me that she'd never loved another man, and she never would. And I said, ‘He's a wonderful man, Norma,' but Norma wasn't listening to me. She said she'd made her peace with the kind of man he was, an imperfect man, and she didn't want me back in their life, that those days were over. She asked me to leave her alone, please leave her and her family alone. And I said, ‘Norma,' but she was already out of the room.
"I walked out of that house perfectly sober. I walked away from that house thinking that I had to do something. I walked away from that house thinking how close I had come to angering Rice."
"You see, I told you I didn't have a choice. Even now, I know it was the only thing I could have done. I knew that without David they would worship Rice again.
"He was headed up to Wild Pig village, and I went up the path ahead of him, and I got to that first bridge. I was able to untie one of the ropes and although the thing looked solid enough, I knew that when a big man walked on it, the bridge wouldn't hold. Then I waited. As it happens, that bridge overlooks a very beautiful rice field, and it must have been toward the end of rainy season. So the rice was high, and I was very calm and peaceful. It was a windy day, and the rice was blowing back and forth, like waves of silver and green. There is nothing so beautiful as a rice field. Then David came, and it was silent. He didn't shout, and I looked, and he had fallen, fallen, fallen, down below. I went home.
"I went to bed that evening and I slept, and I woke up the next morning, and I felt like sleeping again, and I slept most of the next day as well. It was the next night when I had a very strange dream. I dreamed about David. He came to me, and he sang again at my door.
"I woke up the next morning and I didn't know what to do. Because I did not want to be cruel, not at all. He was a nice boy, just dangerous, very dangerous. So I took my hunting rifle, which I'd used exactly once since the blacksmith made it for me, and I went out to the bridge and I looked down, and I took very careful aim. I shot him twice, just to make sure.
"Then I walked home through the rice fields."
EPILOGUE
I WENT UP to Dan Loi village with Khun Vinai.
We drove as far as we could and then we walked. We had nearly arrived when a mechanical buzzing startled us, and we stood aside to allow a young man on a motorcycle to pass us on the narrow path, bouncing over rocks and swerving to avoid a fallen log. This was the first suggestion I had of how much the village had changed in the years since Martiya left it. The village still straddled the same ridge, fringed in every direction by the rice fields, then fields of purple taro, sunflowers, yellow sorghum, and tall corn. But tin roofs instead of thatch now covered about half the huts. A number of them sprouted antennas.
Still, I thought I recognized the place. There were the other roofs, of woven cogon grass. There was the cooking hut. Pigs rooted between their stilts, and chickens squawked nervously under bamboo baskets. Gray, mean-looking dogs with yellow eyes barked at us. A few women wearing the famous Dyalo costume — the low trailing skirt and the brilliantly colored tunics — threshed rice into wicker baskets. Small naked children, brown and lean, stopped playing as we came through the village, but only for an instant: I could have been any Western trekker on holiday.
It had been more than a decade since Khun Vinai was last in Dan Loi. The familiar huts were full of strangers. The headman who had consoled Martiya on the loss of Pell was dead. The woman in his hut knew him only by name. Miss Dan Loi, once the prettiest woman in all Dan Loi, had moved with her husband and their children to a new village; they left no forwarding address. This was no surprise: the Dyalo are wanderers, and it is rare for a Dyalo family to stay in the same place for very long. George Washington had died three years before, the oldest man anyone in the village had ever seen. I began to wonder, wandering through the village, whether Martiya had ever been here at all.
But Lai-Ma and Farts-a-Lot were just where Martiya had left them.
Does one shake hands when introduced to a Dyalo stranger? Bow, as in Thailand? Dance a jig? I had no idea, and so I stood there with an embarrassed half-smile on my lips, moronically shaking my head up and down. Lai-Ma and Farts-a-Lot! I had hardly believed that they existed, and now they were in front of me: Lai-Ma, a small, wrinkled creature, barefoot, in a magenta tunic, her hair wrapped in a headband; and Farts-a-Lot, smaller than I had imagined, and with a sweetness to his lopsided, toothless smile that I hadn't expected from Martiya's letters. Lai-Ma and Farts-a-Lot had a habit I recalled from my grandparents: one began a sentence, and then the other finished it. They were like a pair of garden trolls come to life.
We climbed up the shaky stairs and sat on small stools. The hut was dark and low; it smelled of smoke, sweat, incense, and chili powder. The place kept cool even now in the heat of the day. From a line suspended diagonally across the large room hung the family's wardrobe: a few shirts, a pair or two of black cotton trousers. On the wall there was a calendar from 1997 with pictures of the mother of the king of Thailand. And not much more, really: a hoe, a large covered cistern, some smaller jars, a bamboo mat rolled and propped against the wall, a few blackened cooking implements, and a row of bottles filled with rice whiskey.
"Was this the hut Martiya lived in?" I asked Khun Vinai. "When she first came?"
Vinai said something to our hosts which made them laugh. He turned back to me and said, "Yes. Right there." He pointed to a patch of uneven floorboards near the far wall. Martiya had slept in that corner for almost a year, unrolling her mat at night, leaning cross-legged against the wall during the day as she transcribed her field notes.
Then Lai-Ma said something which provoked a response from Farts-a-Lot. Khun Vinai sat up straight. It was also in that corner, he said, that Martiya lived at the end, when she had no place else to go.
Lai-Ma and Farts-a-Lot spent hours telling their story. Occasionally, Khun Vinai would remember that I was there and summarize ten minutes of animated conversation in a sentence or two: "People were afraid to be Adam-people with David gone. People quit the church."
Then I would ask, "Who quit the church? Did so-and-so stay a Christian?"
This would provoke another half hour of urgent conversation, at the end of which Khun Vinai would say, "No, so-and-so didn't stay a Christian."
"Why did he quit?"
And the cycle was repeated.
The four of us spent most of the day like that. At one point, I leaned up against the southern wall of the hut. This produced an anxious moment. Farts-a-Lot said something to Khun Vinai, who said, "Don't touch that wall."
"Why?" I asked.
Translation. Back and forth. Waiting.
"He says it makes the spirits angry," Khun Vinai finally said.
A trio of young boys from a neighboring Karen village, fishing for river shrimp, found David Walker's body. Their parents informed the police. A squadron came through Dan Loi, and then several hours later passed through the village again, carrying the bloated corpse on a stretcher.