And then there was nothing. The villagers had seen the body and that was all the information they had: there are no newspapers in the mountains, no journalists. At first, they assumed that David's death was an accident: an old bridge had collapsed. No one knew what this meant. The sight of David's body being borne on a palanquin through Dan Loi village had frightened the Christians. If not even David Walker — who presumably knew how to please Ye-su-tsi in ways infinitely more sophisticated than they did — could keep a terrible death away, just how strong was this tsi?
But from the shaman, George Washington, Lai-Ma heard a more disturbing rumor: that David Walker had been shot.
The rains were heavy that year, the harvest was meager, and not long after Lai-Ma and Farts-a-Lot had emptied their baskets into the rice barn, the structure collapsed. Big Teeth's opium crop was half what he had hoped: he would be forced to buy his youngest son an ugly bride. Bad luck pursued Christian and heathen alike. Pastor James, who before his conversion was called Fat Belly, lost two pigs in the jungle. Garlic Breath was stricken with diarrhea. Two children died that winter, one by drowning, the other of a mysterious fever.
The deluge was followed by bitter cold. At night, the water cisterns froze over, and even at midday, in the exceptional clearness of the winter light, the villagers could see their breath. Villagers reported nightmares, animals acting strangely. Wives complained of bad-tempered husbands, and husbands lamented volatile wives. No one could explain it, but the communal cooking hut began to stink — as if something had died and was rotting in one of its corners. No one could find the offending object. Food cooked in the hut was generally agreed to have a bad taste.
Pastors Moses and James read from the pulpit, the congregation sang. But the church had registered its last convert, and its flocks began to thin.
They left for any variety of reasons. Stupid Squirrel had converted chiefly in the expectation of saving money: with a family as large as his, he had been forced to buy pigs frequently to sacrifice. Seeing that the Christians made do without any sacrifices at all, he had converted. But he hadn't reckoned on the Christian ban on opium planting: a man is hardly called Stupid Squirrel for no reason, after all. David had a particular genius for framing these dilemmas within the grand context of biblical history, but, of course, David was gone.
Another who succumbed was Miss Dan Loi. Miss Dan Loi had joined the church chiefly to avoid the dyal: just as Martiya had always suspected, some women in the village found that rite a horror. Even seven months after David was dead, she had remained steadfast in her faith, planting with the other Christians, praying over the fields. But as the first seedlings sprouted, Miss Dan Loi and her husband noted a deformity in their harvest. Miss Dan Loi hated her duties in the dyal, but clearly Rice wasn't happy, and if Rice wasn't happy, she knew, her children would go hungry. In the old ways, the Dyalo had known how to treat such problems: how to feed the deformed Rice glass after glass of whiskey, and trap the drunken spirit in a bamboo cage. If David had been alive to lead them in the appropriate Christian prayers, she and her husband wouldn't have needed to turn to George Washington — but with David gone, what choice did they have?
Pastor James knelt down every Sunday alongside the members of the accursed Vampire clan, and Old Limping Lady, and others. And Hupasha remained a Christian. Every night Martiya expected to hear the news that he had renounced his faith, to hear his footsteps on the porch of her hut. She asked for news from every traveler who passed his way, and the same news always returned: they had found him distracted with the Big Book.
It was at the end of that terrible cold that Farts-a-Lot, waking up early, noticed the flames coming from Martiya's hut. When he burst inside, he found her sprawled asleep and pulled her from the cottage just as the ceiling collapsed. Martiya tried to break free of Farts-a-Lot's arms and go back inside, but he held her back. Over his shoulder she watched the hut burn, and with it her row of spiral-bound, hard-sided notebooks, perhaps forty in alclass="underline" almost fifteen years of field notes, essays, and a manuscript draft, now nearly completed, of The Dyalo Way of Life.
Martiya had no place to go. Lai-Ma and Farts-a-Lot took her back in, as if she were starting over, as if her life still lay before her, and the old songs of Sings Soft were still on every tongue, and Pell was waiting for her back home.
Days later, the shaman summoned the elders of Dan Loi to his hut, and there informed them of his professional opinion: that the string of misadventures in the village was not random, but rather the work of a disgruntled spirit — the spirit of David Walker.
The villagers of Dan Loi became convinced that George Washington's hypothesis squared with the facts: that one (or several) of David Walker's souls had not been carted off with his corpse, and that, far from its loved ones, it was wandering through village, making mischief.
Over a series of tense nights, the shaman entered into his trance and tried to reason with the spirits. I have no idea what happened to the shaman when the spirits seized him. All I can say is this: both Lai-Ma and Farts-a-Lot, like the others in the village, were convinced that the shaman was visiting with the dead David Walker. And David Walker had a tale to tell.
How did the shaman come to know the facts? He knew that Martiya kept a hunting rifle. He knew about Martiya and Hupasha. Maybe he looked into her face and saw the story written there.
Or maybe he went into his trance and communed with the dead.
Everyone agreed that action must be taken. Debate raged in the village. The headman, who had never even after all these years wholly trusted Martiya, proposed settling the situation in the simplest of all possible ways, with a bullet in the back of the head. Had a Dyalo man or woman shot David Walker, this is surely how the situation would have been resolved. Dyalo justice was very much of an eye-for-an-eye sort; there are no jails in a Dyalo village.
The villagers approved the headman's proposal, and only the lack of a willing executioner got in the way. No man in the village wanted to shoot Martiya himself, and although there was a Lahu man willing to do the job, it wasn't clear who would pay him.
Besides, if one dead farang was bad, wouldn't two be worse?
Lai-Ma and Farts-a-Lot did not recall who in the end proposed denouncing Martiya to the police. Lai-Ma thought it might have been Stupid Squirrel, and Farts-a-Lot thought it was Pastor James. But the villagers were agreed on the plan: it was not the Dyalo way of handling things, but Martiya was not, after all, Dyalo.
The day had gone from cool to hot to cool again. I excused myself from the hut. The last light breaking over the dark green mountains was gold and orange. The huts were cloaked in brilliant ringlets of fiery bougainvillea, and in the valley below I could see Karen maidens all in white, in sharp relief against the green fields. Everything was quiet. I made my way around the bend of the village, along the path that led through the ancient bamboo groves, until I found myself on a large rock overlooking the whole of Dan Loi. This was the rock, I realized, on which Martiya herself had whiled away so many hours at just this time of day. From this high rock, there could have been no more exotic and incomprehensible place than a Dyalo village: the sloping thatched huts, the rootings pigs, the shrine of the Old Grandfather, just barely visible in a clearing in the woods. Then, in a language not one word of which I understood, someone began to sing, breaking the stillness of the evening.
I wondered what the song meant.
My story — the story of my involvement in Martiya van der Leun's murder of David Walker — for all practical purposes ended there. I ceased to pursue witnesses, I never went back to the big pink house to sit again with Norma Walker and her husband on the matching fake-leather couches. But I expect that they are still there, that their grandchildren are off spreading the Word, that Thomas Walker is looking out on the horizon and seeing the storm clouds of the Apocalypse approaching.