Mischa Berlinski - Fieldwork

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.

When David was eight, his father found a mewling tiger cub abandoned in the forest behind Eden Valley. Bright eyes, thick golden fur, a cub the size of a Maine coon: a child's delight, a midwestern mother's nightmare. "No, sir, I will not have a wild animal in this house," Norma Walker said, exactly what she had said about all the other strays that Thomas and the kids had previously found in the jungle and proposed to raise under her roof — the civet, the leopard, the monkeys who would eventually steal her grandmother's pearl earrings, the baby deer, and the goral. "No, sir. We are not rearing up tigers . A tiger will eat the baby."

The five children began to wail, producing a polychromatic fugue on the theme of "But, Mom!" Thomas said, "But, Nomie, just look at the little guy!" and the clever tiger cub climbed into her lap and fell sound asleep. Norma fidgeted a moment and relented, as she always did, on the condition that when the thing got just a little older, Thomas would get rid of it, put it back in the jungle, do something with it. To David's other chores was added the task of tiger-mothering, and six times a day and all through the night he fed the cub goat's milk from a baby bottle, until the cub was big enough to eat a warm rice-and-milk mash. Against all odds, the cub thrived, and although David's parents had told him that only people could know and love Jesus, David nevertheless secretly baptized the cat when it was six months old.