Mischa Berlinski - Fieldwork

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!' "

Wu-pa-sha was the creator of rice, rain, life, and thunder, at the very summit of the Dyalo spiritual hierarchy.

By the end of the evening, when Norma served her pineapple upside-down cake, the group was prepared to laugh together.

"So I move into the place, I take a deep breath — and I get about exactly five minutes of solitude, no more," Martiya said.

"Yep!" said Raymond. "They're not a people to leave you alone!"

"First, it's the kids who show up. All of them. Every kid in the village thinks the place is his."

"That means they like you," said Laura.

"First morning in my new hut, one kid is crawling up the mosquito net, another is on my desk — right on top of it! — and a week later, one of the little twerps comes tumbling in right down through the roof . Kid looks up at me, doesn't say one word, picks himself up with a kind of shocked look on his face" — Martiya imitated the child's face, raising her eyebrows and sucking in her lips—"and walks out of the place. Big hole in my roof."

"Oh no!" said Laura.

"But the kids aren't the only thing. I bought myself a mirror here in Chiang Mai. I thought one morning, ‘You know, I better check everything is still in place.' "

"Yes!" said Norma. "That used to drive me insane in Eden Valley. No mirror, not one in six years, I just wanted once in a while to see myself !" Norma turned to her husband. "You see, it's not only vanity."

"In my case it is, actually," Martiya said. Everybody laughed.

"Well," she continued, "I should have guessed, but that mirror has attracted every teenage girl in a ten-mile radius. ‘Martiya, may I use your see-myself square?' That's what they call it, the tai-tin mah ."

"The what?" said Thomas.

"The tai-tin mah ."

"Oh! The tai-tin mah !" corrected Thomas, changing the tone of the final syllable from flat to rising.

" Tai-tin mah ," Martiya repeated.

"It's hard!" said Norma. "You'll get the hang of it. Believe me, it was years before I could say ‘Hello, my name is Norma and that water buffalo there is my husband' in Dyalo."

Martiya laughed. "In any case, from morning until night that hut is filled with girls. ‘Oh, you look so pretty!' I told them all that the thing would steal their souls, it's danger, danger, stay away , but they just giggled. But that's not the worst of it — no sir — it's the boys. They're like flies on—" Martiya stopped herself, recalling suddenly that she was in the company of missionaries. "They can't keep away. One day I come home from a day of interviewing the shaman about Dyalo magic, and there must have been fifteen teenagers in my little place, hormones so thick I needed to wipe the place down with a sponge.

"That's not enough, there's also the drinking men. Nobody told me, but my place is the local tavern. Lately, half of the village men have decided that my hut is the place to meet for drinks in the evening. I walk in, any time of day, half a dozen men are seated on the floor around one of those pots of rice whiskey — you know, with the big straws? Smoking those smelly cigars and drinking whiskey. So I'd say that the new-hut thing hasn't worked out all that well."

Thomas explained to Martiya that the attraction of her hut was almost certainly that it was associated with no clan. "Have you ever had a dog, young lady?" he asked.

"Growing up, yes."

"He ever bark at the other dogs?"

"Sure."

"Same for spirits. That's why those men are in your house. You take your dog for a walk in the neighborhood, he barks at some dogs, sniffs some other dogs, lies down on his back and pretends he's dying for other dogs. You have an aggressive, mean dog, better to leave him at home. The Dyalo think that your clan is the pack of spirits which follow you around like a dog all the time , fight with the other spirits. Over the years, the Dyalo have figured out that you just can't introduce some of these spirits into another spirit's house. Dangerous stuff. But your new hut, young lady, it's neutral territory. That's why they're coming to your place. You best take care, though. Those spirits can be dangerous."

"I'll be on my guard."

"I'm quite serious. You're a long ways from home, and there are things in those hills you don't understand."

Martiya came by the house regularly her last year in Dan Loi, Mr. Walker said: once a month, every six weeks, the doorbell would ring and there she'd be, smiling, full of questions, lively as all heck — who wouldn't like her? Sometimes of course the Walkers were busy, as folks will be, but Mr. Walker always tried to make time for Martiya and would sit with her for hours in his study.

Mr. Walker proved himself among the very best of Martiya's informants on the Dyalo. Sitting with me in the parking lot of the supermarket, he made a list of the things that he had discussed with Martiya. I copied them down with a stub of pencil on the back of a receipt. That Mr. Walker remembered these interviews in such detail suggested to me both the excellence of the man's memory and the considerable time he had spent privately reconstructing the chain of events that had led to David's death.