Bone Talk

by Candy Gourlay

  Look how Kinyo works. He counts their plates and spoons and forks. He boils their water to get rid of the evil spirits that might make them ill. He scrubs their wooden floor with half a coconut husk until it gleams.

  See how these Americans love Kinyo, the Tree of Bones calls. Do you hear what they’re saying? They want to take him back to America with them. In fact, they say they want to take all of Bontok to America. To show Americans our way of living.

  See, the Tree of Bones calls. Can you see?

  Epilogue

  I cut the chicken’s neck quickly. It struggles a little, but it tires soon enough as its blood soaks into the roots of the tree. I watch as its spirit leaves its body. Then I take it up the tree, picking my way carefully on the great sagging branches, slippery with moss.

  The Tree of Bones sighs.

  As I climb, Chuka whimpers a little down below, wishing me to hurry up with my task. Soon I am at the top. I push through the dense ceiling of leaves and tie the chicken firmly to a branch.

  To one side, I can see the mountain flowing down to the caves. On the other side, there is a swirling fog in the valley. The tips of trees poke out like reeds in a river. I can see the rice paddies up and down the mountainside, tiers of them, flooded and ready for planting, glinting like the scales of a snake just after it sheds its old skin.

  On the branch adjacent to me are two figures made of blackened tree fern. They sit side by side, their white pebble eyes gazing peacefully into the distance.

  I say the words the ancients have taught me to honour the souls of my parents, my voice calm and strong. But the beat of my heart is quick and my chest aches. A day is made of hours. A month is made of days. A year is made of months. And a man is made of years. Five years have passed since Father died. And still, whenever I visit the Tree of Bones, I feel like a little boy again, lonely for my mother and father.

  I whisper goodbye to the spirit figures. The wind gently shakes the tree and it tinkles its farewell as I make my way down.

  ‘Samkad!’

  Luki is waiting, just outside the tree’s barrier. She is sitting on her heels, her arms wrapped around Chuka’s neck. She is wearing a skirt and her hair is tied back with a string of beads. She is also wearing a white shirt, a gift from an American missionary. It looks bulky and strange, but Luki seems not to mind.

  ‘Did you hear, Samkad? Kinyo’s new American is asking who amongst us would like to go with him and his wife to America.’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘So … are you going? Kinyo said he might.’

  ‘Kinyo wishes he was American. Do you want to go?’

  Luki shrugs. ‘Maybe. I’d like to see America. Who knows if what Mister William says is true. He could tell us anything and we would never know if he was making it up.’

  I make a face. ‘America sounds … different. What if they make us wear shoes? Or if they take away our axes? What if they make us speak only their language?’

  ‘Haven’t you noticed? They’re doing that already!’ she laughs. ‘Anyway, I’m not here to talk about Americans. I wanted to show you something.’

  She holds it up. I frown. Its a plaited vine fastened to a wooden handle.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a sling! I made it yesterday. Watch!’

  Chuka complains as Luki pushes her aside to get to her feet. She loads a stone into the end of the sling and peers at the trees around us. ‘There! See that papaya?’

  The papaya tree has a long, gangly trunk with a head of unruly leaves. It is growing at an angle, bending away from the shadows and reaching for the sun like a pointing finger amid the lush masses of fern trees and shrubs. A single papaya nestles at its neck.

  ‘Watch!’ Grasping the handle, Luki whirls the sling above her head.

  Snap! The papaya drops to the ground.

  I grin at Luki. ‘Great shot!’

  ‘The handle gives it more accuracy and power!’ Luki smiles.

  The early morning sun edges higher, and everything seems to burst into flame instantaneously. Little Luki’s long black hair is crowned with gold. The back of her long neck is molten with sunlight. Her white blouse is askew and I can see the beginnings of one bare shoulder.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ Luki snaps.

  ‘Nothing.’ But I can’t look away.

  Suddenly Luki swings her leg in a circle, sweeping my feet from under me. I fall to the ground and before I can grab her, Luki’s got my arm twisted behind my back. Chuka yelps, but she doesn’t move to intervene. And then we are grappling. We are rolling in the dirt until we smack against the fencing around the Tree of Bones. Luki is surprisingly strong considering that I’m head and shoulders taller than her now. I hear Luki’s plaintive voice from a long time ago. You’re too short to carry a shield. You’re smaller even than a wild boar – how are you supposed to spear one? And look at your arms! They’re like twigs. How are you going to chop off the heads of the Mangili? I begin to laugh, even though Luki’s arm is now wrapped around my throat. My arms no longer look like twigs. And Luki is no longer Little Luki with that mango face.

  Luki rolls me onto my back, expertly pinning my arms down with her knees, her forearm across my neck. But still I laugh, choking a little because it’s hard to laugh with an arm across your throat.

  Luki grins.

  ‘I saw a boar near the caves yesterday when I was collecting firewood,’ she says. ‘It was huge! Shall we take Chuka and …’ She raises an arm as if she is throwing a spear.

  I laugh even harder. ‘Chochon will be furious.’

  ‘Huh!’ Luki wrinkles her nose. ‘She’d probably rather that I weave a blanket or boil a baby or something.’

  ‘And the ancients will demand that you wear the itchiest, most womanly skirt available.’

  She sticks her tongue out at me.

  I smile. ‘So … shall we meet here after breakfast?’

  She gives me a quick slap on the cheek. ‘I’ll be there!’

  And suddenly she’s gone and there’s Chuka, her paws on my chest, frantically licking my face, because my talking to Luki had made her lonely again.

  The Tree of Bones chortles and somewhere I can hear the loud squawk of a hornbill.

  A Note from the Author

  Dear Reader,

  This story is not history though it is set during a real time, in a real place. There really were headhunters in Bontok, and the United States really did invade the Philippines in 1899, just as its native people were beginning to call themselves Filipinos.

  I read a lot of books from the period – which is known in the Philippines as the Philippine–American War, and in the United States as the Philippine Insurrection. But most of the information I could find was written by Americans, writing as tourists, anthropologists, conquerors. I could find no unfiltered Filipino voices telling our side of the story.

  The Filipino author Gina Apostol reports having the same experience while researching her novel set in the same period, Gun Dealer’s Daughter. When she sought the Filipino voice, she said, she could only find it in ‘a text within a text, mediated, annotated and translated by her enemy’. Writing this book made me realize that there is a world of stories in my native land that beg telling, and a multitude of voices that need to be heard.

  Bone Talk is set in the magnificent highlands of the Philippines – a region called the Cordillera, populated by impressive folk who carved rice fields out of vertiginous mountains and, for three hundred years, repulsed invasions by both lowlanders and Spanish colonizers.

  I do not hail from the Cordillera and I beg the forgiveness of its many and diverse peoples for any misreadings of their culture. As a storyteller I can only spin a pale imitation of any reality. I hope that this story awakens the world’s curiosity about this extraordinary time and place.

  With utmost respect to the people of the Cordillera,

  Candy Gourlay

  Acknowledgements

  With thanks to the British Library
, truly a Cave of Wonders, where I wrote most of this book.

  Respect and gratitude to the people of the Cordillera, in particular Suzette Bencio and Jerome Che-es, who hosted me during my stays in Maligcong, answered all my questions and showed me what mountain hospitality was all about. Thanks, too, to Jeremy Per-ayon, who sat with us around a fire and told stories about the old ways. Thank you to his son, Perky Per-ayon, who guided us up a mountain in total darkness to watch the sun rise and the sea of clouds bubble up into the horizon. And thank you to the stalwart mountain dog, Kunig, who accompanied us on long walks and herded us along on the steep paths through the rice terraces.

  With sincere thanks to the travel bloggers Oggie Ramos and Ferdz Decena, through whose blogs I learned about the secret glories of Maligcong. Imagine my surprise to meet them in person, totally by chance staying at the same homestay!

  I owe a debt to the long-ago men and women who wrote about their travels in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Philippines. I drew much detailed information from The Bontoc Igorot (1903) by Albert Jenks, who closely observed the people of Bontoc at the dawning of the American occupation of the Philippines – though it was from the diary and letters of his wife, Maude Huntley Jenks, that I found a more human and engaging picture of the Bontoc people. Her posthumous 1951 book, sensationally titled Death Stalks the Philippine Wilds, begins with disgust for the ‘savages’ she met in 1903, but ends with a warm affection for a people she had learned to love.

  Respect and gratitude to the historian William Henry Scott, who lived amongst the people of the Cordillera and made it his life’s work to amplify the voices of our native peoples from the historical accounts that reduced them to voiceless sideshows.

  Thank you to my friend Gregg Jones, for meticulously chronicling the forgotten war between the Philippines and the United States in his book, Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream.

  I am also grateful to Bel Castro for her essay ‘Food Morality and Politics’; to my cousin Susan Quimpo, who tried to help me get to grips with Philippine animism by lending me The Soul Book by Gilda Cordero Fernando, Francisco R. Demetrio and Fernando Zialcita, illustrated by Roberto B. Feleo; to the bloggers of The Aswang Project, especially Jordan Clark, whose constant interrogation of pre-Christian faiths and mythology helped me work out the belief systems of my characters. Thank you Xi Zug for helping me seek out readers. Thank you Gawani for your feedback. Thank you, Cristina Juan of the School of Oriental and Asian Studies for her advice and support (especially for introducing me to the Bontok Talking Dictionary of the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan), and to Bontoc film-maker Mark Lester Menor Valle, who helped me find a name for my village’s fictional enemy, the Mangili. Thank you also to Nash Tysmans, for her kind feedback as well as her vivid photography of one of the last remaining mossy forests in the Cordillera region.

  Thank you to my trusted author friends who read and re-read my draft chapters: Cliff McNish, Joe Friedman, Helen Peters and Christina Vinall – their responses helped me find the words to bridge many cultural gaps. Last minute thanks to Mio Debnam for boar odour advice and friendship.

  Thank you, Hilary Delamere, my ever-patient agent.

  And thanks to the team at David Fickling Books for keeping faith with my impossible story.

  Thank you, too, to my sister, Mia Quimpo, who walked the terraces with me.

  And as always to my husband, Richard – whose thoughts about the measure of a man helped me find a way out of my story labyrinth.

  Also by Candy Gourlay

  Tall Story

  Shine

  Copyright

  Bone Talk

  First published in 2018

  by David Fickling Books, 31 Beaumont Street, Oxford, OX1 2NP

  This ebook edition first published in 2018

  All rights reserved

  Text © Candy Gourlay, 2018

  Cover illustration © Kerby Rosanes, 2018

  The right of Candy Gourlay to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 978–1–78845–019–5