Dalin sank slowly to the ground. She did not speak. Moans were ripped from her—animal sounds that were not a wail, but the horrible nameless sound of grief.
Before the cocks crowed, the neighbors already knew. An-no had gone to them asking for old bamboo that could be made into a pallet for the corpse.
Dalin had objected. “We can just wrap him in a blanket and let the earth claim him,” she said.
“We have to bury him correctly,” An-no said.
After Dalin had changed the rags of the corpse, they brought it down and laid it on the woven slats which they had tied together to make a coffin. Beside it burned a candle which Istak had given her. Their job done, the men and their women dispersed. Only Dalin stayed near the improvised coffin.
Istak dozed in the house. When he awoke, he peered out the door and saw Dalin sitting alone on the stump. He went down to her.
“It is not for you to keep the wake,” she said. “I have already been a burden to all of you.”
“God sent you here,” Istak said. “We have to accept God’s will.”
“No, not God,” Dalin said. Her voice carried with it a challenge, but Istak did not want to argue with her. Besides—the thought came quickly—she was in mourning and she did not even have a black dress.
“It will soon be light,” Istak said. “How far have you traveled? Where did you come from?” He sat on the fork of the cart behind her.
She bowed and cupped her chin in her hand. “It does not matter anymore where I came from or where I will be going.”
The fine contours of her face, her straight back; she looked at him then and for the second time, their eyes locked.
“I am impolite,” she said. “You have all been helpful, you particularly. You really want to know where we came from?”
Istak nodded.
She turned away and cupped her chin in her palms again. “My parents were traders,” she said. “We had a boat—a fine boat—and we sailed up and down the coast twice a year. When its sails were full, its prow could slice the water with the case of a blade. Then came a storm and one evening, off the coast of Bawang, we were wrecked. Many things happened to me. I clung to the mast for two days. My husband—it was he who rescued me. He was going south to look for land and had found what he wanted there. We were going back to his people so that he could tell them the news—to Lawag. He was old enough to be my father, you know that. But I was grateful and I had nothing to give.”
Istak understood, but was curious just the same about how the old man had lost his hand.
She turned to him abruptly. “You don’t know?” she asked. “Isn’t your father without a hand, too?”
Istak was miserable and he regretted having asked the question at all.
“They called him a thief.” Her voice was almost a whisper. “It is the simplest crime and it could mean anything, from stealing time or a sack of grain for which you have slaved a week. They hung him by the hand. Now, does it really matter where I come from or where I am going?”
What was there to say? Istak closed his eyes and tried to blot out the vision flowing to the narrow pit of his brain—the old man with eyes closed, the stump for a hand.
“But don’t pity me,” she said with that brightness that steered him away from his thoughts. “It is fate. Now I have no more home.”
“Then stay with us,” Istak said. “You are safe here and there is food—not much, but you will not be hungry. And there is always work and we will not bother you with your memories. Let the scabs harden and fall without our prodding.”
“I would rather keep moving,” she said. “Return to my home if there is a boat that will take me back, or to that plain which my husband saw, farther down Pangasinan, up the mountains, and then below—”
“Did you se it?”
She nodded. “I have been there,” she said, and then was silent as if remembering all the bitterness that was banished. She spoke again, this time in quiet joy. “You can smell the land. Its freshness is in the air, in the light—all through the day. You can taste it in the water from the spring, in the flavor of the three-month grain. The plain is all around you, vast as the world, and without hills. It melts, hazy and blue with the sky, as far as you can see. The forest is there, too, alive with wild boar, deer, and pythons as big as coconut trunks, they say, and just as long. But it is a forest that is kind. It belongs to no one and anyone who goes into it soon loses fear of the dark. You become part of the forest, they say, your veins grow out of you like roots seeking the soil. In the forest, you can live even if you do not hunt. A new life awaits you there.”
Istak listened, intoxicated and believing every word. He had heard of the new land, too, not just from the traders who had gone to the coast then backtracked through Pangasinan but from the Igorots whom he had met when he and Padre Jose had gone all the way to Natonin, and there, at the top of the mountain, they had looked down at God’s country.
“If we could only leave,” he said. “Here, we are fortunate if we own a farm as big as the palm of our hands. All the land we till is not ours.”
He stood up and walked to the tamarind stump where she sat. The fireflies that had ignited the dalipawen tree had taken flight and disappeared in the bowels of the night. The air had become crisper and it filled his lungs with sweetness. Soon it would be light. “But what does the future hold for us? We are tied here forever,” he said, rubbing his palms; they had begun to harden. They were soft once, almost like a woman’s, because he had not held a plow for years and what he held were books, pens, and an occasional broom. And Dalin’s hands—were they also as rough as his mother’s? He took her hand. It was rough, as he knew it would be, and she did not draw it away.
“Do not worry,” he told her, freeing her hand. “Although a widow, you are still very young.”
“It was not my wish to be one,” she said. “He knew I cared for him, that I tried to give him back his health. I wanted to make him happy.”
“He is a handsome corpse,” Istak said. “When we bury him in the morning, you will know what I mean. I was a sacristan and a teacher, too.” He wanted to tell her more but he held back. He did not want to sound boastful. “Even if we do not take the body to church for the priest to bless—I know all the prayers. Do you believe that?”
She nodded.
“I could beg the new priest,” Istak continued. “Maybe he will not let us pay.”
She suddenly stood up. “I will not take him to the church,” she said stiffly.
“That will be a sin.”
“It is his wish, not mine,” Dalin said shrilly, walking away. He followed her.
“I am only suggesting what is right,” he said.
She turned to him. “But we must respect the wishes of the dead. Even before he became sick, this was what he told me, that there should be no church ritual for him, that it was enough that either the sea or the earth claimed him back. If God is everywhere, we don’t have to go to church, do we? He knows where we are, and if He is a just God, He will also forgive.”
He would have to believe her. For the poor, there is only God’s bounty to pray for. He had long known that God’s ministers could usurp the Word and twist it for their gain and comfort or, as it was clear to him now, for their merest whim. All of them in Po-on and in the other villages of Cabugaw—they could all be banished from the land they had claimed from the forest and farmed all their lives—all of them who were dark of skin, who were not adorned with titles of power, who did not wear the cloth.
In the grass that surrounded the yard, crickets started again and a gecko in the buri palm announced itself, its tek-ka keen as a whip in the still air. “He knew he was going to die,” Dalin continued. “He had this wish and I promised I would fulfill it.”
The east had paled and the cocks that roosted in the guava trees and among the fish traps under the house started to crow. The narrow cracks of the split-bamboo wall framed strips of light. In a while, he heard his mother stirring in the kitchen. Breakfast would be r
eady soon—fried rice, perhaps, and coffee brewed from roasted corn and flavored with molasses.
Dalin walked back to the cart, Istak behind her. “You must get some sleep,” he told her. “My mat has not been rolled yet. You can go up to the house.”
Gratitude shone in her face. She went toward the house and disappeared within. He heard his mother call out to him to go to the woodshed and bring up an armful of firewood.
The candle at the foot of the coffin had burned out and Istak lighted another and stuck it in the soft warm wax. As he turned for the woodshed, An-no came down and followed him. Istak was about to draw wood from the stack when An-no gripped him on the shoulder and spun him around. Surprised, Istak dropped the dry acacia branches and turned to his younger brother, who now confronted him, brawny as a bull and just as headstrong.
“I don’t like the way you move about in this house,” An-no said, throwing away the respect a younger brother should always give to an elder.
Istak was stunned. “You act like you are the best man here,” An-no continued. “Not just in the house, but in the entire village. That is perhaps correct—you are the learned one. But don’t forget, it is now we who feed you.”
Istak recovered from his shock. “What nonsense are you talking about?” he asked sternly. “Have you forgotten I am the eldest?”
“I have not forgotten that,” An-no said quietly. He was eighteen but farm work had made him appear older. “But there is no younger or older when it concerns a woman.”
“What are you talking about?” Istak asked. Anger had coiled in him.
“You know what I mean,” An-no said. “I found her, I brought her here. We made her husband’s coffin. Bit-tik and I. You did nothing but snore …”
Istak moved away from his brother. “She is a widow, have you forgotten?”
“Does it matter?”
“And she is much older than you. A full five years!”
“And you say that she is about your age and just the woman for you? I found her first,” An-no reiterated sharply. “And she will be mine. You must not stop me. I will take her and if she won’t come, I will make her.” He turned and marched away.
For some time Istak stood immobile, unable to think, unable to respond to his brother’s sudden anger. It was not real, it did not happen at all—this aberration. Slowly, he stooped and groped for the branches that had fallen and, finding them, placed them one by one in the crook of his arm. His hands started to feel numb and he paused and stood up with but three branches. An-no would do what he threatened and he would not be able to stop him. He would never be able to be firm, to be a rock before anyone because his hands were like the dead branches he carried. He was like his father, and even more like the dead man they were to bury, a cripple to himself and to all the creatures in this miasma called Po-on.
CHAPTER
2
The Darkness began to lift and the eastern rim of the world was tinted with silver. In a while, the cocks dropped from their roosts in the guava trees with a noisy flapping of wings and chased the cackling hens, and the sun burst upon the land in a flood of dazzling light, flowed over the foothills, and its rays impaled the mists upon the kapok trees.
They sat down to a breakfast of corn coffee and bowls of rice fried in fresh coconut oil. Dalin sat at one end of the low eating table, taking sips from the coconut bowl which Mayang had passed to her.
Istak could see her clearly now, the brooding eyes, the thick eyebrows. Even in her gray, shapeless blouse of handwoven Iloko cloth, the contours of her body—her bosom, her shoulders—were as lovely as those of Carmencita, the eldest of Capitán Berong’s daughters, whom he had taught the cartilla. His brother stared at him, bothering him with his unspoken enmity. Istak left the table quickly and went down the yard to make a hearse of the bull cart. His mother followed him. Some of the neighbors who had come in the night—mostly relatives, cousins, and second cousins—had returned. Istak scraped off the candle smudge on the tamarind stump and put the half-burned candle in his pocket.
“Are you thinking of her, son?” Mayang asked.
The question surprised him. “Of whom, Mother?”
“The beautiful stranger,” she said simply.
He did not know what to make of his mother’s question. He decided to be evasive. “It is very sad that at her age,” he said, “she is already a widow.”
“She has not cried that much.”
“Not all those who shed tears really grieve.”
“Still, we do not know anything about her. We help because she needs it.”
“I know that, Mother,” Istak said. “Why are you telling me this?”
Mayang smiled. “My son, it is about time you had a woman, I know. But Dalin—do not let her and her misfortune mislead you into believing that she is helpless, that you should rush into helping her, then loving her.” She turned toward the brown fields beyond the arbor of bamboo which served as a gateway to the village. Beyond, in the far distance, loomed the dome of Cabugaw Church like a woman’s breast pressed to the sky. Her voice became soft, almost a whisper. “I can feel it—this omen creeping into our lives. Something is hounding her. Once we have done what is Christian, we should let her seek her fate.”
Istak smiled. Omens. It was as if he were in Cabugaw again, listening to Padre Jose after a break in his Latin lessons. The old priest had decided to teach him Latin when he was twelve or thirteen, and him alone, there in the sacristy itself, after he had dusted the shelves and seen to it that all the ledgers were in place. “Eustaquio, there are many things in this world that we cannot sec, spirits that move about us, things we cannot explain, not even with the faith that we possess.”
The old priest said he knew things which he was utterly ignorant of when he arrived in the Ilokos. Past seventy and too old to care, he could now say what he never dared whisper when he was young, the mystery of this land, the beliefs rooted in an experience that only a pagan past could have engendered.
Istak held his mother by the shoulder as if to assure her that he knew what he was doing, that no harm would befall them. “Evil is often a creation of our minds, Mother,” he said. “It starts as a spark, then it is fanned into a fire, self-willed and self-sustaining. No, Mother, if we do not think about it, if we do not let it bother us, it will not be there. This is not to say that there are no evil men, but our best protection against them is our innocence and our truth.” This was real Christian virtue, but even as he said this, his thoughts were about his younger brother. Did his mother know what An-no had told him in the woodshed? Had she seen his younger brother’s face—the unbridled desire for Dalin which had now warped his mind?
He found himself saying, “It is An-no, Mother, that I am worried about, not Dalin.”
“What has he told you?” Mayang asked. “Fool sons of mine—I could see him following her all the time with his eyes the way you do. And she had just been widowed. It is a sin!”
Istak shook his head. “You see more than what is there, Mother.”
But Mayang did not hear, for she had turned to leave, mumbling, “My sons, my fool sons.”
They were set to leave. Dalin came down the bamboo stairs, wearing a well-starched skirt. An-no walked behind her, a dark scowl on his face. Together they went to Istak, who had, by then, removed the palm-leaf canopy of the cart.
An-no told him: “I want to go to the cemetery to help dig the grave. It is better if there are two of us.”
“What is this now?” Istak turned to Dalin, perplexed. She had washed her face and her skin shone.
“I tried to explain,” Dalin said, “that I don’t want anyone but the two of us to go to the cemetery—you because you can say the prayers and help me dig the grave. Just the two of us—it is best that way. I don’t want to be a bother to people the way I already am. And the cemetery is far.” She turned to An-no. “How can I repay you? You made the coffin, you brought me here. I will have a lifetime paying you for all you have done. But it is my wish that you s
tay …”
An-no dug his toe into the ground and mumbled something unintelligible.
“Help me carry the coffin,” Istak asked his brother, and together they brought it to the cart. The few neighbors who had gathered in the yard had heard her wish, and to them she said, “God be with you, thank you for coming.”
They drove out of the yard. Istak whacked the reins on the broad back of the bull and the cart dipped down the low incline onto the dusty path lined with dying weeds. The trip would take the whole morning and it would almost certainly be high noon before they would reach the cemetery. The brown fields spread around them. To their right, the Cordilleras seemed so near though they were at a far distance. Since he went to Cabugaw ten years ago, he had gone up these ranges every year during the dry season when the rivers were no longer bloated. Padre Jose always brought with them four of the best horses in the church stable. The old priest did not ride the best one; he reserved it for the tortuous trails to the land of the Igorots that lay beyond the narrow pass called Tirad. Istak had looked forward to these trips, to the rambling discourses of the old priest, to the meetings with the Igorots whom he finally got to know—and yes, to see them again—the bare-breasted girls who worked the narrow valleys and mountainsides, their arms tattooed, their bodies glistening with sweat in the sunlight.
He carried the Iloko missal, the holy water, and candles; on their two-pack horses were their ration of water, some salt, sugar, hand-rolled cigars (which the old priest was addicted to), salted meat, rice, and their iron cooking pot. He soon learned the way so well, it seemed he had lived in this forbidden land all his life. He knew them, too, the Igorots, who did not harm them although his own people expected otherwise; the Igorots were savages—did they not kill strangers or one another when their tribal laws were violated?
Now the mountains beckoned to him—if he could only flee this withered plain and lose himself up there close to the clouds where the air is so pure it made breathing such a pleasure. Maybe someday he would be able to go there again and forget what had happened, break out of the mountains into the valleys beyond. Dalin was beside him, and though he did not believe what his mother had said, she seemed to have cast a spell over him.
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