Dusk

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BANTAY, ILOKOS SUR

MAY 3, 1880

My Very Beloved in Christ,

Reverend Father Superior:

Once again, I will acquaint Your Reverence with what has transpired in this distant post where I served for more than forty years, and once again I will summarize my activities during my last year there and beg your indulgence for what I will relate, knowing full well that you have grown tired of listening to me, particularly my insistence that we need more young people in the missions and, therefore, more of the Indios in the seminaries.

As evidenced by these figures from the mission, you will note moreover that the baptisms and marriages have increased while the deaths — barring another epidemic of cholera or smallpox — have decreased.

From these records, Your Reverence will also see, perhaps with some satisfaction, that there has been an increase in the population, not just in Cabugaw but in other towns, sometimes as much as double, during the last ten years. This makes it really necessary for us to build more churches — an activity for which we have always been known, attesting to our capabilities as builders, and for which I am justly proud.

The entire region is showing commercial importance. While it is true that indigo has been our best crop, now we are also harvesting more cotton. The woven cotton sent to other regions of Filipinas has increased. The raising of draft animals continues and our horses are sold all the way to Manila, where they often win at the races. I hear that even the Archbishop keeps some of these beautiful animals. As a matter of fact, when I was transferred here from Cabugaw because, as Your Reverence said, of old age and infirmity, I had hoped to be sent to Manila instead so that I could see how these horses run in the races. Having cared for them, I know their breed has improved. As for their endurance, I have ridden them across the Cordilleras several times. They have been reliable, and sturdy as well.

As for tobacco, it is true that the crop has increased the revenues and pleased the principalia, but the monopoly has created for us many problems. It has transformed honest men into thieves. We have had this monopoly for decades and I am glad that it will soon end.

Early next year, I will celebrate my fiftieth year in the priesthood, most of these years in Filipinas. Half a century! That I have served this long, still read without glasses, and write with an even hand as you can see, proves that I am still capable and should not be shut up in retirement. I should be ministering to the people or actively teaching in the seminary across the river.

But the wishes of Your Reverence must be served.

I must now reiterate my thinking about the conditions, not only in our province, as I know them and as gleaned from travelers.

The people have not forgotten the execution of the three mestizo priests in Cavile eight years ago. They were from distinguished families noted for their urbanity, education, and of course, loyalty to Mother Spain. It is not for me to recall the ecclesiastical arguments concerning this tragic event; people of greater experience and wisdom have already commented on it. I am merely looking back and reexamining the arguments or the circumstances from which we can learn so that we may continue to build the Church as strongly as we have done during the last three centuries.

I say this knowing that in other parts of the world, particularly in America Sur, our influence is no longer what it used to be. Even here in Nueva Segovia this demonic English organization, this Masonry, has already reached out with its evil tentacles under alluring guises and seduced some ilustrados.

But before I proceed, may I describe what I consider to be the Ilokano character. I will make generalizations and, of course, there are exceptions, for in any community there will be those who do not conform.

The half century I have lived here has convinced me that the Ilokano is trustworthy; he knows gratitude and regards it as a paramount virtue. If we were to look for friends, they should be Ilokanos because I cannot think of a more loyal people than they. They are also hardworking, persevering, and frugal Their industry is such that they work from early dawn to late at night, particularly if there is moonlight, unlike the Tagalog and the Bisaya. And they have enduring patience. The women sit at the loom all day long. They harvest their rice stalk by stalk, and not with the sickle. They are not only patient, for after the harvest there is not a single grain in the field that has not been gleaned.

They do not waste anything — everything is useful. The trees around their homes, the plants in their gardens — all bear fruit or can be eaten. But beware; the water buffalo is a patient, friendly, and docile animal, but when it is angered, it is also the most vicious of creatures. Run away from it for your life is in danger — this we must always remember. Our tragic experience with the rebel Diego Silang has shown that such madness can spread like the plague.

The Ilokanos are true Catholics and nowhere else have they built churches as industriously and as devotedly as they have in this province. They are truly devout and they observe all the holy days of obligation.

I say all this, Your Reverence, because I feel deeply about what is happening in this part of the country, the growing discontent that is not yet expressed but will soon be. We could do so much as men of God to show to our flock that we not only mean well, but that it is only under the protection of Mother Spain that this land can be with God and progress.

Your Reverence, we have often prided ourselves on our sense of history. Indeed, history should be kind to us, for we have not been remiss in our tasks. But our service was not always tempered with wisdom. We know that we are not going to be here forever, that the institutions we are building can only last for as long as they are cared for by Indios themselves. For them we have already given our time, our sweat, and even our lives. And I worry that they will not care for these nor will they bother to strengthen what we leave them if they don’t see these — our ministrations and the Church — as theirs. It cannot be otherwise; these institutions are in their land although we transferred them from a distant peninsula.

It is not for me, Your Reverence, to blunder into a realm about which I know little. But I have lived here so long, I can feel the passions which, I know, are seething in the hearts of many in my flock. This is not our country and these people are not related to us by blood. A wide and cruel ocean separates us and, try as we may to impart to them what we know, they will always be Indios and we, Spaniards. They will imitate us and we flatter ourselves hoping that it is the best side of our nature that they will copy — the dignity, the pride that we have in ourselves. But this will not be so; they will instead inherit our vices, and as I look around me, I can already see what those are — the greed and the corruption that exist in the highest reaches of the principalia here as it had existed, too, in Valladolid.

This is not what we want. When the time comes, I pray that we will go peacefully.

For the first time, some of their young men are now in Europe, learning what we ourselves have learned. Surely, they will return, their minds enlightened, their thinking broadened, in a way perhaps that ours would never be because we wear the cloth. While we have a spiritual depth which they cannot equal, they will also be more familiar with the secular world, which we sometimes do not fully understand.

It is inevitable, I think, that they should be prepared not just for the duties which all citizens of Filipinas should shoulder, but more than this, they should be equal partners in the leadership. The world is changing; we have already seen what happened to our provinces in the Americas. The time approaches when they should sit side by side with us in our highest councils not because this is what they want but because this is what we ourselves desire.

This means that there should be more Indios selected not just from the principalia and the mestizo families, but from the peasantry, who will have to go beyond the cartilla. In the seminary, I should be teaching not just a dozen pupils but three or five dozen so that our strength and our influence will be permanent.

Forgive me, Reverend Father, for what I now have to say. Forgive these thoughts of an old man who has been touched, perhaps by fever, but just the same, please listen.

Eventually, we may have to admit into our Order the native priests we have trained and train them further in our Houses in Spain, not because we believe they are equal to us — which is sometimes difficult for me to believe because I have always regarded them as children — but because they should be able to manage their own house eventually as all children must when they grow up.

Your Reverence, I know that there are loud dissenting voices in our fraternity, that our military grumbles, and many of the officers find the idea abhorrent. In your last visit to the mission, for instance, I am sure that you remember Capitán Gualberto of the Lawag garrison, how trenchant his views. But Your Reverence knows as well as I do that where the sword is used, the cross is cursed. Capitán Gualberto’s objections are not really insurmountable, as can be seen by the effectiveness of our ministrations where we have persevered.

In the Ilokos, Your Reverence, we have succeeded because we have remained and worked with the people, who showered us with goodwill and sincerity. These cannot but be reciprocated.

I have mentioned how bright some of our wards have been, and it is very sad to see that they cannot go beyond the schooling now permitted them. Some ten years ago, for instance, I brought into the mission in Cabugaw a farm boy of ten whom I had confirmed. There was something in the boy’s face which proclaimed not just his intelligence but qualities of leadership. I taught him Latin, too, gave him the books those studying for the priesthood read. I also taught him the little I know of physics, astronomy, botany, and explained to him the native plants of medicinal value. I taught him what I knew of anatomy. I let him read The Confessions. He was full of questions.

He showed great intelligence, for which his race is not particularly noted. I am aware of the advice against someone from the lowest ranks eventually joining the priesthood. He is still in Cabugaw and I mention him only to show how capable they are in learning and, perhaps, in administering their own affairs, so that those of us in the Order can attend to the more important duties at hand — the eradication, for instance, of Masonry.

We have been here so long. This alone convinces me of our God-given obligation to the Indios. I expect to spend my last days here in Bantay just as so many of us have done and I am happy that my life is my contribution to Mother Spain and to God.

We will be reviled, as, indeed, this is already being done by envious men of dark intent, but it is only because they do not appreciate the legacy that Catholic Spain has bestowed upon them, a legacy which assures them, even if they don’t believe it, of one foot in heaven.

I remain, your devoted servant.

Jose Leon, S.A.

The concerns of Eustaquio Salvador, the sacristan about whom I have spoken with much praise in this letter, matter to me very much, Your Reverence. May I seek your permission that he be allowed to enter the seminary in Vigan? I ask this knowing that he will fulfill his duties with loyalty and devotion, and that he will serve his people and Mother Spain.

CHAPTER 1

Dusk is the day’s most blessed hour; it is the time when the spirits of darkness drift slowly down the bright domain. The acacia leaves droop, the fowl stop their cackling and fly to the boughs of the guava trees to roost, and as the light starts to fade and the shapes of trees and houses and even the motions of people seem shrouded, the essence of time, of change, and the brevity of life itself is realized at last.

Istak often felt like this about the day’s end. If he were still in Cabugaw, where he had served as acolyte for the last ten years, he would now be going up the musty flight of adobe to the belfry. There, in the murk of early evening, he would toll the Angelus, stirring the bats that hung in the rotting eaves. It would be dark when he would go down the flight, the clap of bells still humming in his ears. In the past, he sometimes bumped into a protruding abutment, but he had learned to avoid the traps in the corners. Down the dim hollow, he would hurry, hurry to the convent where old Padre Jose had already said the Vespers and would be waiting to impart his blessings to Istak first because he was the oldest and the best, and then to the younger acolytes.

Now, it was dusk again. He hurried up the path to their house at the other end of the village. A lightness of spirit lifted him; he would have the first good meal ever since he left the convent. In the late afternoon, before he went to the fields, he had watched his mother dress the chicken; told her he must have the gizzard and the liver. Mayang had humored him with the promise, then sent him back to the field to help fill the gaps in the dikes before the rains came and ripped them apart.

The low eating table was set and around it sat his mother and father and Bit-tik, his youngest brother. Only An-no was not present, for he had gone to Cabugaw to give the new priest their gift. Istak bade his parents good evening, but only his mother returned his greeting. The old man’s silence worried Istak; his father was moody again. In the orange glow of the oil lamp, his face was lined. His front teeth had been knocked out by a civil guard’s rifle butt and as Ba-ac chewed, the depression in his right check deepened.

Istak dipped his hand into the shallow bowl of water. Mayang had prepared a tasty broth; she had chopped fresh ginger together with green papayas, and now the scent of chicken and spice came to his nostrils.

“Here is the gizzard,” his mother said. She picked the piece from the still-steaming pot which she had placed in the middle of the low eating table and, as in a ceremony, placed it on Istak’s plate. Bit-tik, the youngest of her three sons, took the pot by its narrow rim. He was fifteen and hungry. He, too, had his favorite piece and he held the pot obliquely to the light and, shaking it, examined its contents.

“Enough of that!” Mayang whacked her son’s hand. She got the pot back, and with the ladle scooped out a leg and served her husband next.

Ba-ac picked up the leg and dropped it on Bit-tik’s plate. He turned to his wife. “Let him eat the best. There is no use fattening chicken if we only give it away to the priest.” He dipped his left hand — his good hand — into the pot and drew out the other leg. Shaking it before his wife’s face, he continued, “How many did An-no bring to town? How many did we give for the salvation of our souls?”

Mayang was worried. Her husband was talking loudly. The neighbors might hear; they were all relatives, but still, what he said was almost blasphemy. She feared moments like this. It was as if in the caves, in the corners among the torn fish traps and under the house, gnomes listened. She had known him all her life, even when she was still a child and he was already a man. She was just forty, almost thirty years younger than her husband — and the first touch of gray had come to her hair. She wore the drab gray cloth which she herself wove for the family and had suffered the weaving, sitting for hours before the wooden loom under the house until it was too shadowed to see the shuttle and yarn, and now she seemed to have developed a stoop as well. Her head bowed, Mayang cupped with her fingers a small ball of rice from her plate.

“I am speaking to you, Old Woman,” Ba-ac said, his voice rising. “I ask again, how many chickens and eggs have we sent to the new priest while you let your sons starve?”

“Ay, Old Man, you haven’t learned.”

She turned to her two boys as if she wanted them to agree with her. At her right, Istak was hunched before the table. If he stood straight, he was taller than his father. His brow was high, implying to her a keenness of mind. He had, after all, stayed in the convent for ten years, teaching catechism not just to the children of Capitán Berong — Cabugaw’s wealthiest citizen — but to the offspring of other mestizos. Padre Jose had opened to him not just what he knew of philosophy but also practical knowledge that had enabled him and the other Augustinians to thrive in another land, often inhospitable, often alien to their own customs. Istak’s hair, though cropped short, was not bristly like a pig’s, but soft and pressed flat and shiny with coconut oil which made not only his hair but his skin shine in the sallow light.

Ay! He was indeed the marked one, and on his face — once pale like a banana stalk — Mayang’s eyes lingered.

The oil lamp started to flicker and Istak pushed out the reed-marrow wick. He reached out to the corner and took a small jar filled with fresh coconut oil and let a few drops trickle onto his plate. Then he filled the earthen hollow of the lamp. It burned brighter and showed clearly what hung from the palm-leaf wall — the squash headgear, the fish nets.

“Old Woman!” Ba-ac was insistent.

Mayang braved her husband’s baleful stare. “I want to cat, Old Man. Eat, too, and receive God’s grace.”

Her husband would not be mollified. He waved his stump of a hand. “It is not God’s grace but ours,” he said hotly. “Ours which you sent to town today. How many chickens did you give that young priest so that he will save our souls?”

Mayang turned to her eldest son, as if in apology. “Your father Does not know what he is saying—”

“I know,” Ba-ac interrupted her. “You answer my question.”

“You will know when An-no returns with our indulgences,” she said, trying to humor him, for her tone became light. She went to the jar by the stove. When she returned, she had a large coconut shell filled with drinking water.

“I will not wait for An-no,” Ba-ac said. He turned to his eldest son. “You helped catch the chickens, didn’t you? How many were there?”

“Five, Father,” Istak said softly. He dropped the ball of rice he had just lifted to his mouth. He had lost his appetite as the old and nagging futility of it all started to ride him again. He could not understand why he felt weak like this every time his father, in his blabbering rage, shook his stump of a hand as if it were some proud emblem.

“Five chickens for his birthday. Multiply that by a thousand because there are a thousand households in Cabugaw. How many then will he get on his birthday? Think — then look at us. How many times do we have chicken on our table? Istak did live well when he was in town! He should go back there so we can be sure that when we send food to the convent, our son will benefit from it.”

“I am no longer wanted there, Father. You know it.”

“Be it that way then,” Ba-ac said. The old man leaned forward, clenched his one good hand, and brought it down viciously on the table. The plates shook and the light — almost drowned by the oil — sputtered and dimmed.

“Stop this foolishness, you one-handed fool!” Mayang screamed. It was her time to be angry. Bit-tik continued eating, unmindful of what was happening. He straightened the pot and stirred the broth to see if there was some special piece he might yet pick.

“So I am one-handed,” Ba-ac said, his voice quivering. “They should have killed me instead of lopping off just one hand.”

“Be glad that you have one left; be glad you are alive, that you have sons who tend the field and look after you.” She was no longer eating. The night had become grim.

Istak stood up and, without a word, walked away from the table. The slats creaked under him and the bamboo ladder, too, as he stepped down into the yard, where even the fleas must be asleep at this hour. He passed the bull cart parked in the shadow of the house. Tears burned in his eyes and he tried to hold them back but could not; so, too, the shame and the rage that had become a noose around his throat. He sat down on the tamarind stump by the bull cart and sobbed quietly. Let me not think ill of my father, for he has suffered. I never had and if at all, it is but here in the mind. I was never tied to a post and lashed, nor hung by one hand till the arm rotted off. But I have known pain just as keen because it lashed at the mind and heart. If only I were in Cabugaw again.…

Only a month ago, he had lived fully, complacently, serving the kindly priest. But Padre Jose had grown old and had to be retired in Bantay. And one morning, in the motionless clarity of April, a carriage drawn by two Abra horses rolled into the churchyard and disgorged a young priest. His black cassock, unlike Padre Jose’s, which was always soiled and frayed, was neat and pressed. His eyes were sky blue and his hair was the color of honey. His mouth was large and sensuous, and his voice when he summoned Istak brimmed with authority. Istak kissed the white hand, and as he looked up, the blue eyes regarded him, “You must be Eustaquio,” the young priest said, and Istak replied in polite Spanish.

“Padre Jose thinks you should study in the seminary in Vigan. I have heard you are quite learned, you even know Latin.”

But of what use was all this knowledge now? Around him was the night, total and vast, the cold sparkle of stars. The lamps of the other houses had all been snuffed out, but the crown of the dalipawen tree was ablaze with a thousand fireflies, and on a night like this, the spirits would be there, in harmony with the world in a way he was not.

To the west, rockets swished up the black bowl of sky, then burst among the stars, and moments later, the hollow whumps of their explosions came. It was like this, too, when the birthday of Padre Jose was marked as the birthday of the new priest was now being celebrated. Istak recalled how mountains of food and fruit from as far away as Manila would be set in the hall of the convent and the crowds would spill beyond the church doors into the yard. And shortly after the High Mass, in the heat of day, the old priest would sit on his carved, broad-backed chair in the shadow of the convent door and there the long line would begin — the principalia first, the village leaders, then the people — all would come to kiss the old man’s hand and present their tokens of respect and indebtedness.

Ten years he was witness to this ritual of homage and obedience; ten years, too, he pondered and recited Virgil and Cicero, taught the children of Cabugaw’s nobility, Capitán Berong’s mischievous daughters — Carmencita, most of all. He had served in the Mass for so long, he could be a priest if it were just the liturgy that had to be mastered. Ten years and he saw his palms slowly shed their coarseness just as a serpent discards its skin in molting. What have I brought back with me from the house where God breathed? What have I done to myself and to this puerile mind? Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine—he remembered the lines and found in them neither solace nor meaning. And yet, thinking of Cabugaw again, remembering how difficult it would have been for Padre Jose to live alone, Istak felt a sense of achievement. As the oldest of the acolytes, he had helped Padre Jose in keeping the records, in going to the Igorotc country, and in running the affairs of the church. It was perhaps out of gratitude that the old man called him to his room one afternoon and said, “Eustaquio, I will send you to the seminary in Vigan if you want to be a priest. You are now twenty.”

The letter was written but Vigan was a full day away on horseback and the old priest was taken ill. A week later, he was ordered to live out his last years in Bantay and teach in the Vigan seminary across the river, an hour or so a day if he could.

The father’s footfall was soft and slow; and, in a while, Istak could hear the old man’s heavy breathing. But he did not speak for some time.

Ba-ac spoke finally, the anger gone from him. “Do you want to return to Cabugaw?”

Without turning, “No, Father. I am not wanted there anymore.”

“But you are! You are!” Ba-ac cried. “Oh, my son, you don’t know your worth. Here, nothing. But there, everything.”

Istak let his father continue.

“Sometimes, I pray my strength will return so I would be able to take you away from this dark pit where we have all been flung. But I don’t have the hand to do it and so I say words I never really mean. I am not cruel. Does any one of my children think I am? Yet, I sometimes sound like I am and only because of this arm …”

Istak turned to his father. In the darkness, he could see the wasted face, the stoop, the shabby clothes that clung to the shriveled frame.

“Go to town tomorrow,” Ba-ac repeated. “You are needed there. The sacristans must have a place for you, even in the kitchen. Padre Zarraga should take you back. Beg him. Your place is there.”

“My place is here, too,” Istak said quickly. “You know I can handle the plow as well as An-no.”

“That is not to your liking.” Ba-ac was insistent. “I have known it since that day Padre Jose selected you. I still remember what he said, that you will go far because your mind is sharp. But what can I teach you?”

His father was going to start the ancient miserere again.

“How does a one-armed fool feel? Do you know what the priest did to me, Istak? Do you know how it is to be like this? He had no mercy, son. And he was a man of the cloth, a friar, a Spaniard!”

Istak had heard the story a hundred times, but he never stopped the old man, for every time he told the story, it seemed that the searing pain was eased a little.

“They hung me by the wrist of my right hand. How could I go to work on the new church when I was with fever? But they did not believe me and a week it was — a week and maybe longer. And when they brought me down, this arm was dead. I felt nothing but a rage as large as a house. And my arm — it was bloated and red. They cut it off — I watched them do it and I did not wince. I wrapped what they had cut off with banana leaves and buried it by the trail. They hung me by the right hand — and this stump — I swear to God, I stole nothing, not even time. Am I really a thief the way I am now marked? I stole not a single grain to feed you. You are the eldest, you know that. When I took you to town — a small boy then, barely up to my waist you were — but you were old enough then and you knew. Tell me, my son, that you believe me.”

“Yes, Father,” Istak said and within him he cried, Yes! I believe you. He rose, wrapped an arm around his father’s shoulder. “There is nothing we can do but understand that we have to live, to know that we die when the time comes. As for the priests, not all of them are bad. Padre Jose — he would have helped if he had known. But he did not …”

“Still, you cannot rot here. Even Capitán Berong — he said you should be in Vigan, Lawag — or even Manila, where there are schools.”

“They are not for us, Father, and you know that,” Istak said. “But with Padre Jose’s help, I could have gotten in.”

“You will not return to Cabugaw, then, if the new priest asks you?”

Istak turned away and did not answer. He would not take me back because he is young and so am I. But more than this, he will not take me back because I know what he has done; he cannot share a roof with a witness to his mortal sin.

Across the black maw beyond the cluster of houses, a steady barking of dogs broke out. “Must be An-no,” Ba-ac said tentatively.

Istak grunted and sat on the tree stump again. The whirr of crickets diminished, the barking of the dogs ceased, and the night became quiet once more. A breeze stirred and wafted to them the smell of dead leaves and the dung of animals. The sky above Cabugaw was slashed by the trail of a rocket. The thin line exploded, then came the distant whump. A dog barked again as a bull cart strained up the incline of the irrigation ditch before the village. Istak and Ba-ac turned to where the sound of creaking wheels came from.

The bull cart rolled past the other houses and headed for them. A couple sat on the bar before its bamboo canopy. As the cart stopped, An-no jumped down and went to Ba-ac at once, held his father’s good hand and pressed it to his brow in salutation.

“You went to town on foot,” Ba-ac said.

In the dark, the woman greeted them. Istak could not see her face, but her voice was warm and accented. The cart had a canopy; the visitor must have come from afar. She got down after An-no. Even in the dimness, although her face was indistinct, Istak could see that she was young. She did not have the stoop of an old woman. “She is Dalin,” An-no said, introducing her. He was younger than Istak by two years, but though younger, he was bigger; the work on the farm had made him stronger, too. “They came from the land of salt,” An-no announced.

“They?” Ba-ac asked.

“Her husband is in the cart,” An-no continued. “Sick. He did not even speak all the way from the fork of the road where I saw them.”

“He is dying,” the woman said. Istak could make out her face now — a young face, with a full mouth and eyes that were large and bright.

“I am grateful to your son, Apo,” she told Ba-ac. “I could not find the way. We have to hurry to anyone who knows how to care for the sick. My husband — since yesterday, he has been talking without reason and is very hot with fever. I must hurry.”

Ba-ac ordered An-no to unhitch the bull cart and invited the woman up to the house, where a bowl of chicken broth awaited her. Having heard the voices, Mayang came down and joined them. She held a burning pine splinter and in its smoky glow, her face was serene. Now, Istak could see Dalin’s handsome face, her shapeless cotton blouse, the full breasts underneath. In a glance Istak knew, too, that she had not yet known childbirth. She looked around her, at the family that welcomed her, and her voice quavered. “Thank God, I am with good people.”

“You are very young,” Istak said, amazed he had spoken the thought aloud at all, and when he turned away in embarrassment, his younger brother was glaring at him.

Istak took the torch from his mother and went to the cart. In its red glow, he saw what was inside — the sacks at one end, the figure stretched motionless on the bamboo floor — an old man with a pinched face and eyes closed.

“He is asleep,” Istak said, peering briefly at them from the opening of the canopy. In that instant, a gust of wind snuffed out the light. Istak bent low to feel the man’s pulse. In the last few years that he had worked in Cabugaw, Padre Jose had taught him what he knew of sicknesses, how to look at a person and from the feel of his pulse, his warmth, deduce what ails him. Istak’s hand rested on the man’s arm and he found no wrist or hand — just a stump that had grown cold. Like his father, the man did not have a right hand!

I have seen men die as Padre Jose recited the last unction and I stood beside him, holding aloft the cross before the eyes that sometimes could no longer see. I have seen the dead in repose, in wooden coffins, or just wrapped up in old blankets, buri mats, or even bamboo slats from fish traps. I have stared at their sallow faces even as the holy water was splashed on their ashen skins like rain upon stone. I have seen them, but touched them, never.

A chill came over Istak and he pitched out of the cart, the splinter smoking in his hand. “Your husband is dead,” he said.

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 ready 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 stay …”

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.

The bull loped down the trail and the wheels hit a bump — a root of a tree. Briefly their arms touched.

“Why did you not want them to come along?” he asked afterward. The village was well behind them, just a line of madre de cacao trees.

She turned to him, her face determined. “I told you I would bury him anywhere. That is why it is just the two of us. Over there, at the bend of the river where An-no came upon us, beyond the clump of bamboo — no one can see us dig the grave there.”

“But why there?” Istak asked, surprised. “It is not done that way, you know that.”

“It was what he wanted. He knew he was going to die. Bury me, he said, where there’s water — the river, the sea. Any place where there is water, for water is life, too. Do you understand? And when we have buried him, then I will go. Far away to where his people are so that I can tell them. You will not even remember me then.”

“But I will remember you,” Istak said. He wanted to add, “always,” but he held back. “You cannot travel by yourself now. You know how it is — by land, even by sea — the way is very dangerous. Unless you have companions. You know what I mean.”

She nodded, not as if to acknowledge the truth of what he said but as if to accept the sorrow which she must bear. “But what can they steal from me?” she asked, expecting no answer.

Istak did not reply. “You can stay with us,” he said much later. If she left, there would be peace in their household; the ill wind that his mother had prophesied would not blow their way. And yet, he needed to see her again. Banish the omens then. Why should he believe them? Did he not trust in Someone who bestowed grace on men and saw them safely through their journeys?

They rode in silence. The sun edged up the sky and dust swirled around them as the bull continued its even pace. In a while, the trail dropped into the wide delta of the river, and all around them, the sprouts of cogon grew lush and tall, and farther down, the earth had become sandy. Stones littered the way — some of them boulders that had slid down from the mountains together with dead, uprooted trees when the heavy rains fell in July. Dalin looked around her.

“This will do,” she said, pointing to a spot surrounded by tall grass. Istak drew the reins and the bull stopped. They got down and Dalin unhitched the cart, then tethered the animal to a sprout of cogon and gave it some hay. She got a spade and a hoe from the cart and started digging. Istak took a spade and worked at the other end, the blade sinking quickly into the sandy loam. Soon, the hole was deep, up to their waists, and Istak clambered up, his body dripping with sweat. Dalin, too, was tired and her face was damp with sweat. They had worked in silence.

Questions cluttered his mind. Did she really love the old man? Why should she condemn him to hell? It was so easy to ignore a dying man’s wish and do what was right. Could it be that she herself did not believe in God? And why should she? If God was just, the suffering she had gone through would not have happened. But to such questions, of course, Padre Jose had an explanation — the nature of suffering, the necessity for it, for faith was founded on it, and man would suffer as Christ did. In pain was man’s redemption.

He offered her his hand and helped her out of the narrow pit. Her grasp was firm and warm and her hands were callused like a farmer’s. “You are very tired; you have worked very hard,” he told her.

She smiled, and in the sunlight her teeth were white and even; she did not chew betel nut or smoke, as did many village women, even when they were still young. They hauled the pallet out of the cart; it was heavy and Istak marveled at her strength. He sharpened two lengths of bamboo, then drove the stakes into the ground on both sides of the pit. He tied two lengths of rope then laid the ropes over the grave. They eased the pallet over the ropes and lowered it slowly till it rested snugly at the bottom. Istak intoned the ritual prayer: Tibi Domine commendamus animam famuli, tui, ut defunctum saeculo, tibi vivat …

Beyond the river, from the direction of the sea, the wind careened toward them with the smell of burnt fields. Istak started shoveling back the earth. This was the end, this was the end, and Dalin crumpled on her knees and cried silently at first, then she took a deep breath, and softly, as if in a whisper so that her voice would not travel, she started the wail of the widow.

Ay, I am now alone,

cover to the pot,

useless without you.

What have you left,

salt on my lips,

darkness in my mind.

Why now should I live,

with no blood in my veins,

no breath in my lungs.

Ay, I am now alone.

Istak continued shoveling the earth till a mound formed over the grave. Dalin finally rose. Her eyes were clear; she had no more tears. With her hands, she helped smooth the mound. And the rest of the earth they spread out to mix with the sand so that it would look level, not a grave but some spot where, perhaps, someone had dug up an old pine tree trunk to bring home as kindling wood. The tall grass was not disturbed; it would only be by accident that some boy would stray here, adventuring in this wasteland, and even then, he would not bother wondering what lay beneath this mound. The rains would soon come, grass would sprout even taller, and the flesh of the dead would feed those new roots.

If he returned home, he would have to wash his feet with warm water in the earthen pot laid at the foot of the stairs to cleanse his body and protect the house from the wandering ghost. There might be no such water waiting for him, so Istak said he would go to the river to bathe himself instead. He asked if she wanted to join him and she nodded. He sought privacy behind a screen of grass, where he stripped. Cupping his genitals with his hand he waded into the water and immersed himself quickly. The water was waist-deep, a soothing coolness in the heat. Somewhere, behind some tall reeds, Dalin was splashing. Like all the women who bathed in the river, she did not take off her clothes. Her wet chemise would now be clinging to her body, outlining her shoulders, her breasts. He had reproached himself for such lascivious thoughts — very disturbing but pleasurable — many times in the past, particularly when he conducted those lessons for Capitán Berong’s pretty daughters. The delicious yet forbidden urge would ride down his whole being and flood him with warmth. He was past twenty and still a virgin. For how much longer? When would he finally know a woman?

He let the feeling subside, and after a while, he rose from the water, and cupping his limp manhood in his palm again, he hurried to the tall grass and, still dripping, put on his clothes, which were damp with sweat. He waited till Dalin called out to him that she was ready.

When he returned to the cart, it was still unhitched. In the shade of a camachile tree, Dalin had already laid on the stubby grass a palm-leaf mat with their food — chunks of leftover rice that she had cooked the night before, scraps of salted meat cooked in vinegar, salt, and oil, and small peanut cakes. Her hair was loose and wet and she looked even younger.

“Will you pray the nine-day novena by yourself and keep the year of mourning?” he asked.

She nodded. “Everything else that must be done I will do.”

When they were through eating, she gathered the leftovers carefully and placed the pots back in the cart. “Please,” she reminded him. “If they ask …”

He nodded. He did not want to lie but he had to.

“I will leave you at the fork of the road,” she said. “I will travel only in the day. At night, I will try to find a place where I can be safe. Then when I reach the sea, I will sell this cart and bull and return home by boat.”

“You are very brave.”

“I wish I had more knowledge,” she said. “Not just writing my name and counting. I wish I had a little of what you know.”

“Who told you about me? I am just a farmer.”

“Your brother,” she said. “On the way to your village last night he spoke about you, how learned you are and how you should be in Vigan, or even Manila.”

“There are people who cannot even write their names,” Istak said. “But they are wiser than most who can read.” He turned to her; her skin, freshly scrubbed, was smooth and clear. She was really no more than eighteen — he could see that clearly now.

She bowed and said softly, “I am ignorant, I know.” Then she turned to him, pride in her eyes. “But at least I can write my name.”

“That is good, a beginning,” Istak said quickly. “I was thinking, here in our village many cannot read. I can be a teacher. The catón. And the neighbors will pay not with money but with grain.”

“Is that what you are planning to do?”

“Yes, but I’ll farm, too.”

“What was it like living with a priest?” she asked.

“It was not easy,” he explained. “My time was well divided between my chores and my efforts to improve myself. The work was tiring, too — cleaning the kumbento, chopping firewood, looking after the horses, six of them. The easier tasks, keeping the files, the registry of births, marriages, deaths. And after that, the lessons the old priest gave — science, some botany …” He realized quickly that she did not understand.

Istak turned away as they came creeping back — memories of all those years, wasted now. When he entered Padre Jose’s room for the first time, he was awed by the old books all over the place, leather bound, some of them with gilt edges. Before the old priest had selected him to be a sacristan, all that he knew was the church itself — how massive it was, its walls thick and impregnable, the wood in the sacristy and the kumbento the best that could be dragged from the mountains. Portions of the kumbento were roofed with tile, but the church itself was roofed with galvanized iron, which had rusted in parts.

As a child, he had believed that when huge buildings or churches were built, a fearsome creature called Komaw would kidnap children, kill them, and spill their blood into the foundation diggings so that the buildings would be so blessed they would last a thousand years and those constructing them would not be injured. Surely, it must have taken pails of blood to make this church endure. He had wanted to ask the priest but never dared, for Padre Jose, Istak learned later, was skeptical about the many miracles the other churches claimed and had a surfeit of, a skepticism which the old priest did not voice but which Istak knew was there — in the shaking of the venerable head, in the lift of the thick eyebrows when such topics were brought to him.

The church was more than a hundred years old; he had often imagined the multitude of workers hauling those big rocks and cutting them in perfect shapes to make arches that could withstand earthquakes. He wondered why the church was built on a rise of ground on the fringes of the town — not in the middle as it was with the other churches. The church was like a fort; indeed, it was a sanctuary from Moro raids along the coast — self-sustained, with granaries, wells.

When he was new in the church, one of his chores was to toll the bells. He had delighted in climbing up to the belfry and once up there, past the dim stairway, the wind whistling through, he would scan the vista around him, and look to the far distance, to Po-on, where he came from, where time began — just a smudge of brown hidden by bamboo groves, the river that emerged out of the low hills like a trough of silver and disappeared in the narrow plain, and all around the town, the fields ready for the seed, or — as it was in November and December — a sea of shimmering gold. He would hurry down after the Angelus, the tolling of the bells still humming in his ears, and in the sacristy join the singing: Tantum ergo, tantum ergo. Then to the kitchen where, with the other boys, he helped with the cooking and setting of the table in the dining room, above it a broadcloth which was swung continuously to stir a breeze when it was warm or to drive away the flies. Here was the chipped china, the polished candelabra, the frayed gray napkins, and Padre Jose’s simple dinner of chicken broth, some vegetables, and rice that was cooked soft.

All the rooms in the kumbento and the sacristy were no longer secret; he had grown up cleaning them, learning in them the cartilla and all that Padre Jose had imparted to him — knowledge and a sense of right as well. The old priest was patient; sometimes he would surrender himself to reverie. His bushy eyebrows would lift, his gray eyes glazed, and he would then start those soliloquies — about his sister and brothers, his parents, and that sparkling whitewashed village in Andalucía where he came from, the skies that were always blue, grapes as big as chicos, the golden oranges, the sherry, and most of all, the bread his mother baked. Mail took so long, and sometimes he read to all the acolytes letters that described Spain. Once it was a mighty nation, possessing an empire that stretched across the oceans; but in the decades past, this empire had dwindled. Though Padre Jose never told him, Istak came to realize, too, that the old man joined the priesthood not so much in service to God and country, but to escape the poverty of his own village. And this was what Istak wanted to do, too, what his father and mother had hoped would happen — that he would be a priest, not just so he could flee the drudgery of the village, but because he was the eldest, he could help his brothers and all his relatives who were mired in Po-on.

But the priestly life was not one of ease; even in his old age, Padre Jose worked hard, tending to the people, reaching those sitios where the Ilokanos seldom went, across Tirad to the land of the Bagos where they could be killed, their heads chopped off to decorate some heathen’s house. Padre Jose had prided himself on his order. “We are builders, Eustaquio; above all else, not just of buildings and churches, but of men. We will go wherever there are souls to rescue.” He would tell them then of Saint Augustine, of the first Augustinian in the country, Padre Rada. Padre Jose, without any family, had taken on a bigger one, not just the order to which he belonged, but the Ilokanos, whom he had grown to love.

Can one really love a people? And why not a village? A family — or even a woman? It had all become so remote, Istak’s discovery of his manhood and the desires that had shamed him once and at the same time warmed him to the pleasure that he would surely forgo if he became a priest. She was the eldest of Capitán Berong’s daughters — Carmencita, sixteen and already full-breasted, with flesh aching to be caressed beneath her long skirt. Just looking at her made him feel that all the beauty there was to behold in the world was in those red lips, the pert nose, and the cheeks that shone. Her two younger sisters — Filomena, fifteen, and Angela, fourteen — they were beautiful, too, but not as Carmencita was. They were not bright but they were all clever, and it was not difficult teaching them what he knew, a bit of history, arithmetic — and none of the homemaking arts that all women of high birth such as they would learn in the school in Vigan. It would all be wasted, of course, for Carmencita was just waiting for the right suitor to come to her father’s door so she could be married off to settle in some Ilokano town as mistress of a big stone house.

The sisters came to the convent in the afternoon, and stayed till the Angelus, when they went down the wide churchyard and the street, bringing with them their nubile laughter, and with Carmencita a presence that often was a challenge and a tease, for at sixteen, she knew she was desirable and if she wanted to, she could command men to do her bidding. He would have done so if only he had not been just a farm boy from Po-on. He believed then — as the old priest had taught him to believe — that with knowledge, righteousness, and faith in the Almighty, he would open the gates of Heaven to his countrymen, benighted as they were. But probing his thoughts, his own being, he had felt so small and worthless, for he reached the conclusion that, above all, with the priesthood, he would be able to rise from Po-on, and, perhaps, bring up with him his parents and brothers as well.

“You will not have a woman then,” Carmencita had told him pointedly. They were in the room behind the sacristy, a wide room with walls of thick coral stone and a floor of earthen tile. Outside, in the shaded patio, her younger sisters were playing patintero, while upstairs, Padre Jose was fast asleep, one of the younger acolytes — his arms perhaps already aching — pulling at the huge cloth fan that dangled from the ceiling to ward off the strangling heat of a March afternoon.

What would it matter if he would never know a woman? “If I become a priest, señorita,” he said diffidently, “but that is not for me to say.”

She pouted.

He started the lesson again: “There are really only so many elements on earth. Some are metals—”

“I don’t want to know about elements,” Carmencita said, bending down again to examine her right foot, visible below the hem of her white cotton skirt. Again, he could see the white mounds of her breasts and yes, his heart thumped — the small pink nipples. She straightened up immediately and caught him, and now, the knowing smile.

“Am I beautiful, Eustaquio?”

He could not answer; the blood rushed to his head, to his limbs, burning him, imprinting in his mind that image of her bosom. How shapely were the legs beneath that skirt? The hips?

“Well, are you not going to tell me?”

His throat was parched, “Yes, señorita,” he croaked. “You are beautiful.”

“My foot,” she said gazing at him, witch eyes beckoning while he seemed to sway. “Will you do me a favor? I twisted it this morning. Do you know how to massage a sprain? Weren’t you taught something like that, too?”

He shook his head.

“Please massage it,” she said, suddenly thrusting her right foot forward, baring a white, smooth leg up to the knee.

When he did not move, she repeated, “Please …”

He moved toward her as if in a daze, and then knelt. With trembling hands, he held her right foot and slowly started to massage it.

“Higher up the leg,” she said, her voice bright with pleasure. The touch of her flesh kindled in him this want so intense, so deep, it stirred him immediately. When she finally said enough, he still knelt, ashamed to rise knowing that she would see what she had done to him, the proclamation of his manhood.

He could not sleep that night. Carmencita had actually invited him, teased him, and he was shocked and at the same time ashamed of his feelings — he was a teacher and he had betrayed Padre Jose’s trust. He need not have worried more about temptation and lust and his own willful proclivity for sin. The following day, the young priest arrived, and upon seeing the three sisters that afternoon, he forbade Istak to teach them — he would do that himself now, and when the old priest was transferred to Bantay, the young priest moved the classroom for Capitán Berong’s daughters to the room upstairs, beside his quarters.

And it was there one afternoon that Istak had gone, and as was his custom with the old priest, he did not knock on the door; it was there that he saw just the legs — the white, creamy legs and between them, the hirsute legs of the young priest. They were behind the high cabinets where many of the records were filed. Istak did not close the door — he ran down the stairs and on to the church, where he knelt and prayed, telling himself that he did not see anything. And that evening, the young priest called him after the Angelus. He asked no questions, he merely told Istak his services were no longer needed.

The wheels of the cart, built of solid wood, were not oiled and they squeaked at every indentation in the path. Here was a woman, here was temptation again, and yet it was no longer the old temptation. It seemed as if he had known Dalin for a long time. Here was kinship, as strong as any that could bind two people together. She had listened passively at first, but now she seemed engrossed with everything he had to say. He told her of that inscrutable world whose fringes he had reached, the darkness — or was it light? — that had enticed him, the compulsion to know more, not just about faith and God, but of men, what made them what they were. He told her of his numbing sense of frustration when he was driven out of the kumbento, and how he would live in Po-on, to which he had become a stranger.

He marveled at how easily and quickly he had revealed himself to her, but this new kinship would surely go to waste, for very soon they would part.

The river was far behind them. They neared the fork of the trail, where she was to leave him. Clouds of dust whirled ahead and a man on horseback was cantering toward them.

Istak reined in the bull and pulled the cart to the side of the path. It was only the wealthy or Guardia Civil officers who rode on horses, and as the rider drew near, Istak recognized Capitán Berong in his finery, white coat and silver-studded squash hat.

The mestizo stopped.

“Good afternoon, Apo,” Istak said, bowing in greeting.

Capitán Berong’s father, a Peninsular, had settled in Cabugaw after serving in the Spanish army and acquired large tracts of land which he had passed on to his children from a union with a mestiza from Vigan.

“So it is you, Eustaquio,” the capitán said, recognizing the teacher of his daughters. “How fortunate that I should meet you on my way to your village. Now I don’t have to ride that far …” He wiped his face, burnt to a reddish pink. His leather boots were dusty. “I have been riding since morning, visiting barrios — not just yours. I don’t like going around with the bad news, telling people of the misfortune that has befallen them …”

So what his mother had prophesied was coming true. But how could he believe in auguries after the many years during which he had learned from Padre Jose that much of the suffering in this world was man’s own doing?

Capitán Berong appreciated beauty whether it was in horses or in women, even if they were the lowly daughters of his tenants. His eyes were on the young widow. “I have not seen you before,” he said. “Who are you?”

Istak answered for Dalin. “She has just been widowed, Señor. She is staying with us …”

“It does not concern her then.” The mestizo dismissed her, although his eyes were still on her. “It is about you, your family — and that sitio where you live.”

“Yes, Apo.”

Capitán Berong stroked his wisp of a beard and turned away as if he could not tell the young man the bad news to his face. “You have to leave the sitio, Eustaquio, you and your whole family. The new priest has been studying his books. He thinks the yield of the land is very low. He wants to give the land, in fact, all the land in your sitio, to a new set of tenants. Tenants he likes.”

The words sank deep. “You are sure that this is what he wants, Apo? I cannot believe that this is so,” Istak said, his throat gone dry.

Capitán Berong turned to him and nodded. “Yes, Eustaquio. These were his words. If it may comfort you — you are not the only ones. In the other villages — there will be changes, too. Some families he does not want …”

Istak wanted to say more, but Capitán Berong looked at him with great severity. “I do not speak rashly. You can stay in your village the rest of your life. You can keep the accounts for me and teach my children and the children of my children. It is better this way. Your fate is still yours to change.”

“What should I do then, Apo?”

“Go see Padre Zarraga. Perhaps you can dissuade him.”

“And if he refuses to see me?”

Capitán Berong seemed vexed with him. He pulled at the reins of his horse and wheeled around. “Tell the others in your village. Their fate is the same, only your family goes first. The rest can go after the next harvest season.” In a while the chestnut horse and its rider had disappeared in a swirl of dust.

The sun was hot. Istak steered the cart to the shade of a camachile tree. This was where he would leave her and he would then walk back to his village to bring the news.

“But why should the priest send you away?” Dalin asked.

“For many reasons,” Istak said. “Maybe he Does not like us.”

“But why now?” She was persistent.

Istak did not reply. Yes, there was reason for the priest to send him away from the church and though he was never told, Istak knew it was because he had seen. But to banish all of them, there must be a more stringent reason other than guilt, for Istak was an unerring witness to a mortal sin the new priest had committed; he was a debaucher, the way Padre Jose could never be. He recalled again his mother’s warning that Dalin was a foreboding. He coveted the oval face, the dark, inquiring eyes. She was truth, she was life — but she had been cast adrift, without moorings, as he, too, had been. If only they could go together wherever the wind would blow them.

CHAPTER 3

“Are you really going to leave Po-on? Where will you go?” Dalin asked as Istak got off the cart. It would be the last time he would see her.

“If this is what God wills …”

“It is not God’s will,” Dalin said.

“There is always land for those who want to clear it,” he said.

“Is that what you will do? Look for new land? I have told you what I have seen.”

“And it is so far away,” Istak said, but quickly there flashed in his mind the vast valley well beyond Tirad and across many ranges. What Dalin had seen would not be much different. Would he have the will to leave Po-on or Cabugaw itself? And how would he tell his father, who had poured his sweat into the little plot he did not even own?

Dalin continued evenly, “I can go with you. Part of the way. Then I won’t have to travel alone.”

Istak turned to her — dark eyes beseeching. He smiled, and in a leap, he was beside her on the cart again. Yes, it was the right thing to do, the kindly thing to do — she would go with them since she had nowhere else to go. Where would it lead? There seemed to be no way he could elude what he himself had wanted to escape, this Po-on to which, like most of his people, he had been chained. But she was here, flower to the eye, and this was not good-bye.

He told her then how it was more than ten years ago. It was as if he were on the same cart, only he was not returning to Po-on, but leaving it instead. Padre Jose had come to say Mass, as he had done twice a year for many years, and after the Mass he had performed the rituals of confirmation on the children — many of them well into adulthood. The old priest had picked him out because he was the smartest, the most alert. That was the beginning and Istak did not disappoint his benefactor, although afterward, when he was older, Istak knew that the barriers to his ambition were higher than the Cordilleras. He had heard of what had happened in Cavitc, and Padre Jose was not one to deny or gloss over it — how three native priests were executed “for leading a revolt” and one of them was from Vigan, an Ilokano like him. The disturbing knowledge had lodged deep in his mind, grown with him, merged with his flesh, and become an oppressive afterthought; he knew his place, he had accepted it. Perhaps it was possible … but he did not let the thought consume him. The ways of the world were set; he was not going to be a thorn. He was a man of peace and would turn the other check as Christ had done, to teach people to love others if they cannot even love themselves. He could have gone to the seminary in Vigan; he had visited there with Padre Jose, had seen the classrooms, the library shelves with so many books he would have loved to touch, but it was all over now — and it was God’s will, perhaps, that he was not meant to be a priest, that he and his family would always be with the land. If this was so, then he should not fret too much. Thoughts of Dalin beside him, sometimes their arms touching, lulled him. He would have someone like her, and again, the shame and wonder — how it was with Capitán Berong’s daughters, how they teased him, always leaning forward at the table so that he could peer down into their white blouses to the rise of their breasts.

When they reached the village, only Ba-ac was at home. Istak’s mother was in the creek washing and his brothers were out in the fields. They waited at the foot of the stairs till Ba-ac came down with a large wooden basin filled with warm water. He strained down the flight, his left hand pressing the heavy basin against his waist.

When they were through washing, Istak told him what Capitán Berong had said. The old man listened calmly; he was easily given to anger, but now there was stoic patience in the shrunken face. After a while, Ba-ac said dully, “I will go to town and beg the new priest to let us stay for another year. If we move out now, how will we live? We have but little grain left. If it could be the next harvesttime, we might prepare.”

“He wants us to leave immediately, Father.”

“One more year will not make a difference,” Ba-ac said. “We wall be able to bring along some chickens and we will be able to uproot this house properly. And your mother can weave some lengths of cloth. Don’t tell your brothers, or your mother.”

“Let me come with you,” Istak said. I can speak his language — he wanted to add, but did not.

“You stay here,” Ba-ac said. “I do not think the new priest likes you, else he would have retained you, is that not so?”

Istak did not reply. His father had confirmed what had long lain in his mind. And yet it was so obvious in the manner with which the priest spoke to him, as if he were a mindless child good only for kitchen chores. As the new priest had said, he had had his fill of “la sopa boba.”

The old man hurried to the house, and when he emerged he wore his white starched pants and white collarless shirt. He even seemed to be in good humor. “I will also ask him to take you back,” he said brightly.

“He will not permit it, Father.”

“I will beg,” Ba-ac said. “Beggars cannot be proud. I will get on my knees …” His voice trailed off.

It was a long walk to town — a full three miles of April dust and a sun which bore down on everything. The catuday and marunggay trees along the trail were powdered with dust. At this time of the year, the frogs found refuge in the deep cracks in the earth, where they were sought and speared with barbed hooks.

Ba-ac reached the town shortly before dusk had settled. Soon they would be indistinct — the grass-roofed houses in yards enclosed by bamboo fences, the old houses of stone with tiled, high-pitched roofs and sash windows — the homes of Cabugaw’s rich — and at the edge of town, the big church, its limestone walls painted creamy yellow, its belfry higher than any tree in the village. The streets were empty, save for a few stray goats and pigs. Near the church, across the wide plaza scraggly with dying grass, was Capitán Berong’s big brick house. His daughters were seated in the iron chairs on the wide lawn over which stood an old acacia tree, its trunk huge. The sisters would probably grow into spinsters unless they went to Vigan, or unless some rich trader came and saw them, for there were no young men in Cabugaw rich enough or intelligent enough for them.

The churchyard was not yet cleared of the litter of the revelry which marked the new priest’s birthday, the palm leaf and banana wrappers of rice cakes, the orange peels and frayed paper wrappings of candies, the blackened remnants of rockets and firecrackers. At the door of the kumbento, a young acolyte was scrubbing the tile floor. He recognized the old man, so he let him in.

How many times had he been here when Istak still served in the sacristy and yet had never set foot beyond the tile porch into the sanctum within. This massive building — his grandfather and his father had helped build it; they had fired the brick for its walls, and the lime that set the mortar, they had gathered it from the sea. He had seen the scars on his father’s back, what the bull-whip had etched permanently there, like harsh lines drawn by the harrow on the land, and though he was very young then, he could never forget, and remembering it, Ba-ac felt a loathing for the building slowly coil in him. He pushed the heavy wooden door and stepped into an alcove, dimly lighted by an oil lamp. In a while, night would engulf the town and soon, one of the acolytes would climb the belfry to toll the Angelus.

Beyond the alcove, as the boy at the door had told him, were the stairs, and up the stairs of huge solid planks were the priest’s quarters, forbidden to all of them unless they were called. He went up the flight, apprehensive that no one had announced his coming. The walls were lined with heavy velvet drapes, broken only where a sash window was open to the oncoming evening. He was in a sala with some cane furniture, and beyond it, another door. In a voice which quavered, Ba-ac announced himself. “There is a man, Apo. There’s a humble servant entreating you for an audience …”

No reply. He wavered, wanting to return downstairs to the porch to ask the boy to announce him, or wait there till the priest made his appearance. But gathering more courage, he pushed the door ajar; it opened to still another room, better lighted than the alcove below. The last light of day shone on the mahogany floor and washed the walls with tawny light. A tall cabinet of shining wood with a glass front stood in a corner, a monumental piece of carpentry, exquisitely carved. On the walls were huge pictures of priests in various postures of supplication, their faces upturned and swathed with holy light. This is where my son lived, he told himself; he saw this every day, this splendor, and for a moment, he wondered if Christ would be comfortable here. He felt smaller now, and when he rapped on the door, he did it quietly lest he disturb the opulent silence. Barely above a whisper, he spoke in Ilokano, knowing that all the Augustinians could speak the language. “Señor, one of your lowly servants is here to beg a favor from you …”

No stirring beyond the heavy door. Then a voice called from within. “Come in — since you have already gotten this far.”

Ba-ac pushed the door ajar and peeped in: another room except that the floor seemed shinier. Statues of saints — he recognized San Lazaro immediately — stood on pedestals. Barefoot, he barely lifted his feet so that he would not make any noise. A chandelier dangled from the rose-colored ceiling adorned with cherubs in pink, and as a slight breeze blew in from the open window, the many-faceted glass prisms tinkled.

The young priest was kneeling before a low cabinet; he was not wearing his soutane but was dressed only in long-sleeved underwear. On the floor were a silver crucifix and the chalice which he was cleaning with a stained piece of cloth. Ba-ac knelt before the priest, grasped his hand, and kissed it. He did not rise, he could not rise until the young priest commanded him to.

“Who are you and what do you want?” the young priest asked in heavily accented Ilokano. He was muscular; his hirsute arms and his neck were pale, as were his hands; his face, which was exposed to the sun at times, was ruddy; there was a quality of malevolence in his eyes, and as he stood up, he lifted the big crucifix and appraised it in the fading light. The silver gleamed.

“I am the father of Eustaquio, Apo,” Ba-ac said, still kneeling, his voice quavering as recognition came swiftly. His old eyes were not mistaken. This was the same young priest who had condemned him to his fate, who had — although he did not wield the knife — cut off his hand. It was the same face, deceptively young and kind in countenance; in the past five years — had it really been that long? — he had not aged one bit. There was something youthful about him, perhaps eternal as Satan is eternal, and now Ba-ac was face-to-face with him again, and this time he was again begging as he had done in the past, proclaiming his innocence in a frightened and distraught voice which was not heard. Yet it was possible that a man could change, as men everywhere have changed when confronted with the evil of their ways or a superior moral force. Perhaps, this was a new man — a vain wish, knowing it was he who had sent Istak away — his poor, patient, ever-forgiving son.

“And who is Eustaquio?”

“Your acolyte, Apo,” the old man said. “He tried to serve you as well as he could, but …”

The young priest turned to him. “I know. And I suppose that you think he has become a Christian because he served here, don’t you? And that you are one, too?”

“I am, Apo,” Ba-ac said, bowing. “By Mary’s breath, and Joseph’s and Jesus’, too.”

“How gratifying! And your son Eustaquio. He is in your house now, among his carabaos. Did he really think he was bright enough to be a priest?”

“It was Padre Jose, Apo,” Ba-ac said. “The old priest, he told me he wanted Eustaquio to be a priest …”

The young priest paced the floor. It was now nearly dark, but Ba-ac could still see everything clearly, the white underwear, the brute hands.

“Soon, they will be aspiring for membership in the order. Then they will want to be bishops — vicars of Christ. Soon, they will grab the habiliments not just of the Church but of temporal power. There is no ending to that. Soon—” He sighed and turned to the old man who was still kneeling before him. “Do you really think that you Indios are educated enough to understand the meaning of government or of God?”

Ba-ac did not answer; he had not come here to be told that his brain held only so much. He did not have the education of this priest, or of his son, but this he knew, that Eustaquio was asked by Capitán Berong to teach his daughters, that Padre Jose — and he was old and wise — wanted Eustaquio to be more than just a sacristan.

“I do not ask that you pity Eustaquio, Apo,” he said. “I came here for the land — to beg you to allow us to stay one more harvesttime. We have lived in Po-on all our lives, Apo. My father, my grandfather. And the last harvest was not good, as you know. That was why your share, Apo, was not as much as it should have been. The drought — that was the reason. We did not keep anything you did not know about. We did not steal.”

The priest looked at him, at the right hand that was missing. “I did not know Eustaquio came from a family of thieves. Padre Jose — he was too old to be sound of mind. He should not have trusted your son too much, given him ideas that made him feel important. It should not be difficult for you to survive — with your special talents, you will not starve. The land should then go to a farmer better equipped — with two hands. But tell me truthfully, do you people really have two hands? No, you have four feet like the water buffalo.”

Ba-ac, still kneeling, let the words sink; they were lies, they were poison, and it was a holy man uttering them.

“All of you,” the priest said softly, “you were born to be like the carabao, to serve us. The little knowledge you got from us — it is dangerous. You will soon imagine yourselves as Spaniards, and because you know it cannot be, you will soon be thinking like those robbers who want the country for themselves, filibusters, rebels.”

“No, Apo,” Ba-ac said, knowing what the priest was leading to. “My son, he is a true Catholic. You cannot find a more loyal servant than him.”

The priest glowered at him. “So you see why you must leave this place. I don’t want contagion here.”

There was no use arguing; perhaps, if he appealed to his sense of mercy. “All our lives, Apo,” Ba-ac said in desperation, raising his left hand. “We have lived in Po-on, working faithfully for you. Please, until the next harvesttime is over. We have very little food, Apo. In God’s name—”

The blow that blazed across his face did not really hurt the old man, although it knocked him to the floor.

“Don’t blaspheme, you wretch,” the priest said evenly. Ba-ac was prostrate at the feet of the young priest and when he opened his mouth to continue with his pleading, he tasted salt. He brought his palm to his lips, and in the shadowy light, the blot of bright and living red was distinct. He shook his head and rose slowly, leaning on the side of the cabinet behind him. His left hand touched something solid and in the corner of his eye, he saw it was the crucifix. The moment of truth, of revelation, and he grasped it.

The young priest was too stunned to react; what could this armless old man possibly do, this ignorant Indio with fire in his eyes? He did not back away, although he easily could have done so, so that when the silver instrument crashed into his face, he did not even raise his hands to defend himself. He fell, not noisily like a tree, but just as slowly, and even when he was already slipping, Ba-ac raised the instrument again, and when he finally stopped to look at it, silver had turned to red. The young priest was unconscious, prostrate on the floor, and Ba-ac bent over him and struck again and again at the Castilian brow, the blue eyes, till the whole face was pulped.

Ba-ac stood over the man, not quite believing that he was dead. Blood still oozed from the wound in the face and neck. He glanced at the hairy arms which were nerveless, the powerful torso that seemed to dissolve into a black blur as the night encompassed everything. The Angelus must have already tolled, but he had not heard it. He must flee, not just this church, not just Po-on, but Cabugaw. But to where? He breathed deeply, and felt very light, as if the crushing weight upon his chest which had long oppressed him had finally been lifted by this single act.

The sense of elation stayed, but it was soon compounded with fear, not just for himself but for his poor, sinless family, and his younger brothers as well. He did not try hiding the dead priest under the bed, although it did cross his mind to do so — anything to delay the discovery, anything to give him time. But did he or Po-on really have this precious time? They had all been doomed from the very beginning, their fate foreordained because they had dark skins, because their noses were flat.

He breathed deeply again and tried to calm the trembling of his hand, the strangling in his throat, the earthquake within. Then he walked calmly to the huge wooden door, down the black stairway to the alcove. The young acolyte who had sent him upstairs was still there.

The acolyte was perhaps only twelve, or eleven even. “Did you see him, Tatang?” he asked.

Ba-ac nodded. “He did not want to see me — he said he was going to sleep …” He wanted to say more, but was afraid lest the tremor in his voice betray him.

At last, he reached the door and outside, in the wide yard, he could pick out the goats still tied to their stakes and grazing grass. He walked slowly, as if on a Sunday stroll; it suddenly seemed as if the churchyard were without limit, like the river delta he would have to cross. When he got to the fringes of the town where the houses were made of bamboo and buri palm and not of hardwood and stone, he walked faster, but without seeming to run. It was when he reached the open field that he began to run out of the reaches of Cabugaw. He was surprised at his stamina. He was consumed by only one thought: to flee as fast as he could, alone if that was possible. He was a dead man and it was a dead man who would return to Po-on, to Mayang and her quibbling, to the boisterous boys who bore his name.

As he crossed the river, he slipped on a moss-covered stone. But he rose quickly, then ran again, his lungs close to bursting, his throat rasping dry. Across the river finally, he paused on the bank. Was that the tolling of bells? He keened — yes, the church bells of Cabugaw were tolling as they often did when there was a fire, a calamity that must be announced, a Moro raid, although it had been ages since there was one. The tolling was long, insistent. They had found the body! Did the boy tell them that he was the last man to see the young priest? And did not the boy recognize him? Indeed, who would fail to recognize him since there were not all that many one-armed men in the entire Ilokos.

As he neared Po-on, Ba-ac consoled himself. They had a little time, as the Guardia and their Spanish officers did not like pursuing their quarry at night. They were afraid of the bandidos who hid in the villages and ambushed them on the trails to get their Mausers and their revolvers. This had become increasingly common, particularly because there had grown to be so much uneasiness and discontent all over the Ilokos. The bells had proclaimed to the whole town what he had done; he was marked, convicted, but they did not have him yet.

Ba-ac fled down the fields, over the rough, uneven earth the plows had gone through, the soft, ash-brown scars where the torches had seared. He was thirsty but amazed at his own strength, that he could reach Po-on so fast, not on a spirited mount but on his feet.

Even as he hurried, walking fast when running squeezed his lungs, there came lucidly to mind as if it had happened only days ago, how the same young priest had ordered him confined in Vigan and there, in the fortresslike kumbento, his inquisition had started, the memory ever present now like a branding iron scorching the flesh. He was an ever-loyal and obedient Christian. Did he not know that there were roads to be built, to lace the country so that progress would come to each town and village? These were, after all, what the ilustrados, the filibusteros, were asking for in Europe, where, like frightened dogs with their tails between their legs, they had fled? Ba-ac had tried to explain that he was with fever during those two weeks when his contribution to the well-being of the patria was demanded. He had sent word through his youngest son, Bit-tik. He did not mean to refuse service. Why should he when he knew what the punishment was? Had he not given up his eldest son to work for the church in Cabugaw and this dearly beloved son had seldom visited his parents in the last ten years? True, he had not given work for two weeks, but let him pay for that with four weeks’ labor if it had to be paid double, for that is how long the rice which he brought with him would last.

The young priest was unmoved. Ba-ac, past sixty, was taken to a cell of the municipio, a dank and perpetually dark enclosure smelling of urine, and was hanged there by the right hand.

Now the hand was gone, but not the anger that blazed in his mind and the venom that had inflamed his being. He could still see the young priest as he saw him then — the ivory face, the sensuous smile — even as he pronounced Ba-ac’s fate. Maybe he had not really been killed. Maybe everything was an aberration. But the image in his mind was clear, and in the muffled night, the bells which tolled confirmed only too well what he had done.

The camachile trees at last, the edge of the village, the growling of dogs. He stumbled once more at the margin of the field which they had planted to mongo beans, and bits of hard earth dug into his palm. As he rose, he glanced up to a sky sprinkled with stars.

An-no was in the yard, talking with Dalin, whose bull cart had already been unhitched. To him, Ba-ac shouted: “Hurry, hitch all the bull carts. We are leaving — all of us, we are leaving!”

An-no followed him as he rushed up the stairs to the kitchen where Mayang, her eyes red from blowing at the earthen stove, was letting a pot of rice simmer.

He drew a full pitcher from the water jar and drank, his throat making gurgling sounds, then he faced his wife, waving his left hand. “Old Woman, we must flee Po-on! Do you know what I have done? You have no time to serve that meal. Listen — all of us, your children, we have to flee …”

“You are drunk again,” Mayang said, not minding him.

“I am not!” Ba-ac shouted at her. He brandished his left arm as if it were a precious ornament he wanted her to sec. “With this hand, I smashed his face till it could not be recognized. I killed him!” Triumph, pride! “The young priest who sent your son away, who made me what I am. I killed him!”

His wife looked at him, disbelieving; then she saw his trousers grazed by dust, the white shirt speeked with red. She peered at them, touched them, then withdrew her hand in horror, for the blood had clung to her fingers.

“Yes, it is blood, Old Woman,” Ba-ac said. “I could not stop. I struck again and again.”

Mayang crumpled on her knees, wrung her hands, and animal sounds escaped her. Her wailing brought Bit-tik to the house. “Old Man, you have decreed death for yourself and shame and punishment on all of us!”

“Shame? Punishment? Disgrace?” It had filled him quickly, this courage which lifted him as well. Mayang had grown old. He looked evenly at her as she struggled to hold back her tears. “It is not disgrace I bring you, my beloved half”—he rarely used the words—“it is honor. Don’t you know what this means? I am not a servant anymore. So we must run away and hurry. Else they will find us here in the morning.”

Mayang stood up sobbing and went to their wooden trunk in a corner. Their few clothes were inside, most of which she had woven herself, her skirts, her starched pañuelo. An-no and Bit-tik were now in the house, silent and tense, and Ba-ac told them what to do. They listened, understood, and in an instant they were down the yard herding the animals. The neighbors — they had committed no crime other than to live in Po-on and be related to him — they must be told, then they could elect to stay and suffer, or to flee.

“It is not your sons who should tell your brothers and cousins,” Mayang told Ba-ac with derision in her voice. “Go tell them yourself. Are you not proud of what you have done? When the Guardia come, will they make distinctions?”

He needed Istak now. He would know the right words to bring the truth to them not as a bludgeon but as light. Where could that son be at this time? At the edge of the village again, thinking, dreaming? He went out and at the wall of blackness he shouted: “Istaaakkk — Istaaakk!”

Istak came running from the direction of the dalipawen tree, his white shirt distinct in the dark.

“My son, we have no time …”Then quietly, solemnly, Ba-ac told him. Istak listened, the words cutting deeply; when it was over, he embraced the old man and wept; his father’s breath told him the deed was not the handiwork of basi. His father smelled of tobacco, the earth, and harsh living.

“It is my fault, Father,” Istak said bitterly. “This happened because of me. So leave then — all of you. I will stay.”

Istak knew the Guardia Civil. They were Indios like himself and yet they were different — the uniform and the gun had transformed them. What would he tell them when they came? Padre Jose had said that a father’s success could be measured only by how well he had made his children able to stand on their own. The old priest was thinking, of course, of that time when Istak would be a priest, cast adrift by the ways of the world, but strengthened by faith. To the real father who would be hunted like a mad dog, how would Istak be to him?

“Help me tell our relatives,” Ba-ac said. “I have brought disaster to them—”

He had not spoken too soon. From the houses across the mud-packed yard, his cousins, their wives, and their children came running, An-no and Bit-tik behind them, then Kardo, Ba-ac’s youngest brother, Simang — Mayang’s sister — and still others, the neighbors in the six-house village: they gathered in knots, their inquiries and anxieties a continuous murmur punctuated by exclamations—“Ay, fate!”

Ba-ac was the eldest, he was the leader, and they knew of the agony he had gone through. He did not speak of the young priest; he told the older people equably, without justification, and they listened intently, knowing that now they would share his punishment.

“So we must seek new land beyond the mountains,” Ba-ac said to the hushed gathering. Above, the stars were out in all their splendor and the night around them was thick with the smell of earth, of sweat, of living. “We will go beyond the land of the Bagos; if need be, we can learn to live with them, start a new village, as others have already done — the many who also ran away. They cannot follow us there. They will not dare unless they come in droves and we will not be alone. Haven’t others done this?”

Ba-ac turned to Istak beside him. “Tell them, son. Tell them it is not hopeless.”

Istak turned to faces eager for solutions, for peace. He must tell them what he had always been told by Padre Jose — to have faith. As for patience and industry, they were Ilokanos born to these virtues — it was in their blood, in the very air they breathed.

“Since we have been ordered to leave anyway, we should not wait — we should look at this as a challenge. But in doing so, let us not forget the Almighty, that we go in peace although we be threatened, persecuted. This is the way of the Lord. I know some of you may want to stay …” From the older people, an immediate sound: one said, “No, we are all related, we will stay together.”

“How will we live with little grain? Will we eat the seed rice?” his uncle Kardo asked.

“We will live as we have always lived — frugally. We will eat bamboo shoots, the green leaves of the mango and butterfly trees. And the forest provides — we can trap deer, wild fowl. We have known difficult times — remember when we had so little food we ate the pith of the big palm?”

They murmured approval. They were Ilokanos — they would not starve anywhere. And they also believed Istak because he was the most learned, the most skilled in a language none of them could understand. Ever since his return, they had flocked around him, urging him to set up a school so that they, too, would know how to read and write — not just the rich mestizos and favorites of the friars. They would sustain him, weave his clothes, cut his hair, and give him enough grain to fill his granary so that he would not have to hold the handle of a plow and coarsen his palms. He had, of course, become enthusiastic about it, how much he could do — those years in Cabugaw were not to be wasted. He had already fashioned a series of lessons from the elementary cartilla to the higher form that would include philosophy and some science — he was going to impart to the young people of Po-on all that Padre Jose had given him.

He must tell them that there would be no school, and worse — that they really had to leave Po-on. This was all that the new priest wanted them to know. Now he would tell them that they had only the night to prepare, that sunrise must not catch them here. He remembered what Padre Jose had once told him of history, how the bearer of bad news was himself dispatched with the sword although the bad news that he brought was not of his own making.

To the right, across the level patch of ground, was the house of Kardo, his father’s youngest brother. Istak felt closest to him, perhaps because Kardo was more like an older brother. What mattered were his wife and his five children. He must leave, and not in peace but in fear. They had been welded together, not just by blood or marriage, but by work, for they had always shared what could not be done by just one man or one family — the planting of rice, the harvesting, the repair of the dikes, of the irrigation canals, and of their homes.

Before the clump of bamboo which formed an arbor, a gateway to the village, was the house of his mother’s sister, Simang. Her husband and children were before him, repeating, “Must we leave now?”

“But I will stay behind,” Istak said quietly. He had decided on this, to stay and to beg with them who ruled, that what Ba-ac did was on impulse. He would take whatever punishment they would mete out because it was for him that his father went to see the new priest. He spoke their language, he had proven his loyalty; they would understand. Yet he recoiled at the thought of what might happen; the Guardia did not care about justice; they knew only how to exact punishment.

Kardo told Istak there was no sense in being left behind, but Istak was adamant. If it was a guide they needed, Dalin knew the way.

He got an armful of firewood in the woodpile and tied it underneath the carriage of the cart. From below the houses, they gathered the chickens in bamboo coops. The pigs were trussed up. They did not have too many clothes — for each family just one wooden trunk and no more.

Tears in her eyes, Mayang dismantled the ancient loom under the house and carefully bundled the levers, the shuttles. The loom was her grandmother’s. Would there be cotton in the new land? They would build new homes and there was no time to uproot the posts, the sturdy sagat and parunapin which their fathers had dragged from the mountain. There were a few old posts, however, from the old house — as strong as ever — and these they tied underneath the carts.

They worked strenuously, loading what little food there was, even the green papayas in the yard. Daylight was nearing and stars glimmered in the bowl of sky; they would fade soon and the feared sunlight would be upon them.

Six carts — thirty people, including the children — that was all of Po-on. They would join the many others, the mal vivir who had fled the Ilokos whenever there was a revolt or a crime against the Spaniards.

An-no was finished with his chores and went to Istak. “Why don’t you want to come with us?”

Istak held his brother by the shoulder; An-no was taller and bigger of build. “This is what you want, is it not, my brother?”

An-no shook his arm off and his voice was no longer rimmed with bluster. “We need you, Manong,” he said. “No one among us can speak their tongue. This is a journey where wisdom is needed.”

“I have to stay,” Istak said simply. “I must speak to them, beg them.”

The dogs started to howl. Among the children roused from sleep and uncomfortable in the bull carts, one started to cry.

“This is one time we should stay together,” An-no said. “Can you not see that Father needs help? What have you really learned in Cabugaw?”

“What Does one need to know?” Istak asked, holding up his hands to show the raw blisters, but in the dark, An-no could not sec.

He could make out An-no’s angry face. “Stay behind, then,” his brother said, “and recite your Latin. Maybe the fruits of the trees will fall at your feet.” Then he wheeled and headed toward the line of carts being readied.

Alone, covered by the night which he sometimes wished was permanent, Istak cried softly. He was not going to be a martyr, he was not going to be heroic. It was they who were leaving who would be more than brave; the tulisanes preyed along the coast and the roads that led out of the Ilokos. If they went by sea, they would probably be safer, and if bad weather came, they could always head for some cove. But by sea, they could also be easily tracked and caught by the Spanish steamboats. If only Padre Jose were here to plead for him, for them.

In the house, Mayang had finished putting everything of value into the trunk. She had also gathered the woven bamboo crowns for the pots to sit on, the pine splinters for kindling wood, and lengths of rope. From a peg that stuck out of the bamboo wall, she took her most precious possession, a tortoiseshell comb inlaid with a thin veneer of gold. In the flicker of the oil lamp, Ba-ac recognized its gleam. “You are not wearing that,” he said.

“If I will die running,” Mayang said, “I might just as well die with this on my head.”

Their most precious possession, however, was not their good clothes or, for the women, their tortoiseshell combs. It was the carabao which they treasured most, because without this docile animal, they would not be able to farm; they would go hungry. Its skin had no pores and had to be cooled with a daily bath in the creek or with water from the well.

From under the house, Ba-ac gathered the golden sheaves of tobacco hung to dry. They had been harvested two weeks before and some of the leaves were still greenish and not ready for smoking. The municipio was going to buy it all, but he would not give them that privilege now; he would need a lot to smoke, to chew, and to barter.

Then they were ready; a big pot of rice had been cooked and coffee had been brewed from roasted corn and flavored with thick molasses. Toward the cast, still no glimmer of sunrise. They would not wait for daylight.

Why should we be rooted here, in a land which is not ours? All over the north, in the past, men had fled to the forest. Free men, they cleared the land and started anew, well beyond the claws of the Guardia Civil, the friars and their fawning acolytes. No less a man than old Padre Jose had spoken about them when they had pressed beyond Tirad, down the fertile valley of Nueva Segovia. They were everywhere, with new names, new lives. They could start anew, too.

Not me, Istak told himself. If he stayed he could perhaps explain — hold back the storm that would descend and engulf them all. Explain he would, not with words but with his faith in the justness of God.

“I will be safe, Mother,” he assured Mayang, standing by the lead cart which An-no would drive. Behind them, tethered with maguey twine, were the work animals, a carabao with a calf and two cows. In Po-on, they had the most, but where they were going they would all be equal. Six carts altogether, with children wrapped in coarse blankets, for it was cool. Underneath the carts and behind them stoves and cooking pots were carefully tied. Six carts, six families — how could they travel without being seen? If they went singly, they would fall prey to robbers who ambushed in the foothills and isolated distances. If they went together, they could easily be tracked, questioned, found out; now, more than ever, they needed cunning, which, perhaps, Istak would be able to give them.

“I will follow, Mother,” he reiterated. “It will not be difficult to trace you. I just want to be sure, to know what will happen to Po-on.”

“Don’t look back, then,” Mayang said, her voice sad. “Keep us in your mind.”

Istak walked with them to the edge of the village, well beyond the bamboo grove, down the gully to the open fields, the carts in single file, their solid wooden wheels creaking. They must be oiled, Istak reminded his brother. In the darkness, he could make out the familiar faces, the nephews and nieces, the cousins he had grown up with. And as Dalin’s cart passed — the seventh and last, she reached out and held his hand briefly. A dull ache coursed through him, the warmth of her hand filling him with warmth as well; so young and already a widow. Would she be able to show them the way? And what would happen to her? To them?

CHAPTER 4

The road to Vigan was well traveled. Ba-ac and his brothers had gone to the capital when they were conscripted to work on the governor’s mansion and on the road to the south. They would not take that road — in every town they would be stopped by the Guardia, who would have been warned by telegraph. If they were not detained, their chickens, even their work animals would be taken.

But time was in their favor. The rivers were dry and the trails would no longer be rivulets of mud. They would skirt the foothills of the Cordilleras through land which they were familiar with. In the day, they would rest while the men scouted what lay ahead and when night came, they would be on their way again. There were enough hollows, folds in the hills and bamboo groves to hide them. They had bows and arrows tipped with iron, and their bolos were sharp. If they were lucky, they could even have wild boar or deer meat.

Daylight now. The sun rode the heavens and banished the dew that had covered the grass, glistening like many jewels. They were near the Cabugaw foothills, where the tall grass still grew lush and green on the dikes. They had traveled slowly on trails not often used. The carabao hooves had also dug a rhythm of hollows on the ground, and in places where the runners of sleds had cut, the ridges were high and it was difficult for the carts to roll smoothly and straight.

Ba-ac in the lead cart saw it behind, the cloud of dust in the first flush of morning far down to the horizon — the Guardia finally coming to Po-on.

The bend of the river was to their left — actually an expanse of sandy loam, boulders, and more scraggly growths of grass and stunted camachile trees no taller than a man. It was an act of God, Istak would have said, that they were there at that very moment. “Hurry! Hurry!” the old man shouted at the carts behind him. “Down the gully, all of you. Behind the grass, hide where you cannot be seen. And the animals — keep them quiet. Unhitch the carts!”

He was a leader, the repository of wisdom, though he had but one arm. They were all afraid even if they had done nothing. They would protect Ba-ac, too, because they were together, related by blood. Now, the morning sun poured on them. They waited, the mothers shushing their children, the men silently looking at one another. The dust cloud raised by the horses drew nearer and though they could not hear them, they could see the cloud disappear; they were crossing farther up the river and in a while, the dust cloud appeared again, a wraith on the horizon.

The animals did not make a sound. A long, long wait — then it came, the crack of a gun echoing across the fields. Ba-ac went up the incline and peered at the distance.

Toward the east, beyond the thin line of bamboo and trees, a wisp of smoke plumed up. The smoke thickened and soon the trail of dust again, going back toward them. In the distance, the flames shot up with spirals of gray smoke. Po-on was burning! They did not even leave the houses for the next tenants to move into. Years of sweat had been poured into that village, the roofs they shaped, the posts they dragged from the forests. Everything was in that pillar of smoke reaching up to the cloudless sky. The men cursed, the women wept silently.

“I will go back,” Dalin said resolutely after some time. “They are not after me, they have nothing to blame me for or accuse me of. I am not from Po-on …”

“What can you do even if you went back?” An-no asked. “If they burned Po-on, surely, they must have killed Istak, too, or taken him. They will catch you, torture you, and then they will know where we are … and where we are going.”

“You don’t know what I have gone through to be alive,” the young woman said, looking straight at the man who, she knew, wanted her to stay, not just for her safety, but for himself. She hitched her cart. “Do not go away. I will return here,” she told Ba-ac.

They are gone. Istak turned over the words, feeling their bite. He glanced around at the houses, empty now and shrouded by night. How would it all look when daylight came — this ghost of a village, without the voices of children, the grunt of animals? Even now, he could imagine his mother’s voice summoning the pigs to the trough, “Riii — say, Riii — say”; Ba-ac calling for the young calf to come home. “Ooooowah-ngek … Ooooowah-ngek …” In their hurry, they must have left behind many precious things. Not all the chickens were in the coops, the firewood, the sheaves of tobacco were still under the house, the old pots, the seeds of mango, of tomato, and eggplant were still hanging in the caves to dry. Even this wooden mortar on which he sat, its smooth hollow recessed deep by the constant pounding of pestles. As a boy he had helped his mother pound rice in it after the stalks were first threshed in a long wooden trough hewn from solid wood. The pestle had callused his hand. He had loved the rhythmic sound of the pounding if there were three of them at the mortar, the thuds following one another and echoing in the quiet. It was not the grain which he had enjoyed pounding, though; it was the boiled bananas mixed with young coconut meat and cakes of cane sugar. The bananas became pulpy and sticky, they sucked at the pestle, and part of the skill in pounding was in the ability to withdraw the pestle quickly before the next came crashing down.

An-no had argued against bringing the mortar, for it was heavy, so they brought only the pestles. He wondered if they would be able to find another trunk as solid and as hardy as this.

From its perch on the guava tree near the house a rooster crowed. Istak looked up at the sky, at the stars that still studded it like gems. The east had started to pale; he could hope for the morrow — this was what Padre Jose had always said, although his father had long since given up the fervent prayer. Padre Jose — a rock of virtue, of kindness, maybe because he had spent more than forty years in Filipinas. After dinner, in the early evenings, he would indulge in his only vice — a glass of tinto dulce, which Istak served. He had once caught Istak tasting the wine and he had roared with his only expletive: “¡Carajo!” But he had, perhaps, immediately felt so miserable at having to scold his favorite acolyte that he gave the young man instead one glass — one full glass — to sip in his presence.

Istak had gotten drunk, but Padre Jose was drunker and started to sing of his youth in a voice out of tune and loud.

And on Istak’s twenty-first birthday, he was summoned to the musty room where the old priest slept. And from an ancient cabinet he brought out a ledger bordered with gold and gave it to Istak. It was handsomer than the ledgers he used for the registry of births, deaths, and marriages. Istak was dumbstruck by the richness of the gift. The old priest said, “Here, Eustaquio — write down your thoughts. In Latin because you know it well now …”

He had expected that year to enter the Vigan seminary and take the ledger with him, but when he left Cabugaw he also left it behind. The young priest would inspect his things and it would seem as if he had pilfered expensive church property. He left it in the sacristy among the other ledgers. It all came to mind, what he had written one early dawn like this when visions of the future were sunny, even in that dreary room behind the sacristy where the acolytes slept.

He wrote:

We go from one darkness to another and in between, the hidden light of the world, of knowledge. We open our eyes and in this circle of light, we see not just ourselves but others who are our likenesses. This light tells us all men are brothers, but even brothers kill one another, and it is in this light where all this happens. But living in this dazzling light does not blind us to what lies beyond the darkness from where we emerged and where we are going. It is faith which makes our journey possible though it be marred by the unkindness of men, their eternal faulting, before we pass on to another darkness.

So they are gone and, as he promised, he would follow them to Solana, to the valley, which Dalin said would be their haven. He would take the shortest route, cross the Cordilleras in Tirad, which he already knew, then risk the journey through Igorot country, hoping the friends he had made there would remember him.

Would he be able to leave? He had decided to suffer in his father’s stead — so stay he must so that they could leave without being hounded. He would explain, he would beg, he would tell them his forfeited life was just as good. And perhaps there would be compassion for him; perhaps Padre Jose would intercede, tell them what a good and loyal subject he was. After what his father had done, there was no more hope — ever — of his going to Vigan. Of what use was this plodding, then? He was not a farmer; he must learn how to become one, to leave behind the intoxicating world of books. It had occurred to him how he had often felt a pang of guilt when he was still in Cabugaw, remembering his brothers and parents immersed in the drudgery of Po-on. He had been untrue to them, he could not pay back even a kusing of the debt he owed them all. Now was his chance to redeem himself. These were the thoughts badgering him when his eyes became heavy with sleep, and he lowered himself onto the polished floor of the threshing trough.

He woke up to the thunder of horses’ hooves on the hardened earth. He rose quickly and recognized Capitán Gualberto of the Lawag garrison, a shock of blue-and-black uniform in the morning light, his golden epaulets gleaming. He had come to the convent so many times, always carefully groomed, his boots shiny, his uniform well pressed, his short-cropped hair trimmed so that the white of his scalp just above the nape and the cars shone. On these occasions Istak had served him hot chocolate and rice cakes, and the Guardia officer had always thanked him in a raspy, effeminate voice belying the anger that burned in him, anger at the recalcitrant Igorots whose domain was denied him, anger at the secret enemies of Spain, the masons. Maybe Capitán Gualberto would remember, maybe he would consider his plea.

With the officer was Capitán Berong and six Indio Guardia. Capitán Berong’s white shirt was drenched with sweat and dirtied.

Istak rushed to meet them. To Capitán Berong, first, then to the Spanish officer, his eyes beseeching, in polite Spanish, as was expected of him, his good morning, then: “I beg for mercy, Apo …”

It was as if Capitán Berong, who had asked him to teach his daughters, had never known him. “He is the son,” the capitán said to the Spaniard, his voice rimmed with derision. “Evil is in him as well.” Was this the same man who had said he, Eustaquio Salvador, was needed in Cabugaw?

Capitán Gualberto drew the revolver from his holster. “And where are they? And your father with one arm?”

He did not want to lie, but God forgive me, I must protect them, I must be worthy of the blood that flows in me, and it came out quickly, the words carefully chosen, “Apo, when Capitán Berong said that we must leave Po-on where we were all born, we followed what we were ordered to do. Except for me, they all left yesterday, Apo. I chose to remain, to watch over this village in the hope that I–I may be allowed to stay”—he glanced at Capitán Berong—“perhaps to teach … but if by leaving they have committed a crime, then take me in their stead …”

“That is easy,” Capitán Gualberto said, taking aim with his revolver. “Spanish justice triumphs again.”

How Does Death come? Dalin, Ave Maria, purísima—a rod of black catching a glint of sun, the hole — the big, black hole, Dalin, Ama mi adda ca sadi langit, the spark of fire, the thunder and the massive hammer, oh, the black, black pain, the blackness, Dalin, Dalin …

The light came first as a ruddy glimmer which grew larger, brighter, then took shape, hazy but real, an are of sunlight and above the are, what seemed like a roof, yes, a roof of matted palm leaves. I am alive, I am seeing something real. I am alive, I can feel the throbbing in my head.

He stirred and a sudden pain exploded in his chest, scared his entire being, so sharp, so intense he screamed, the sound erupting from the depths, confirming that, indeed, he was alive. It all came back, the gun pointed at him, the burst of orange flame, the massive hammer that struck him. Now he tried to raise his right hand, but there was no right hand at all. Have I lost it? Have I become a man with just one arm like my father? He tried to turn to his side; the arm was there but it no longer followed his command.

It was not the voice of an angel which he heard, although it might just as well have been. No sound was more sweet, more well remembered afterward, than “I am here,” she said. “Don’t move, else you will start bleeding again …”

He turned to the voice; Dalin was silhouetted against the are of light and though he could not see her distinctly, her presence touched him with its promise, her hand upon his left arm, like some magic balm that cased all the fears that possessed him. I can go to sleep now. This is not true, this is not true; this is some blissful dream and I don’t want to wake up!

The pain crept back but no longer as sharp as when he moved for the first time, a dull weight against his shoulder and his chest. Though the air smelled clean, he had difficulty sucking it. Were his lungs punctured? He listened to his breathing — there was no whistling, no rasping, but the ache was there, deep and permanent.

“Be still,” Dalin again, oh that beautiful, soothing voice; “You have lost a lot of blood. It is a miracle that you are alive. A miracle. There is a hole below your shoulder and behind your back where the bullet went through …”

His lung must be punctured and he must be bleeding inside. He was so weak, it seemed he had no body anymore and he was just a hollow man, his bones and innards taken out. He was dying, he was now sure of that. Our Father Who Art in Heaven … oh, dear God! Dalin, don’t leave me, don’t leave me … Above him, the design of bamboo slats which held the woven fronds in place — was this the last thing he would sec? Dalin, Holy Mary, Mother of God … then darkness again …

And again, too, the are of light, brighter now. It was no illusion, he was alive, his lungs were intact, he was breathing. He could even bring his head up a little, and in doing so, he realized that his chest was bandaged with strips of cloth.

“Dalin … Dalin …”

“I am here,” she said behind him. He could hear her move toward him, then her hand rested on his arm. Her calm, lovely face, a finger pressed to her lips. “Do not talk,” she said, squatting beside him so that he could see her, feel her leg pressed against his side, her whole wonderful presence banishing the lie of his passing. “I will tell you everything. Your father, your family — they are all in the delta waiting for us. We will not leave till it is dark so that we will not be followed …”

“And where are we?” His voice sounded weak.

“We are within a ring of bamboo at the foot of a hill, away from Po-on. It is no more. They burned it all. Nothing there but ashes and posts still smoldering. They left you in the yard. Thank God, after they shot you, they did not drag you into the fire. Perhaps they thought you were dead. And why not? We were in the delta when we heard the shot, we saw the fire, and after they had left, I came after you …”

Sweet, beautiful stranger.

“I thought you were dead, but I looked closer. You were breathing. The blood had clotted and stopped the flow. I unhitched the bull cart, tilted it, and lifted you into the back.”

Sweet, beautiful stranger.

“My bull is tethered and grazing. If you are hungry, or if you are thirsty?”

Sweet, beautiful stranger, my guardian angel, may you be always near.

“It will be dark soon, we will join them …”

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the joy of being alive waned and a great, formless weariness dropped over him, the weariness not of the wound throbbing in his chest. Another wound festered deeper than the laceration in his flesh, the thought that they showed no mercy to him, ever loyal servant of the Church, of Mother Spain. He closed his eyes as the tiredness suffused him and now he really wanted release, the comfort of sleep, anything to dull the mind, to keep him from thinking. They were only men, doing what would prove them stronger, more powerful, and therefore, fit to rule. There is still a just God who will pass judgment. Or could this be but part of that suffering he must endure, condemned as he was to believe in a God who decreed that salvation lay in suffering?

Bit-tik’s voice woke him, “Will he live?” The rustling of people, heavy breathing, murmurs indistinct and incessant, and blackness heavy and portentous all around.

“Let us pray,” Dalin said.

Now he could feel the cart lurch a bit. They were moving, moving away from Po-on. A still, moonless night, the dark mass of the range their only guide; they would follow the foothills all the way down to La Union, then to Pangasinan.

They had onions and garlic; the two pigs that had squealed when they were still in the riverbed were quickly butchered, their meat salted. Not all the meat could be salted, however, so they feasted in the evening and for a moment forgot that they were fugitives. The chickens were quiet in their bamboo cages under the carts — it was the roosters and their crowing that could give them away, but there were roosters all over the land, many of them wild, their crowing everywhere.

There was room in Dalin’s cart, so he stayed there, in her care. She had really joined them.

That night, Mayang gave him a piece of roasted pork. It should have given him pleasure; it had been a long time since he had had pork, not since he left Cabugaw. But it tasted bitter and he had no appetite. He was weak, he could hardly move, and his right arm was without feeling still. He touched his fingers with his left hand but could feel nothing. He was really like his father now.

Soft footsteps alongside the cart, the carabaos straining at their yoke. Moving along on uneven ground, the cart sometimes dipped or yawed, and each fall brought a bolt of pain. He felt the bandage again and again to make sure that he was not bleeding, and was relieved to find it was not wet.

Dalin sat out front and he could make out her shape, her turning to him occasionally. He slept fitfully and had disjointed dreams: Padre Jose in his black cassock drinking not his wine but basi in a coconut bowl; Carmencita — yes, he had dreamed of her many times — dressed in the white gown of a bride, baring her breasts to him, and he had grabbed at them, sucked them, and when the warm milk filled his mouth, he spat it out and found it red, the dark living red of blood. He woke up, then drifted back to sleep. This time he dreamed he had entered the seminary in Vigan; he was no longer a novice — he was wearing the soutane of a priest, and he was teaching — yes, he was teaching and his students were not Indios — they were all old and venerable friars, among them Padre Jose. They were all listening to him, rapture on their Castilian faces, as he spoke not about theology, but about the mind as healer, about the capacity of man to free himself from the bondage of his own carnal limitations. And he showed them how it was possible for someone of earthly shape like him to do what was not possible — he willed himself off the floor, and he rose till his head almost touched the ceiling, then he looked down at them, smiling benignly at their amazement.

“What does it all mean?” he asked Dalin in the morning when they stopped in the hollow of a hill, surrounded by a flourish of butterfly trees. Children splashed naked in the stream behind the cart and the women were cooking the morning meal. The rich smell of roasting pork drifted into the cart.

“I do not know,” Dalin said, lifting his head a little so he could drink the bittersweet coffee Mayang had brewed. His chest throbbed with a dull blob of pain. “My dreams are so simple … nothing as interesting as yours,” Dalin continued, “although once I flew over the sea and could look down into the depths and see where the schools of fish were.”

As they waited for the dark to come, she kept him company. Mayang drifted in and out, feeling his brow and bringing to him bowls of broth. Outside, the women prepared the meals, pounded rice, and the men mended their fish nets, or wove baskets out of the young bamboo which they cut from the thickets along the streams.

Istak grew weaker and his right arm was still numb no matter how much Dalin massaged it. The wound throbbed even more. He prayed, tears streaming down his face, asking that his life be spared, not because he wanted vengeance, but because he wanted to prove he could surmount this personal anguish to do service to his God still.

He thanked God, too, for Dalin beside him, comforting him, telling him now about herself. Who was this angel, whose touch was elixir, whose presence was light? Where had she come from? Lingayen: that was where she was born, a small town at the rim of the sea. Her people were fisherfolk and salt makers. They had a house surrounded by coconuts. Lingayen — a beach with white sand and a gentle surf. There was this tall and ancient tree at the fork of the road which led to their town and when people passed by, they always looked back. Lingayen — looking back — and that was how the town got its name. She knew enough of his language and she spoke it with an accent; she had learned it as a child when her parents sailed up and down the coast, selling coconut sweets, salt, and shrimp paste which they made from the tiny shrimps they caught in fine mesh nets in the gulf.

Long afterward, he remembered what Dalin said through his bouts with pain.

“I’ll tell you what really happened. We were not shipwrecked. All of us in our family, we worked very hard.”

During the dry season, they gathered the dry leaves of coconuts and heated the huge iron vats which had earlier been filled with salt water and then left out in the sun until the water had evaporated. Her mother bought the shrimp from the fishermen and then stored them in earthen jars. And once they had enough to fill their boat, they sailed up the coast. In the next year, they journeyed by cart to the new towns of Nueva Ecija onward to Cagayan. They either sold the salt and shrimp paste or exchanged these for rice, which was abundant in the western plain. If they sailed up the Ilokos coast, they bartered for tobacco, handwoven cloth, and cotton twine, which the Pangasinan fishermen wove into fishnets.

On this particular trip to the north, a freak wind tossed them a distance from the shore. Toward late afternoon, they were overtaken by a boat with giant sails and six men aboard. They maneuvered their craft close to the frail boat for some time, bantering with them. Then toward sunset, the big boat edged alongside and the six men jumped into their boat. They killed her father; her brother and her mother, who were at the other end, were able to get their bolos but they, too, were overwhelmed. Her brother was able to wound one before he, too, was killed. Their bodies were flung into the sea. They tied her arms to a beam and leered at her. Soon it was dark; they loosened her bonds.

Through the daze and terror of the night, in those moments when she was left alone, she prayed that she would be allowed to live, although life would no longer be the same. Toward midnight, they gave her cold chunks of rice and salted fish which were like rocks in her throat. They let her drink a bowl of coconut water — but only so that she would have strength, for the six of them never let her rest.

“They did things to me,” Dalin said simply.

When the dawn limned the east, they were some distance from the shore, and the mountains were a blue wall beyond the waters. Their boat was fast — its sails bloated with wind, its prow cutting the water like a blade. Except for one who was at the stern, manning the rudder, all were asleep on the broad deck, sprawled between the earthen jars of shrimp paste and bales of cloth which they must have taken from other hapless traders. They did not even bother to wash the knives with which they had slain her brother and parents. The blood had caked, and seeing it she retched and threw up all that she had eaten in the night.

In the morning, they transferred the salt, the shrimp paste, and the husked coconuts from her father’s boat, which they had tied to their big sailboat. She was left on board. She could not make out where they came from, although they spoke both Pangasinan and Iloko. In the daylight their skin seemed darker, even shiny, perhaps from too long a punishment from sun and sea. For a time, she thought they were Moros, but those stories of their raids on the coast were of the past. Her parents were always aware of the dangers of travel by sea, but it was much safer than going over land that was infested with robbers, too.

The man who was at the rudder left his post, came over to her, and untied her hands. She would not dare jump into the sea, prowled by sharks and too distant from land. They did not touch her the whole day; they let her sit alone weeping, looking senselessly at the heaving waters around her, listening to the wind whip the gray sails above her. She feared the night, for they would surely come to her again.

They had a jar of basi and they took long draughts from it after they had supped on rice and salted fish. The helmsman often turned skyward, to a sky studded with stars. He pointed the prow to one of them. Perhaps, they never expected her to jump — she would not be able to swim that far to land and they no longer watched her. Drowning or being devoured by sharks was a better fate; if she stayed, they would eventually kill her anyway.

They circled many times, shouting, and at one turn, the prow of the boat almost bashed her head, but she always stayed under when their craft loomed near. They could not see her in the dark. They lighted a torch but that did not help. They gave up after a while and soon the high sails vanished in the dark altogether. She was finally alone, the awesome immensity of the sea around her.

As a child in Lingayen, she was no stranger to the moods of the sea; she knew how to keep afloat and her father had warned her and the other children about the undertow in the gulf that often dragged unwary swimmers to their death. They should not fight it and thereby lose their strength; they should just keep afloat and after the undertow had spent itself, then and only then should they attempt to swim back to shore.

God in His Heaven, where was the shore? Then she remembered the helmsman looking at the stars and guiding his boat by them. She recalled how it was on those nights when her father also turned to the stars and identified landfall.

The evening star — if she swam toward it, she would reach land. She could float — that was easy — but how could she defend herself from the marauders of the deep? Once, she felt something rough like an is-is leaf brush against her leg and her whole being trembled. A shark! The fishermen in their village had often caught baby sharks in their nets and fish traps and their skins were rough and could cut. For a long while, she waited for the snap of those razor jaws. But if it had been a shark, it did not return. She prayed again that she would not fall asleep, that the sea would not grow rough again and that she could continue to float without tiring too much. Already she had drunk mouthfuls of water and her stomach turned.

Dawn came stealthily shimmering on the waters and with sunrise, she was now sure where land was. Through bleary eyes, she could see the high outline of mountains — so near but really far. She paddled slowly toward the vision, doubting that she would be able to reach the shore.

Toward midday, a plume of smoke rose hazily in the distance. Soon it came into view — a black steamboat, one of those which must have come from the Ilokos or from other lands, headed for Manila — a place she had never seen but which she had heard about as the final destination of these giant boats that could go against the wind or sail on even when the seas were rough. It came closer and she could see shapes moving on the deck. She shouted till her throat ached and her lungs seemed ready to burst — but the big black boat did not lose speed — it glided on until it became just a speck in the distance, and then its plume of black smoke disappeared altogether.

In her worst moments of fear and hopelessness she thought she would just sink. But she kept on floating, marking time with her breathing, gulping the air painfully, her mouth now bitter and dry. Then, something glinted in the sun, and for a while she thought it must be a huge fish but it was not. She swam toward it for what seemed like forever and near it at last, she cried — it was a huge banana trunk and she embraced it, clung to it, and thanked God and all the spirits of the departed for this raft.

She paddled slowly. The sun rode the heavens and lashed down at her, blistered her skin, which hurt so much she would scream. Darkness finally came. It was cold. Her eyes closed and she would struggle to keep them open. The searing blisters, the aching in her throat were now dulled, even bearable, as sleep threatened to engulf her. Once, her grip on the trunk loosened and she seemed to have drifted off into sleep; she woke up in time, fear giving strength to her body and she gripped the trunk even tighter. Then, to her dismay, a skein broke off and now she was afraid that the whole trunk would fall apart before she reached the shore. Worse, it seemed as if the sea itself now wanted to claim her. The waves seemed bigger, and she could not see what was ahead as the sea heaved. Thoughts of death flashed through her mind once more, of fish feasting on her flesh as she sank to the bottom. Her legs were already numb and her arms were heavy as logs. It was then that she made the vow: that if she lived, she would serve whoever saved her for as long as she was needed and she would do anything, anything demanded of her …

Morning again; the shore seemed much nearer. A wave lifted her, and through eyes that smarted she was overjoyed to see the line of trees on the shore. But her arms were no longer hers, her throat was being scraped by thorns. With no food in her belly for two days, it seemed as if it were being gnawed by sharp fangs. The banana trunk seemed so enormous, she could no longer hold on to it, and all around her, the turbulence of waves, the sound of crashing surf, of thunder.

“I was very surprised to find out later that I was alive,” she said. The man who rescued her had seen her from the shore clinging to the banana trunk. There were no houses in this part of the coast — surely she was not out there for a swim. He was not a good swimmer but he had four large coconuts whose husks were ripped partially then tied together. He used them as floats when he swam out to her. She was hardly conscious when he reached her, her arms like a vise on the trunk; he towed her to the shore and carried her to his cart, watched her sleep till early evening, when she finally woke up.

“It was dark,” Dalin said, “but there was this cooking fire at my feet, and this man with one hand tending the pot. I cried again and again with happiness. My body ached all over — the blisters on my skin — and I realized that I was naked, that he had removed my wet clothes and covered me with a blanket. More than that, I realized, too, that he had bathed me with fresh water — there was no salt water on me. Even my hair had been combed. I remembered my vow.”

He was more than twice her age. He had taken the seaside route and was carrying back to the Ilokos three sacks of grain and a jar of salted fish. He had gone to eastern Pangasinan and had gleaned the newly harvested fields there. He would tell his people of the virgin lands where they could still settle, the mountains they had to cross.

That night she ate for the first time and never before had rice and green tomatoes dipped in salted fish tasted so good. But he forbade her to eat or drink too much. He made soup with marunggay leaves which scalded her insides and warmed her all over. He was right in warning her, for hardly had the food settled in her belly than she started to vomit.

She could not make out his face too well in the light of the cooking fire, but she could see the ridges on his forehead and his only hand. Before she went to sleep naked under the coarse Iloko blanket, the uneven earth covered with grass mat, she wondered what his thoughts had been when he undressed her.

She woke up very late, the sun a glaze upon the land and sparkling on the sea to her right. The blanket had slipped and her breasts and her belly were exposed. Nearby on the grass, her skirt and blouse were already dry and she stood up weakly and put them on. Her benefactor was nowhere in sight, the cart still unhitched beside her. He was not inside. Down to the left, his white bull was tethered to an ipil sapling and was grazing on the stubbly grass. Beyond the growth of ipil trees and scrub was a wooded hill; on the trail farther on, two carts were straining up the incline. He emerged from the screen of trees slumbering in the heat, on his shoulder a bundle of dry twigs for firewood.

He had a dark kindly face, a small nub of a nose. “There is food in the pot,” he said with a faded smile. “You vomited everything you ate last night …”

She wanted to rush to him, to kiss his hand, but she could only stumble forward. He helped her to climb up on the cart, which was loaded with grain, coconuts, and the jar of salted fish, then he hitched it. He wanted to take her back to Lingayen, but there was no one there to whom she could return; besides (she did not tell him) there was this vow she had made. If she was going back at all, it would be on a pilgrimage of gratitude to the Virgin in Manaoag. Would he take her there? Yes, but first he must go back to his people in the north — they needed the grain he was bringing back.

That day, her dead skin started to peel and in time the blemishes disappeared. She gathered catuday flowers and marunggay leaves along the way, and cooked them flavored with young tamarind leaves.

He told her she could leave him anytime, particularly after she had regained her strength. After all, she was no stranger to this route but she said she would go wherever he would go. She was his servant and would ask for no money, just the food she ate. She drove the cart at night, and while they rested in the daytime, she gathered grass for the bull. It was a big beautiful animal — and patient.

On the seventh night on the seaside road they stopped by a river which they would cross in the morning. It was dry along the bank and on the opposite side other travelers had also stopped for the night. Her strength was fully restored, but sleep was often fitful and, as he told her, she often screamed in the night. She always slept in the cart, atop the sacks of grain, while he slept on the ground, sometimes beside the cart, but always close to the bull. They had eaten and she had washed the pots. Cicadas were lost in the grass as the darkness came quickly. Somewhere in the distance, a dog howled. All the cooking fires of the other travelers arrayed farther up the bank had long been extinguished. Below them, the river had become but a thin and shallow stream, gurgling now as it coursed through boulders and their catch of weeds. As the night deepened, she went down from the cart and lay beside him. He told her she was like a daughter to him. He was a widower; there was no reason for him to refuse other than his feelings of shame, if not of inadequacy. He had grown-up children and the grain he was bringing home was for them. I have not had a woman for many years, he told her, but in a while, he responded and quietly she accepted him. Gratefully she kept her pledge.

Years afterward, Istak would always remember not just this story but how he, too, had made his vow. That night she unfolded her past to him, he told her, “I will also do whatever you bid me.”

Her touch upon his chest was soft and warm. “You are not well yet,” she said.

CHAPTER 5

It seemed as if an eternity passed before the second day came. The pain — continuous and dull — the loss of blood, the anxiety, all these had weakened him. His mind remained clear and he could hear the quiet talk of his kin, the things they forgot to bring in their hurry, the scouting for the direction they must take. He had not eaten anything except several spoonfuls of broth his mother had prepared from marunggay leaves. They stopped and when Mayang bent over to give him another spoonful, he asked in a whisper: “Where are we now?”

“You know how Bit-tik likes to wander. He says we are close to Vigan. From here, we can see the bell tower of Bantay …”

Through mists and the throbbing pain, he could imagine Vigan again, Ciudad Fernandina — regal city of the north, the repository of wealth as only Ilokano industry and commerce could amass it; Vigan, anointed domain of power and learning, of grace and beauty and all the plenitude of blessings that are bestowed on those who commanded in the name of God and of the Spanish realm. He first saw it as a boy of fifteen when Padre Jose took him to the seminary there. He had followed the old priest silently and in awe of the resplendent appointments, the convent with its huge oil portraits of beatified priests, and within the vast masonry, the august halls glowing with the luster of piety and age, as if wisdom were impregnated in the gray walls forever.

Then to dinner in one of the pretentious houses nearby, and from the kitchen where he was sent to eat with the other servants, he had glimpsed the wide living room ablaze with crystal chandeliers, the finely crafted furniture, the porcelain vases that stood serene in solemn corners. The kitchen itself was floored with tile. And beyond it, the dining room with its giant fan overhead, a table laden with sweet ham and other exotic meats, and under the table, two young girls with fans stirred a breeze and drove away the mosquitoes from those legs encased in black woolen trousers or billowy satin skirts and pointed shoes. Here they were, the men and women of noble bearing, educated in Manila and well traveled in Europe, the wealthy mestizos, Europeans, and, of course, the Spanish prelates who ruled. And after the dinner, Spanish brandy, preserved sweets, and the elegant music of a string quartet. They glided with case, these elegant women in embroidered blouses, their fingers sheathed in diamonds, complaining of their peasant servants and how far they were from Manila, where they could be pampered with the latest gossip, fashions, and imports from the continent; the men in tight suits rambling on about the sinking price of indigo, the new profits to be made in ranching, and yes, their uneasiness and disdain for the heathen English scourge of Freemasonry, which seemed to reach out to Ciudad Fernandina.

On the third day, the fever finally came. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, it spread all over him like a flood of hot mud flowing from the wound in his breast. His head seemed wedged between two tree trunks and now the trunks began to press and grind against each other. He shook with chills no matter how many layers of blanket Mayang and Dalin covered him with. His mind was fogged and in those few moments of lucidity and wakefulness, he could see inchoate shapes of people, of children, peering at him through the open archway of the cart, overhear their conversations — the coffin which should be readied, but there was none, how they would have to bury him not in a cemetery but on some desolate mountainside, in the shade of a great tree so they could at least place a marker where he lay. Images formed, the faces blurred and soon flitted away, and then from the smoky chaos Padre Jose emerged, wraithlike, his eyes piercing, his mouth moving, though no words came forth. After some anxious waiting, the words, though almost in a whisper, took shape. The priest was speaking in Latin: “The ways of the world are devious and the trials through which we must go to earn God’s grace come in many forms. Do not despair, do not despair — we are men of peace, and we are destined to bring life to the sick, happiness to those who grieve — this is our burden.”

They were not in the sacristy or in the convent in Cabugaw but on a mountainside, surrounded by Igorots whose arms and breasts were tattooed. Again, Padre Jose spoke to him: “My God is the God of all men, and it was He who gave this land to all of you.”

“Look at yourself,” the old priest commanded, and Istak looked down at his belly, at his chest and arms. They were tattooed. In his hand a spear — and his hair was long. He was an Igorot, too, and he was telling Padre Jose harshly: “Your God is not mine. He is not in the seminary in Vigan, he is not in you, and if he is in all men, then he wears the uniform of the Guardia, he has a gun pointed at us. I was baptized in the river and the river is cold and it is my brother An-no who carried me there, and it is Dalin and my mother who cared for me. It is they and my people whom I will serve, not you and your god. And as for you — and the likes of you — I will kill you! Death to all Kastilas!”

And with one mighty heave, he flung his spear at the old priest. But the spear bounced off the old man’s chest and fell broken to the ground. Padre Jose was no longer flesh — he was stone!

The old priest smiled. “You are mistaken, Eustaquio. And I forgive you as I always have because deep in your heart, you are an honorable man, a man of peace …”

Istak picked up the broken spear, detached the blunted spearhead, and rushed at the old priest. He struck him in the chest again and again, but stone was harder than metal and with every blow, the ache in his arm increased until, exhausted, he cast the useless spearhead away.

Padre Jose spoke calmly: “My child, I am beyond touching or hurting. Still I would like you to know that like me, you have a mission. You will lead your people to the new land. You will undergo great suffering as you do now. You will cross many rivers and you will be filled with sorrow. But you will reach your destiny. Though you are not a priest, you will serve your people and your God as well, and you will do this because you have faith. You will do what I have never done, because you are from this land, because God has chosen you …”

On the seventh day, the fever left him and he slept well and without screaming. Sometime in the night, he woke briefly to find Dalin by his side, wiping his brow. The solid wheels of the cart were creaking — they were relentlessly moving, moving. He slept on through the yaw and jerk of the cart. When he woke up, the cart no longer jerked; they were now on the plain, on a trail, or on the beach.

Soon it was daylight and they stopped traveling. No one was in the cart — they were all outside. Mayang was saying there should not be too much salt in the chicken broth. How sweet her voice sounded! Then she was saying how sad it was that she was not able to bring all the yarn she needed so that once they had arrived in the new land she could start weaving.

Beyond the door spread an obscure forest. Birds twittered outside, and the delicious scent of meat roasting over an open fire drifted to his nostrils, lifting him, and for the first time, he craved food. It came to him then, the dream about Padre Jose and for an instant, a chill coursed through him.

Inang! Inang! — he called but only a gurgling sound escaped his lips as if pebbles filled his throat. He coughed then repeated, “Inang! Inang!” and now the words took shape but were a mere whisper.

“My God, thank you,” his mother said at the door. “He is alive.”

In a moment, Dalin was in the cart, too.

They brought him newly cooked rice and roasted pork and sliced tomatoes; aroma flooding his senses. He had not eaten for days except broth; now was the time to practice self-restraint. Padre Jose had always dinned it into him, to restrain himself, to avoid temptation, for to surrender to it was to invite perdition.

He took just a mouthful of rice, a tiny piece of pork, savoring the meat fully, letting it linger in his mouth, and a cup of the chicken broth. He was weak; he could not even raise his head from the coverless pillow without Dalin holding him up. Then he realized that he could feel with his right arm the ridges in the split bamboo mat which walled the cart; the arm was no longer numb. Slowly he raised it, moved the thumb first, then all the fingers. They were all responding. He tried to raise the entire arm, flex it, and it was then that this lacerating pain lashed at him and he screamed.

They crowded around the cart. His brow was damp and cold. He asked Dalin to examine the wound to see if there was pus. She lifted the bandage carefully and smiled. “It is beginning to heal. The wound is closed and there is no swelling,” she said happily.

The worst was over.

“You did not know what was happening,” Dalin told him afterward. “We all thought you would die.”

He smiled, remembering quickly the bits of conversation he had overheard, the dream.

Dalin said, “We were frightened. And when you became very hot, thank God, you told us what we should do.”

“And what was that?”

“We took you to a stream and your father and An-no, they soaked you in the water, up to your neck, till your body cooled. On the fourth day, when your fever became worse and there was no stream, you told them again what to do. They cut a wild banana stalk, took off the skins, wrapped you in them, till the fever subsided again …”

He had not forgotten his lessons, not from the books that he had read, but what Padre Jose had told him.

“You know so many things,” Dalin said, wonder in her eyes.

“I had a very good teacher,” he said. “An old, kindly priest.”

“A priest?” Dalin asked. Istak nodded.

After a while: “You were talking in your sleep,” Dalin said, “Now I find it difficult to understand why you said those things.”

“What did I say?”

“You were shouting, ‘Kill the priest! Kill all Kastilas!’ ”

Istak became silent. It was An-no who took him to the creek, the brother who loathed him, who coveted Dalin for himself. It was Padre Jose whom he had always respected and loved — yes, he had really loved the old priest not so much in return for the many kindnesses that had been shown him, but for the light that Padre Jose had cast upon the path Istak had taken. And yet, in the deeper wilderness of his mind, in this dream, he had wished his benefactor harm. In wine, truth; in dreams, the soul?

If these thoughts were hidden in the fastness of his mind, if he did not recognize them, would they surface someday as evil deeds?

It was true then what Padre Jose had said, that there is evil in all of us, that only with faith and its capacity for exorcism can we master this evil.

“Where are we now? And how long have we been traveling?” he asked.

“A week,” she said. “We are still close to the mountains, but in a day we will be down by the shore. We have been harvesting wild bananas and green papayas.”

“How long before we get to the sea?”

“Tomorrow,” she said.

He went back to sleep and dreamed that he was flying, floating over the caravan, scouting far ahead of it the plain beyond the hills. He floated above the treetops and waved at those below; he soared with ease in any direction he wished; it was such a natural thing for him to fly. Then he saw the narrow road which cut the mountainside and skirted the coast, and ahead were hundreds of Guardia waiting. They would all pass through this dreaded funnel, they could not hurdle the mountain.

He woke up at noon and remembered the dream. He called for Ba-ac, who came to the cart immediately. They propped him up on a sack of grain. Beyond the line of carts, a dense growth of scrub, butterfly trees browned by the dry season.

“Father, we will soon reach the Spanish road and we will all be searched there.”

“I know,” Ba-ac said sadly. In the light, his father seemed much older. “But there is no other way.”

“We must cross singly,” Istak said. “They will not think of stopping or searching just one cart. One at night, one in the daytime. And we should all then meet … but where?”

Dalin, who knew the road, was ready with a suggestion. “Before we reach the Abra River,” she said, “we cannot miss that, we will wait till everyone is there.”

Istak had passed the road many times when he and Padre Jose traveled to Abra. The people were forced into building it, just as, even now, the ilustrados were forcing the people to work for nothing, exacting punishment if they refused. It was a narrow dirt road flanked by brick embankments, gently sloping with the descent of the hills, clinging to the strip of land before it plunged into a rocky coast. There were battering waves during the typhoon season, but the sea this time of the year should be blue and calm.

“If you look long enough,” Dalin said, “you can see the bottom.”

That night, Istak could not sleep. He lay, waiting for each lurch as the cart dipped into ruts or went over stones, the swish of tall grass as they cut through outgrowths.

“Where are we?” he asked. Dalin was in front, holding on to the reins of the bull. She turned briefly and shushed him. They must be passing again through dreaded territory and the wheels had been greased anew with coconut oil so they would not creak.

Istak closed his eyes but could not sleep. The pit in his stomach deepened. He would endure the hunger till morning. What was it compared to what awaited them in this dark maw of night? Even the Guardia were not safe here. But the cocks — they would give them away by their crowing. He was alarmed.

“They have all been killed,” Dalin assured him.

Morning again; the sky lightened slowly and the stars winked out. Istak could raise half his body now. They were on a rise of ground and close by the forest, with the mountain rising behind the tall trees. On one side, through the curtain of tall grass, the land plummeted to the sea, and there, like a brown line on the coast, was the Spanish road.

Even at this time of the year, when the land was scorched, the forest was a deep green, throbbing with secret life. Farther up the mountain, the green turned into a purplish black that cloaked the foothills all the way up to the peaks.

The forest was hostile, with unseen threats, but every year before the rains started he and the old priest had ventured without fear into it and beyond to the land of the Bagos — the Igorots, the ancient enemies of his people. He had listened, entranced, to the dal-lot and the life of Lam-ang, the epic hero whose courage and strength were tested in battles with them.

In times of peace, the Bagos came down, half-naked, their torsos caked with dirt, their spears glinting and awe-inspiring. But they did not come to fight, merely to trade their baskets, their dried deer meat for dogs, tobacco, and fibers for their looms. He could recognize them even if they dressed like Christians because they were short and squat, their backs broad, their legs muscular. They chewed betel nut continuously and their teeth were blacker than those of his own people. As a boy in Po-on he did not fear them; it was the Komaw that frightened him, that huge and ugly kidnapper of children who would take him away if he did not behave as his mother instructed him.

Only the Bagos lived in these mountains, kindred to the wild boar and the python. They were hunters who could merge with the foliage, become one with the bush until they assumed the mystery of the forest as well, sharing its darkness and its sensuous promise. But there was no promise in the forest now. It was a black redoubt to be sundered so that its soil would bear the seed. It cannot be, it must not be the haven of those who fear the light — and Istak recalled again the dim sacristy of the church in Cabugaw and how secure he felt there with the ghosts of the past, of the nameless and innumerable dead in all those records that he had kept, his fear melting in the air he breathed. It was a far more mysterious forest which they would now face, and perhaps — he shuddered at the thought — they would not be able to go beyond it.

It was the fourth day since the first two carts had left carrying Bit-tik and his aunt Simang. All the departures from the hollow of the hill were timed so that the carts would be on the coastal road late in the night or in the deep, deep dawn. It was Ba-ac who went first on foot and alone, balancing on his shoulder a small sack of rice, his stub of an arm on a sling of coarse Ilokano cloth. He was carrying this sack of rice as a wedding present to a niece in Candon; he was walking all the way even at night, hoping he would not miss the wedding. Istak had been to Candon, of course — it was a very prosperous town, one of the stations where Padre Jose used to stop for additional provisions before they turned left toward Tirad and the perpetual challenge of the Cordilleras.

Four days, and Istak wondered if all that he had taught them would be remembered, if they would be able to pretend that their destinations were not the same.

Now it was his turn and Dalin’s. They had spent the last three days waiting. Dalin was never idle; she had tended the bull, done some sewing and cooking. There was always something a woman could do while a man mused and pondered his fate. The day comes different from all others, night quickly falls, and sometimes it is best to be silent, to be alone with one’s thoughts. But for her I would be dead — but for her — there must be some purpose for this long journey other than shredding the soles, just as life is one journey from one night to another. So it must be, exitus and reditus, leaving and coming, and in between, the uncertainty which numbs the heart and lacerates the soul. But perhaps, though it is broken now, the body will be reborn — just as a tree might be ravaged by all forms of blight, yet in spite of its frailty, its fruit can be sweet because the tree itself comes from a good seed.

Dalin had calculated the distance very well; they left the hollow after they had supped on green papayas with pieces of chicken. She had cooked the food before sundown when the cooking fire would not reveal their presence. For a while, Dalin walked the bull through thickets of bamboo and shallow gullies; inside the cart, Istak remained still, braced as he was between two sacks so that the wound would not reopen.

Then, after a while, the cart stopped. From the rear of the cart, Dalin took the oil lamp out. It had not been used for a long time and the wick was dry, but soon it sputtered into a flame. She brought the lamp to the front.

Istak lay down. The light cast patterns on the canopy. The ride was smooth; they were no longer on rough ground or fallow fields but on the cobbled Spanish road, a light proclaiming their presence — persons of peace on a long journey. They were moving slowly, steadily, the wheels creaking, Dalin before him framed by the doorway of the cart, and beyond, the night dangerous and vast; Dalin near him, comforting him with her presence, easing the knot in his heart.

They had rehearsed what they would say — they were newly weds going to settle with relatives in Pangasinan. As for their being married, “I hope it will be true someday,” Istak told her.

He slept fitfully and though he often asked Dalin to lie down while he kept watch, she had refused. Once, he woke up to find that the cart was not moving, that the shadows the lamp cast were still. The bull was chewing its cud but Dalin was nowhere. He half rose in fright and saw that they were by the roadside, and Dalin was seated on a rock, resting the bull, while below them, the waves murmured on the rocks and the air was salty and clean.

“Please come and sleep now, and I will watch,” he said. Dalin mounted the cart again.

“We have passed the two posts where we should have been checked,” she said softly. “There”—she pointed to the distance where a lighthouse beam shone—“that was the last one.”

“And they did not stop you?”

“Who would bother with a cart at this time of night? The sentries were probably all asleep.”

He was right, then. The other carts must have passed the sieve.

Morning comes to the Ilokos quickly, the sun rising from beyond the mountains and flooding the land with amber light. They were still on the Spanish road, for in this part of the country the mountains and the sea often meet, and the narrow road followed the coastline through narrow plains and villages that had begun to stir.

To their right, a few fishing boats sat motionless in the water, while beyond, a ship with smoke trailing long and black from its funnel headed toward the north. Perhaps it was one of the Spanish boats headed for Aparri, or even to Hong Kong. Toward midmorning, six horsemen followed by four carriages came thundering down the highway. One of the horsemen roared at them to get off the road and, for an instant, fear gripped Istak. But the man merely wanted the road to be cleared, for soon after Dalin had dismounted and led the bull aside, the four carriages rolled on, their well-dressed passengers chatting, among them a priest — perhaps a bishop, in his resplendent finery, on his way to officiate at some festivity.

Where possible, Dalin took the cart away from the main road and then ventured through seaside hamlets. This was what traders often did and in each she asked if there was any dried fish she could buy. For traveling, it was much better than dried meat, as it was not likely to spoil quickly.

By nightfall, they had to be on the road again. They were near the Abra River now. Istak knew this almost by instinct, and if it had been the rainy season, they would have had to cross the river by ferry. The river would be dry in parts and where the water was still running it would be shallow. There would be many travelers along the stretch of riverbed, for there they paused to cook their meals and do their washing before journeying onward to La Union and Pangasinan.

They stopped for the night in a village far from the road, their presence known to the villagers who on occasion would receive travelers seeking company and perhaps protection from the highwaymen who roamed these parts. And in the early dawn, long before daybreak, Dalin hitched the cart again.

They reached the river before noon. Bit-tik, who had waited along the road, rushed to them breathless with the good news: they had all managed to get through the eye of the needle — they were together again, farther along, down the wide are of the riverbed, hidden by tall grass.

Dalin took the cart down a well-traveled gully. Along the way, close to the narrow stream of water, were the ashes of cooking fires, traces of a night’s habitation, laundry spread out in the sun to bleach on the stones, women washing their hair, and children splashing about.

There were a few Igorots in loincloths. It would be a long way back across the mountains to their villages and for the moment, they were here in peace, although once in their own domain, they could be the fiercest hunters of heads. They could be Tinguianes, Istak told Dalin, who cringed when one of them approached the cart, baring teeth stained by betel nut, and asked in Ilokano if they had any sugar to sell.

They had none, of course, and after he had left and joined his companion, Istak assured Dalin she was in no danger, not while Bit-tik was with them. “Toward that turn of hill, that is where they are waiting,” Bit-tik told them, pointing. They would get there by noon.

All of them had bathed and their faces shone. But no one lived here, they said; who would be able to grow anything on this desert of pebble and sand? Even the camachile trees remained stunted.

Ba-ac would tell them again and again afterward how he had fooled the Guardia, how everyone was asleep at the first station except for one sentry. He had approached the sentry and asked first if he could have a drink, and after that, if he could just rest his tired legs and, perhaps, go to sleep nearby till daybreak, for here he felt completely safe — what with the rice and, perhaps, his only good shirt in the sack — he, a defenseless old man. He would relate many times till everyone knew it by heart, how the sentry did not even bother asking him where he came from, but had, instead, complained about the mosquitoes that infested the air, while below, the waves slapped sonorously and soon lulled him to sleep. In the early dawn, Ba-ac had asked if there were more sentries down the road where he could possibly rest again, and he was told there were a couple more, but who would travel on foot at this time except a crazy old man worrying about something as trifling as a few gantas of rice?

In the evening when they made ready to leave the riverbed, Ba-ac came to see him again. “You are much better, son,” he said. “You are no longer as pale as a banana stalk. It is good that you have Dalin to take care of you. Now, at least, you can sit up and show us the way. You know it better than any of us, at least all the way to Candon. And from there, Dalin will be our guide.” Ba-ac turned to the woman who was leading the bull to the yoke. “You are one of us now, young woman,” Ba-ac told her warmly.

“Thank you, Apo,” she said.

“Where is An-no, Father?” Istak asked. He could not forget how his younger brother had railed against him, how he wanted Dalin for himself.

“You are brothers,” Ba-ac said. “There is no distance between you that cannot be bridged.”

It was a cryptic reply. Did the old man know of the rift between the brothers that Dalin was the center of? Did he know how Mayang had looked at his relationship with Dalin to be as ominous as sin?

They would no longer use the Spanish road; again, they would take the circuitous route close to the foothills, away from the towns. They still had a long way to go before they reached Candon, where Ba-ac had second cousins who would probably give them shelter for a day. A long journey ahead still, and no peace with An-no in sight, only this silence and this distance that could widen if he did not move wisely.

It was all routine now, the women cooking the meals, the men walking ahead and behind the carts, particularly where the grass was dense and the farms far between, places where brigands could lie in wait.

Then, the plain narrowed again as the mountain dropped to the sea. An-no had gone miles out in front to check if there was any outpost where they could be challenged. He had returned with the glad news that the road was free. They waited till dark and only then did they come down from a fold in the hill.

The mountains gave way to fields, the plain unfurled. Beyond the bamboo brakes, Istak recognized it at once — Mount Tirad, stabbing the sky like a spearhead. He knew the way not just to Tirad but beyond, and if it had just been the menfolk with him, he would have suggested that they cross over to the valley through the pass. But there were women and children, and a venture into the land of the Igorots without Padre Jose was always dangerous.

Before the day would be over, they would reach Candon.

It was one of the richest towns in the southern portion of the Ilokos. Even from a distance the spires of its magnificent church could be seen in the sunlight. The plains around it swelled with green, and to the left, up the foothills of the Cordilleras, were the ranches. From here, some of the best cattle and horses from the Ilokos were raised. Market days, as in most Ilokano towns, were festive as well. From the villages, the people came to buy their weekly ration of salt, oil, thread, matches, even books — cheap novels in Iloko. Istak loved the days when they sojourned in Candon, particularly the marketplace, where he saw so many goods on display, sometimes even better than those in the market in Vigan.

But the people they were going to see were not in town; they lived close to the foothills. Like Ba-ac, they did not know how to read and write, and they worked the land with diligence, for that was the only thing they knew.

They had been traveling slowly, determinedly, for ten days. The wound in Istak’s chest had completely closed, but it was still painfully sensitive, its edges now hardened with pus which had turned to a scab that would soon fall off.

Every day, at his instruction, Dalin washed the wound with warm water that had been boiled with guava leaves, and her hands were ever gentle. He was still weak. Though he could sit with her in the front of the cart, he could not walk around as much as he wanted to.

They had paused in the shade of a lomboy tree and across the expanse of fallow land were the houses of a sitio where, Ba-ac said, his cousins lived. They had settled in this part of Sur some twenty years ago after one of them married a local girl.

“Do we have to see them, Father?” Istak asked. “And what will we tell them? And how do we explain to them why we do not have with us our house posts?”

“They are relatives, son,” Ba-ac said. “They will understand our silence. They may even help us with provisions that we do not have.”

“Why don’t you go first by yourself, Father?” Istak suggested. “They know you — and then, when everything is clear, we can follow …”

Bit-tik went with his father to the sitio while the men unhitched the bull carts and the women started to prepare the noonday meal.

They would not venture into town, they would never go to places where there were people and, therefore, the Guardia and the priests. Not till they were far, far away from the Ilokos and all its encumbrances.

Ba-ac and Bit-tik returned while they were about to eat a meal of catuday flowers, eggplants, and tomatoes scrounged from the marginal farms they had passed.

“Blas and the others — they are all gone,” Ba-ac said softly. “The houses are there, but they are empty — all three of them. Not one chick, not one piglet left — they must have left within the last two days — there were still fresh ashes in the stoves, and there is no dust on the floors …”

Could they have been ordered away, too? The thought hovered in Istak’s mind. Could they have left because they could no longer endure the harshness of living in the Ilokos?

An-no, who had scouted the way farther ahead, returned in time for lunch. The way was clear and good, and there were no houses close by. Now it was Dalin’s turn to be the guide, to stay in the lead cart — it was she who knew the way, for Candon was the southernmost point that Istak had ever reached.

By nightfall, they were crossing the Tagudin River, and though it was wide, a child could wade through the deepest part. The bull strained over stones. Across the bank, behind a screen of camachile trees, they stopped for the night. They would bathe again, do their washing, and in the morning they would be on their way. They slept well, except for the two men who stood guard quietly, ears alert to every sound; but there were none which presaged danger — just the wind soughing in the grass, the grunt of animals, the stirring of dogs, the murmur of the river as it coursed through, and the distant crowing of cocks.

In the morning, they were surprised to find that three carts had stopped nearby. Istak woke up to Ba-ac’s happy shouts: his cousins were in the carts, and to them he ran, waving his one good hand. It was years since he had seen them last, but memory holds on to images, to joys that were shared.

Ba-ac’s cousins and their wives came to them soon after with their daughters and sons. They were going to the valley, they had left Candon forever, and like those who came from Po-on, they, too, had been ordered to leave their farms.

Now there were ten carts. Istak had his doubts but he kept them to himself; he did not want to hurt his father, to suspect their distant relatives of some future perfidy. Did Ba-ac tell them everything? The reason why they were taking such a tortuous way to the new land? They would soon know, and they would then be afraid. If threatened by the Guardia, they would probably betray Ba-ac.

In afterthought, he need not have worried. He should have simply relied on the Ilokano iron sense of loyalty to friend and family. Istak was particularly happy with his new uncle, Blas, who was a man of words. A big, bluff man, he had been and still was the poet capable of stringing the honeyed phrases that could waylay the most aloof of women. But he was unable to bend to his will a girl from Candon who had come to Po-on to visit. He had followed her to Candon some twenty years or so earlier and in the custom of those who were not favored by either the parents or the object of desire herself, he had served in her household, working the land as a farmhand with no pay at all, except for his meals. He slept below the granary, apart from the house and close to the work animals — for he was almost treated as one — and for a year ingratiated himself with the girl’s family, returning on occasion to Po-on to be the object of jokes from Ba-ac and all his relatives, why with his silver tongue he was not able to convince a simple girl to accept him after a few days.

His uncle’s tenacity surprised Istak no end, but he knew also that he would have done this for Dalin if she were still the same unfeeling creature she had been in the beginning.

Just the two of them, Blas with big, handsome words rolling out of his mouth without effort, and Istak full of questions. It was one of those early evenings when the meal was done, the animals fed and safely herded, and the women had long since extinguished the cooking fires.

“I have known how it is to snatch a field from the forest,” Blas said quietly. They had left the riverbed and were up the brow of a hill beyond which the narrow plain would unroll again. “That was what surrounded Candon when I first went there. It was hard work which drained the body of its juices and numbed the mind to dreams. Dreams that what we had carved out of the wilderness would be ours — but it would not be. Always, wherever we, the little people, will go, there will be those with more strength than us who will wrest away what we thought was our own.”

“And you are willing to go with us and suffer the same fate?”

“My son,” Blas said, spitting out the wad of tobacco he had been chewing, and turning to his nephew with melancholy in his eyes, “this is the relentless destiny of the poor.”

“And you will go with us all the way to the valley?”

“We will journey with you to the farthest corner of the earth,” Blas said, lifting his eyes to the grandeur of a full moon. “We have relatives now, people we know who will make our suffering endurable.”

It did not matter then that they were his father’s mere second cousins, capidua, as they were called, and perhaps it was just as well. For if they were first cousins, it would not have been possible to even think that in the certitude of the valley, in some future time, Blas’s elder daughter, Leonora, also known as Orang, could be the wife of An-no, and that his younger daughter, Sabel, could be Bit-tik’s.

CHAPTER 6

By the end of the second week, they were close to the mountains again, and the forest was now encroaching like a green flood upon the sliver of plain. Dalin had never traveled this far from the coastal road and all she knew was that they were now close to the land of the Bagos.

In a few more days, moving slowly as they did, they would come to where the divide would widen and become another plain. In so short a time, the three families who had joined them were no longer strangers — their faces took on names, particularly Orang and Sabel, who were often with An-no and Bit-tik. Istak was glad. Perhaps Dalin would now be banished from An-no’s attention.

Istak desired her, as he once had desired Carmencita, although he had tried to subdue that longing, denied it to himself as something beyond fulfillment. But not with Dalin, who was with him every day, speaking with him, touching him. The wound was healed now, the pain completely gone, but at times there was some numbness in his arm, which he still could not move freely.

If Dalin had an inkling of how much Istak wanted her, she did not show it. There was the day’s work, the gathering of grass for the bull, the preparation of food or the search for it — green papayas, wild bananas, and the edible leaves of trees.

They had stopped for the day, and the men had cleared the crest of a hill on which stood a giant tree. They were at the edge of the forest and to their right the land undulated in a series of low hills into the sea.

The women were cooking within the semicircle of the carts which had been unhitched around the tree and the men had returned from the shallow creek at the bottom of the hill where they had bathed the carabaos. The dogs, with their snouts encased in woven rattan so that they would not be able to bark, were leashed to the carts.

Istak had ventured down the hill, the afternoon sun warm on his face, and he had returned, worried. “There is not a single house nearby,” he told Dalin quietly, not wanting her to be more apprehensive than she already was.

He wondered how really safe they were, and if the uncles who joined them knew how well the Bagos tracked their prey. The Bagos came to Cabugaw in the dry season with their cargo of baskets and colorfully woven cloth. They exchanged these for rice and a pack of scrawny dogs, which they then tied to a leash, the rope extending to the animal’s necks through a small hollow bamboo, so that they would not get entangled. Their approach was always announced by the yammering of the dogs as they marched down the dusty streets.

Padre Jose allowed them to leave their dogs in the churchyard and to sleep under the acacia trees. He even gave them rice for their meals and galletas to cat with their coffee. They spoke Ilokano, of course, but Padre Jose chose to speak to them in their own language, which he had learned tediously through the years.

Istak had gone up to their villages for the first time when he was a boy. They had crossed over Mount Tirad, Padre Jose on a horse and he walking behind or leading the two other pack-horses. He had always regarded the Bagos as ferocious savages who chopped off the heads of their enemies and stuck them on the eaves of their houses. This was true, Padre Jose had said, but we are not their enemies — we are their friends, and we are bringing God to them.

Istak now wondered how they could defend themselves should the Bagos decide to attack.

“While you were ill, that is what they made,” Dalin said. On the cart beside her lay two coconut bowls filled with very fine sand and salt. Thrown at the eyes of an intruder, the mixture could blind him for a while. From the side of the cart she picked up a bamboo pole which he had not noticed — there were four of them there. It was sharp, the point tempered and hardened in the fire. One had a spearhead — a knife that his mother used in the kitchen, thrust into the hollow of the bamboo, then woven neatly into place with rattan as only his brothers could do so that it was secure and would not be dislodged if it was thrown.

“They have made bows and arrows, too,” Dalin said.

These were not allowed by the Guardia Civil — such weapons were confiscated, and depending on the mood of the Guardia at the time, the offenders were taken to prison or simply lashed.

Istak was still weak; so this is how one returns from the river from which usually there is no return. He could move his hand and he prayed that soon he would be able to move his arm at will. Would he end up like his father, who sat in a corner silently cursing the powerful men who had condemned him to a life that was maimed? More than ever he understood now how it was to have but one arm, not just the physical loss, but something deeper and more disturbing.

The shade of the great narra tree was cool. The white plumes of grass around the carts waved in the breeze. It was he who first saw beyond the curtain of grass that the caravan had been surrounded. The young boys who were their lookouts did not have his eyes. He saw them moving quietly beyond the grass, the brief glint of a battle-ax in the morning sun alerting him. He shouted the warning: “Bagos — we are surrounded!”

The men stood transfixed for a moment, then rushed to their carts. The children clung to the skirts of their mothers. The men crouched behind the carts holding on to their bolos and the stakes they had shaped from bamboo.

The lookouts had seen the Bagos and they rushed to the dubious protection of the carts huddled together, their faces pale with fear.

A voice from beyond the grass boomed. Although it was in Ilokano, from the intonation Istak was now sure that the warriors waiting there were Bagos.

“O countrymen, why did you trespass into our land? Did you not see the signs? Can you not read them? We do not enter your towns without asking your honorable permission. Why do you not respect us the way we respect you?”

Ba-ac shouted back. “Brothers — we did not see your signs. Forgive us. We did not use the road below and you have been here for a long time so you know the reason why. Permit us, brothers, to stay here till dark because we travel at night. We fear not just the Guardia who still steal our rice, but also the bandits who trouble defenseless farmers like us. We left the farms we were born on, brothers, because we were driven away. No one pities the poor. We beg your pity, your forgiveness …”

Silence descended upon everything, marred only by the rustle of the wind in the grass and birdcalls from the mountain.

“Brothers — will you forgive us? We will give you tobacco, rice, for having trespassed into your honorable country …” Baac shouted again. Still no reply.

Then Istak saw from beyond the tall grass a wisp of gray rising. Smoke! The Bagos were burning the dry grass. They would roast alive on the crest of this hill even if they had made a clearing around them.

“Fire, Father! They are burning the grass!” he shouted. His voice could carry only so far but Ba-ac and the others had already seen the smoke. The fire leaped now in crackling flames, kindling the dry grass as if it were paper. They hurriedly hitched the carts, the children screaming, the women rushing them into the carts even before they were hitched, scooping up their pots, everything, urging, shouting.

“To the sea,” Ba-ac shouted, “Keep inside. Do not show yourselves. Lie down on the floor,” he kept screaming at everyone, then they rushed down the hill through a chasm in the wall of fire, and when they passed through, it seemed the fire was eating into their lungs and they could not breathe, but the animals surged on blindly. They had just cleared the swath of fire when spears rained on them, some striking the hapless animals, some thudding on the woodwork and going through the roof. There were screams in the other carts. “God — they will kill all of us,” Istak said, as a spear dug into the side where Dalin was crouched. It quivered, then was still. A little lower and Dalin would have been hit. The carts raced onward through a narrow valley.

“Do not stop!” Ba-ac shouted. The spears no longer fell but still the carts raced, the carabaos straining. Panting, angry, and afraid, Ba-ac, who was in the lead, finally stopped. They were at the end of the narrow valley which formed a gully to the plain. The hills had dropped behind them.

They gathered the carts again. They were all there — ten of them. The men poured out with spears and their bolos. They would fight here, on level ground, where they could see the Bagos from where they might emerge. The tufts of grass were sparse and not as tall as the grass on the hill.

From one of the carts a wailing erupted. Dalin went to it. When she returned, she told Istak simply. “It is the boy — the youngest — of your aunt Simang. He is dead, a spear through his neck. She told him to lie down but he stuck his head out because he wanted to see.”

They dug a hole in the center of the circle of carts and buried the boy there. Istak led the prayers and though not empowered to bless, he recited the prayer for the dead: Tibi Domine commendamus animam famuli tui …

But the Bagos did not pursue them. The family plucked a dozen spears from the sides of the carts, and from a carabao hit in the rump and bleeding.

“Now we have more weapons,” Ba-ac said.

They did not tarry. For as long as they were on the fringes of the land of the Bagos, they would have to travel in the daytime and risk whatever attack might come rather than be ambushed at night or lulled into the kind of trap they had just escaped.

Dalin pointed to the mountain ahead that dropped into the sea. “Beyond that,” she said, “is Pangasinan. And a week beyond that mountain, we will cross another range. Then it will be the valley.”

Destiny was near, to be reached in one leap or by stretching out a hand. Dalin tried to ease Istak’s mind. There were still forests to pierce and rivers to cross, and death could still lurk behind each shrub, each tree.

An-no’s aloofness and silence bothered Istak. Dalin made it all too clear, like daylight upon the plain, that she preferred Istak. How could he tell his brother that he did not plan this, that it had happened as so many inexplicable things do, because he had stayed behind in Po-on to bear whatever punishment the Spaniards would mete out? Perhaps, since Istak had climbed out of the grave, An-no had controlled his passion and given up his claim as well. Blood, after all, should be thicker than water.

There were times when he envied his younger brother, taller and stronger of build. He wanted An-no to be happy. He could give up Dalin; she was not his property, he had no claim on her. In fact, it was he who must now serve her the rest of his life; he owed her a debt which could never be repaid.

When the caravan had paused for the night and the dogs had quieted down and the children had been put to bed, he would lie awake, listening to her breathing. The silence was always thick — a steady ringing silence as if his ears were hollow and he could clearly hear the whirr of insects, the distant sounds of night. He would turn onto his side and touch her breast, worrying lest he disturb her, for she needed sleep. Sometimes she turned to him, her breath smelling of life and sun warm upon his face. She did not smoke or chew betel nut like the other women. Always she was scrubbing her teeth with twigs crushed into a brush. She was clean and not at all what the men had expected of the girls from Pangasinan. He suspected that she wanted to be touched, but she always said, “Not yet, not yet. You are not ready yet.”

And once, when he was very insistent, she said, “I don’t want you to strain yourself. If you persist, I will sleep outside.”

She was right; there was enough time in the coming days. He could wait. He prayed that the way to the new land would not be difficult. It should not be, not only because Dalin knew the way, but also because she was beside him. In the late afternoon, the clouds boiled in the horizon, then pushed up and hid the sun. The land smelled of heat and dead leaves. April was ending. Soon it would be May, and with it, the rains.

Istak was finally almost completely well; he could climb out of the cart and walk about. But his pallor was the continuing object of curiosity and pity. His hair had thinned and it seemed as if he had been ravaged by those dreaded diseases — typhoid and tuberculosis — which had afflicted so many in Cabugaw, their spittle scattered in the churchyard to be avoided and swept over with dirt.

Again, they traveled by night. To use the road, they would have to circle around the towns where the Guardia would be.

“We must change our names now, Father,” Istak said. “If they ask where we come from, we must be truthful and say we come from Cabugaw. And our names will begin with S just the same. They can’t know all the barrios there, so we won’t say we came from Po-on …”

Ba-ac was seated on the side of the cart, his crumpled face somber in thought. His striped shirt, which Mayang had woven, had not been washed for days and was lined with dirt and sweat. They must stop by a stream soon, to wash and bathe.

“What should we call ourselves now?” Ba-ac asked sadly. “Salvador has always been our name. Yes, the Spaniards gave it to us, but we grew up with it.”

“To survive, Father, we have to change,” Istak said solemnly. He turned to his brothers, Bit-tik and An-no; they were talking with the daughters of Blas, who had joined them in Tagudin. Like his, their hair was long now and they needed a haircut. He remembered the stories of the Bible. “Samson, Father — it begins with S, too, but there is not a single Samson in the registry in Cabugaw — I know, because I wrote in it for the last five years every time there was a birth or a death.”

“And how about our cédulas?”

“We will throw them away — and we will say that they were burned in our house when we left. We will have new ones when we reach the valley, and we will have our new name on them …”

New land, new name. They had always been Ilokano, with all the faults, the vices, that had shaped them, the habits which the narrow and infertile plain had etched in them. This is the way you are, Padre Jose had told him, but you are also a loyal people who know how to return a trust, to stake your life for a friendship that had withstood storm, earthquake, and fire.

He had wanted to ask the old priest what precisely he had meant. Was this the hell he had been talking about? Why was it impossible for the three priests who were executed in Cavite to serve God as they saw fit? Was this the Guardia Civil marauding the countryside and forcing tribute from people who did not even have enough to eat? He was not going to live with the people in their wretched villages — he was going to be a priest, and he would have a new name, just as the high and the mighty had new names, the Don, the gobernadorcillo, the Apo. He would not be just Eustaquio Salvador, the peasant from Po-on. He had suffered through Latin, gotten up every morning at five to clean the sacristy, to toll the bells. He was going to be near God, said Padre Jose, and to be so, he must have a good name. It is what one really owns in the end, a name. If it were silver, you would have to polish it every so often with deeds. Even in isolation, silver tarnishes. Look at the candelabra, the crucifix, the chalice — aren’t they streaked with tarnish if we don’t polish them? But someday an earthquake or some heavenly fire will destroy everything and ashes will be blown in the wind. What then? There are names which will live forever, and he had read them, in Latin, in Spanish. And would Eustaquio Salvador — or Samson — endure? Would he engrave his name on the land that he would clear, in the children he would sire?

As these thoughts came, the image of Dalin — her quiet face, her long tresses — swooped into his mind. He dreamed of that day in another country when he would finally be strong and able to clear and plant, and after the first harvest, he would ask her. His name would then be written down in the registry—Registro de Casamientos—as he himself had written so many times in Cabugaw. Now they flitted across his mind, the pages with carefully written names, among them, Salvador. His father knew his grandfather — but that was as far as Ba-ac could go. It was now too late, but he should have looked it up in the ledgers when he was still in Cabugaw — found out who they were, for there had been Salvadors in Po-on before them, and in that dim past, they must have suffered, too, as all Ilokanos had done. Why did they take punishment without question? Did they really believe that man was made to suffer so that he could receive the final reward that only God could bestow? Be patient, his mother had dinned into his cars. And be industrious. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the kingdom of God. And the meek are many and nameless.

They now traveled in the daytime, following the dusty road, just like the other carts leaving the Ilokos, carrying settlers like themselves, looking for land, free land. Land! What a melancholy and elusive word!

Sometimes they would come across a telegraph pole that had leaned and the wires were within reach. If there was no one to witness it, Ba-ac lashed at the wires with his bolo till they were sundered. “Don’t tell them about us,” he would say hoarsely.

In many places, the road was nothing but a swath of dust which swirled up like a funnel when the day was hot. These funnels sometimes loomed ahead, and once they were caught in one and could see nothing as dust enveloped them, and with it, this hot wind that seemed to suck everything. What a sea of mud the road would be in the rainy season! In some places, however, were cobbles of brick, but these only covered brief stretches of the road. Before the approaches of a town, they would head toward the nearest village instead to spend the night there, using the wells and the stoves of kindly Ilokanos.

It finally rained a week after they had raced down that hilltop. Every afternoon, the clouds had gathered and darkened but no rain fell. Now, gusts of wind tore down upon them and the clouds that had thickened on the rim of the sky loomed — a black and massive wave about to engulf them. Raindrops, big as pebbles, thudded on the dust and shook the grass. Then it came in slanting sheets, covering everything, and they could no longer see what lay ahead, the shapes of trees, the paths that now turned into rivulets of brown.

They had stopped to put up the detached palm frond doors of the carts, but the wind lashed against the doors, against the walls of the carts, and sent the rain through the tiny slits of bamboo siding, through cracks in the disheveled roofs. The children asked if they could go outside and bathe, and were quickly given permission.

It was May at last, and the first rain had a special magic. They must bathe in it, wash their clothes in it, drink it. Mayang laid her pots outside till they were full, and after the children had bathed, the older folk went out, too. Istak went out without his shirt, his ribs protruding. An-no and Bit-tik were with the girls who had joined them and he could see them through the rain, laughing and joking. Maybe An-no had already forgotten Dalin.

Dalin was close by, bathing the bull, scrubbing its white hide. She was wet and her hair came down behind her in dripping strands. Her wet blouse clung to her body and in the rain he saw her breasts, the nipples dark and distinct. She turned to him briefly and smiled.

He gazed at her, at the skirt that clung to her legs. He admired her, seeing for the first time the fullness of her body. A pleasant sensation coursed through him — desire, just as he had once desired the daughters of Capitán Berong when they would bend before him so that he could see their breasts. Then they would face him while the blood rushed to his face, smile at him, and he would stammer, unable to continue with his teaching.

But the daughters of Capitán Berong were beyond the compass of his imagination. He was from Po-on and they were fair of skin, unreachable; the men who could claim them would not be brown like him.

Dalin was brown.

They stopped that night in a mango grove close to the road and a village where the women went to cook. The firewood that they had strapped behind the carts was drenched and would not kindle. It stopped raining shortly after sunset and the smell of earth blessed with rain, the leaves still dripping, was about them. The whole world was alive and breathing.

They gathered the carts in a semicircle and put the cambaos and the bull within the are, and while the men talked the women prepared their meal or hung their wet clothes on the maguey twine which they strung from cart to cart. They cooked rice and vegetables for the next day’s breakfast as well so that all they would have to cook in the morning would be the coffee to warm their stomachs before they started out again. They had one more mountain to cross and the trails through the forest would be tortuous and slippery, but thank God, they were now free from the land of the Bagos.

Earlier in the evening, An-no had found a kutibeng in one of the carts and was strumming it. Ever since Dalin had taken Istak into her cart, An-no must have concluded it was no longer possible for him to possess her. It was just as well, for there was this girl Orang. She had a younger sister, but Orang was more mature, although flat-chested, and her eyes were always bright. Now, in the dark, Istak could hear his younger brother singing an old ballad, and the words were meant for Orang.

Since his recovery, Istak no longer slept in the cart but beneath it. Tonight, however, the ground was wet and Dalin told him to come up. He had demurred. “They are already saying many things about us, how I have been taking care of you,” she said. “Would it matter if we slept together now?”

He did not go to sleep at once. She sat before the cart looking out into the night, listening to the laughter in some of the carts, the mooing of carabaos. Cicadas called from the black shroud of trees around them, and beyond the shroud, in the open field, fireflies winked at them. The cooking fires of the houses beyond the grass kept them company as well.

It was cool, not like in the past when he was forced to take off his shirt, and this he had done with great difficulty because the wound, though healed, did not allow him easy movement. He needed a blanket now. Dalin faced him and their legs touched.

“Soon you will get back all the strength that you lost. I am happy,” she said.

“You will really go with us wherever we go?”

She did not speak; he could not see her eyes but knew she was looking at him. Then she turned and lay down beside him. She had turned on her side and so did he.

“I will decide when we get there,” she said.

“Suppose I asked you to stay with me …”

“You are not a farmer,” she said quietly. “I knew that from the very beginning. I do not think you can stay long on a farm. Not that you will not work.”

“I cannot be anything now but a farmer.”

“You can teach. You know many things we don’t know.”

“There is no place for people like us except the farm, Dalin,” he said. “Or the road, or the sea.”

She asked him how his arm was. He lay on his back and extended it to her. He could move it but the shoulder reminded him of a greater pain each time he lifted his arm.

She felt the scar with her hand. He liked the feel of that hand on his shoulder and impulsively, he turned and held it.

She understood. “You are not yet strong,” she said. “There are still many things you cannot do.”

He could feel himself stirring, the blood rushing to the tips of his fingers.

“I am not a virgin anymore,” she said with some sadness.

“You will be my first,” he said.

He kissed her, but she pushed him away tenderly.

He could not leash the animal stirring, he could not stop. His hands groped for her, found her warm and trembling, but she would not let him. “You are not yet strong,” she whispered into his ear as she half rose, looming so close, her face almost touching his. Then she kissed him and he tasted her lips, felt her tongue probe into his mouth.

“Don’t move then,” she told him. “I will do everything for you. And then, when you are strong …”

“You are the first,” Istak said again, then there were no more words.

So this is how two bodies melt into one, a communion, a celebration. This is what he had longed for and would have missed had he entered the seminary. He was a weakling after all, unable to withstand the devil call of the flesh. They were not even married — this was what he was taught, this was what he knew. Yet, within his deepest conscience, this was not wrong. It was bound to be, not temptation, but fate that brought them together, not just her stumbling into Po-on but her going back to the village to take him away from the avid clutch of death. She had given him life, now she was giving herself to him as well.

He slept well afterward, then woke up to the twitter of birds and the scurrying all around him, the boys hitching the carts, the women collecting children, animals, and clothes, getting ready to move. The pots had all been washed and he had slept through it all. He pretended sleep when Dalin went inside the cart and looked at him. The cart started to move, the solid wooden wheels squeaking. The children were talking about the falling star that night. Think of your birthday — and your wish will come true.

The air had a freshness to it; clean and washed, it flowed inside the cart. Dalin’s back was before him and he remembered how he had embraced her, felt the smooth fall of her shoulders, the softness of her breasts.

“Dalin,” he whispered.

She turned to him, her face radiant as morning.

“Thank you,” he said gratefully.

“Are you hungry?”

He nodded.

“There is rice in the pot — it is still warm and the coffee is still hot. There is also a piece of dried meat on top of the rice.”

He rose, squatted behind her, and ate. Occasionally, she turned to him, still holding the bull’s lead, and watched him. They were in the middle of the caravan and his mother was walking up ahead. The grass was wet and the ground was still solid, but in many places mud had already formed and the prints of carabao hooves on the mud were indistinct now. One more caravan like theirs and the road would turn into a quagmire.

He got off the cart when he was through eating and caught up with his mother, who had lifted her skirt to her knees so that it would not be soiled.

He wanted to tell her about Dalin. She must have expected it. Before he could speak, she asked, “How is Dalin?”

“Why do you ask, Inang?”

She turned to him briefly, her face burned by sun and lined by years of work, the eyes sharp and sad at the same time, streaks of white on the hair knotted at her nape.

“She is good,” she said quietly. “This I must say — in spite of all my forebodings. You cannot find a better woman. She works very hard. She has done so much for you at a time when I could not look after you. Your father, he is old and tired and very angry. Do you know what I am trying to say?”

He nodded slowly.

“Dalin is good for you. Take care of her,” his mother said, “and she will reward you.”

It rained every afternoon and they stopped in the villages until the rain passed. Ba-ac was often seized by fits of anger, and as if he were mad, he would shout his curses to the wind: Cunts of your mothers, you are evil like lightning. What have I done to you? Why are you doing this to us? You will have your time, you will pay! And not just with your blood. We will chop you bit by bit, your balls and your penises, we will throw them to the dogs. Cunts of your mothers!

Mayang did not stop his ranting anymore. She would just wait until he quieted down, his breathing heavy and tired, his eyes wet with tears. Seeing him like this, Mayang often cried. The children were too young to understand, but the other farmers and their wives understood. They were silent, for the old man’s anger was also theirs; he was just giving shape to the emotions that flamed in their hearts but could not burst out — neither words nor deeds nor yet light in their minds to show them how they could truly be themselves and not be hounded — helpless creatures that they were.

There were more towns now and every time they approached one, they would circle away from it. An-no, Bit-tik, or their uncles and the older boys walked ahead of the caravan. The road had become muddier as the days lengthened into a week.

Then, one morning, the Guardia came upon them — eight mounted soldiers with a Spanish officer, their rifles slung on their shoulders. They descended upon them from the rear so quickly they seemed to have appeared like phantoms from the grass. The men were brown like them, except for their officer.

Ba-ac, who was in the lead cart, happened to be asleep; he had stood guard the night before and was about to rise at the shout of “¡Alto! ¡Alto!” but Mayang quickly pushed him back and covered him with a blanket.

Istak was holding the leash of the bull out front when the Spanish officer rode past him and, briefly, their eyes locked. Capitán Gualberto did not recognize Istak, although Istak knew him at once. Who could miss his short-cropped hair, that aquiline nose, and those eyes that seemed to burn with perpetual hate? But Istak was no longer the acolyte who had served him in the kumbento in Cabugaw; he was now emaciated and pale as if he had just been snatched from the grave.

The Guardia had apparently been riding for some time; their blue uniforms were dirty and their horses were panting and wet with sweat. In his heavily accented Ilokano, Capitán Gualberto asked Blas, who was nearest to him, where they came from. Ba-ac’s cousin meekly told the truth, “Candon.”

And where were they going? “To the valley.”

“Your cédula, your cédula,” the Spanish officer barked.

From the wall of the cart, Blas took a small pouch and within was a piece of paper carefully wrapped with cloth; he presented it with trembling hands to the Spaniard, who glanced at it, then handed it back.

Istak felt his chest caving in, his knees giving out. Now the officer would ask for the cédulas of the others, now they would be found out and most probably killed right there.

But Capitán Gualberto did no such thing; one cédula seemed enough. He ordered them to dismount — all of them — and when they had dismounted, he rode to each cart and peered within. At the lead cart, he paused briefly to look at Ba-ac covered with a rough blanket, the face haggard, the eyes closed in sleep. “He is very ill,” Mayang, who stood by, told him.

Not one of the Guardia had dismounted; they formed a line beside the caravan while Capitán Gualberto continued his inspection. There was nothing of value in the carts, just the usual provisions of poor farmers, until his eyes rested on Blas’s two girls, first at the younger, then the older; his eyes widened and a grin crossed his face.

He asked Orang to step out of the line, and when she did, he looked at her again, her youth, her good limbs. The soldiers knew what to expect next and they were laughing boisterously. Blas was now livid with fear and anger, but a soldier drew a gun on him. His wife started to cry, and so did the younger sister. An-no, who stood by, knew what was going to happen, too, and though the darkest thoughts rushed to his mind, if he as much as moved a hand he would be shot, as Istak had been.

Dismounting, the Spaniard took the frightened girl’s hand while the other soldiers kept guard over the caravan. He led her across the empty field stubbled with grass to where a patch of cogon sprouted. The soldiers joked and laughed and made obscene remarks; they were Ilokanos, too, but to Istak, they were no longer men but beasts; it was they who had burned Po-on, who had left him for dead. He heard himself repeating his father’s curses.

CHAPTER 7

They were at the dusky rim of the jungle again. The tall razor grass was greener now and would no longer ignite as easily as it did during the height of the dry season. This portion of the road was rarely used, for in the last town most of the travelers stopped and from there they boarded the boats to the coast of Pangasinan, its towns rich with coconuts, fish, and salt.

The girl, Orang, did not want to join them anymore. She was sixteen and could read the alphabet and write her name, Leonora, that was all. All of them, they were going to learn to read and write with Istak teaching them. But now she wanted to kill herself, to drown in the first river they would cross, or to stay behind and work in any village as a servant, but not to go with them with her shame. The women — Mayang more than the rest — stayed with her through the night, soothing her, telling her it was not her doing, that no one among them could have stopped the dastardly deed.

When they started out the following morning, she was gone. She had slipped away in the night and they searched for her in the gullies, behind the mounds and the tall grass, shouting her name, their shouts echoing in the morning stillness. Orannggg … but the only answer was the sighing of the wind.

They could not leave without her.

It was An-no who found her weeping bitterly in the shade of a culibambang tree up the rise of ground where the foothills lifted. He had heard her and when he appeared, her weeping turned into a loud sobbing. He put his hand on her shoulder to comfort her. She shuddered and stiffened.

An-no rushed back to the caravan and told them she was all right, that he would bring her back. When he returned she was no longer weeping, but tears still streamed down her face and her eyes were swollen. She wore a shapeless skirt and blouse which her mother had woven.

“You must leave with us,” An-no said, kneeling before her but not touching her.

She looked away. “And you will all regard me as if I were dirty and you would not want me among you. All of you …”

“Why do you say this, Orang? Haven’t we suffered enough? Look at mc, don’t you think I feel so small because I could not help you? And if I did would I be here today? Begging you to come back? Manong Istak — he did not even raise a hand against them and they shot him. He can speak Spanish, I told you. He pleaded with them. Did they show him any mercy?”

“I cannot face anyone.”

“Look at me, Orang,” An-no told her. “Look at me or I will hold your face and force you to look at mc.”

She turned to him slowly, sorrow in her eyes.

“You are a woman now,” An-no said. “If I ask that you live with me when we reach the valley, will you do that? I will protect you and pray that no evil will happen to you again.”

“You will not take a soiled rag,” she said. “You will want something clean.”

“You are not soiled.”

“I am now.”

“Not to me. Not to me. You are pure and you are going to be my wife …”

She turned away again, but this time she was no longer crying.

They camped that night in a shallow field flanked by bald hills. Not long ago the field was planted to rice — they could see that in the strands that stubbled the land, in the broken dikes that bordered each plot. Close by, madre de cacao trees had started to bloom and there was even a sprout of banana trees without fruit. Istak wondered what had happened to the village nearby, why the people had gone. In the lead cart, he approached the hamlet, intoning loudly, ¡Bari-bari! — the ritual incantation with which an intruder sought permission to pass unknown precincts guarded perhaps by inhospitable spirits. The houses were falling apart and weeds clambered over the bamboo fences and up the walls right onto the thinning roofs. The windows were wide open, gaping at them like sightless eyes. There was nothing inside but rotting bamboo and disheveled walls with the sun streaming in. The people did not leave anything, not even a broken pot. The houses had been abandoned for more than a year and houses with no people in them die like humans.

Ba-ac did not want to sleep in the abandoned village; it smelled of disaster, of hoary gloom, and so they moved on, farther up the valley before they would ascend the mountain.

The narrow road that slit through the jungle was slippery; grass and saplings grew wild on both sides and big trees arched above them and shut off the sun, so that although it was morning it seemed as if in this face of the mountain it was early evening. There were sudden breaks of sunlight among the trees, and birds flitted through the small frame of sky. Orchids dangled from branches, some of them in bloom, bouquets of purple and white, but they were high up and only monkeys could climb after them.

One of the children walking out front screamed in horror; he had felt an itch on his calf and when he looked, there was this black abominable thing as big as his thumb, slimy and fat, and he could not remove it.

“Leeches!” Ba-ac said. He went to the child and scraped it off with his bolo. The leech was bloody and full.

Although it had not rained that afternoon, water dripped from the trees. Around their trunks, up to the lofty branches, vines coiled like huge snakes.

It would take more than a day before they would break out into the open country again and know the sun. Istak pointed out to Dalin what they could cat, the tops of ferns which could be cleaned like bamboo shoots and cooked. No one need starve in the forest, he told her.

She asked him how he came to know so much and he said he had been in the forest beyond Tirad. Padre Jose had pointed these out to him and all the other plants that could sustain life. He showed her the fruit of the rattan vine which they could cat and that she already knew. There were other wild fruits and berries — they could all be eaten.

They stopped for their meal in a white patch of sunlight, but did not tarry. They moved on. Bit-tik and An-no were now in the front and Ba-ac was in the rear immediately behind Dalin’s cart. The last cart carried their seed rice and was heavy, so no one rode in it except Ba-ac.

The big solid wheels of wood were creaking noisily, for they had not been oiled for days. It was no longer necessary — they were not going to hide anymore or travel in the night. They had passed the Guardia Civil. Ba-ac felt safer now. A few more miles, then they would break out from the low saddle of the mountain into the plains of eastern Pangasinan.

It was Dalin who first noticed it when she looked back; the cart was following them, but Ba-ac was not in the driver’s seat. Istak called for all of them to stop. He peered inside the cart but the old man was not there either.

“Tatang! Tataaang!” he shouted. The forest echoed his voice.

“Maybe,” Dalin said, “he stopped to defecate.”

“He would have told us,” Istak said. “And he would not let the cart go ahead without him.”

He retraced the trail, shouting his father’s name. Maybe Ba-ac had slipped, or had fallen asleep and toppled off the cart. But he would have awakened and called.

The forest seemed to close inexorably on Istak; he was far from the carts and could no longer see them nor could they hear him, for he had run part of the way.

Birdcalls shrilled from his right. There would be wild boar and deer here — if only he had a chance to hunt, but he could do that only with a gun. “Tatang!” he continued screaming. Still no reply.

He should work out a system by which every man would have to look back occasionally to find out if the carts behind him were secure. He must tell them that at the next stop.

At the turn of the trail, he saw it — this python dangling from a tree, as thick as his own thigh, and it was coiled around the old man, who was no longer moving, his eyes closed as if in sleep. The reptile was tightening its coil, squeezing the life, the blood, out of Ba-ac. For a moment, Istak stood transfixed with fear. Like his brothers and all the menfolk in the caravan, he always had a bolo slung on his waist. He knew what had happened; the reptile had swung down from its coil around one of the low-hanging branches where it had waited, struck his father, then quickly strangled him. As soon as all the bones were crushed, it would swallow its victim slowly.

The python had seen him, but it did not move or relax its tenacious grip. With all the force in his weakened body and praying that he would not miss — God give this wounded arm strength! — Istak struck at the python’s body with his two hands. Immediately the coil loosened but the reptile was not dead; now it lashed around and again Istak struck at it. The shiny skin was now gashed with a deep wound, the white flesh opened, the blood started to spurt. The reptile fell on the ground in a heap, helpless, its great, slick body twisting, weaving. Again and again, with two hands Istak lashed at it, not caring where he hit it. Again and again, from each new and open wound blood spurted out. The reptile was now quivering, a dozen cuts on its long body, its head almost severed. Istak did not stop until it was still. Then he went to his father.

Ba-ac’s body was completely crushed. His bones sticking out of the shapeless shirt wet with blood. Istak sank on his knees and cried. A massive wave of weariness swept over him, drowning him.

An-no and the others found him staring blankly, the python dismembered at his feet, its innards spilled on the wet ground. They carried Ba-ac back to the cart, his body wrapped with the leaves of the anahau palm, which grew along the trail, and tied carefully with twine. They also brought back one of the carts and loaded the python onto it. Its meat was good — like chicken, the Ilokanos always said — and the women cut it up and salted it, for it would not do to dry it; the sun no longer shone regularly as in the season past. The rains were really upon them.

They buried Ba-ac at the edge of the forest. Ahead — perhaps a day or so, past the cogon-covered hills — were the plains of eastern Pangasinan at last. That night, after the prayer which he led, Istak asked his mother if they should go back to Cabugaw. “Father is gone, we need not flee from the Guardia anymore.”

“And if we returned, what will greet us? The ashes of our former homes? A land which we cannot till because it never belonged to us? I am old, my sons; it is you for whom I must live. I will go wherever you want to go.”

“I will go on,” An-no said. “Orang cannot go back. We can start a new life.”

“And you, Istak?”

Somehow, his mind was still cluttered with what Padre Jose had said, a tenuous hope that he could return to the kumbento, to the seminary in Vigan. Dalin had said that he was not a farmer and would never be one, but that he could help the farmer even if he himself never touched the handle of a plow.

“I don’t know, Mother,” he said.

“Ask Dalin,” his mother told him.

It was dusk and on a dry patch of ground they had already placed the stones which they used as stoves, and lighted the firewood. Dalin had gone to the creek down the clearing to fill the water jar. He followed her. She was crouched on the bank and had put sand inside the earthen jar and was scrubbing the insides to remove whatever moss had gathered there. Watching her, he knew that he would not leave her, that he would go with her wherever she wanted to go.

When she was through, she filled the jar with water and rolled a piece of cloth which she placed on her head. Istak helped her raise the jar and lift it to her head. Neatly balanced, she carried the jar without holding it although the path was slippery.

They walked up the low incline.

“Will you tell me where you want to go?” he asked.

She did not turn to him; it was difficult to do that with the jar so. “Wherever you want to,” she said.

“You must make the choice and I will follow.”

He could not see her smiling. “It is you, my husband, whom I will follow. Wherever you want to go,” she murmured.

“Tell me then, the valley?”

“I pray that we reach it with nothing setting us apart …”

“Nothing can set us apart now,” he assured her. “Tell me, what is it like there?”

“A plain as far as you can see,” she said solemnly. “And all the land you can clear. I will help you. I will work very hard beside you.”

CHAPTER 8

They did not linger in the towns in the great plain. They kept to the narrow muddy roads. In places, the constant rain had washed away the roadbed and the foundations of stone jutted out, jolting the carts as the caravan labored over them. The new towns looked scraggly and unkempt, and they did not have the stone churches or the big houses of brick that lined the main streets of the Ilokos. It also seemed to them that the Guardia were far away. Among these poor settlers, there was not much booty.

In the near horizon, the Caraballos were a wall of deep blue. They would still have three days of travel before they reached those mountains.

They brought out the salted python meat to dry whenever there was sun; the white strips were laid on flat bamboo baskets balanced atop the carts. They continued to worry about food — they had barely enough to last them through one planting season. But there was always the tobacco they could sell freely now that the monopoly had been lifted.

They met other caravans, Pangasiñenses with woven baskets and salted fish to sell. They overtook farmers who were also looking for land. They were all in a hurry to get to their destinations before the rains really fell — the siyam-siyam that would transform the plain into a vast rimless ocean of brown and the giant river, the Agno, into a rampaging sea.

At night when they bivouacked, sometimes with other settlers, while cooking their meals or just drinking an occasional coconut bowl of basi, Istak came across wisps of his recent past. A squad of Guardia Civil was stalking the caravans, asking questions about those who had come from Cabugaw. He told his brothers and uncles to avoid the other settlers, not to talk with them unless necessary. They now camped by themselves, away from other groups, even though they had also come from the north.

In the mornings, when they started out, there was always something uplifting about the land, the cascade of light everywhere, the brilliant glaze on the leaves of bamboo, on the acacias. Even the razor grass seemed greener in the plain. Indeed, the rains had begun.

There was more variety in their food now. The saluyot shrubs had started growing in the fields and alongside the roads more catuday trees had bloomed, and they gathered the pink and white flowers and cooked them.

Once they encamped along a long, sandy stretch of land near a creek. The place was overgrown with tough ledda grass. Shortly before nightfall, the air was suddenly alive with huge insects. Some clung to Istak’s clothes while others just buzzed about. Dalin called happily from where she was cooking the rice. These are May beetles, she cried, and like a madwoman, she started flailing and catching them, storing them in a fish basket. She called to them to do as she did, and they set about catching as many as they could.

They were northerners and though they ate everything, even the small white larvae of the big red ants and the young green leaves of mangoes — food that was unusual to Dalin then — they had never tasted these beetles. And that evening, they sat down to their first supper of May beetles cooked in cane vinegar and coconut oil. They were not queasy eating it, and they liked the bottom best, the milky, juicy taste of it.

That night, Istak wandered off to the line of shrubs beyond which was the trail that they would follow in the morning. In the distance, the lights of bull carts proceeding on their journey flickered until they dimmed and disappeared completely.

He sat on a tree stump and pondered the riddle of what awaited them, and the pursuers they must elude. Maybe, after they crossed the Agno, they could come upon some anonymous corner where no one had been before.

Others had done it, escaped the clutches of the Spaniards, who called them remontados. They left the security of the towns and sought refuge in the forest, where they cleared land and raised their food, far away from their tormentors. Some were changed, though; they became brigands as well, preying on the poor who could not defend themselves, who would rather have the peace and security “under the bell.” Perhaps, in the new land, they would be left alone without the past rising out of the ashes to threaten them again.

Istak envied the young Igorot friends he had made in the Cordilleras, half-naked, their arms and chests tattooed, their teeth blackened with betel nut. They had listened to Padre Jose’s exhortations, they were even baptized, but they had reverted to their ancient worship once the priest had gone. Up there in the mountains, their lives were complete. But then Istak remembered, too, the skulls which adorned their houses. Any one of those skulls could have been his if he had not gone to them with Padre Jose and his gifts of salt and tobacco and his promises of salvation.

There is no escape, then, from this prison that is living, just as there was no escape from his unquenchable yearning for knowledge.

How did it all start, really? Did it start with his father? With his being in church? It had come to him before, though not as clearly as it did now. It was the harsh living in Po-on, really, more than anything, which had drawn him to the Church, to seek not salvation but a future that was not limned by hunger. It was really for this reason that he would have become a priest, as did most of the Indios who came from the lowest stations. They would overcome the hazards of peasant birth and become teachers if not priests, and thus bring not just comfort to themselves and their families, but a bit of the respectability such as that which Capitán Berong had.

Padre Jose had taught him how to worship, to hold on to the rosary as if it were a sturdy rope which drew him up from the black pit of creation. And this rope gave him a strength that others from Cabugaw or those born like him would never have. It would draw him not only out of the pit but from the putrefaction of the poverty and villainy of the village — out and into a world of abundance and a surfeit of case which the Church gave only to a chosen few. He saw this in Padre Jose and in the other priests — resplendent in their vestments, gorging on the food that people had worked so hard to produce.

Would he transform this rope into a leash?

It was the priest who ruled, who enacted the laws of the Church and of man, and added to such laws the lash of prejudice, for power was always white, Castilian, and not brown like the good earth.

It seemed so long ago now, but even when he was in Cabugaw it was often talked about in whispers, like the dusty whiff of age that whirls up from cupboards and cabinets long shut — the death of those three mestizo priests, Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora — why were they killed? Could they have managed to weaken the Church — just the three of them? The very Church to which they belonged and which they served?

Did the Spanish priests really believe that the Indios — even if they were mestizos — could be equal to the Spaniards, that they could be the highest officials of the Church?

There were always excuses, there was no escaping them, for the power to disagree was not with the Indios, just as it would never be with him. So the Church, then, was Castilian. The Church was not interested in justice, or in the abolition of inequality. The temple, then, was just another pit, and the rosary he held offered no salvation. No God can haul men like him up from the abyss of perdition.

But God, I don’t doubt You. I can see You in the morning, in the dew on the grass. Should I worship You in silence, without the obeisance and obedience to Your ministers? Should I stop singing and, within me, let my deeds speak of my gratitude and belief in Your greatness?

The men who taught us of Your presence, who opened the doors of Your temple that we might see the light — they are white like You. Are You, then, the god of white people, and if we who are brown worship You, do we receive Your blessings as white men do?

I pray that You be not white, that You be without color and that You be in all men because goodness cannot be encased only in white.

I should worship, then, not a white god but someone brown like me. Pride tells me only one thing: that we are more than equal to those who rule us. Pride tells me that this land is mine, that they should leave me to my destiny, and if they will not leave, pride tells me that I should push them away, and should they refuse this, I should vanquish them, kill them. I knew long ago that their blood is the same as mine. No stranger can come battering down my door and say he brings me light. This I have within mc.

He returned to the cart to find Dalin already asleep. She woke up as he lay quietly beside her. Rain pattered lightly on the palm roof and she drew the old blanket over her legs. He turned on his side and fondled her flat stomach, feeling its smoothness, its warmth.

“Where have you gone?”

“I was by the trail, by myself …”

He had never asked her before, and they had never talked about it, although he had always known that, in her own way, she was religious, crossing herself every morning when she woke up and again when she went to sleep.

“Do you believe in God?”

Though he could not see her face clearly, he could make out her eyes and they were wide open.

“What kind of question is that?” she said, then quietly: “Surely, I believe in God. We are together — this is God’s will.”

He lay on his back again. He wanted to tell her then, but there were things he could not reveal to others; he was not sure now that he still believed.

CHAPTER 9

They were up early in the morning. Two merchants from Abra with a dozen horses trailing them trotted up to where they were brewing the corn coffee. The men traveled very light; they carried their provisions in packs on two horses. They were going all the way to Manila and may they just cook their meal with them? They had dried meat and leftover rice which needed to be fried. Both were in their early thirties, dark-skinned, and obviously well traveled. While Dalin waited for the pot to boil, the younger man talked about the horses. They were for the races in Manila. After retiring from the races, the horses would be used to pull the carriages of the rich. Then, casually, he asked where they came from.

“From Ilokos Sur,” Istak said with some hesitation.

“What town?”

“Cabugaw,” Istak said.

The man shook his head and dug his bare toe into the soft earth. “Two towns away,” he said, “in Binalonan, there are Guardias with a Spanish officer.”

“What does he look like?” Istak said.

“White like all Kastilas,” the man said. “He has short hair.”

There flashed in his mind the image of Capitán Gualberto.

“The Guardia are searching all the caravans from the north. There is a one-armed man from Cabugaw they are looking for. They have been beating up people, particularly those who come from Sur, to get information from them — even if they are not from Cabugaw. But they did not bother us — he knows how to deal with them.” The man thrust a chin to the older horse merchant, obviously his employer, busy turning the dried meat roasting on the coals.

“There is no one-armed man here, as you can see,” Istak said.

“Even so,” the man said. “You are from Cabugaw, aren’t you? If I were you, I would put as much distance as I could from them immediately …”

Dalin had heard everything.

The other man spoke softly. “Yes — after you cat, you should leave. You never know what they will do. I hope all your papers are with you.”

Dalin turned to Istak. She did not speak; her eyes told him of her fear. He turned around to the morning activity, children playing in the sun, wives preparing breakfast, and men checking on the work animals, giving them their ration of hay.

Their visitors would ride all the way to Tarlak, and from there, they would put the beautiful animals on the train to Manila. Finished with their breakfast, they mounted and were on their way.

Istak did not want to distress the others. He let them brew their coffee and roast the dried python meat on the open fire.

It was best that only he and Dalin know that the Guardia were closing in on them again. They must leave now. Already the Caraballo range loomed ahead. A few more miles and they would cross the Agno, and from then on, the promise of eastern Pangasinan.

Now, they struck out onto trails even Dalin did not know. A pelting rain by midafternoon hid almost everything from view, but they moved on, the water seeping through the walls of the carts. The wheels soggy with mud, they sloshed through villages enveloped with rain and as evening finally shrouded the land, still they moved on. By now, the uncles from Candon understood only too well why they must not pause. For supper, they ate cold chunks of rice and the dried python that was roasted in the morning; the cold rice stuck to their throats and had to be washed down with water.

The men who went ahead of the caravan were wet and they shivered but they, too, marched on, stopping only once in a while to ask from an isolated farmhouse the general direction of the ferry which they would have to board to cross the Agno. Shortly before daybreak, the rain finally lifted and the east was bathed with the mellow light of a new day.

They were back on the old road, muddy and impassable in many places. They had to detour through fields and indentations that were made firm by banana trunks laid over them. An-no, who was ahead of the caravan, rushed back to them eagerly shouting: “The river, the river — it is ahead.”

It was finally before them — the life-giving artery whose delta was so fertile and wide it could swallow all the settlers with nowhere to go. They could not settle permanently in any place, however, for anytime during the year when the rains came, the waters changed course and laced the delta with rivulets, rising no higher than a woman’s ankle.

They stopped at the river’s bank. Indeed, exactly as Dalin had described it, the river was wide and swift. In the middle and close to the bank were whirlpools. The current carried trunks and branches of trees from the mountains and islands of water lilies.

They should make their crossing immediately. At the landing below, people were gathered. But there was no ferry, no raft, and there was none on the other side either.

It started to drizzle again, and in a while the drizzle turned into sheets of lashing rain. Under the canopies, almost everything inside the carts was dry. Out where he sat holding the reins, Istak was thoroughly drenched. The palm leaf helmet and cape were no protection. But just as quickly as the rain started it petered out.

Istak went down the incline to where people were gathered, farmers with goats and chickens which they wanted to transport to the other side, and women carrying baskets filled with greens.

“How do we cross?” Istak asked no one in particular. A farmer turned to him and shook his head.

“You could swim,” he said lightly.

When Istak did not speak, the farmer went on. “The ferry — it broke from its mooring in the night when the water rose. It must be far downstream now with the ferryman, who perhaps had fallen asleep.”

“Is there no other ferry?” Istak was anxious.

The other farmers who were listening shook their heads. No other ferry but this one. Maybe, if you go downriver to Alcala — but that is very far from here. And in Bayambang, there is a ferry there because they are building a bridge.

“And upriver?”

Again, a collective shaking of heads.

“There must be a shallow place where we can cross.”

“Yes, there is,” a farmer said, pointing to the line of carts up the incline of the bank. “But it will be dangerous.”

There was no time to think. As leader, he must now decide. “We are in a hurry,” he said. “God will take care.”

During the dry season, when the river was shallow, the ferrymen had built a roadway along which carts and people could pass. Where the river was shallowest, they piled the stones; they stretched across the shallow water several coconut trunks on top of which they spread cogon grass, then a layer of gravel. They did not use the ferry anymore. With this bridge, they charged a cheaper rate.

“The bridge is there.” The man pointed it out to him. “You can cross but don’t stray from the embankment because it will be deep now on both sides. And as for the coconut bridge, you must go ahead of the carts and feel for it with your feet. It should still be there.”

The carts came down the gully. The men had dismounted and were holding the animals by their reins so that they would not go down too fast.

An-no took the lead carabao. The road to the small bridge had not been washed away by the rain, though the water had risen. The stone embankment still showed through the brown water.

The uncles from Tagudin were reluctant to cross. Blas suggested that they could very well settle in this wide and fertile plain — surely there were still forests they could clear, where they would not be hounded.

“It is a distance we need,” Istak said, “distance from those chasing us. They will ask people and so many have seen us — they will know where to find us. The farther we go, the more difficult it will be for them to follow. And after we cross the river, no one would really know where we headed.”

And because he was learned, they finally agreed.

The bridge had to be tested first, and Bit-tik, who was a good swimmer, went ahead, following the embankment. It was still secure, as the men at the riverbank had assured them. He moved slowly in the brown moving waters which never got higher than his waist, feeling with his feet the boulders that had remained. The carts could go over them. Then the line of boulders ended and he was on the bridge itself. The coconut trunks had not been dislodged — they were intact all the way, but the current had become swift and Bit-tik had difficulty steadying himself.

Once across, on the embankment again, he turned to the waiting carts across the expanse of water and shouted: “The bridge is still here. You can cross.”

The carabaos were used to water; every day during the journey, they had to look for some stream or well so that the animals could be bathed. The bull might be scared, but Dalin was sure it would be all right; she led it steadily into the line. Istak went onward to the middle of the river, and realized that he was not yet all that strong and could be swept away by the current.

The carabaos were not too sure of their footing, and the carts jerked and swayed with every boulder; then the wheels tumbled across.

Istak could feel the current, at first slight and then a steady pushing against his legs. As he moved deeper toward the middle of the river, it came as a powerful force that could easily have swept away the children if they had not been in the carts, holding on to their mothers. An-no in the lead kept screaming at them to go straight for the middle and not to stray and fall into the depths and be washed away. The ten carts were now well into midstream. There was no turning back.

An-no finally hit the bridge. “I am here,” he yelled at them, his voice carrying through the rush. He was waist-deep now in the brown swirling waters.

Then Istak saw the big branches of trees, huge swatches of grass and reeds that must have been torn away upstream, and they rushed toward the carts, sometimes pushing them dangerously close to the edge of the embankment.

One of the men went toward the left to push away the branches that had gathered on the side of a cart. They moved on, swaying and jerking as they went over the coconut bridge, the water pushing steadily against the solid wooden wheels.

Within the carts, some of the children were shouting, enjoying the sight of the swirling waters, unaware of the danger they were in. The first cart was now over the bridge. An-no was going up and was shouting again, telling them to keep a straight line, that the bridge was not that long, and it was still solid underfoot. As he went up, he saw it. He shouted, fright in his voice, for in the middle of the river, hurtling toward them with the current, was a huge uprooted tree.

The men shouted and pulled at the leashes of their carabaos. The women and the children peered out of the carts, at the mountain of leaves and branches racing toward them. On its downward rush the tree had also amassed reeds and water lilies.

Istak led the last cart with Mayang and their seed rice. If he tarried, the tree might sweep away the coconut trunks underfoot. He was now in the middle of the river, directly in the path of the oncoming tree. He shouted at the animal to hurry. It was then that the cart refused to budge, its wheels stuck between the coconut trunks. No matter how he pulled at the poor beast, the cart would not move. He shouted at his mother to get out quickly, but Mayang, perhaps too tired to move, did not hear, or if she heard, she acted too late. The tree was upon them like an avenging hand.

It towered over the cart, swallowing it. Istak felt the trunks under him give way. He let go of the leash and ran to the other side, the leaves, branches, and island of reeds engulfing him. For a moment, the green mass seemed to smother him. His legs, his body, were being pushed toward the rim of the embankment. But his feet touched a boulder, solid and secure, and the mountain of branches and leaves swept by. He emerged in time to see the carabao slip into the water, the wheels of the cart bob up briefly, then disappear altogether. It was but an instant, but like a lightning flash in the darkened sky, fate passed before him. He witnessed it all and did not move, the current eddying around him, while the men who were on the shallow side of the river raced past him and, screaming at one another, dove into the river. And when they surfaced, they were already downstream. They swam back toward the shallow rim of the river, then to the embankment, and dove again and again. The carabao, which had broken free from its harness, was recovered; it was no stranger to water. Some of the men who were waiting for the ferry at the other side saw what had happened and they, too, joined in the search.

Not once did Istak dive. He prayed that his mother might finally be granted the peace she never had in life.

Far into the afternoon, they ranged along the river, but found no trace of the cart.

At sundown, they stopped and set up camp for the night. Beyond the river were newly opened fields and Carmay — a solitary village on the fringes of a forest being cleared. The great trees that had not yet been felled were burned; they stood around like huge black skeletons. The caravan found refuge from the rain in the houses, and the women, who had no dry firewood, cooked the evening meal in the stoves of kindly villagers.

Early in the evening, the three brothers sat down together for the first time in weeks to a meal prepared by Dalin. They had barely spoken to one another the whole day, and though words were not uttered, Istak knew that his brothers resented him; perhaps they even blamed him for their mother’s death. Why did he not dive at all — he, the eldest son — when even men who were strangers helped? Why did he give up too soon?

The vegetable broth warmed their insides, and the salted fish with crushed tamarind tasted good. Istak had no appetite; he put into words the thoughts that rankled An-no. “Do not blame mc, my brother, for our mother’s fate. Do you think I wanted her dead? Who is the son who would wish this on his mother? I would not have been able to save her. The hands of fate are stronger than mine. I prayed.”

“You did not even try.” An-no’s words were like prongs that dug into his flesh.

Istak bowed, then stood up and walked away, down the muddy path toward the river, the dusk thickening around him, the insects noisy in the grass. Dalin, who was serving them, followed, but Istak waved her back: “Let me be alone,” he mumbled.

What was it, really, that had happened to him on that submerged bridge? Why did he not dive after the cart? It all came back — how it was when Ba-ac was nowhere to be found. In his mind, it had quickly formed — this knowledge, this certainty that the old man was dead. And again, at the river, it had flashed through his mind clearly, that there was nothing he could do, as if something stronger than the current had held him back, telling him he could do nothing, nothing. He was not a coward, he reassured himself; when he decided to stay behind in Po-on, he was fully aware of the risk. What was this in him that seemed to guide him in his deepest thoughts? Was it some supreme intelligence that he had gleaned from the kumbento in Cabugaw? If only he could explain this to his brothers, if only he could put into words these fears and feelings, inchoate and yet so real.

It was not just Mayang they had lost. Lost, too, were the sacks of seed rice which must have pinned her down when the cart overturned. Now they would have nothing to plant and little to eat. But at least they were alive; they could subsist on weeds and insects. Ilokanos can eat what other people cannot. And most of all, with the bridge gone, for the moment, at least, they were farther away from Capitán Gualberto and his Guardia.

The rain resumed the following morning and the fields around them were flooded. The road to the valley, Dalin said, would be a quagmire. Istak and his brothers left Carmay early and paced the riverbank, asking the few settlers who lived nearby if they had seen the cart or Mayang, but no one had. The water was higher, with more islands of water lilies and reeds, occasional logs and small uprooted trees that drifted with the current.

All through the journey, Istak was amazed at the kindness of villagers, how readily they were invited to sleep in kitchens, in sheds, or under the houses if there was no space upstairs. He understood then how Dalin and her family could go so far with a cart loaded with more goods to sell than what the family needed to live.

He asked them to please bury his mother if her body ever surfaced; he would surely come back to find out and to express his gratitude to whomever had done the Christian thing.

At noon, Istak asked his brothers and everyone in the caravan to join him at the riverbank to pray. Dalin had gathered a basket of white rosal flowers in the village, and these she made into a wreath which she then tied onto a small raft made of banana trunks.

Rest in peace, Istak intoned as An-no and Bit-tik lowered the wreath into the water. Bit-tik pushed it toward the middle, where the current was strong, and silently they watched it drift down the river. It was caught in a whirlpool briefly, then bobbed up and swiftly floated down the vast brown expanse. They watched it grow smaller, till it was no longer visible, hidden as it was by the flotsam from the mountains.

“We are orphans now,” Istak said, turning to his brothers. “Whatever may rile us, whatever differences we may have, we must be closer together. We have no one else.”

The farmers who gave them shelter in Carmay told Istak that in the town of Rosales they could get some help.

“You must go to Don Jacinto. Everyone knows him, for his big house is by the big balete tree. He is good — he will help you …”

They left Carmay at midday; the rain had eased somewhat. The sky was scabbed with gray clouds that scudded away and the sun came out in short shifts, full and bright upon a land now laved in green.

To their right, a straggle of trees and beyond the trees, farther in the distance, was the heavily forested mountain called Balungaw. Dalin told Istak of a village with the same name near the mountain, of a hot spring there where the sick often went. To their left was another creek which emptied into the Agno, and like the Agno, it was also swollen.

Shortly before nightfall, thatch-roofed houses with buri palm walls appeared on both sides of the narrow road. Pigs wallowed in side ditches. From under the houses, mangy dogs appeared and trailed and barked at the slow-moving carabaos. People went to the windows to look at the caravan, the palm-leaf canopies of the carts dark with rain, the solid wooden wheels caked with mud, and the new settlers walking beside their carts while inside were their women and children. They were in Rosales at last.

It was one of those new towns carved out of cogonal wastes and forests by settlers like them. As in most of the new towns that lined the road to the valley, its leading citizens were mestizos who were the favorites of the friars. Some took advantage of the recent opening of the colleges in Manila for Indios and went to the University of Santo Tomás to study law and medicine, and became infected, too, with the ideas of liberalism, that deadly contagion which the friars detested and ranted against. Large tracts of land toward the east, all the way to that prosperous village of Balungaw, to the very foothills of Mount Balungaw, were claimed by the first Spanish settler in this part of the country, but there were also equally large areas titled to the principalia—the educated men like Don Jacinto.

Since most of the settlers in this wild part of the country were Ilokanos, their new settlements were named after the towns they came from — Casanicolasan, Cabalawangan — or after the vegetation that abounded in the new land — Cabaletean (balete trees) or even Rosales itself, after the rosal bush which lined the roads and with the start of the rainy season had started to bloom with puffy white flowers. They brought with them not just implements from their old villages, but the attitudes of hard work and perseverance that had made them endure.

From Rosales, if they pushed onward to the south, it was to the towns of Nueva Ecija — Cuyapo, Gapan — most of them still surrounded by forests; and to the north, Santa Maria, Tayug; and onward to the Caraballo range, the new settlements of San Nicolas and Natividad. And to the east, Umingan, Lupao, then San José, the big town that was also a gateway to the valley, for beyond San José, up to the first mountain range that was a barrier to the valley, was the narrow trough of Santa Fe.

Like most of the new towns, Rosales had no municipal building except a ramshackle shed near the open market, where, sometimes, the health inspector conducted what little official duties he had. There was no telegraph as yet in this part of the country, no Spanish official. The priest in the new church was Indio, for the Spanish friars usually stayed in the bigger communities where their quarters were more comfortable and their meals more nourishing. Civic order was imposed traditionally by a member of the principalia, and in Rosales, this authority was vested in Don Jacinto, who was not only rich but also educated.

His house stood prominently in the middle of the town, and from there he dispensed patronage, and like the Indio priest, was revered for his many acts of kindness to his tenants and those wayfaring strangers passing through. It was a big house roofed with tile, and its wide yard was dominated by a balete tree, massive and brooding, a perpetual abode of spirits and endowed with an awesome talisman. Its trunk was three, even four times the size of a cartwheel, larger than any of the forest trees they had passed. The thick veins coiled around it, fat as pythons, thrust upward and merged with each other, forming a mantle, a pall, of vivid green.

Across the plaza was the small wooden church with a grass roof. Istak could put on the soutane and say Mass now for Ba-ac, for Mayang, but he was not a priest, he was not going to be a priest. It was getting on toward evening and the Angelus should soon be tolled. The Indio priest who was pacing the churchyard walked to where the carts were unhitched in the shade of the balete tree and asked where they had come from. The Ilokos, An-no replied politely.

They were Ilokanos; they did not have to be told about the balete tree. In the evening before eating, they would make an offering of food to the spirits. In the old country and here, there were many things that could not be explained. One had to accept them without question, just as one welcomed the morning and recognized God.

Istak would go to Don Jacinto in the morning, tell him what had happened. The work animals were their most precious possessions; he would leave one of the carabaos if necessary so that they would not starve.

In the onrushing dusk, he glanced at his arms; they were sunburned. His palms were no longer soft — the few days’ work in Po-on, gathering firewood, feeding the carabaos, all that had callused his hands. And there would be harder work now that he would really be the farmer he was not meant to be.

No one but he could talk to Don Jacinto. There was not much that the Carmay farmers could tell him except that Don Jacinto had studied in Manila, and that he was rich — as all the few educated people were. He wondered how it would be when he would finally ask for help. Else they would have to eat banana pith and all those weeds meant for pigs.

He pitied Dalin most. She had known only tragedy, and she would be hungry, too. And only because she had elected to cast her lot with them. What more could a man want from a woman but this loyalty?

Morning stole into Rosales during the rainy season with little sun, but there was the pleasant odor of cooking fires, and the stirring of work animals. The farmers had to go to the sodden fields early to plow, to plant, to watch the seedlings. Then the sun rose, and the grass in the plaza shone; beyond the edge of the plaza were green hedges of rosal in bloom. Dalin had risen earlier and she had again gathered a few of the white blossoms and now, with the flowers in an empty pot, Istak drank the fragrance. She had taken a piece of black cloth, cut it into strips, and pinned it on the sleeves of the menfolk and on the blouses of the women. They could not afford black dresses to wear as emblems of their grief. They would wear these ribbons for a year, after which there would be a bakas, the ritual end of mourning.

Istak put on his best trousers and the white shirt that Mayang had woven. His clothes were now tight, but they were all he had.

He was asked by a servant to go up the staircase, so polished that the reddish narra grains shone. The house, though made of stone, was not as big as the houses in Vigan, nor as old; the brick sidings were new and no weeds sprouted from the tile roof as yet. The walls were painted with a lime wash, but with the oncoming rains, the wash had turned a dirty brown.

Inside the house, all the sash windows were wide open, and the waxed floors were solid, thick, and wide, as they were cut from huge tree trunks. The furniture had probably been made in Manila, for the pieces were sturdy but not as well made as some of the furniture in the kumbento in Cabugaw, which had come from Europe and was finely crafted, resplendent with gold and silver paint.

He stood in the middle of the sala, waiting. Then the rich man came out from one of the rooms.

He was about forty, with patrician features — a thin nose and a wade forehead. He was fair, like most mestizos. It could have been his grandfather — perhaps a Dominican friar? perhaps a Spanish officer? But there was nothing haughty about him. Warmth, welcome lit his eyes, and at once he asked Istak to sit on the wooden chair by the window which opened to the plaza where the carts waited.

“Good morning, Apo,” Istak began in greeting. “I am Eustaquio Sal—” He hastily corrected himself. “Eustaquio Samson, Apo. We arrived yesterday and those are our carts.”

“Yes,” Don Jacinto said. “I saw you when you arrived.” He did not waste words. “What is it that you want?”

“We are from Cabugaw, Apo.” Istak paused. Did the rich man know? There was no question in his face. “We are planning to go to the valley. But the other day—” He paused again. His lips trembled and his eyes misted. “The other day, when we were crossing the Agno, one of our carts overturned — then it got carried away by a tree that rushed down with the current. My mother — she drowned, Apo.”

The rich man’s face softened, and immediately Istak saw sympathy in his eyes.

“We also lost all our seed rice in that cart and some of our provisions. It is the rainy season now but we have nothing to plant. And we will be hungry, Apo.”

Don Jacinto had listened attentively, then quickly asked, “What do you want now?”

“We would like to borrow grain from you, Don Jacinto. And pay for it with a carabao or some of the tobacco that we have.”

Don Jacinto stared out of the window at a plaza washed with morning sun and glinting on the new grass. “It is a still a long way to the valley, you know. Rotten trails all the way now that the rains have come. And I am sure, the pass across the mountains in San Jose would be impassable in parts, very muddy, if not washed away. You can stay here, you know …”

Istak looked at the handsome profile. There was kindness and compassion in the man, and Istak knew at once that he could be trusted, mestizo though he was.

“We have to hurry, Don Jacinto,” he said evenly. “Even now, I know we have but little time. When the ferry is back …”

“Arc you fleeing from anyone?” Don Jacinto asked. How quickly the man had guessed their plight! “If you are, you don’t have to run anymore. You can hide here, in the forest close to the mountain, in the cogonal near the delta. You must work hard.”

Istak did not speak. “My father, they are looking for him, Apo, but he is dead …”

Don Jacinto waved a hand and smiled. “Do not tell me why. I can guess the reason. After all, you are not the only ones running away. There are so many of you, and I understand.”

“We have no cédulas, Apo,” Istak said plainly.

Again, the low, pleasant laugh. “Pieces of paper,” Don Jacinto said. “You can get new ones here. I’ll help you. And if you are worried about having new names — no one need know about this.”

Istak was silent. He had said more than he should have but, again, almost instinctively, he knew this man, this rich mestizo, was not like Capitán Berong or any of the mestizos in the Ilokos who flourished because they pandered to the friars. Don Jacinto would not betray them, though he may on occasion have pandered, too.

“I can help you,” he continued. “You must help mc, too. I have land which I cannot clear or plant because there are not enough hands for it. You can work there …” Then he turned to Istak. “There is plenty of land here — across the creek are more cogonals, mounds, many, many trees. They are yours if you can clear them. So why don’t you work for me and I will give you all the seed rice you need? There is still time — if you want to stay — to prepare some of the fallow land for planting.”

Already, Istak could envision fields of ripening grain, all theirs, and no priest telling them to leave. Already, he could imagine himself building a house, and asking Dalin to live with him.

The rich man told them to sleep in the large bodega roofed with iron sheets beyond the house should the rains come strong in the evening. They could store their things there while they built their houses.

After they had eaten breakfast, all the men went with Don Jacinto beyond the town, onward to the still unplowed farmlands spread on both sides. They reached a small creek, brown and full.

“It dries easily after the rainy season,” Don Jacinto explained. “Since this is all rainwater, when it stops raining, the creek becomes shallow and there are places where you can cross on foot, although a simple bamboo bridge would help. You can build a better one when the dry season comes.”

A bamboo raft was tethered to a sapling near the bank and they pushed it to the other side; the creek was not really wide, no more than a length of bamboo, and it was not swift the way the Agno was.

Across the creek, more cogon wastes dotted with mounds as far as the eye could see. Don Jacinto described an are to the right: “All this is my land,” he explained. “And beyond the cogonal are swamps — you will see, they never really dry up, even when it does not rain anymore. There are a lot of mudfish there — as big as your legs — and you will always have snails and frogs — if you have the patience to look for them — even in the dry season.”

In the horizon, to the west, an uneven line of trees. “When he was a boy, my father planted those to mark where his father had said the land was theirs. It is all recorded in the titles I keep. How can I farm all of this?” He spread out his hands in a gesture of futility. Istak was surprised; Don Jacinto’s hands were rough like any farmer’s. The rich man knew what he was talking about. More cogonals to the left, and within the near distance, all the way to the foothills of Balungaw mountain, the forest began — a thick, green canopy upon the land, brooding and secret.

“The forest belongs to no one — it is yours to clear if you want. Mark the land you clear. I told you, you don’t have to go to the valley. Here there is land for everyone who wants to sweat for it.” Turning to Istak, Don Jacinto whispered warmly, “It is also a good place to hide.”

Then, as if dragged into some deep misgivings, the rich man’s countenance changed. He shook his head, mumbled, then inhaled deeply. The lines in his brow deepened. “I hope I am not giving you false hopes,” he said softly, as if in apology. “The most powerful people in this part of the country are the Asperris; they are Spanish, they own whole villages, all the way to Balungaw to the east and Santa Maria to the north. They own the biggest house in this region — you will see it on the way to San Pedro — a castle of a house, with many, many rooms, and a tower — a massive building of brick. They came here much earlier than my grandfather and only God knows if they have title to the mountain, too. I am sure that this land that I am showing you, which I tell you is mine, is really mine. Help mc, too, if you can.”

They left Don Jacinto by the creek, then they headed toward the forest, beating a path through the high grass, disturbing pigeons in their nests, and gathering their eggs in their palm-leaf hats. Although the rains had come, new cogon shoots had not sprouted yet. If only the sun would shine the whole day and tomorrow, they could set fire to large tracts to make them easier to plow.

They reached the forest before midday, first the primary growth of trees, and as they went deeper, the forest thickened, tall trees blotting out the sun, vines clambering everywhere, the earth damp and wet, smelling of rot and the decaying veneer of the land. When Padre Jose and Istak went to the Bagos, the forest they passed was a fearful domain whose recesses could never be reached, where death could waylay those who did not treat the forest with respect. It was a haven for the Bagos, who knew how to live from its surfeit, a sanctuary to the remontados who had escaped the wrath of the Spanish. It was neither haven nor threat — it was an enemy to be vanquished, and the conquest must be complete — not a single tree must stand so that the good earth would yield its blessings at last. Grimly, Istak recalled what the old men of Po-on had said, how they, too, had cleared the lands below the Cordillera. They had poured their sweat, even their blood, into each patch. And how did it all end for them? For Ba-ac? The land belonged to the King of Spain — all of it, and the King’s ministers were the friars — it was they who benefited from the land for which they had shed not a drop of sweat.

But he was not here to question, no matter how painful the memory. There was power which was man’s, and there was power which was God’s alone.

At Vespers that evening, Istak went to the church. Like most of the churches of the new towns which they had passed, the church in Rosales was quite small, unlike the stone churches in the Ilokos. The floor was hardened earth — it would be some time before the town would be prosperous enough to have a church of brick. How would he ever thank God for their new fortune? Dalin, most of all? He owed her his life. What, after all, was belief or faith? It was easy for Jesus to want to live, not die, but He died. Did He know He would rise from the dead? His agony was real. So, then, perhaps it is faith that is tested, not by those who will kill for it but by those who will die for it. I have not lost faith, Istak cried within himself. I will always be under this holy roof, but not under the bell.

Yet now, more than at any other time, this implacable sorrow hounded him — the knowledge that they were forced to leave the warm womb of home that had nourished them. If they had not left, if they had not been ordered to depart immediately, surely Ba-ac and Mayang would still be alive. Was all this part of a divine plan which no man, least of all himself, could sunder?

I have always worshipped You according to Your rules, given You proper obeisance, and still You were unmindful of Your son in his hour of need. Where, then, did they all go — my hours of penance? Were they lost in the ether? But You are wise and ever-present like the air I breathe. You snatched me from Death once, and perhaps will again, and still again. And each time Your gift of life is renewed, I stray further from You. What really was my suffering? How could it ever compare with what You suffered on the cross? You have tested me and though I have faltered many times, still I have been true. There must be some deeper reason why I am this way, why men commit themselves to something they cannot touch or see. If You are the God of my people, how could You also be the God of those who oppress us?

He had not cried when his mother died, and now Istak wept, the tears burning in his eyes. All the bruises that had hurt in the last few days became this vise clamped upon his chest.

His mother. His father. They had paid dearly. Their flight had come to an end.

It did not rain that night, so they did not go to Don Jacinto’s storehouse to sleep; it was wide and empty until the next harvest season, when it would be full again with the rich man’s share of the harvest.

After supper, they gathered around Dalin’s cart, now Istak’s as well. Above it, from a low branch of the balete tree, a lamp dangled and lighted up their faces, work-weary — yet alight with hope. The children had all been put to bed, but the older ones were awake, trying to listen to what was being said.

“You have seen the forest,” Istak said. “It will take us years before we can clear it.”

“We will burn the trees during the dry season,” Kardo, the youngest brother of Ba-ac, said. He had some experience clearing the forest beyond Cabugaw.

“We will plant whatever we can in the land we clear,” An-no said. “We will trap the wild pigs and deer that will come to destroy the crops, and we will raise our families here,” he continued, his eyes touching Orang, beside Dalin at the other end of the circle. She had overcome her shame and no longer kept to herself. Dalin had drawn her out slowly. In the tawny light of the lamp, her long hair shone.

Orang’s voluble father did not say much this time. “Though we did not start with you in Cabugaw, we have shared many things — we traveled as one family. I think we should continue this way. When we start building our houses, we should all be neighbors.”

“What shall we call our village? Shall we name it after a saint? Or after a flower the way this town is named?” Bit-tik spoke eagerly.

“I should not have brought posts from the old house,” Blas continued. “They remind me of where I came from.”

Indeed, there was enough mature bamboo for posts. There were the trees in the forest to use as timber. And cogon for roofs. They would just build huts now; the planting was more important, and after the harvest, they would build their permanent homes.

“Our village should be close to the creek. We could bathe our work animals there. We should have a street which we hope will someday be wide enough and long enough to lead to town. We have to sell what we cannot cat or use,” Istak said.

Kardo added: “We will dig a well in the middle of the village, and when we have enough money, we will line it with brick so that it will not cave in.”

“And we will have a fiesta, too, don’t forget that.” Blas started to gush. “And we will have a patron saint, just like Rosales has San Antonio de Padua. This is Istak’s choice — I will sing the dal-lot and compose new poems. I will celebrate our journey, retell vicissitudes we suffered and how we surmounted them all, no matter how sad and painful. This, after all, is our own calvary, is it not so, Istak? And during the Holy Week, I will sing the pasyon in a way you have never heard before. Orang — daughter of mine, are you listening? She has the best voice in all Candon and she can sing very well. I have taught her well …”

“But what will we call our barrio?” Bit-tik was insistent.

“Cabugawan,” Istak said simply.