Dusk: A Novel (Modern Library Paperbacks) (5 page)

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.