Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

The old man alighted slowly and helped me down. He unstrapped the pack from the saddle, unholstered the gun, and laid it on the grass. I held the barrel up and asked Father if I could carry it.

Father shook his head. He pointed to the saddle pack that contained our lunch and the water bottle. Leaving the horses tied to knots of grass near the dike, we walked to the riverbank and down a narrow gully; at its bottom, a bamboo raft swayed with the current. A tenant setting fish traps in the shallows told Father that the first cucumber and watermelon seeds in the small clearings were planted the other day.

“So it’s like last year, eh, David?” Father said happily. “Pray that the birds haven’t been frightened away yet. We should have come earlier.”

Old David strained at the raft line that stretched across the river. The raft moved closer and hugged the muddy river edge. Father leaped into the raft, and I followed him with the lunch bag and the water bottle. The raft swayed giddily.

“You come back for us at sunset with the horses, David,” Father told the old man. “This time, since you aren’t coming, we may have better luck.”

Old David pulled the line, and the raft slithered with the current. We balanced ourselves on the dry bamboo floats, safe from the waters that lapped and swished at our perch. With Old David’s every heave at the line, the steel wire above us sang. The land and the mossy reeds jutting up the waterline drew near, and in a while the braced prow of the raft smashed into the delta. The tamarind tree, on whose trunk the steel line gnawed deep, quivered with the impact.

I leaped into the sandy landing, the bag and the bottle narrowly missing the tree. Father followed; he wasn’t much of a jumper. He splashed into the river’s edge, and I turned just in time to grasp the gun, which had slipped from his hand.

“I’ll hold it, Father,” I suggested. I raised the bottle and the lunch bag. “These aren’t heavy.”

Father grabbed the gun from me and did not answer. He started out immediately on one of the paths that forked from the landing, Swinging the lunch bag and the bottle over my shoulders, I followed the measured drift of his steps. He did not speak. We plodded on until the trail we followed vanished into a high, blank wall of grass that fringed a small brook.

“Shall we stay here, Father, and wait?” I asked, wiping the sweat on my forehead. I had begun to tire, and I had not seen a single bird. “Old David said the delta birds usually roost near the mudholes.”

“We rest here,” Father said. He parted the grass and the undergrowth with the muzzle of the gun.

“But won’t we go deeper?” I asked. “Old David said we have more chances of finding something to shoot at … if we go deeper.”

Father scowled at me. My other questions remained unasked. “We stay here,” he said firmly. “Maybe the herons weren’t driven away by the tenants yesterday.”

I sank on the dank black earth. My legs started to numb, and my throat was parched. I opened the bottle and took a hasty gulp.

Father saw me. “And what will happen if you are lost with no drinking water?”

I hastily screwed the bottle cap. This was no hunt at all; we were sitting on the edge of a stagnant brook, just waiting. After a long while, when nothing stirred in the grass, Father stood up and threw the gun over his shoulder. “Let us move,” he said without turning to me.

“Where do they really stay, Father?” I asked, following him.

“Anywhere.”

Were they in the high grass that rustled with every stirring of the wind? Or in the shade of the low camachile trees?

We came upon untidy clearings that were already planted and lingered in the empty watch houses at their fringes. The sun scorched the sky, and on and on we probed into the grass. Once, I listened to a faint, undefined tremolo — perhaps a birdcall — but nothing came out of it, no quarry taunted the sight of Father’s gun. Only tiny rice birds and still smaller mayas twittered and shrieked in the green.

Our shadows became black patches at our feet, and I felt the first twinges of hunger. I did not open the lunch box. As we walked on, I nibbled at the cheese Old David had given me, and its salty tang heightened my thirst. We reached the fire tree at noon. It would be some time before it bloomed. Old David said it was a landmark we could not miss. It rose above the monotony of rushes and thorny saplings.

“You never notice a fire tree that’s young,” Old David had said. “Not until it’s in bloom. You never see it as sapling or seed. You see it just like the way God had planted it and meant it to be, a blazing marker on the land.”

“I know this tree well,” Father said, pointing to his rudely carved initials on its trunk. “I did that years ago.”

I unslung the lunch bag and the water bottle. “Old David and Grandfather spared this tree when it was still small,” I said.

Father did not listen to me. He ripped the lunch bag open and handed me two cheese sandwiches. He ate hastily, and when he drank, small streams trickled down his chin. He smacked his lips contentedly as the water ran down his neck and drenched his shirt front. After eating, Father slumped on the big roots that crawled up the trunk and lowered his wide-brimmed cap over his face to shield off a piece of sun that filtered through.

“I’ll steal a wink,” he said. “Try it, too.”

Father took his hat off and fanned his face. He looked at me quizzically, then laid his head back against the trunk.

I laid the empty bag on a gnarled root beside him and perched my head on it. Above, hemmed in by branches and the grass, in the blue sky, swallows circled slowly. When I turned on my side, I saw that Father’s jaw had dropped. He was snoring, and a small line of saliva ran down the corner of his mouth. Later, when the sun shone through the branches on his face, he stood up. His eyes crinkled. Tightening the cartridge belt around his wide waist, he bade me follow him.

He said, “You will find hunting is luck. Mostly luck.” He straightened the wrinkles on his breeches, then walked again. I kept pace behind him and flayed the grass with a stick, sometimes with my feet. But no matter how vigorously I worked at it, not one heron or quail soared up from the grass. We were finally stopped by a brook, wide and still, and its quiet and opaque blue meant it was also deep.

“Shall we cross it, Father?”

Father contemplated the glazed waters and shook his head. “We can have as much luck here as across it.”

We hiked back to where we came from, where the ledda grass was burned by Father’s tenants the other day and many charred tufts still smoked.

“Are we going home?”

“You ask too many questions,” Father said.

The sun dipped. From the green before us, a pagaw suddenly whirred up and disappeared in the grass. Father raised the rifle too late. He did not fire. “Not even your grandfather or David could hit that,” he said, lowering the gun. “We are heading home.”

But where was the way? I followed him, and then we were once more near the tree in whose shade we had rested.

Was our aimless meandering now one of the cursed tricks of the delta? It is so easy to get lost in it, Old David had warned, especially at this time of the year when the grass was still high and the water holes were deep. And the thought that we were drifting in its fastness without finding our way soon frightened me.

“Aren’t we lost, Father?”

“Lost?” Father laughed. “Lost?” he repeated but did not look at me. He paused, whipped out a handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped his face. He studied the thin trace of a trail — if it was a trail — that led to the west, then peered at the sun. We followed the trail hurriedly, and when we heard the river finally gurgling in the shallows, Father’s steps quickened. When we reached the bank, however, the raft was not in sight, nor the tamarind tree to which it was moored. We scanned the other bank, but there was no familiar gully there — only the long hump of earth, the dike.