Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

“Why do you butcher your carabao and feed a throng because your son is getting a wife?” Father always blustered to them who came asking for loans. But always, in the end, the tenants got the money — what they needed for a “decent” funeral, a baptism, a wedding. And as their debts piled up, they promised, “Next harvest will be good …” Sometimes, when their forecast was right, they did pay, but during the planting season — in the lean days of June, July, and August — they would again be before Father with the same old plea.

When Angel came to the house, his flesh was mottled with a skin disease caused by long hours of work in the waterlogged fields. Father bade him sleep in the bodega , by the wall near the west window. It was a shelf, actually, which was used to hold jars of fermenting sugarcane wine, and when the harvests came he was hemmed in by sacks, and there was only enough space for him to crawl onto his board and snuggle there. When the grain was sold and the storehouse was emptied, the cavern was all his again.

In time the coarse board was polished by his back. The seasons changed, the balete tree lost its leaves, then sprouted them again. The fiesta filled the house with loquacious cousins from the city, and before long, Christmas. The boys and Old David received new clothes, they sang carols in the yard. New Year — the boys from across the street dueled Angel and me with bamboo cannons loaded with empty milk cans — and, finally, harvest time, and Chan Hai cluttered the yard again with his trucks.

“This is a harsh year,” Angel said, when his parents came to stay in the bodega with him. May rain fell at its appointed time, and Old David hoped the harvest would really be good, for he had observed the sun sink blood-red behind the foothills and seen the full moon and its indigo halo. Weren’t those the signs that augured beneficence?

But shortly after the seedlings sprouted from the beds, the worms crawled out and devoured them. What the worms spared was transplanted into the irrigated fields, but barely grown, the sprouts were parched by a long August drought. Only those near the waterways survived to be lashed later on by an October storm. For a week the winds whipped the crops and the farmers scurried in the fields. But no matter how fast they cut the ripened grain, they could not pick each seed from the mud where the wind had embedded it. Father’s share did not even reach up to Angel’s pallet, and Chan Hai made but a few trips to the bodega . By February all that was left were a few sacks of seed rice, over which Angel kept watch, because every day some hungry tenant came to town and peeped into the bodega before going up to Father to ask for a loan.

Hunger precipitated despair. But more than despair was the nagging belief that the land they had patiently and lovingly groomed never really belonged to them but to Father or Don Vicente. This rankled in their hearts — Tio Baldo had long been dead, but they remembered. They knew that in the unrecorded past their forebears cleared the land but were cheated when influential men made the Torrens titles. This belief alone united them and gave them strength.

One late February afternoon, Angel’s father rushed to the storeroom and told his son to leave immediately. Angel refused; instead, he convinced his father to go see Father, who was in the azotea , watching a ball game in the plaza.

“They are coming tonight,” Angel’s father said. “They will force the storehouse open. The grain will be divided among them.”

Father listened without stirring, and when Angel’s father was through, he walked briskly to his room. When Father came out, the new Garand that the soldiers had given him was slung on his arm.

He looked at Angel’s father coldly. “By God, I’ll use this if I have to! I’ll call the constabulary. The bastards will not get a single grain.”

They came at dusk, their bolos tied to their waists, their talk a drone of many bees that rose ominously to the house where, from the half-closed windows, the maids tried to make out their brothers and fathers. They spread out in the yard restlessly, then one of them strode to the door and rattled the iron latch and called, “Apo, we want to talk with you!”

Father was waiting for them at the top of the stairs. He went down, brushing aside Old David, who tried to hold him back by saying, “Blood must not be spilled,” for Father was unarmed. I rushed down after him, walked among the strangers whose brown faces were indistinct in the shadows cast by the storm lamp Old David held high in front of Father.

His tenants followed him like steel filings drawn by a magnet. Walking behind him, I expected anytime the shining arc of a bolo to descend on him. He walked on, silent and sure, and when he reached the bench under the balete tree, he mounted it. Old David hung the storm lamp on an overhanging branch, and in its yellow glow Father’s face was livid with rage. He looked at all of them gathered before him, the men whose first names he knew, and when he spoke, his voice trembled.

“I knew you were coming,” Father said. “I know you want to tear down the gate of the storeroom, so you can get what is in there.”

The men shuffled and murmured among themselves.

“And I know, too,” Father went on, his voice now pitched and stern, “that you are saying, ‘Why must we pay a yearly rent when the land we farm is ours?’

“I’ll tell you. I was not born a hundred years ago, but I know that when my father came down from the north, he cleared this land. I bought the rest. You know that. Maybe Don Vicente did steal from you, but not I! I can drive you from your farms, use machines. It is cheaper, easier, less trouble. Maybe I’ll even harvest more.”

Father paused. His hands shook. “You came here to tear down doors. Well, go ahead. You’ll get a few sacks of grain. You’ll have full stomachs for a week. But after that, what? When the planting season comes, where will you get seed rice?”

No answer. Then, slowly, some of them drifted away from where Father harangued at them and sat under the awning of the storeroom, mumbling a babble of solutions.

“But can’t you give us something to eat, Apo?” someone finally asked.

Father stepped down from the bench and went to the bodega . At the door Father called Angel. The massive doors swung open, and in the light of the storm lamp, which Old David raised, Angel stepped forward, the shotgun in his hands. The tenants glared at him, and from their curses I knew that they had disowned him.

“I am not the government, nor is Don Vicente,” Father said. “If I give one, I must give all. Go home, all of you, or I’ll run you out of this yard!”

“Hunger can’t wait, Apo,” one was brave enough to shout.

“You’ll die of starvation tomorrow if you eat your seed rice!” Father shouted back. “Go home, all of you. I’m not the government — nor a philanthropist!”

Then the dry season — the land beyond the fence browned. Heavy clouds formed overhead, but rain did not fall and light passed on to darkness. The boys gathered edible moss from the creeks, the women returned empty-handed from the withered vegetable patches, and the men scanned the blue, burning sky.

Angel’s father, who came to the house every Sunday to give his share of firewood as did Ludovico’s father, stopped coming, and one April morning Angel and I rode a bull cart to Carmay to trim the madre de cacao and acacia trees that lined the barrio road.

On our return, the cart loaded with green twigs, Angel said, “It is hardest this year.” Angel’s parents came with us with all their things, and upon reaching the house, they sought Father.

He was smoking in the azotea .