Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

“We have nothing left to eat in Carmay, Apo,” Angel’s father said. “The sweet potato has been shorn of its green leaves.”

Angel’s mother said, “We have tried everything. Even banana roots.”

Father listened placidly, rocking his chair, his arms limp on his lap. The smoke from his pipe curled above his head. “I have many mouths to feed,” he said finally, “and your debts — you haven’t paid them yet.”

“We won’t stay here long, Apo,” Angel’s father pleaded. “Before the planting season comes we will leave Carmay.”

“For where?” Father asked.

“We are selling our house and our carabao , Apo, for our fare to Mindanao.”

“Like the others, ha?”

Angel’s father did not answer. There being no alternative for Father but to let them stay, they carried their things to the storehouse and swept away from a corner the cobwebs, bat droppings, and bran. They did not mean to be idle. Angel’s father fixed the fence, and his mother helped in the kitchen, until one May morning Father chanced upon her coughing hoarsely there. He told her never to work in the house again.

Father did not send them away as the town sanitary inspector had recommended. It was June at last, and the first showers of the rainy season blanketed Rosales. All the things Angel’s parents owned were packed in two bundles, and Angel drove them in Father’s calesa to the train station. All through the narrow, shrub-lined dirt road, they did not speak. They loaded their bundles into a boxcar.

As the train chugged to start, Angel reminded his father, “Don’t forget to write. Tell me what is happening. And someday”—he stared at his big toe digging into the sodden, coal-sprinkled bed of the ties—“I’ll come, too.”

Angel’s father nudged his wife. “Hear that, woman? Don’t forget what your son said.”

A slight drizzle started as they climbed into the boxcar, and Angel and I ran back to the rig. They lifted their hands in awkward farewell, but Angel did not look back. We drove back slowly, and he held the reins in check so that we reached home in a walk.

A full month passed and the land finally stirred. The rains became fuller and stronger, and the fresh green of June darkened to a dirty hue. The banabas bloomed and amorseco weeds wove violet patterns around the mud holes that pocked the plaza. One afternoon, as was my daily chore, I returned from the post office with a bundle of letters. At the foot of the stairs, I called Angel, who was in the garden weeding the gladiolus bulbs, and threw him the bundle.

“From Mindanao,” I said.

In the storehouse that night, in the light of the storm lamp, I pored over the letters. They told of how his folks barely had enough seed rice to start the planting season in that distant land. They were isolated, and in the evening only the flickering of a faraway neighbor’s lamp in the trackless dark impinged upon them the consoling thought that they were not alone at the edge of the forest.

The succeeding letters arrived regularly, and I answered some for Angel, who now mastered the alphabet but could not yet write legibly. The boys envied him for his parent’s luck. He told them of the wonderful Cotabato fields, how his father caught a wild pig under their house, how one evening his father killed a python in the chicken coop. As to what was in store for them, Angel had no foreboding. In another year Angel’s mother told of how they were plagued by moneylenders who wanted to get all they harvested for the little that they owed.

“Tell me why it is like this,” Angel asked.

I could not explain the tragedy that stalked his folks before the next harvest was in. When he received the fateful letter, he managed to have one of the boys read it. In the afternoon, when I came upon him filling the horse trough with water, his eyes were swollen from crying.

“Father is dead,” he said simply.

“Let me see the letter,” I said.

He washed the bran and black molasses dripping off his hands and gave me a folded sheet from the ruled pad on which his mother always wrote. “Read it, please,” he said.

I started cautiously, feeling out the words: “My dear son:” (The letters always started that way.) “This old and aching heart will overflow with joy if, when this letter reaches you, you are in the best of health.

“There is not much for me to do now [there was an erasure that blotted out two lines] … now that your father is no more.

“Sometimes I think we should have never come here, but in this land the rice grows tall. We thought we would never know hunger again, but hunger will always be with us. Your father could not even fight when they got him …”

Somewhere in the stable, a neighing horse drowned out my words. Angel leaned on the wooden rail that separated the trough from the stall of Father’s castaño .

“Why did they do it?” he asked.

“We came here,” I went on with the letter, “because they said that for us who cannot wait for the three-month rice to bear grain, there is plenty here. The trees — they are in the forests. The cogon grass and bamboo, too. We can build strong houses here, but we shall always be cowering before the big men around us, doomed to die, paying …

“We will always fall prey, chick to the hawk. They said this land is ours and we can own all we plant. But here there is hunger, too, as elsewhere in the world. We fear not only God’s wrath, but the field rats that devour our grain, the animals that trample our fields. We fear men because they have made the world too small for us. There is not enough of it for us to plant, we who have never known what lay beyond the waters we crossed or the high mountains that now surround us …”

“What about Mother?” Angel bent forward, his eyes burning. “What does she say of herself?”

I turned the letter over. “There is nothing more,” I said.

In the days that followed, Angel would rush to meet me every time I appeared at the bend of the road with the mail from the municipal building. He would trail me up the stairs, and without bothering to look at him, I always shook my head. There were no more letters.

I chanced upon him in the bodega one afternoon while hunting house lizards and mice. He was hidden by piles of firewood and corn, poking a rod into the piles to flush out the mice. He did not speak until I saw him. His eyes were hollow, his voice was heavy. “Mother is dead, too,” he finally said.

“You are not sure,” I said, cocking my air rifle as a mouse raced across the eaves.

“She is dead,” he said.

I fired, and the lead pellet whammed into the tin roof with a sharp metallic twang. I lowered the air gun with a curse.

“Two months,” Angel said, breathing hard, “and not a letter. Can’t you see? How was she buried, who dug the grave, was there a cross?”

Silence.

“And if someday I’ll go there, how will I look for them?”

There was nothing I could say. I stood up and left him, his words ringing in my ears. The next day Father found him behind the bodega , seated in the wide drop of the driveway. He did not water the rose plots for a week, and in the heat, the young plants that Father loved were dead.

Hard times, Angel said, for during the last harvest Father did not go to the fields anymore as was his wont. But for a company of soldiers who had their camp — an untidy blotch of olive-colored tents — in the town plaza, who drew their water from the artesian well behind the house, Father and I would have gone to the city to return to Rosales only when he could safely canter on his horse to his fields again.

A few weeks back, the Huks swooped down on the next town and all through the long night the sad boding chatter of machine guns and the scream of speeding trucks on the provincial road kept us awake. Since then it was prohibited to walk in town at night without a light, and Father slept with his shotgun and his new revolver within easy reach.