Francisco Jose - Dusk

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.

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.