We never had an old venerable church such as those moss-covered edifices farther north, because our church — like our town — is new. The old church had been a ramshackle building that, somehow, was not refurbished even at the time when Rosales was at the height of its prosperity as the rice-trading center of eastern Pangasinan. But it had a quiet and simple atmosphere, and any man who wanted peace could enter and never bother asking if it was Protestant, Aglipayan, or Seventh-Day Adventist.
The façade was a triangle mounted by a white cross. The churchyard was plain carabao grass, with a gravel path lined with rosal. The floor of the church was plain cement, rough and uneven in parts. A skeleton of a belfry was attached to one side of the church, and it shook every time we climbed it to toll the Angelus, the elevation of the host, or the arrival of the dead. A mango tree squatted by the belfry, and on the days that we had nothing to do, we often climbed it, roosted on its branches, and told fool stories.
Everything is changed now; the mango tree has been cut. On the days that it was laden with fruit, Padre Andong used to count them like some miser and would rail at us when he saw us eating the sour green mangoes. “Why can you not wait till they ripen?” he lamented.
“Some people cannot wait for heaven,” Cousin Marcelo would have retorted.
Padre Andong came to the house one Sunday afternoon. He was a short, bulky man in his seventies. For the past three decades or so, he had been our parish priest. He used to be quite slim — that was what the old people say — but the town must have agreed with him, for he had put on weight. His bulk was covered by tight, ill-fitting soutanes, which were always frayed in the cuffs and collars and patched in the buttocks. He had a slight squint, which was not noticeable when he wore glasses. Somehow, that strong smell of tobacco and of public places never eluded him.
He could not have chosen a more propitious time to visit Father, although the visit was not necessary, for even if Father no longer went to church, he sometimes went to the convent to play chess with the old priest or with Chan Hai, another chess player, waiting in the wings for his turn. But Padre Andong wanted to be correct; he had come to ask Father a favor.
The harvest that year had been very good, and the wide yard was filled with bull carts laden with grain. Upon seeing the priest approach, Father gave the ledger to Tio Baldo and went to the gate to meet him.
Up in the azotea where they had gone to sit in the shade, Sepa was preparing the merienda table. It was like this during harvest time, this ritual visit, and Father was in a boasting mood: “Is there any man in town, Padre,” he was saying, “who will give you thirty sacks of palay this year? Thirty fat sacks — you cannot eat that in a year!”
“No, Espiridion,” Padre Andong was saying, “but there is a man who will give me forty sacks next year.”
“I don’t believe it!” Father said.
“You will,” Padre Andong said. “Because it is you who will do it. But I did not come here for the palay, Espiridion. I know that you will give it to me, even if I did not come. As you told me, it’s time that you send your boy over to be an acolyte.”
His words jolted me; serving him was not easy, for he had flogged his erring sacristans and worked them hard and long. It did not seem to me an equable arrangement for Father, who did not go to church, to send me there, but it was his wish and I walked to the church that afternoon with Padre Andong, who was silent most of the way except for his quiet assurance that I would be a good acolyte. Old Tomas, the sacristan, immediately took me under his care, and we proceeded to the sacristy, where he showed me the vestments; he could have said mass himself, for he had served there so long, he knew the Latin liturgy backward.
I served in the church for many months without pay, though money did come in, not just in the Sunday collection but from services: the baptisms, for which there were special rates, if celebrated at the main altar or in his residence; for burials, depending on how long the bells were tolled, on whether we met the funeral procession outside the church, halfway from the residence of the deceased, or when we went to the residence itself. The most expensive, of course, was if Padre Andong went with us to the house and accompanied the hearse to the cemetery. Even weddings had to be priced accordingly, and it was Old Tomas who recited the rates as well as the “specials” that went with them.
The larder was never full; Padre Andong’s breakfast often consisted of just plain rice and dried fish, and as if to save on food, he often made the rounds of his parishioners, as we were having lunch or supper, which was good, for he became known to everyone and was involved not just as confessor but as counselor in many of the problems of small-town families.
I was talking once to Sepa about there being no food in the convent, and she said, “That priest — he would boil a stone, add salt to it, and then call it excellent soup!”
And it was not just with his food that he was niggardly; his clothes, as I have said, were a pauper’s. I had to consider, however, the fact that Sepa was not a Catholic and, therefore, had a biased view.
About Padre Andong’s sternness — there was enough evidence of it to go around. I could start with Father, although I was not there when it happened. Father persistently kept away from the mass but not from the chess games that he, Chan Hai, and Padre Andong played in the convent patio. Father ceased attending church in the month of July, I think, when the rains were particularly strong and even the sturdy blooms of the rosal in the churchyard were frayed. That Sunday the rains had lifted briefly, and as usual, Father had gone to hear mass. Padre Andong was a disciplinarian when it came to how the faithful should act during the elevation of the Host. There were instances when he would interrupt this portion of the mass to shout at an erring parishioner and tell him to kneel.
The old roof had long been leaking, and many portions of the church were wet. Father’s special pew near the altar was drenched, and even if Padre Andong knew it, I suppose he did not really feel it enough reason why now Father should stand up during the elevation.
He spotted Father standing thus, and Padre Andong shouted, “Hoy, there, kneel down. Kneel down!”
Father continued standing, straight as a spear, so the story went, and next Padre Andong shouted: “Espiridion, kneel down not for me but for God!” And Father, in his white alpaca suit, head drooping, crumpled to his knees in the puddle before him.
Unlike God, said Cousin Marcelo, Father was not a vengeful man, and came harvest time, he sent the usual sacks of palay to Padre Andong. And Padre Andong came to the house on the occasions that warranted his being there — the thank-you call, Father’s birthday — as if nothing had transpired.
He was more Ilokano than most of us, though he was Tagalog; when he first delivered his sermon in Ilokano, so the story goes, he had the whole congregation buckling in laughter, for some Ilokano words that he mispronounced easily became obscene. But what really labeled him as a native was his practicality around the church; he had planted fruit trees like the mango later, guava, pomelo, and avocado. He kept poultry, too, and even coaxed us to work with him several plots of pechay, eggplant, and tomatoes so that his larder was literally independent of the marketplace.
But while his hens were always fenced in and properly kept away, the garden was not free from the chickens of the neighbors, which often flew over the fence and pecked on our plants. On one such occasion, Padre Andong was so incensed that he chased a white leghorn and felled it with a stick.
He did not know where the chicken came from, and we certainly did not want to bring it home. The problem was solved by him, and that afternoon, in the convent, we sat down to a wonderful meal of arroz caldo con gallina. When given the opportunity, Padre Andong was also a good cook.