Father had found Angel behind the bodega, sitting on a sled and gazing at the faraway hills, unable to explain why he was there on a morning when he should be working and — most of all — why he neglected the rose garden.
After his whipping, Angel returned to the garden and sprinkled water on the wilted plants, shielding each with his palm.
“It won’t do any good,” I said.
He turned to me and smiled sadly. “I shouldn’t have forgotten.” He dropped the tin can back to the water pail. “I just couldn’t forget what happened to Father and Mother. It seemed so impossible …” He drew the can from the pail again and, his palm over the withered plants, sprinkled them. “These are difficult times,” he murmured.
Angel was eighteen, but he looked shriveled and lines of premature age furrowed his brow. He stood up when his pail was empty and returned to the artesian well by the kitchen stairs, where three soldiers stationed in the town plaza were filling canvas buckets. They belonged to a company supposed to patrol the nearby foothills, which were now alive with Huks. Angel was soon conversing with them.
He was back in the garden in the late afternoon.
“Will you teach me now?” he called. I was at my window watching him. I went down to the back of the storehouse where Father had seen him loafing. We sat on a ledge; against the back of an old chair, he balanced the dog-eared primer I gave him and turned to its last pages.
He tackled a few sentences, and after one page he paused and leaned on the warm stone wall. His eyes wandered to the tamarind tan of May that covered the land. From his shirt pocket, he dug out the last frayed letter from Mindanao, which, as one would a Bible, I had read to him many times before. Exasperated at the thought of reading it again, I said, “No, not this time.”
He seemed hurt, and he thrust the letter back into his pocket without unfolding it.
“What can you do now?” I said, feeling badgered. “You should burn it. All the other letters, too.”
He came close to me, smelling of the stable and the dry earth. His voice trailed off: “About this morning, when your father saw me here, I was thinking …” Again his eyes were on the barren land beyond the barbed-wire fence and farther, the mountain half-hidden by coconut trees. He spoke brokenly. “I just cannot believe it. How they both died …”
I looked at the dust where with his finger he had spelled his name wrong. I did not want to remember the stooped, pallid woman, his mother, and the slight balding man, his father. “You never learn!” I said, and stood up to leave.
Angel was to serve us for ten years without pay. In the ledger in Father’s room, on the list of debtors, was the name of his father. As with all the other tenants, Angel’s father had often been in great need.
“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.