“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.
“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 …