“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.
Shortly after the Angelus, Sepa came to the sala, where, beneath the new Coleman lamp, I was reading. “Angel has something for you,” the old woman said, and gestured that he was waiting for me in the bodega. I went down to the silent yard. Inside the big building I flashed a light on the broad wooden board where Angel sat leaning against the wall.
“Do you want ointment for blisters?” I bantered, playing the light on his face.
He did not answer. I turned the light off, and in the pale haze from the barred window above him, his gaunt, tired face became softer.
He stretched his hand to me. “Here,” he said in a tone that was supplicating. I took from him the battered cardboard box where he kept his mother’s letters. “Keep it for me.”
I climbed to his side and sat on the pallet. I flashed a light on the stone floor, saw that his trunk fashioned out of packing boards was tied. He wore shoes, too, the worn-out pair Father thought he had thrown away.
“Are you leaving because Father whipped you? Why, he whips everyone. Even me!”
Angel shook his head.
“Where are you going, then?” I asked, gripping the box.
“Don’t tell Apo,” he said. “I am leaving tonight. With the soldiers.”
“But where?”
The alien sounds of evening filled the storehouse. In its blackness rats moved. Outside, in the balete tree, cicadas were alive.
“I don’t know where they will send us,” Angel said carelessly. “I am not going to Mindanao, though. Maybe, someday, I’ll go to the United States, like your Tio Benito. But for the next few years …” He turned reflectively to the barred window and pointed to the starlit west where the mountains loomed. “We will go there. Fight there.”
In my mind flashed the vivid sight of the uncovered bodies of soldiers brought to the town plaza after the all-night fighting in the nearby hills — the stiff, half-naked dead, some barefoot, all their faces anonymously stolid in death — dumped by the camp roadside to be identified.
“You are stupid, just as Father said.”
“I am eighteen,” he retorted.
“You don’t know what is waiting there for you. You’ll die.”
His rough hand slid into mine. “It doesn’t make a difference.” His voice quavered. “But what can I do? Will I stay here forever like David, tending the garden, feeding the horses? I would have joined the Huks if they came and asked me. I am sure that with them I’d be in a place other than here. Can’t you see? I have to go. Where I am going I’ll have my own life. The soldiers have that much to offer. And they are here.”
“You are going to die.”
He let go of my hand. In the dark, his teeth gleamed in a quick smile. “That should worry your father,” he said with a trace of sarcasm, “but don’t think I’m running away from my father’s debt. My salary, most of it, will go to Apo. Until we are free.”
“You are going to die.”
His head drooped. He eased himself down the pallet and paced the stone floor. “Yes, but I’ll die decently,” he said, pausing. He leaned on his elbows and faced me. “Isn’t that what we should live for?” His questions had a quality of coldness, of challenge.
I swung down the pallet and beamed a ray across the black void to the open door. His letters were in my hand. I walked away without answering him, Angel, my servant, my friend.
CHAPTER 15
In the morning the household was agog over Angel’s sudden departure, the servants speculating on where and when he would die.
“I can’t understand it,” Father said at the lunch table. He was angry and perplexed. “So I did whip him, but was that enough to make him leave?”
“Maybe he wanted to be free,” said Sepa, who was serving us.
“Free?” Father asked incredulously. “Wasn’t he free here to do his foolishness?” He turned to me. “You were the last one he saw. What did he tell you? Why didn’t you stop him?”
“He said he would send you the money, Father, to pay the debt of his parents.”
“And I’ll believe that? Why didn’t you stop him?”
I could not speak.
“So Angel is gone,” he said aloud for all the servants to hear. “Ingrate! I gave him a roof and three meals a day, and he could at least have come to me and said, ‘Oy, I’m leaving now because my belly is full and my limbs are strong.’ See what I get for my kindness to people. Nothing but insults that claw the mind!”
Father’s anger, however, did not persist, nor did the talk of the servants about Angel. In a week, all attention centered on the forthcoming celebration of Father’s birthday. It was not really for him alone; more than anything, it was an occasion for all of his tenants to come to town to partake of his food, and at the same time bring their children and grandchildren, so that Father would get to know them. It was a time for them to render us service, to fix the fences, clean the yard, and whitewash the walls.