Luis sometimes tried to fathom what went on in his driver’s mind, but Simeon was quiet most of the time and there was this meaningless smile plastered on his face when Luis called him down for some small misdemeanor. Luis was almost sorry; the car had already been thoroughly cleaned, and a thick powdery coat would cover it again by the time they returned.
Simeon drove slowly, his headlights picking out the stray pigs along the main street, then they turned right to the narrow camino provincial. It had not been maintained; the sides were covered with weeds, and the gravel undulated in piles where it was not swept back by the camineros to the center of the road. The night was calm, that vaporous kind, which transfixes the land during the dry season. The dark was pervasive but for a few flickering orange lamps that marked the houses. In the backseat Luis tried to catch a firefly that had been blown in, its pale luminosity popping up and down — but the firefly was soon sucked away and once more Luis was immersed in expectation and apprehension.
“I should be cooling off in a brook now,” Simeon said without turning to Luis as the car crawled on.
Luis peered at the left side of the road shrouded with night. They had passed the last kerosene-lamp-lit house, and the road sloped down into the farmlands, anonymous and black around them. All this distance, this vastness, belonged to his father.
“Drive a little bit faster,” he said. The car crunched forward. The camachile trees that flanked the road hurtled by. A gray unending stream of night insects caught in the white glare of the headlights pelted the windshield. As the pebbly road rushed toward them Luis searched for the old landmarks, and in a while he recognized the broad end of the bull-cart path from Sipnget that joined the camino. Simeon slowed to a stop and Luis got out. A bridge made of coconut trunks laid side by side and covered with matted bamboo spanned the irrigation ditch alongside the road. The land waiting for the plow smelled burnt.
“Wait here,” he told the driver. “I’ll walk.”
Simeon stepped out of the car. “Your father, Apo — he told me not to leave you.”
“Simeon,” he said firmly, “I am seeing my own village and my family.”
A thick layer of dust covered the path and fluffed up at each step, and he often stumbled as he stepped on depressions formed by the steady groove of carabao hooves. Tobacco patches on both sides of the path clogged the night with a thick, pungent odor. Insects whirred in the grass that covered the dikes.
I am home. I am home. This is the place honored in the mind and sanctified in the heart. Although he had been away, the sounds and smells were always with him — the aroma of newly harvested grain, the grass fresh with dew, the mooing cattle, the young herder’s call for his water buffalos, the cackle of hens, the rustling of bamboo in the wind, and most of all, the tones of his language, for there was in Ilokano the aura and the mystery of things left unsaid. There was the past, too, that did not have to be relived, which must be escaped because it spelled perdition and all the bog and swamp of his muddied beginning. How was it then, how were the hours, the moments at the river, in the water-lilied ditches, the taste of newly harvested rice? Bring back the strum of guitars, the children’s eager voices — all the happiness that ended on a night like this!
It was high noon that day, that year, when his father’s tractor came. After a hurried lunch he had snatched his buri hat from the deer-horn rack — a relic of his grandfather’s hunting days — and gone to the kitchen, where his mother was washing the dishes. Victor followed — Luis was the leader, and Vic was his only follower.
Can we join the others in the road? his younger brother said.
It is hot, his mother said, pausing; see how the land heaves in the heat.
The old man was knitting fishnets by the window. He drew the shiny bamboo shuttle into a loop. Let them go and see how a rich man farms, he said.
His mother turned to them and bade them leave. They rushed down the stairs, into the white powdery road. They did not join the crowd at the bridge or the boys under the acacia trees. They sat on the dying grass by themselves, in the shade of a camachile sapling up the road.
Before long, a rumble came down the road and they saw it — the tractor with a puff of dust behind it, its infernal noise growing louder, its red paint gleaming in the sun. The men stood up from their haunches, and the two brothers joined them. The tractor rumbled closer, and then it was upon them like a snorting bull. Santos saw Luis then, and he beckoned to him. He asked if he was Nena’s son, and when he said he was, the caretaker asked him if he wanted to sit beside him. It was something he could not refuse, and much later he remembered that he should have asked Victor to join him, too.
The engine roared again, and its dark fumes almost choked him. The driver flipped a lever forward, and avoiding the bridge, the tractor loped down the shallow ditch, then clambered up the other bank, tearing huge chunks of soil as it made for the open field. It went straight, followed the path, and obliterated the deep ruts wrought by bull-cart wheels and sled runners. The iron treads etched their deep rectangular pattern on the path. More children came from beyond the dike and formed a procession behind the machine. On the seat beside the caretaker, Luis felt his chest bursting.
The dike did not stop the tractor. The machine went up the incline faster than a carabao and roared into the village, which had never felt the tread of an engine. As they roared by his home his grandfather appeared at the door. Luis could not look at the old man as they passed. Somehow he knew that his grandfather did not like this intrusion, and he was glad when they finally passed the house and headed for the edge of the farmlands, where the grass grew lush and tough. There the caretaker alighted and dispersed the children who had gathered before the engine. To the tractor’s rear the driver attached the plowshares, and then he drove into the tangle of grass and weeds. As it reached the high grass, the machine paused, and into the ground, deeper than an animal-drawn plow could pierce, the steel shares sank, ripped the sturdy soil into clean furrows, and upturned the tough dry earth now moist and rich brown. Behind the newly plowed earth and the prostrate grass they walked and followed the caterpillar as it moved on, unimpeded by rocks and roots of dead trees that had long defeated the wooden plows. Near the river dike the sticky soil where the amorseco grew wild yielded, too, and this patch of land that could never be planted would now be ready for seed. The tractor moved on until it reached the river.
It was late afternoon when Luis went home. The excitement had worn off, and the children who had crowded around him asking how it was to be on the tractor had stopped pestering him. He had somehow expected this moment when he would be acknowledged as his father’s son. He had seen it in the women from the town who often went to his mother to have the panuelos of their ternos starched or their Sunday clothes mended. They had appraised him, then talked in whispers. He lingered at the dike until the sun went down, then he went up to the house. He greeted his mother and his grandfather in the ritual that he was brought up in. It was dusk and it was quiet, but Vic broke the silence with questions: Where had he been after the tractor had gone?