Could they have been ordered away, too? The thought hovered in Istak’s mind. Could they have left because they could no longer endure the harshness of living in the Ilokos?
An-no, who had scouted the way farther ahead, returned in time for lunch. The way was clear and good, and there were no houses close by. Now it was Dalin’s turn to be the guide, to stay in the lead cart — it was she who knew the way, for Candon was the southernmost point that Istak had ever reached.
By nightfall, they were crossing the Tagudin River, and though it was wide, a child could wade through the deepest part. The bull strained over stones. Across the bank, behind a screen of camachile trees, they stopped for the night. They would bathe again, do their washing, and in the morning they would be on their way. They slept well, except for the two men who stood guard quietly, ears alert to every sound; but there were none which presaged danger — just the wind soughing in the grass, the grunt of animals, the stirring of dogs, the murmur of the river as it coursed through, and the distant crowing of cocks.
In the morning, they were surprised to find that three carts had stopped nearby. Istak woke up to Ba-ac’s happy shouts: his cousins were in the carts, and to them he ran, waving his one good hand. It was years since he had seen them last, but memory holds on to images, to joys that were shared.
Ba-ac’s cousins and their wives came to them soon after with their daughters and sons. They were going to the valley, they had left Candon forever, and like those who came from Po-on, they, too, had been ordered to leave their farms.
Now there were ten carts. Istak had his doubts but he kept them to himself; he did not want to hurt his father, to suspect their distant relatives of some future perfidy. Did Ba-ac tell them everything? The reason why they were taking such a tortuous way to the new land? They would soon know, and they would then be afraid. If threatened by the Guardia, they would probably betray Ba-ac.
In afterthought, he need not have worried. He should have simply relied on the Ilokano iron sense of loyalty to friend and family. Istak was particularly happy with his new uncle, Blas, who was a man of words. A big, bluff man, he had been and still was the poet capable of stringing the honeyed phrases that could waylay the most aloof of women. But he was unable to bend to his will a girl from Candon who had come to Po-on to visit. He had followed her to Candon some twenty years or so earlier and in the custom of those who were not favored by either the parents or the object of desire herself, he had served in her household, working the land as a farmhand with no pay at all, except for his meals. He slept below the granary, apart from the house and close to the work animals — for he was almost treated as one — and for a year ingratiated himself with the girl’s family, returning on occasion to Po-on to be the object of jokes from Ba-ac and all his relatives, why with his silver tongue he was not able to convince a simple girl to accept him after a few days.
His uncle’s tenacity surprised Istak no end, but he knew also that he would have done this for Dalin if she were still the same unfeeling creature she had been in the beginning.
Just the two of them, Blas with big, handsome words rolling out of his mouth without effort, and Istak full of questions. It was one of those early evenings when the meal was done, the animals fed and safely herded, and the women had long since extinguished the cooking fires.
“I have known how it is to snatch a field from the forest,” Blas said quietly. They had left the riverbed and were up the brow of a hill beyond which the narrow plain would unroll again. “That was what surrounded Candon when I first went there. It was hard work which drained the body of its juices and numbed the mind to dreams. Dreams that what we had carved out of the wilderness would be ours — but it would not be. Always, wherever we, the little people, will go, there will be those with more strength than us who will wrest away what we thought was our own.”
“And you are willing to go with us and suffer the same fate?”
“My son,” Blas said, spitting out the wad of tobacco he had been chewing, and turning to his nephew with melancholy in his eyes, “this is the relentless destiny of the poor.”
“And you will go with us all the way to the valley?”
“We will journey with you to the farthest corner of the earth,” Blas said, lifting his eyes to the grandeur of a full moon. “We have relatives now, people we know who will make our suffering endurable.”
It did not matter then that they were his father’s mere second cousins, capidua, as they were called, and perhaps it was just as well. For if they were first cousins, it would not have been possible to even think that in the certitude of the valley, in some future time, Blas’s elder daughter, Leonora, also known as Orang, could be the wife of An-no, and that his younger daughter, Sabel, could be Bit-tik’s.
CHAPTER 6
By the end of the second week, they were close to the mountains again, and the forest was now encroaching like a green flood upon the sliver of plain. Dalin had never traveled this far from the coastal road and all she knew was that they were now close to the land of the Bagos.
In a few more days, moving slowly as they did, they would come to where the divide would widen and become another plain. In so short a time, the three families who had joined them were no longer strangers — their faces took on names, particularly Orang and Sabel, who were often with An-no and Bit-tik. Istak was glad. Perhaps Dalin would now be banished from An-no’s attention.
Istak desired her, as he once had desired Carmencita, although he had tried to subdue that longing, denied it to himself as something beyond fulfillment. But not with Dalin, who was with him every day, speaking with him, touching him. The wound was healed now, the pain completely gone, but at times there was some numbness in his arm, which he still could not move freely.
If Dalin had an inkling of how much Istak wanted her, she did not show it. There was the day’s work, the gathering of grass for the bull, the preparation of food or the search for it — green papayas, wild bananas, and the edible leaves of trees.
They had stopped for the day, and the men had cleared the crest of a hill on which stood a giant tree. They were at the edge of the forest and to their right the land undulated in a series of low hills into the sea.
The women were cooking within the semicircle of the carts which had been unhitched around the tree and the men had returned from the shallow creek at the bottom of the hill where they had bathed the carabaos. The dogs, with their snouts encased in woven rattan so that they would not be able to bark, were leashed to the carts.
Istak had ventured down the hill, the afternoon sun warm on his face, and he had returned, worried. “There is not a single house nearby,” he told Dalin quietly, not wanting her to be more apprehensive than she already was.
He wondered how really safe they were, and if the uncles who joined them knew how well the Bagos tracked their prey. The Bagos came to Cabugaw in the dry season with their cargo of baskets and colorfully woven cloth. They exchanged these for rice and a pack of scrawny dogs, which they then tied to a leash, the rope extending to the animal’s necks through a small hollow bamboo, so that they would not get entangled. Their approach was always announced by the yammering of the dogs as they marched down the dusty streets.
Padre Jose allowed them to leave their dogs in the churchyard and to sleep under the acacia trees. He even gave them rice for their meals and galletas to cat with their coffee. They spoke Ilokano, of course, but Padre Jose chose to speak to them in their own language, which he had learned tediously through the years.