“And if we returned, what will greet us? The ashes of our former homes? A land which we cannot till because it never belonged to us? I am old, my sons; it is you for whom I must live. I will go wherever you want to go.”
“I will go on,” An-no said. “Orang cannot go back. We can start a new life.”
“And you, Istak?”
Somehow, his mind was still cluttered with what Padre Jose had said, a tenuous hope that he could return to the kumbento, to the seminary in Vigan. Dalin had said that he was not a farmer and would never be one, but that he could help the farmer even if he himself never touched the handle of a plow.
“I don’t know, Mother,” he said.
“Ask Dalin,” his mother told him.
It was dusk and on a dry patch of ground they had already placed the stones which they used as stoves, and lighted the firewood. Dalin had gone to the creek down the clearing to fill the water jar. He followed her. She was crouched on the bank and had put sand inside the earthen jar and was scrubbing the insides to remove whatever moss had gathered there. Watching her, he knew that he would not leave her, that he would go with her wherever she wanted to go.
When she was through, she filled the jar with water and rolled a piece of cloth which she placed on her head. Istak helped her raise the jar and lift it to her head. Neatly balanced, she carried the jar without holding it although the path was slippery.
They walked up the low incline.
“Will you tell me where you want to go?” he asked.
She did not turn to him; it was difficult to do that with the jar so. “Wherever you want to,” she said.
“You must make the choice and I will follow.”
He could not see her smiling. “It is you, my husband, whom I will follow. Wherever you want to go,” she murmured.
“Tell me then, the valley?”
“I pray that we reach it with nothing setting us apart …”
“Nothing can set us apart now,” he assured her. “Tell me, what is it like there?”
“A plain as far as you can see,” she said solemnly. “And all the land you can clear. I will help you. I will work very hard beside you.”
CHAPTER 8
They did not linger in the towns in the great plain. They kept to the narrow muddy roads. In places, the constant rain had washed away the roadbed and the foundations of stone jutted out, jolting the carts as the caravan labored over them. The new towns looked scraggly and unkempt, and they did not have the stone churches or the big houses of brick that lined the main streets of the Ilokos. It also seemed to them that the Guardia were far away. Among these poor settlers, there was not much booty.
In the near horizon, the Caraballos were a wall of deep blue. They would still have three days of travel before they reached those mountains.
They brought out the salted python meat to dry whenever there was sun; the white strips were laid on flat bamboo baskets balanced atop the carts. They continued to worry about food — they had barely enough to last them through one planting season. But there was always the tobacco they could sell freely now that the monopoly had been lifted.
They met other caravans, Pangasiñenses with woven baskets and salted fish to sell. They overtook farmers who were also looking for land. They were all in a hurry to get to their destinations before the rains really fell — the siyam-siyam that would transform the plain into a vast rimless ocean of brown and the giant river, the Agno, into a rampaging sea.
At night when they bivouacked, sometimes with other settlers, while cooking their meals or just drinking an occasional coconut bowl of basi, Istak came across wisps of his recent past. A squad of Guardia Civil was stalking the caravans, asking questions about those who had come from Cabugaw. He told his brothers and uncles to avoid the other settlers, not to talk with them unless necessary. They now camped by themselves, away from other groups, even though they had also come from the north.
In the mornings, when they started out, there was always something uplifting about the land, the cascade of light everywhere, the brilliant glaze on the leaves of bamboo, on the acacias. Even the razor grass seemed greener in the plain. Indeed, the rains had begun.
There was more variety in their food now. The saluyot shrubs had started growing in the fields and alongside the roads more catuday trees had bloomed, and they gathered the pink and white flowers and cooked them.
Once they encamped along a long, sandy stretch of land near a creek. The place was overgrown with tough ledda grass. Shortly before nightfall, the air was suddenly alive with huge insects. Some clung to Istak’s clothes while others just buzzed about. Dalin called happily from where she was cooking the rice. These are May beetles, she cried, and like a madwoman, she started flailing and catching them, storing them in a fish basket. She called to them to do as she did, and they set about catching as many as they could.
They were northerners and though they ate everything, even the small white larvae of the big red ants and the young green leaves of mangoes — food that was unusual to Dalin then — they had never tasted these beetles. And that evening, they sat down to their first supper of May beetles cooked in cane vinegar and coconut oil. They were not queasy eating it, and they liked the bottom best, the milky, juicy taste of it.
That night, Istak wandered off to the line of shrubs beyond which was the trail that they would follow in the morning. In the distance, the lights of bull carts proceeding on their journey flickered until they dimmed and disappeared completely.
He sat on a tree stump and pondered the riddle of what awaited them, and the pursuers they must elude. Maybe, after they crossed the Agno, they could come upon some anonymous corner where no one had been before.
Others had done it, escaped the clutches of the Spaniards, who called them remontados. They left the security of the towns and sought refuge in the forest, where they cleared land and raised their food, far away from their tormentors. Some were changed, though; they became brigands as well, preying on the poor who could not defend themselves, who would rather have the peace and security “under the bell.” Perhaps, in the new land, they would be left alone without the past rising out of the ashes to threaten them again.
Istak envied the young Igorot friends he had made in the Cordilleras, half-naked, their arms and chests tattooed, their teeth blackened with betel nut. They had listened to Padre Jose’s exhortations, they were even baptized, but they had reverted to their ancient worship once the priest had gone. Up there in the mountains, their lives were complete. But then Istak remembered, too, the skulls which adorned their houses. Any one of those skulls could have been his if he had not gone to them with Padre Jose and his gifts of salt and tobacco and his promises of salvation.
There is no escape, then, from this prison that is living, just as there was no escape from his unquenchable yearning for knowledge.
How did it all start, really? Did it start with his father? With his being in church? It had come to him before, though not as clearly as it did now. It was the harsh living in Po-on, really, more than anything, which had drawn him to the Church, to seek not salvation but a future that was not limned by hunger. It was really for this reason that he would have become a priest, as did most of the Indios who came from the lowest stations. They would overcome the hazards of peasant birth and become teachers if not priests, and thus bring not just comfort to themselves and their families, but a bit of the respectability such as that which Capitán Berong had.