Not once did Istak dive. He prayed that his mother might finally be granted the peace she never had in life.
Far into the afternoon, they ranged along the river, but found no trace of the cart.
At sundown, they stopped and set up camp for the night. Beyond the river were newly opened fields and Carmay — a solitary village on the fringes of a forest being cleared. The great trees that had not yet been felled were burned; they stood around like huge black skeletons. The caravan found refuge from the rain in the houses, and the women, who had no dry firewood, cooked the evening meal in the stoves of kindly villagers.
Early in the evening, the three brothers sat down together for the first time in weeks to a meal prepared by Dalin. They had barely spoken to one another the whole day, and though words were not uttered, Istak knew that his brothers resented him; perhaps they even blamed him for their mother’s death. Why did he not dive at all — he, the eldest son — when even men who were strangers helped? Why did he give up too soon?
The vegetable broth warmed their insides, and the salted fish with crushed tamarind tasted good. Istak had no appetite; he put into words the thoughts that rankled An-no. “Do not blame mc, my brother, for our mother’s fate. Do you think I wanted her dead? Who is the son who would wish this on his mother? I would not have been able to save her. The hands of fate are stronger than mine. I prayed.”
“You did not even try.” An-no’s words were like prongs that dug into his flesh.
Istak bowed, then stood up and walked away, down the muddy path toward the river, the dusk thickening around him, the insects noisy in the grass. Dalin, who was serving them, followed, but Istak waved her back: “Let me be alone,” he mumbled.
What was it, really, that had happened to him on that submerged bridge? Why did he not dive after the cart? It all came back — how it was when Ba-ac was nowhere to be found. In his mind, it had quickly formed — this knowledge, this certainty that the old man was dead. And again, at the river, it had flashed through his mind clearly, that there was nothing he could do, as if something stronger than the current had held him back, telling him he could do nothing, nothing. He was not a coward, he reassured himself; when he decided to stay behind in Po-on, he was fully aware of the risk. What was this in him that seemed to guide him in his deepest thoughts? Was it some supreme intelligence that he had gleaned from the kumbento in Cabugaw? If only he could explain this to his brothers, if only he could put into words these fears and feelings, inchoate and yet so real.
It was not just Mayang they had lost. Lost, too, were the sacks of seed rice which must have pinned her down when the cart overturned. Now they would have nothing to plant and little to eat. But at least they were alive; they could subsist on weeds and insects. Ilokanos can eat what other people cannot. And most of all, with the bridge gone, for the moment, at least, they were farther away from Capitán Gualberto and his Guardia.
The rain resumed the following morning and the fields around them were flooded. The road to the valley, Dalin said, would be a quagmire. Istak and his brothers left Carmay early and paced the riverbank, asking the few settlers who lived nearby if they had seen the cart or Mayang, but no one had. The water was higher, with more islands of water lilies and reeds, occasional logs and small uprooted trees that drifted with the current.
All through the journey, Istak was amazed at the kindness of villagers, how readily they were invited to sleep in kitchens, in sheds, or under the houses if there was no space upstairs. He understood then how Dalin and her family could go so far with a cart loaded with more goods to sell than what the family needed to live.
He asked them to please bury his mother if her body ever surfaced; he would surely come back to find out and to express his gratitude to whomever had done the Christian thing.
At noon, Istak asked his brothers and everyone in the caravan to join him at the riverbank to pray. Dalin had gathered a basket of white rosal flowers in the village, and these she made into a wreath which she then tied onto a small raft made of banana trunks.
Rest in peace, Istak intoned as An-no and Bit-tik lowered the wreath into the water. Bit-tik pushed it toward the middle, where the current was strong, and silently they watched it drift down the river. It was caught in a whirlpool briefly, then bobbed up and swiftly floated down the vast brown expanse. They watched it grow smaller, till it was no longer visible, hidden as it was by the flotsam from the mountains.
“We are orphans now,” Istak said, turning to his brothers. “Whatever may rile us, whatever differences we may have, we must be closer together. We have no one else.”
The farmers who gave them shelter in Carmay told Istak that in the town of Rosales they could get some help.
“You must go to Don Jacinto. Everyone knows him, for his big house is by the big balete tree. He is good — he will help you …”
They left Carmay at midday; the rain had eased somewhat. The sky was scabbed with gray clouds that scudded away and the sun came out in short shifts, full and bright upon a land now laved in green.
To their right, a straggle of trees and beyond the trees, farther in the distance, was the heavily forested mountain called Balungaw. Dalin told Istak of a village with the same name near the mountain, of a hot spring there where the sick often went. To their left was another creek which emptied into the Agno, and like the Agno, it was also swollen.
Shortly before nightfall, thatch-roofed houses with buri palm walls appeared on both sides of the narrow road. Pigs wallowed in side ditches. From under the houses, mangy dogs appeared and trailed and barked at the slow-moving carabaos. People went to the windows to look at the caravan, the palm-leaf canopies of the carts dark with rain, the solid wooden wheels caked with mud, and the new settlers walking beside their carts while inside were their women and children. They were in Rosales at last.
It was one of those new towns carved out of cogonal wastes and forests by settlers like them. As in most of the new towns that lined the road to the valley, its leading citizens were mestizos who were the favorites of the friars. Some took advantage of the recent opening of the colleges in Manila for Indios and went to the University of Santo Tomás to study law and medicine, and became infected, too, with the ideas of liberalism, that deadly contagion which the friars detested and ranted against. Large tracts of land toward the east, all the way to that prosperous village of Balungaw, to the very foothills of Mount Balungaw, were claimed by the first Spanish settler in this part of the country, but there were also equally large areas titled to the principalia—the educated men like Don Jacinto.
Since most of the settlers in this wild part of the country were Ilokanos, their new settlements were named after the towns they came from — Casanicolasan, Cabalawangan — or after the vegetation that abounded in the new land — Cabaletean (balete trees) or even Rosales itself, after the rosal bush which lined the roads and with the start of the rainy season had started to bloom with puffy white flowers. They brought with them not just implements from their old villages, but the attitudes of hard work and perseverance that had made them endure.