The produce from the farm sufficed and there was the additional grain, pork, chickens, and eggs his teaching earned for him. At first, it was just the children in Cabugawan who came to learn, but soon children and even adults from the nearby villages also came. A shed was built at the end of the lane close to his house, its earthen floor hardened with carabao dung. The roof was cogon and the walls were palm leaves. One side was completely open. At one end was a small table, and above it, close to the rafters, dangled a wooden crucifix. Aside from being a schoolhouse, it was also here where he ministered to the sick.
He also built a small shed in his bangcag near the mound where the huge snake had appeared. This mound was never touched, as were most of the mounds that dotted the fields. It was now surrounded with orange trees.
Down the shallow incline to the ground were the neat vegetable rows of ampalaya, eggplant, winged beans, watered constantly by the spring. This hut was his and his alone. He would lie on the bamboo floor and shut off everything — even the whisper of the wind on the grass roof. It was here where he replenished his strength, for after every healing he felt like a hollow length of bamboo — inert and useless, his innards spilled out, his veins and arteries drained. He stayed in the shed sometimes well into the night, when the whole village was already asleep, and would return to Dalin’s side shortly after the cock had crowed. Lying there, he could feel his spirit leave his body slowly, like an essence floating away from a bottle, or smoke which rises from the kitchen stove to disappear in the air, and from there, he could see everything clearly, himself weightless on the floor. He could feel himself soaring over the fields, over Cabugawan. Then that blinding light that seemed to wash over everything, a brilliant wave cascading down on him, and still more light so intense he dared not open his eyes. I have seen another world without the hard crust of earth. I have gone beyond passion and craving; I have seen the spirit, an invocation beyond understanding …
When he was in his shed in the bangcag, Dalin, who understood, did not have to dissuade people from bothering him. It was not necessary, not after what happened to those who had trespassed.
At one time in the early part of the dry season when the watermelon and pomelo were ripening, two interlopers tipsy with basi thought they could simply snatch a few fruits. They were taught a fearsome lesson they would not forget, a lesson which soon got whispered about in the villages. One had seen the fat pomelos dangling from the trees, and without asking permission, simply walked through the uneven fence of thicket and bamboo and started to reach for the fruits. His story was frightening.
The watermelon thief had come upon this length of big bamboo stretched between the leafy rows. Only it turned out not to be bamboo, but a giant snake suddenly come alive, hissing and staring at him with beady eyes. As for the orange thief, he was about to reach for the fruit when he saw a fat vine coiled around the tree trunk. Only it was not a vine, but the long body of a snake with its fangs bared. Both could have been killed and they thanked the spirits that the snake did not strike them. They understood only later: it had merely warned them.
There were eight houses in Cabugawan in the beginning; soon there were more as other settlers from the Ilokos joined them. There was land for everyone who dared challenge the forest and the wild cogonals that bordered the swamps to the south. The lane between the new houses widened, planted on both sides with marunggay trees, and another gully to the creek where the carabaos bathed was carved out.
Dalin was a good wife and mother but memory was her implacable enemy and at night when they were in their small sleeping room, she would remain awake, badgered by thoughts of what was, wondering if Istak truly loved her in spite of all that had happened.
She was very glad when the baby came — a boy — for she knew that with him they would be brought closer. He was baptized Antonio, in honor of her father, and this truly made her happy, and happier yet when, in a couple of years, the second baby came — also a boy — and was named Pedro, in honor of her grandfather. She had hoped for a girl, so they would have her to depend on in their old age — but no girl — in fact, no more babies came after the birth of the second child. Her life was ordered, comfortable, and she had no complaints. Istak provided well, he was esteemed and everyone regarded him as the repository of wisdom, although he was not the eldest. His uncle Blas was certainly much older, and was better with words.
In times like this, when the world was still and their thoughts were distinct and whole, it seemed as if they were completely one, their bodies merging, their spirits entwined as well, and the days ahead seemed clear and without shadows. Still, when she spoke her thoughts, it was as if this ancient sorrow never could be assuaged, not by her two boys, not by this man who had sworn to serve her to the very end.
“Old Man, when will you no longer want to have me lie beside you?”
“Old Man, will there ever be a time when I will forget what happened years ago, and remember only that I live for our children and tomorrow?”
“Old Man, who will take you away from me?”
He would hug her closer, feel the beating of her heart against his chest, smell the sun and earth on her skin and wonder why, after all these years, the old wound had not healed. He was a healer, but this was one wound he could not close no matter how much he reassured her, no matter how much he showed her by deeds that he loved her.
“I know it,” she said, holding him tight. “Someday you will leave us.”
Neither one was allowed to forget that they were running away and that even in Cabugawan they were not spared the omens of events to come. The news which reached them was of troubled times, of men being killed by the Spaniards in the north and the south. They did not hear the gunfire, so Istak consoled himself with the hope that perhaps they would no longer be hunted. What he had read convinced him that the tides rise and ebb. Though they could erode the shore, the sea itself remained constant, just as the land will be and they who work it, inseparable and perhaps indestructible.
“Whatever ill wind blows, we should not run anymore,” he told Bit-tik, Orang, and his cousins. “We will work as before. If there are men who believe so much in themselves that they can drive away the Spaniards, let them think that way; let them shout themselves hoarse. Our duty is to our families.”
As talk about the wildfire spreading in the south, particularly in Manila, heightened, they looked at the house of the Spanish landlord in Rosales for signs. The house stood there, quiet and impregnable, and the Spaniard’s many tenants continued to leave his mountain share in the bodega behind the house. Could it be that he had the unblemished loyalty of his tenants and was not worried about any Indio recalcitrance? Or could it be that he, like Padre Jose, was unsparing in his criticism of the Indios yet loved them as only a father could?
The harvest that year was very good and the sacks which Istak and the new tenants brought to Don Jacinto were fat and heavy. Their benefactor received them, however, not with great joy but with a face overcast by gloom. Once, as they were about to leave, Don Jacinto took Istak aside to the shade of the balete tree in his yard and presented him with a bottle of new basi. Then, the serious talk. Don Jacinto, gobernadorcillo, the authority of office imprinted all over him, was now merely another Indio in a moment of mourning. “Rizal is dead, Eustaquio. You may never have heard of him, but he is known to many of us who believe in justice. The Spaniards executed him last week at the Luneta …”