Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (24 page)

You pumice away a little more of the likeness and can breathe again even as the welts on your back start to weep.

Your Grannie endured the wounds of her bondage. She carried them into freedom. She refused to forget. She took her payment. She demands you remember. The work is yours now. It has claimed you.

You gaze down at your lover, sleeping with his mouth open just so. He burns with fever still. You burn with fever, too.

Later, he calls to you: “Lover, lover, come here and let me look on you.”

You approach his side and settle next to the bed.

“I’m here,” you say. His eyes are rimmed red. His skin raw and ragged. He opens and closes his eyes, searching for you. Your fingers ache with need. The likeness is just an arm’s length away on the dresser, telegraphing a wild heat.

“Bring our picture from over yonder. Come look at us together, pretty and strong,” your lover says.

You hold the picture up close to his face. You hide your own face behind the cardboard frame. You won’t look at the photograph. Your lover’s fevered eyes tell you what you already know.
In fact, you favor. He could be your kin
. His eyes, gone pale with fever, search for you – on the photograph, all around this tiny room.
If they already gone, this’ll find the next in line.

The likeness shimmers in your hand before you remember grabbing it; you take the pumice to the likeness and scrub. The woman in the dress is almost gone, chafed beyond recognition. It will be delicious to finish it off, a deep breath of air after almost drowning.

You are almost gone.

Past the wreckage of pulp and your trembling hand, your lover trembles.

The thread tugs you between your Grannie and your lover. The thread tightens, soon to break.

Art by Eric Orchard

April 1900
Ilocos Norte Province, Philippines

She padded barefoot and silent in the early morning darkness – long before any rooster’s first crow – across the nipa hut’s floor. Snores rumbled out from the older couple in the neighboring hut, and Angela didn’t want to wake them and give the woman she called Auntie Dungo anything more to gossip about.

She gathered things that had been her father’s, things she had saved without her mother knowing. From her small, wooden chest, she took out a threadbare cotton shirt, hole-ridden trousers, and a beaten, floppy-brimmed hat – the clothes her father used to wear while working the tobacco fields. From a spot hidden behind her books, she grabbed the same sheathed bolo knife that had been found on his body after a failed rebellion four years before.

She wore the shirt inside out, cinched the trousers with a bit of rope, and tied the leather straps of the sheathed bolo around her waist. She drank some water from a jar, filled a canteen, and slung it over her shoulder.

From a basket, she clasped the last three eggs, cracked them open one by one, and sucked out the yolks and whites. That was all her mother had left her the morning before, when she took all their chickens to the market outside town. Her mother hadn’t returned. Angela had no brothers or sisters; her grandparents, like her father, were dead.

She rolled up the frayed pant legs, set the hat over the uneven tufts on her freshly shorn head, and crept through her empty home, down the stairs and through the barangay. By starlight, she walked footpaths that skirted fields of sweetly ripe tobacco plants, rose between rice paddy terraces alive with chirping insects and croaking frogs, and climbed into the hills, where light breezes let faint traces of sea-salt air mix with the rich dryness of fallen leaves from balete trees.

The day’s first light cast a blue-green glow as she walked the forest edge. Long, ropy tendrils wound round wide trunks or hung lazily from muscular branches, as if they had always been there and always would. She kept walking until she smelled cigar smoke. She planted her feet and they sank into the cool, soft soil. She called, “Buenos días, Señor!”

A cough from high in the tree turned into thunderous laughter. A booming voice said, “Angela! You’ve come back!”

Leaves rustled and branches creaked as her kapfre descended. He didn’t climb with slow and deliberate pauses to doublecheck footholds and handholds like a human would. Instead, he glided through leaves, branches, and limbs, leaving them swaying behind him. His body seemed to flicker and change, one moment, part giant; the next, part tree. She thought it magic and smiled with delight, despite her situation, to see him standing before her.

He clutched a lit cigar in one meaty hand. He wore baggy pale cotton pants torn at the cuffs, a dingy white shirt, and a dark vest with deep pockets stuffed with cigars and who knew what else. A smile spread across his bearded, weather-beaten face, a vigorous light shining in his deep black eyes. He doffed his hat, bent his back in an awkward bow, and then, straightening, lifted his brows and widened his eyes as if to make his lined face as open as possible. “You’ve come to live with me forever?” He sucked deeply on his cigar and exhaled a long, white stream. “Together, we will live atop the trees and watch over the forest.” He took another puff and smiled.

Angela’s smile waned. Even though she felt comforted by his routine words, she knew she couldn’t give her usual reply. “I can’t go with you; my mama needs me,” she said as usual. Then she added: “You see, there’s a war going on and my mama hasn’t come home.”

“Hmm,” he said, brows tight. He scratched his beard, leaned against the tree trunk and again said, “Hmm.”

Usually, their banter would lead to stories, riddles, and jokes. They only stopped when they heard voices of others, most often rice farmers in the fields below. At that moment, his eyes would turn into Os of surprise and he’d smile at her, wink, and disappear back up into the trees.

He puffed on his cigar for a while before saying: “War? What’s that? Some kind of game?”

“You don’t know?” she said, unable to hide her surprise or the whine in her voice. She realized her mistake, confusing an ancient forest spirit for a human adult. “It’s not a game. It’s–” she didn’t know what to say next as words crashed into her mind:
Yanqui,
Peninsulare,
Illustrado,
Insurrecto,
Spain,
America,
colonialism,
empire,
occupation,
benevolent assimilation,
nationalism,
patriotism,
Philippines,
freedom,
rebel,
guerrilla,
revolution.
She knew these words were important, but they stood for things she didn’t quite comprehend. She said, “War is when strangers come with guns and your father is killed and your mother disappears.”

“Hmm,” he said again, and he coughed. Clouds of smoke spewed from his mouth. He poked at them with a lazy index finger. “I’ve no mother or father, so maybe I need not worry about this war.”

“But,” she said, her voice rising. “This is serious.”

He snapped his fingers, and his eyes brightened. “Angela, you must stay with me. I will make a home for you in the trees, and we can stay away from war.”

“Mama needs me.”

“Hmm.” A mischievous half-grin bloomed on his face. “How can you know if she’s disappeared?”

“She might come back,” she said. “You disappear all the time; you always come back.”

“Ha! Ha!” He said: “I do not disappear, Angela. I hide!”

“This isn’t a game!” She frowned. “Maybe Mama is hiding, hiding from men with guns. I have to find her.”

“I’ve an idea,” he said. “I’ll give you a riddle, and if you don’t get it, then you must come live with me forever. Deal?”

“And if I do get it?”

“I will help you find Mama!”

She said, “It’s a deal.”

He shoved his cigar in his mouth and rubbed his giant hands together. “What moves over all the earth, is heard everywhere, but never seen?”

She closed her eyes and thought of owls hooting unseen at night. Then she thought of the creak of wood planks in the hut at night. How many times had she heard that? How many times had she thought it was her father returning home? Her mother said wood “talked” as the weather changed, but she liked to think it was her father’s spirit come to watch over his little girl because he loved her so very much. She had her answer. She opened her eyes.

Her kapfre said, “Well?”

She said, “A ghost!”

“A ghost? Ha! No!” Quicker than she thought possible, he scooped her up in one arm and climbed smoothly and magically to the top of the tree. He set her on one of his broad shoulders. They swayed a bit. “Here is where you and I will sit and smoke forever.” He didn’t sit. He said, “Do you want to know the answer to the riddle?”

“I’d like another guess.”

“No, no, no. That wasn’t the deal. But here’s the answer.” He grasped her two legs with one hand to hold her in place. He jumped straight up.

They rose. She clutched his straggly hair. The air rushed against her face and swooshed into her ear. She shouted into the breeze: “The wind! It’s the wind!”

He laughed. They continued to rise. Even though she gave him the answer, their ascent didn’t stop. She had no idea when it would stop. The morning’s full light revealed to her the vast expanse of forest; it went on and on and on; and that, too, frightened her. She couldn’t see the paths she had taken that morning, the paths that defined her world. They were too small and hidden away to be of notice from this height. How tiny she felt; and still they continued to rise.

Then something changed. She felt her kapfre’s shoulder muscles tighten. His laughter ebbed. It was replaced by a gruff shout: “What? What?” He thrust an angry finger toward an area where the lush green of the forest was injured by a long, deep scar.

“What? What?” He pointed in another direction, to the right of the scar, where farther in the distance a steady column of white smoke rose from the trees.

“What? What?” he said again, harsh and angry.

They fell, gently and slowly, his bare feet landing firmly on a branch atop a tree.

“What? What?” he asked, a piercing heat in his eyes aimed at her, as if he blamed her. “My trees? Disappeared? What?”

“Don’t blame me,” she said, but she couldn’t help thinking that the fires were cook fires and that her mother was there preparing food. Or maybe that was only a fantasy created by her hunger and the dizzying heights she had climbed. She said, “That’s war.”

“No!”

“Yes, in your forest.”

“Men with guns took my trees?”

“Not men,” she said. “Yanquis.”

“Yanquis? What’s that?”

“Bad men.”

“I don’t like bad men.”

“I know,” she said. “But I can help you.”

“You?” he said. “Help me?”

“You take me to the smoke, and I’ll find out who it is. If it is Yanquis, then we play tricks on them to make them leave.”

“Yes! Yes!” he said. “Let’s go make them leave! Let’s go now!”

“First, you must answer my riddle. If you get it right, then I’ll help you.”

“Hmm,” he said. “A riddle is it? And if I get it wrong?”

“Then you must help me find Mama. Deal?”

“Deal,” he said.

She thought for a moment, then said: “I wear a crown, but I am not a king; I just crow like one.”

“Ha! Ha!” he said. “Easy! You’ve used that one before! You’re talking about a rooster!”

“Very wise, Señor,” she said. “Now I will help you.”

He sucked on his cigar, now wedged between his lips, smoke pouring from him. “Ha! Ha! Let’s go!”

Treetops shook as they sailed across the forest. The giant leapt from tree to tree, his feet barely touching a branch as he landed and pushed off again. They rose and fell as if riding waves, carried at treeswift speed, the forest canopy a blur below.

The sound of human voices brought her kapfre to a stop. They swayed on a tall, thin branch. With cigar still lit between his lips, he said, “Hmm.” Leaves whispered in their wake.

She knew he wouldn’t want to get close to other people, but she was still surprised when she saw him smile and wink, and then, in less than a blink, she found herself standing alone in the dense shade of the forest, her bare feet awkwardly atop an array of twisted roots. She whispered, “Señor Kapfre? You’ll wait here?”

His only reply was a fresh waft of cigar smoke. Then she smelled the mouthwatering aromas of cook-fire smoke. She again heard voices, but they were too distant to make out. She crept toward them, staying low, her eyes on her feet and the uneven roots, so she wouldn’t trip as she got closer to spy on these trespassers.

After a few steps, a man’s voice shouted: “
Tigil
!”

She stopped and looked up.

An unshaven man holding a rifle across his body – one hand on the stock at his waist, the other on the barrel near his shoulder – blocked her way. He wore a loose cotton shirt, dark woolen trousers, and brown boots. His black, sweat-matted hair stuck to his tan forehead. He said, “Where you going with that bolo… boy?”

He spoke neither Spanish nor her native tongue, Ilocano, but Tagalog, a language from the south, from Manila. She knew enough to understand his words, but she wasn’t sure why he smirked when he said “boy.” Did he think she was a boy and was commenting on her youth? Or did he know she was really a girl?