“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?
She stood, rested a hand on her bolo knife’s handle and said in Ilocano: “I’m here to keep the war out of my kapfre’s forest.”
“Kapfre?” He looked left and then right in a pantomime of a search. He shrugged. “And you’re what? His bodyguard? Is he shy?”
She didn’t like this man.
He rested the butt of his gun on the ground: “Tell me something, little man. Kapfre are magical, right? But all they do is sit around, smoke cigars, and play pranks? I mean, come on, doesn’t that sound like something that came out of a lazy person’s daydream?”
She narrowed her eyes.
The man with the gun said, “Your kapfre is a superstition, little man. But war? That’s real. It’s been real for years. And it’s fought by men. So why don’t you and your kapfre run along home.” He pointed his chin to the forest behind her to send her on her way.
She didn’t move. She said, “I’m not afraid of you.”
“You’re certainly a bold one.”
“And you’re a stupid Tagalog!” she said. “My kapfre showed me the smoke of your cook fires. He brought me here to check it out. D
on’t you think Yanquis can see the smoke, too?” She watched the smirking twinkle in his eyes fade into something hard and calculating.
But then, just as quickly, his expression changed: his brows lifted, his eyes widened, his mouth opened as if in wonder. He said, “Maybe you can help us. That is a fine looking bolo you have. May I see it?”
Disarmed by his sudden friendliness, she unsheathed the bolo and handed it to him.
“Oh, this is very nice,” he said. He swung his rifle around so it hung by a leather strap on his shoulder. He examined the knife some more with both hands. “Solid. Good craftsmanship.” He held the knife in one hand and, with the other, he reached around her and seized the back of her shirt. “Now, you will come with me.” He pushed her onto a narrow path, released her shirt with a shove and said, “Keep walking, boy.”
* * *
Thin, haggard men shuffled about or slumped against tree trunks or lay on the bare ground. Their vacant eyes stared at things she couldn’t see. She saw bandages made of torn, filthy rags wrapped around heads, necks, shoulders, arms, torsos, legs. Here and there, small tents had been set up. From those came cries and wails of men in pain. Their air reeked of sweat and blood and something dark and pungent. She scrunched up her nose to stop it from penetrating her.
The soldier said, “Keep going, boy.”
They walked beyond the wounded and dying, though a dense part of the forest and into a second clearing, where horses stood tied together. One rose taller than the rest, a stallion with such a deep, black coat and glossy mane that she couldn’t stop herself from gaping.
“That,” the soldier said, “is Father Aglipay’s. And that is where you’ll meet him.”
She turned from the horse to see a large tent in the line of shade between forest and clearing. A cloud of uncertainty settled around her. Had the soldier said “father,” as in a priest? He didn’t mean a priest was leading this band of rebels?
The soldier said, “Tell me your name.”
“My name is An” – she paused and decided to be the boy he thought she was – “Angelo Silang.”
They stopped outside the heavy canvas tent, where the soldier spoke quickly in Tagalog to a guard. The guard stepped inside, and the soldier turned to her. “Don’t be afraid,” the soldier said. “Just tell Father what you told me.”
She nodded, even as her confusion solidified with his saying “father” again. Priests, she knew, couldn’t be trusted. They either came from Spain or sided with Spain, and then sided with Yanquis. Could this priest and these Tagalogs be on the side of the Yanquis and against the Filipinos? She reached for the comforting wood of her bolo handle, but of course it wasn’t there.
The guard stepped out of the tent and held the flap open.
Inside, the warm, dim-lit space smelled like church. A dish of incense smoldered in a corner. Deeper inside, men hunched over a table. One was saying, “…surely, if our information is correct, that would be the only route.”
Another said, “Thus making this the spot” – the table thunked as if hit by a fist – “to ambush them.”
More men spoke, their voices rising over and through one another. One of the men turned from the table and looked at her.
She gasped.
The man’s unruly hair stood tangled and unwashed above a high forehead and wide face. Uneven stubble littered his cheeks and neck. But what shocked her was his long, black cassock with a square of white collar showing, a wooden cross suspended by a chain around his neck. He had stern eyes and a serious mouth. His voice seemed to bark when he said, “Private?”
“Father,” the soldier said, shoving her forward and knocking the floppy hat off her head. “This boy, Angelo Silang, claims a kapfre showed him our cook-fires.”
The priest stepped forward and smiled at her.
All she could think to do was to follow tradition by taking the priest’s hand, kissing the back of it, and raising it to her forehead.
The priest made the sign of the cross over her and, while still mumbling a prayer in Latin, rested a large hand on the tufts of hair on her head. The touch felt warm but only for a second.
The priest said, “Now, tell me child, is this true?”
“Sí, Padre,” she said.
He nodded with downturned lips. He looked over her head then and said, “Private, please tell the cooks to douse the fires.”
“Yes, sir.” The soldier left, and he still had her bolo.
The priest picked up her hat and handed it to her. He said, “Your kapfre doesn’t want war, I assume. Nobody wants war. But we are in a difficult situation, with our leader, General Aguinaldo, on the run.”
She felt a bead of sweat roll down her forehead and drip to the ground. He seemed to be waiting for a response, but she had only ever said, “Sí, Padre,” to the village priest, the one priest she knew. But this man had said the right thing. She knew the name General Aguinaldo. She had also heard adults call him Presidente Aguinaldo. He was the Tagalog man who led the rebels against the Spanish and now against the Yanquis.
The priest said, “Kapfre are known to be tricksters, my child. So how do you know your kapfre isn’t tricking you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I am wearing my shirt inside-out.”
He laughed – “Ha! Ha!” – with deep, unexpected joy that reminded her of her kapfre. His laughter silenced the men at the table. “I see, yes, your shirt is to trick the trickster. Ha! And your hair, too. Did you chop it off to trick your trickster, my dear?”
She said, “My mother cut off my hair before she went to the market and disappeared. She did it in case Yanquis came to my barangay, so they would think I was a boy.”
The men at the table stopped moving. Lines of pained worry spread across the priest’s face. For a moment, it seemed as if no one in the tent was even breathing.
The priest nodded. He said, “My child. My child.” He shook his head. “Now, if I showed you a map, could you tell me where you saw your kapfre?”
She said, “Sí, Padre.”
He set a hand on her shoulder and led her to the table. The men stepped aside. Stretched over the entire surface was a map unlike any she had ever seen. She understood what was land and what was sea, but she didn’t understand the dizzying array of squiggly, uneven circles within circles all over the land. Maps she had seen had squiggly lines to represent paths and roads that linked church, market, barangays, towns, and fields. It took her a long time to find her barangay, Torre, but she eventually found it after spotting the nearby barangays of Salugan and Lioes. From there, she traced her path through the tobacco fields and rice paddies and up into the forest. She tapped her index finger on that area. “This is where my kapfre lives.”
Some of the men whispered, but the priest said, “I see. So how did you make it all the way from here to here?” He traced his finger from where she had pointed to a spot in the forest much farther north and inland than she expected, even beyond a big town – Batac – where she had never been.
“My kapfre brought me,” she said. “Because we saw white smoke, and I didn’t want to go to the scar.”
The priest asked, “Scar?”
She nodded. “The place where all the trees were cut down.”
“Can you point that out, too?” the priest asked.
She screwed up her eyes as she recalled seeing the scar and the smoke. The scar had been closer and to the left of the smoke, meaning on the map it was closer to the big town. With her finger, she circled a large area south of the town. “I think, maybe, around here.”
The men drew closer, murmuring. She could feel the heat of their bodies and smell their sweat and cigarette smoke. In the murmurs, she heard the word Yanqui a few times.
“Thank you, my child,” the priest said. He turned to the men. “Gentlemen, young Angela here has brought us useful information, but I don’t think it changes our mission. Except now we know we are in a kapfre’s forest, so you must order your men to wear their shirts inside out.
That way, we won’t be tricked. Dismissed.”
“You.” The soldier from before was back. He scowled as he spit out her real name, “Angela,” letting her know he hadn’t liked being lied to. Still, he returned her bolo to her and led her back outside and onto a different path. She saw his shirt was now inside out. They passed through some trees and into another clearing, which was rich with the scent of cook-fire smoke.
The soldier said, “I must return to my post, but Father wants you to–”
He may have kept talking, but she stopped listening once she saw a woman take a wet sheet from a basket, plant her feet a little more than shoulder-width apart and flick the sheet into the air with such swift force it unfurled with a snap and came to a rest neatly on a rope tied between two trees. She knew those moves.
* * *
“Mama!” she cried, running toward the washerwoman.
The woman stood and turned. Her long, dark skirt was wet, and brown stains – blood? – spotted her blouse, the one with the wide, elegant sleeves she wore on market days. She fell to her knees and opened wide her arms.
Angela ran into them, hugged her mother and breathed in her mother’s rich, familiar scent, a musky combination of sweat and clean that Angela equated with strength. She said, “Mama, I found you! My kapfre helped me find you!”
Her mother pulled back and ran her eyes over her daughter, from floppy hat to soil-encrusted toes. “You silly girl.” Her mother smiled then looked up at someone behind Angela.
“Excuse me, Doña Brigida,” the soldier said. “Is she your child?”
“Yes,” she said. “My Angela.”
“Well, you should be proud. She made quite an impression on Father Aglipay. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
“Thank you,” her mother said.
The soldier nodded to her and Angela and walked away.
Brigida said, “Did you eat the eggs I left? Even so, you must be hungry.” She took Anegela’s hand and walked her to a place not far away, where enormous kettles sat over the smoldering remains of once-strong fires. Men and women guarded the pots of cooked rice, dried fish, and water. Brigida got Angela a bowl of rice topped with dried fish.
Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History Page 19
