The Solemn Lantern Maker

by Merlinda Bobis

  Close by, two men watch him from a car. One makes a phone call and nods to the other, then they quickly move in.

  108

  He’s afraid there’s no angel waiting up there because there’s no star yet, of course. The stick figure is halfway up. Sometimes it disappears, swallowed by the brightness. He squints to bring it back. In the bedroom, the big prayer has abated.

  The uniforms walk out. They squint with him and make more phone calls, alerting a deployment ahead, closer to their quarry. Soon they trudge toward the hill, less anxious now, but not the boy. He feels hot and cold as the uniforms recede into the white light, growing more distant, unreal. He wants the brightness to swallow the stick figure on the hill again, or the dark to swallow the brightness, so the stars can come out, then the winged creatures. But first he must push the sun from its height. Make it sink. Trick the field from white to gold, quickly now. Then the dark will follow.

  It’s so silent inside the hut. He wants to call out to her, but his throat is a dry well. He tells himself she’s praying silently.

  He shifts uneasily; his pants are wet. He wants to shut his eyes so he can bring on the dark in his head, but he’s too afraid to lose the first climber, more so now. Other stick figures are going up, but the very first one is already high up, so the boy takes heart. He claps his hands, wordlessly he cheers. It’s like a big race and he feels as if he’s running too, he’s sweating, panting as the others gain ground, and he knows the angels won’t come because the sun is high and it’s hot and the field may never turn to gold.

  109

  He races, feet pounding on the pavement, vibrating his jaws or maybe it’s just his screaming fuck you-fuck you at the men behind and whoever squealed at the pool joint, or at the world about to nab him. The swearing in English powers his legs, makes him invincible until the next corner, where the plainclothes police grab him. One starts the car, the other drags him to it but he slips away, swearing at the top of his lungs. He sprints again, ducks into alleys, he knows this territory—c’mon, try and get me, motherfuckers! But the men know more, the sickos on the prowl, the pimps on the prowl for sickos, the children prowling with pimps and sickos—the boy breaks into a halt, steps back. This can’t be, the alley is closed off! He keeps stepping back, taking in the tall buildings on both sides, the men moving in, the fucking new wall behind him—he pulls out his gun, the men say, drop it, he shakes his head, I’ll shoot, I’ll kill you both, you pricks, he grows ten feet tall as a string of curses in English spills from his mouth, he grows as high as the wall, he pulls the trigger.

  The heat cuts through his gut. He looks at it, bewildered, a little hole quickly blooming. He looks at the men, one of them still pointing a gun at him. His bewilderment grows. He’s lost all his English; his mouth can’t even form a swear word in his own tongue.

  110

  It falls, a stick figure rolling down the hill, and the boy sneaks down the wooden steps and keeps walking, tracing the familiar path. His father always goes there when he’s worried. That little hill on the hill. He says close to the sky he can think. The boy tells himself his mother is still praying, so he goes alone. The rice embankments are dry so his feet don’t sink, and the earth is burning so he sprints. This close the rice isn’t really white. It’s green and still. There’s no wind. Once in a while there’s a red or yellow flag signaling from afar, but it’s only a canna lily. It makes the green greener—a trick of the eyes, his father tells him.

  Don’t let your eyes play tricks on you, son. Look first, then close your eyes, and draw it in your head. Make it yours in there. This blade of rice, the tree trunk, the brook behind the hut, that little hill on the hill. So you don’t forget. But how could you, it’s in your name. I gave it to you for remembering. Noland. No land. And why is that? Don’t forget to keep asking, don’t betray our hands. My father and my father’s father farmed this land, and they never forgot. You see, the head looks small but it’s big enough to carry a whole farm and all the hands that worked on it.

  So he’s walking up to look.

  When the fields turn gold, the boy finds himself crouched in the bushes, shivering. Earlier, he stumbled over a body with red all over it. It looked familiar but not quite. The face was also covered in red and dirt; it felt sticky. The eyes were looking up, trying not to forget the sky.

  When he comes out of hiding, he’s still afraid but he must look again before night falls. He must not let his eyes play tricks on him. So he looks and looks. This is how a neighbor finds him. Squatting in the dark, silent at his father’s feet.

  111

  Look closely. Around the city, men divine their palms and hold them up to their ears to listen, or speak. An intimation of fate, but from afar it looks more like a child’s gesture, like leaning against the hand to sleep. Or perhaps a pensive, thinking act.

  It is a circuit of divination with minuscule phones transmitting a singular fate: the other boy is dead, shot, accidentally.

  Roberto looks at the boy squatting in the middle of the room, looking up at him. He sees the full story passing on his face. He turns off his phone and instinctively stretches a hand toward him. “It’s okay now, Noland,” he says. “You can go.”

  The boy keeps looking at him, his hand, as if the tale has ended there.

  “It’s okay,” he says again and the boy opens his mouth. He imagines he hears a sound, a word—he wants to hear it desperately. “What is it, child?”

  “Noland?” the mother asks, dreading the usual whimper, but her son closes his mouth again, his arms.

  “What were you going to say?” Roberto falls on his knees, both hands extended now.

  “Don’t you dare touch him!” the mother snaps, rescuing her son.

  Roberto drops his hands, quickly rising. What’s got into him? This interview is over. Only two will go to the safe house now. He opens the door to call for the car, but can’t bring himself to leave. He wants to say something, do something, but he’s afraid to look back.

  He should know better. When a story is told, there’s nothing much to do. The air does it for us, replenishes our lungs because we’ve lost so much in the telling, but even this air is thick with story. It feeds us back what we’ve just told, so it’s difficult to breathe.

  The mother clutches her son tighter, making it harder to breathe, but the boy cranes his neck to keep looking at the man who asked them so many questions. The mother wonders why he’s silent, no sound of distress at all.

  He is silent because he knows. He is sure now. That stick figure, that body on the hill. His father.

  112

  He remembers something else, before the neighbor finds him. He’s waiting for the stars, the angels. His father is waiting too, eyes open. The boy goes up the little hill on the hill to search the sky better, to make certain that they will descend, then returns to the other waiting man. They wait a long time, wondering whatever happened to their wings.

  The whole city waits. One more hour and it will be Christmas. The churches are set for the midnight mass. The choirboys are rehearsing hope and joy, so they can burst from their lungs in perfect harmony. The houses are breathless, the kitchens more so, the children pestering grown-ups—is it time yet? The fireworks are longing for their momentary lives. But not the stars or the trees. They’ve been flashing every night since September. Christmas is taken very seriously here.

  Beside a canopy of light a woman turns in a drugged dream, waiting to finally wake. Under a giant star, a man waits for traffic to lead him home. Another man combs the streets for the boy he will lead home. The widow waits too on her bed, for what, she doesn’t know. Only the senator knows of early good tidings divined on his palm after an auspicious beep. But not for the young reporter shocked at the story flashing on a little window: it’s as if he died. At the intersection, lives are also waiting to cross with luck, while a mother and her son wait for the morning.

  EPILOGUE

  He is in a safe house. He does not know this house or this neigh
borhood. Nor how they got here. He does not know the men who took them here. He only knows what is in his head. He closes his eyes. He begins again.

  Stars in the sky. The hill. And then?

  It is harder to draw. There are no angels. He begins again. The deeply thinking face breaks and quickly mends his mother’s heart. She is very sad, very proud. He does not whimper, he does not weep.

  How to draw a Christmas fairy tale? It’s time to help. We begin right here. We look closely at the boy and the mother. We draw wings on him, on her, we let them fly through the locked window, to the canopy of fairy lights, to a woman on a hospital bed. We make sure she too sprouts wings, make sure they fly together, glide over bodies in a morgue to finally find the other boy who needs his own pair. We make him test them, make him join the flight back to that hill where the man with open eyes sees four winged creatures descending—we hesitate, but we take our chance and draw his own pair, flawed but taking off with them back to the sky, all five points of light.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to Carlomar Daoana, Annette Soriano-Ward, Nilo Candelaria, Medge Samblaceño-Olivares, Ma. Trinidad Maneja, Benhur Arcayan, Luis Liwanag, and all the “angels” who led me to the stories. To David Blackall, Margaret Gee, Susan Hawthorne, Reinis Kalnins, Connie Jan Maraan, and Elizabeth Pomada, and to Anna Rogers who helped me see and hear the stories clearly. To Caitlin Alexander and Kay Scarlett, who have kept believing in them. To PP, who has nourished both stories and storyteller. To all those who, with a passion, have guarded the human right of children to be children.

  Merlinda Bobis was born in Albay, Philippines. The author of poetry, fiction, and drama, she has received the Prix Italia, the Steele Rudd Award for the Best Published Collection of Australian Short Stories, the Philippine National Book Award, the Judges Choice Award (Bumbershoot Bookfair, Seattle), the Australian Writers’ Guild Award, the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature, and most recently the Philippine Balagtas Award, a lifetime achievement award. Her first novel, Banana Heart Summer, was short-listed for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. She lives in New South Wales, Australia.

  DON’T MISS

  “[A] wonderful debut novel … This coming-of-age novel, winner of the Philippine Golden Book Award and short-listed for the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal, resembles Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street and is destined to be a hit among everyone from high school readers to adult book club members.”

  —Library Journal (starred review, “Editor’s Pick”)

  “[Banana Heart Summer] is poetry in prose… Nothing short of dazzling.”

  —Philippine Star

  “Enchanting.”

  —The Virginian-Pilot

  AVAILABLE NOW FROM YOUR FAVORITE BOOKSELLER

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A Delta Trade Paperback Original

  Copyright © 2008 by Merlinda Bobis

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Delta Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delta is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in Australia by Pier 9, an imprint of Murdoch Books Pty Limited, Sydney, in 2008.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bobis, Merlinda C. (Merlinda Carullo)

  The solemn lantern maker / Merlinda Bobis.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-440-33895-6

  1. Boys—Philippines—Fiction. 2. Americans—Philippines—Fiction.

  3. Philippines—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9550.9.B58S65 2009

  823′.914—dc22

  2009009636

  www.bantamdell.com

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