Sons of Darkness

By Reuben R. Canoy

Even now I still cannot understand why Father hated Mother so much. It was almost as if she were an ugly and thoroughly repulsive creature that had to beat and kick and push her hard against the loose sawali walls of our old house.

There were nights when we children would not be able to close our eyes just like listening to mother whine painfully. Father would hoarsely bellow at her to stop — croaking obscenities that drunks hurled at voluptuous tuba vendors at the tabadas near Tito Balso’s land — and she would bury her head between her knees so that the pitiful sobbing would be a little by her skirt. Then Father would spread the buri mat on the floor, roll under the saguran blanket to keep out the biting cold. And fall into a deep snoring sleep, while Mother — still hunched up and shaking all over in that tiny corner where he had roughly shoved her — would whimper until the first cockcrows of morning.

It was like that for a life time.

We got so used to it that, even if he were beating her face blue and swollen, we would go on with our magic dreams of golden-brown rice cupcakes that Tia Denday always baked on the first days of the harvest and the crunchy pinipig that the boisterous young men from the neighboring village of Tubod pounded in the firelight, their pestles throwing long shadows on the faces of the old maids who perhaps nursed secret yearnings for them. Tia Denday was the wife of Tiyo Baldo, my mother’s younger brother, and we loved her for the nice things she kept for us on a light woven frame of thin bamboo strips, hung high up on an after of their kitchen. Their house was just a few meters from the opposite bank of the river and sometimes, when the carabaos had been led to the wallow, we would go and kiss her hand.

Father did not like us to go to there except when he took us along with him and then he would warn us sternly not to say anything unless we were asked. Of course, we would not tell him that we had been there yesterday or the day before and had eaten of our Tia’s bocayo, or he would have snatched us by the legs swung our mall bodies against a sturdy post as soon as we reached home. Father was a very strange man. Perhaps we did not know him well enough to understand why he was cruel and heartless to mother because whenever we would visit Tio Balso, he would speak of her as if she were the last person in Podiongan — or the whole world for that matter — he would hurt.

For some reason that we could imagine, Mother seldom want to Tio Balso’s place. If she ever did, it was to sell eggplants and tomatoes at the tabada, which gave her little time to chat with Tia Denday, so that our aunt would only learned of the incidents from us. However, I think she never mentioned a word of it to her husband, for Tio Balso and Ftaher still appeared to be on speaking terms.

“Yes,” Father would answer his questions with a cordial smile, “Petra is well and strong.” And them he would go on to tell him about the piglets she was fattening for the baptism of little Otilo in April, the plow he was intending to buy from the widow of Elenterio. But he would never tell Tio Balso about the night he slapped her many times on the mouth.

We were all asleep when he staggered up the rickety ladder of the batalan and groped his way into the kitchen, shouting rudely for a light. It was Mother who did the match under the pillow, so she had to wake up. As soon the oil lamp had been lighted, Father wobbled towards the ear then stove and flung of the banana leaf that covered the cooking pot. He felt the rice with the back of his hand. It was cold. Trembling with drunken range, he grabbed Mother by the shoulders and shook her violently.

Through the minute holes that the weevils had bored on the slashed Bamboo wall which separated our room for the kitchen, I saw him hit hear ears with a while- clenched fist. My younger brother Pili, who had crawled up behind we, cried almost instantly and I had to gang him for a while. What surprised us — even frightened us intensely — was that Mother did not wince from the blow. She just stood her near the table like the statue of the Virgin Mary, only that her hands, instead of being clasped together in prayer, hung limp and lifeless by her sides.

“You — “he snarled viciously. That night Father was like our black dog Bitoon which Pili had drowned in the river by tying a stone to its tail because it had killed two pullets and wounded a piglet in an afternoon.

“I scald my back in the sun to feed you and the worms of your filthy belly while you do nothing but eat-eat-eat! You do not even bother to keep the rice hot for your husband! What do you think I am — a pig? I could kill you for that, woman without shame? And he slapped her full on the mouth.

We all knew it was Father’s fault for coming home late and drunk, but we remained silent. Mother tried to say something and he thrust a fistful of the rice into her mouth, which he forced open still wider by digging his thumb and forefinger into the hollow of her cheeks. Then he slapped her with the savage strengthen of his huge and muscled body — again and again, this way and that — stopping only when she swayed, reeled and collapsed on the floor wit a soft thud. He kicked her aside and picking up the clay oil lamp, smashed it into little pieces on the table.

We could not see anything in the darkness.

Father took the ropes from my hand and, giving them a good hand jerk, sent the carabaos scurrying into the silent pool beneath the shade of a bamboo brake. It was Monday and the sun glare infiltrating through the spaces between the leaves projected strange patterns on the broad wet backs of the animals as they rolled and splashed and viewed their cuds in the water. I sat on a big log that had deposited there by the October floods and whittled away on the one of the branches. Father stopped down to pry out a few pebbles on the ground before spreading the dirty jute sack. Reaching for a grass stalk to pick his teeth with, he lay down.

“How was your nanay when you left the house, Dido?” he muttered coldly.

“She was coughing, tatay, and Pili told me that early this morning she vomited a coconut- shell full of blood.”

Remembering it now through the mist of years, I can not be too sure that he smiled at what I had said. Father was a strange man and it could have been something else he has thinking about then.

“She is a witch, Dido,” he said, spitting out a portion of the stalk. “She is now vomiting the blood she sucked from me.”

Seeing that frightened look on my face, he let out a loud that echoed wickedly down the bead of the river. Witches had always terrified us beyond the assurances of Mother that the evil screeching sounds we would hear coming from the kamanchile grove a short distance from the house were the calls of the night birds; and Pili and I would clutch at each other inside of the saguran blanket, thinking fearfully of the one-eyed Apiary who lived somewhere along the cogon-covered trail to Tubod and was very fond of the tender flesh of children.

Father slung the sack across his shoulder and squatted in front of me.

“Look at me, Dido. Look at your tatay,” he laughed again. ”Am I not the devil?”

“Susmariosep!” I gasped, and immediately made the sign of the cross.

“Yes, that is right — you must not forget what your nanay has thought you. Now answer me quickly — sigue!” his lower lip hung heavilly and the betel nut stains showed red on his teeth.

“No — no, tatay!” I was afraid he would place me inside of the sack and lash me with the end of the rope as he did to Pili once.

“Did not your nanay tell you that I am one? Did she not tell you that I have horns as long and sharp as those of old Pugot?”

I stopped whittling and put my bolo into its wooden sheath, pretending to have some difficulty in doing so because I did not want to answer him anymore. He balled up the sack and threw it at the pit of my stomach.

“Answer me, boy!” he growled.

“Yes, tatay, she said so.” I squirmed uneasily on my perch.

“But you have no horns at all!”

He pointed at his temples, saying, “I do not have them here, blind bat — “and he paused to bring his finger down on his left breast — “but here!”

It was the first time Father had talked to any of us boys that way. I almost forgot that he could be like our black dog Bitoon when he got angry. He was a very strange man.

He picked up a dry twig wit his toes and broke it into short of pieces, which he flicked into the water one at a time. When he had finished, he rubbed his big hands on his maong trousers and gazed on me intently. His eyes were red and bugged out from their sockets like those of a bull carabao gone mad from the heat. We startled by a splash followed by short squeaks and snorts. He twisted from the waist to see once of the animals horn another on the rump and back. Father cursed and clucked his tongue at them, and then he turned to me.

“Now, ask me why I slapped her last week, Dido… Well,“ he said after along silence, “what a fine flock of chickens my sons turned out to be! Do you not have any tongue that you do not speak? I shall tell you then, dumb boy! I slapped your nanay because I love her!”

And the wild echo of his laughter come back to us louder than a protesting creak of the bamboo clumps nearby.

“Yes, we love each other so much that even before Padre Fausto married us, you were already curled up in her belly for five months!”

He was still laughing and pressing his sides when Tio Baldo came down the steep bank across, riding with his legs to one side on a carabao, which was panting wheezily and frothing at the mouth like a mad dog.

With him were Julio and Ambo who were helping him with the plowing and had also brought their own animals to wallow.

Father, stood up, stretching his arms and pounding the numbness out of his legs, and called: “Hoy! Baldo, why don’t you bring your carabao here so that we can talk?”

Tio Balso glanced contemptuously at him, then went on to knot the rope ground a bankal root that had been exposed from the earth by the erosion of frequent floods. The other two men were strangely silent. The sun had dipped slightly towards the west and the afternoon light defined the rough contours of their dirt- coated faces.

Having tethered the carabao, Tio Baldo waded across the rushing waters below and, with his lips pursed into a thin hard line, strong up to the big log where Father and I were waiting. As he drew nearer the spot, I could feel the air become dry and sultry. Father tumbled in his pockets and brought out a thick wad of chewing tobacco which Tio Baldo refused with a curt Hip at the hand.

“Baldo, what is the matter?”

“I want to see you tonight, Manong Dencio,” he said with a tense voice, “then maybe I can tell you what is the matter?”

Without waiting to hear what Father would say, he walked away with slow, hesitant steps, his hand tightly gripping the delicately carved horn-handle of his bolo.

When he came home from the fields that evening, Pili met us on the way and told Father that Mother had gone to Tio Baldo’s taking little Otilo and a bundle of clothes with her.

The night birds were screeching harshly in the kamachile grove again an Pili huddled closer to me.

“Did you hear that, Manong Dido?” he whispered breathlessly.

“Go to sleep, Pili,” I nudge him with my elbow. I was tired from the days work. “That is nothing but the mating call at the bird kwahaw. Tomorrow we will set a sapling trap so that in the evenings it will make sounds no longer. Julio said that it can be eaten by the wallow.”

Pili kept still for a while, but when he thought that I had fallen asleep he shook me anxiously.

“No, Manong Dido,” he insisted. “It is not the kwahaw I am listening to — it is the cricket amispis. The chirp that is so much like the jingle of the centavos — do you hear it, Manong?”

I sat up to satisfy him and perked my ears to one corner of the room. Pili was right, sure enough. The metallic of chirruping of the insect resounded clearly in the darkness like rain on a tin root. Mother had told us once that when the amispis chirped at nighttime somebody would die. I pulled the blanket from Pili to cover my face but he would not let go. We were tugging at it when suddenly the voice of Tio Baldo my mother’s name. We ran to the window to see if Mother had come along with him. He was alone.

Father stirred heavily in the next room, then he brought the oil lamp, which he had left to burn with a short wick, to the door so that my uncle could find the stairs. There was a thin slice of the moon in the sky, but the clouds had become too thick and gray for its timid brightness to soak through. Tio Baldo took his hide sandals off and left them hanging on the end of a pestle that jutted out from under the house. We opened our own shutter a little and saw Father lead him to the molave bench beside the window.

“Well, Baldo?” Father said., trying to be very casual. “You must know that I did not come here for the chewing tobacco, Dencio.” He spoke out of the corner of his mouth.

He had always given Father some kind of respect, now no trace of it was present. He was proud and arrogant and belligerent- he did not addresses him “Manong” anymore. He stood up and banned the door with a jolting clatter of the slender bamboo pole.

Pili whispered: “What is Tio Balsdo trying to do, Manong Dido?”

“I do not know, I answered with a low, choking voice. “ Pili, do not drag the saguran blanket on the floor — you will tear it on the nail heads.”

Father was angry at what Tio Baldo had done.

“Salbahis!” he snapped at him. “Do not forget that you are in my house! I shall tell you when I want the door closed!”

Tio Baldo grunted like a forest dog. “Do not also forget that I am the brother of Petra, Dencio. That is more important. That is why I am here. You will say that I have nothing to do with her. You even say that Baldo, opposed to your marriage. You will say many things. But I have seen her this afternoon, Dencio, and I must be told why you did things to her!”

Father stamped towards the door and faced him with his arms folded grimly over his breast. His lips curled up as he roared at him to stop. “Baldo, while you are in my house I will not allow you to speak in that manner! Bet out! Go back to your own house before.”

My uncle brushed Father’s hand aside and laughed so loudly that the chickens roosting on the rooftop began to cackle.

“Ho-ho-ho!” he shook with hysterical laughter, pointing at father straight in the face, “Prudencio Alegre — the beggar, the good-for-nothing, he who did not have any grain of sand to his name- dares me to get out? Have you forgotten that I gave this to you only because I did not want my sister’s husband to be the object of ridicule and shame in the village? So that his children might live and bless him in his old age? How very easily you forget, Manong!” Tio Baldo smacked sarcastically.

“What did he say, Manong Dido?” Pili asked.

“Hush, Pili,” I whispered back, “they might hear us.”

Father gnashed his teeth and we could see the veins come out on his temples.

“You are not a man, Dencio,” Tio Baldo went on. “You are a devil a thousand times worse than Lucifer himself. First you disgraced her who bears our name in the sight of the people. I did not do anything to you because it was also her fault. But she is still my sister-the daughter of my father-and you tried to kill her, Dencio, slowly and painfully.” And he draw his bolo with the carved handle which had been sharpened so sharply that the flickering light gleamed on the blade fiercely .

“Susmariosep!” I shuddered in terror. Pili had left me and was covering in a corner with the saguran blanket drawn tightly about him and crying, “Manong, manong…” I dragged him by the shirt to the window so that he could climb down and run to Julio’s hut for help, but he was too scared to move.

Then I heard Father shout gruffly: “Don’t come near me, salbahis, or I will break every bone in you with this bench!”

I rushed back to the wall and peering through a slit, saw the strong body of Tio Baldo flash by as he lunged furiously at Father, hacking away with his bolo…

Tio Baldo did not stop right away. I could still hear his mad laughter and the ring of his bolo as it stuck bone when I leaped from the window with Pili and ran out into the night with my heart beating so fast and hard that I did not know where I was going.