LADY IN THE FOREST

Nobody can drink that much vino and not have to urinate. Crouching hidden on the slope above the town, Diosdado has watched the fiesta of Ina Poon Bato, watched the headmen celebrating noisily afterward at the table set up in the plaza, banners of Nuestra Señora de la Paz y Buen Viaje still hanging overhead. It was not hard to follow the movements of the alcalde, the best-dressed of all in his barong with the crimson embroidery, the one with the braying laugh and the surprisingly beautiful tenor voice when they sang. He is a fanfarrón, this mayor, Ignacio Yambao by name, bragging of his good amigos the yanquis and all they have offered for his cooperation, bragging of his disregard for whatever deluded bandits may still be hiding in the mountains. Which is why Colonel San Miguel has ordered Diosdado to cause his disappearance.

Other men have staggered out of their houses, a few only pausing to irrigate from the rear platforms, most making the trip to the letrina on the other side of the bamboo stockade. One fellow veered far enough off the path that he was unable to find the gate and decided to orinar through the fence slats into a cassava patch. But so far no Ignacio Yambao, who, though alcalde of Taugtod, surely has no modern receptacle within his house of nipa and bamboo. It will be light soon, cocks already voicing their impatience with the night, and Diosdado has to wiggle his bare toes to keep his feet from falling asleep. He is dressed in the simple, soiled cotton of the kasama, his story if discovered that he has fled his mountain town because a band of insurrectos have taken it over. The yanquis are easier to fool than Zambal villagers, of course, having no local knowledge, and more than one of his boys when spotted has strolled grinningly up to the foreigners, rifle held useless at arm’s length, and thanked el Dios en el Cielo that the Americans are finally here to accept his surrender. Most have returned within the month, with many a story to tell and occasionally a better weapon than the one they turned in.

“The yanquis recognize only two kinds of Filipinos,” Bayani is fond of saying. “The living and the dead.”

Bayani offered to do tonight’s business, naturally, insisted on it, but Diosdado is the teniente still, despite having left his uniform under a rock on a hillside near Bacolor, and it is not something he will order another man to bloody his hands with.

“Who have you ever killed?” demanded the sargento.

“I shoot when the rest shoot,” Diosdado answered. “Sometimes an enemy falls.”

“But close, close enough so you can look into his eyes?”

Diosdado did not ask if Bayani had killed men in this way.

“If I don’t come back in two days,” he told the sargento, “move the band to the escondite north of Iba.”

He has always been suspicious that it was the friars who made up the story of the Ina Poon Bato. A negrito man, years before the arrival of the first Spaniard, meets a beautiful, glowing lady in the forest. “Take me home with you,” she says. He protests that he already has a wife, and a jealous one at that, so she gives him a carved image of herself, a small wooden statue. As he walks back to his village he hears her voice, over and over, saying “You must take me home with you.” When he arrives his wife is immediately suspicious of the statue, and when he is not looking she hurls it into the fire. Their entire hut is immediately engulfed in flames, the couple barely escaping. But when they sift through the ashes later, the one thing that has not even been charred is that wooden statue, now stone, the Ina Poon Bato. It becomes a sacred object of their tribe, carried from place to place as they migrate through the mountains, bringing them peace and good fortune in their travels. But somehow the statue is lost, and food grows scarce, diseases strike their children, their enemies grow in power. The story of the lost statue remains in their minds, though, and so when the men with beards wearing long robes arrive from across the sea carrying their statue of the same beautiful lady, their Virgin Mary, it is cause for celebration, for the renewal of hope.

A fabricated legend maybe, but an enormously popular one in these mountains, and Diosdado has tried to use it to explain the war to the Zambals. “This fight will cause great destruction,” he tells them, “but at the end when we sift through the ashes, something will remain untouched, something pure and miraculous and as permanent as stone—a Filipino Republic.”

It is perhaps too distant a metaphor. In Nacolcol the consensus was that the problems all sprang from that ancient negrito’s wife, who should have known better than to throw enchanted statues into a fire.

There is a dog, rat-tailed and underfed, making its way up the slope with its nose up, alert, and Diosdado notes that the air has shifted, a cold wind rolling down off the monte behind him. The dog slows a few meters away and sniffs at the edge of the copita bushes, stepping cautiously now, till it sees him. The cur’s head goes down, ears back, and a warning growl vibrates its scrawny chest. Diosdado tightens his grip on the bolo but does not move. The dog investigates, body stiff, bumping its wet muzzle twice against Diosdado’s face before stepping aside to lift its leg on a macaranda and trot back down to the village.

Only the alcalde has not yet taken a piss.

He lost a few men, deserters, when the news came that the silver-voiced Bryan had not won his election, that the Americans would be staying. And then they caught the supremo on the day before his birthday. Funston of Kansas and a handful of his junior officers marched as prisoners through the wilderness by Macabebes disguised as rebels, stumbling half-dead into Aguinaldo’s mountain retreat, and after being revived by the food and water and the respect due to captured warriors, able to pounce on the General in an unguarded moment. And the General, delivered back aboard the great ship of the White Admiral like a penitent schoolboy, called immediately for his followers to join him in compliance. Now even people like Scipio Castellano have become americanistas, declaring that anyone still in the field is no more than a bandit.

“This is not an insurrection,” Diosdado lectured his men, “it is not a revolution. It is all of us, patriotas humildes de las Filipinas, defending our homelands, our families. If the General is in their hands, so be it. Until the last man lays down his rifle, our cause is alive.”

It has been nearly three years since he took the head of Colón off with a blacksmith’s hammer. “Columbus” as the yanquis call him, the first European to claim their continent, another mercenary for the Spanish crown. When the Assimilation decree was posted, before the shooting war began, Diosdado was the one chosen to go to Cavite and wait until night and desecrate the Americans’ favorite statue. He felt more like a student on a prank than the avenging arm of the revolution.

The ground and the buildings have begun to take on color by the time Ignacio Yambao steps down the ladder from the platform of his house, walking in a surprisingly steady line toward the path to the letrina. He is singing very softly to himself, a kundiman from the party, in his beautiful tenor. Diosdado rises slowly from his crouch, legs burning with the sudden rush of blood, and angles down the slope with the bolo swinging loose from the thong around his wrist. If the alcalde turns to see him he will smile and keep coming and tell his story.

But no story comes to Diosdado as his bare feet, still tender, suffer over the jagged ground. Señor mio, Padre y Redento, he thinks, me pesa de todo corazón haberte ofendido porque me puedes castigarme con las penas del Infierno—

The Act of Contrition must come after the sin. The alcalde, Ignacio Yambao, is squatting with his pants around his ankles when Diosdado steps up behind him. The smell is awful.

He has practiced the stroke on the way to the village, a chopping backhand through green saplings and thick poles of bamboo, careful to resharpen the blade with his whetstone afterward, and knows he needs to use both hands. I studied anatomy with the Jesuits he thinks as he fixes on the back of the squatting man’s neck and raises the heavy itak to strike.

There is light now, enough to see details of the slaughter, but it will be a full hour before the sun peeks over the tip of the monte. Diosdado strides away from the trench, first carefully wiping the bolo clean on the man’s barong, leaving a dark stain behind.

Halfway up he comes upon a negrito man, naked but for a loincloth of pounded bark and a curved knife stuck in the drawstring, walking down. They always make him nervous, even the ones when he was a boy who lived in the rancherías and obeyed the priest. The man’s eyes are yellowish, as if he may be suffering from one of their mountain diseases, and he has patterns scarred onto his arms and chest. Un cortacabeza verdadero, as his father used to say, a real headhunter.

The men nod silently to each other, and go their separate ways.

They are moving again, marching out from Las Ciegas as part of a flying column, the sky behind them filled with smoke. Royal is sick, sick like at the end of Cuba, a little less fever in the hot spells and a little less bone-aching chill in the cold. The doctor in Long Island had said it might catch up with him, that there might be rough spells, and the men reporting queasy or fevered this morning have been told they have to march with the rest, that there will be no treatment or conveyance back to Manila till they reach Subig.

Right now he is burning, walking at the rear of the company with everything too bright and loud and even with the others warned not to talk there is the sound of them creaking, jiggling, breathing, the stampede of their footsteps on the hard-baked road, the sloshing of water in the canteens. Nobody noticed till it was too late, they said, but all the villagers, all the muy, muy amigos, disappeared from Las Ciegas just before the attack. Not a word, not a warning, just gone. They have not returned, and orders were to burn the village and move out to garrison another area the rebels are supposed to be operating in. At first he thought it was the flames making him burn but then the chills started in the middle of it, Royal in a cold sweat torching the off-kilter little hut where Nilda had been staying, where she must have gotten word and left with the others without warning them. Before starting the blaze the lieutenant had them round up what animals were left, the pigs herded screaming into the thorn-branch corral and butchered. The pigs were out on the Filipino dead the night after the attack and Royal wanted to shoot them then but the lieutenant said no more firing.

They walk up and down a series of hills through a forest of hemp, the towering plants seeming to provide no shade. The white fiber is hung out on long lines to dry, making a kind of fence, and if there are any workers meant to be out here they have all gone and hid.

The land flattens out then and Royal keeps his eyes fixed on Corporal Ponder’s back and puts one foot in front of the other, all of them wary of straggling now after Junior. It feels like his head is cooking under his hat but he knows he can’t take it off. The worst was last night with the fever dreams again and Jessie in them, calling to him from across a swift river too loud in its rushing to hear her voice. It feels like he couldn’t lift his arms if his life depended on it, that marching is possible only if he leans enough to fall forward and then manages to keep his feet in front of him. Hardaway alongside has something wrong with his stomach and is the wrong color. Sergeant Jacks drops back every now and again to look over the sick men and Gamble, who was hit in the arm in the attack, and tell them with his eyes that they need to keep up.

Maybe they were in with the rebels, some of them, the people in Las Ciegas, or maybe they weren’t. Just got wind of it and they didn’t want to be there when whatever happened started up.

“Make yourself scarce,” they always said at home, like when he was little and a colored man had cut a white man down on Dock Street. Make yourself scarce tonight, cause anyone colored and out on the street was an insult, was temptation for the rope and the torch, and even the tough sports at the Manhattan Dance Hall kept the lights low and didn’t play their music. You almost didn’t need words, just get a feel on the street and hurry to get behind a door somewhere. This is their country, the Filipinos, and they have that kind of feeling for it. They know where to go and wait till it is safe to come back again.

The lieutenant said to leave the church alone. No sense in being disrespectful.

They veer off the road and march through a section of what they called chaparral at Huachuca, Gamble moaning a bit now and holding his shattered arm tight to his side. Royal has Junior’s Krag still, the artificer having taken his own to use it for parts. With the marching orders there was no way to send the body back, but the boys pitched in and dug a good deep hole and borrowed a cross from the church. There is no chaplain with either H or L, so they stood uncovered around the hole and the lieutenant said some words and told Royal he would write to the Luncefords in New York and then they filled it in. Royal would write, too, only they might blame him for it. It doesn’t seem possible that anything, much less one little piece of paper, could start from this hot island in the middle of the sea and find its way to some colored people lost in a great city in the north of America.

Royal moves ahead with the column, all his joints aching now with the fever, flushed with a liquid heat that seems to flow up across the back of his neck to his cheeks and to his temples and everything so bright it is hard to tell what is near and what is far as they reach the river, the same one, he thinks, but a different spot, and the column bends alongside it for nearly a mile before the lieutenant says it is a place they can ford.

The banks look high here but when it is Royal’s turn he sees there is a section that has caved in and the head of the column has already reached the far side, men holding their rifles over their heads and wading up to their chests, moving slowly on what looks like slippery footing, the double line bent in the middle by the current. The water is cold and feels good on his legs, tugging. It is all a jumble of rocks below and the Krag seems to weigh as much as a man when he lifts it overhead, Hardaway making little noises in front of him, afraid of his snakes like always in the water and the current is even stronger than it looks, making you brace yourself and push one leg forward and get a foothold before you dare swing ahead. There are no shoals but the sound of the water rushing between the soldiers is insistent, deafening, and it is Too Tall just next to him upstream who falls and knocks him loose, off his feet in the water and swept away and the bottom is gone, can’t find it, his head under once, hat gone, men’s shouting voices growing distant so quickly and he thrashes his free hand and his feet searching for something, anything and then finally thinks let it go and lets Junior’s Krag slip from his hands so he can try to swim. But the banks are so high here, the river deeper, swifter, and his arms are so weary, the fever taking all the starch out of him and Royal gulps air and puts his head in the cold water and just lets it take him away. Away. Make himself scarce. He is getting scarcer and scarcer, the cold passing into him, and it is an annoyance that he has to raise his head to take a breath.

There is a tree downed partway across the river ahead and if he had the strength he might paddle around it and let the river keep him. A branch cuts his cheek as he is driven into it by the current and his legs are swept under and then he is struggling with the tree, wrestling branches and ducking under and then there are rocks, some of them sharp on his hands, and he pulls himself half out of the water like a mudpuppy, legs still tugged by the current behind, and lies on his face with nothing left to spend. He doesn’t think they’ll bother to send anybody after him.

The heat is gone out of him and the chills come, running up the backs of his legs and out his arms like ripples before a fast wind. The rushing river sounds hollow and far away, all sound dull till the snap of the rifle bolt above.

Royal manages to roll onto his side. A boy stands on the thick trunk of the upended tree, bare toes dug into the bark, his skinny arms leveling a battle-scarred Model 93 Mauser at Royal’s head. He looks scared or excited or both. He says something and jerks the barrel of the rifle up and down.

Royal closes his eyes and lays an arm over his face.

Kalaw whistles the warning and Diosdado slows, raises his arms over his head so they can see that it is him. The sentry waves him on gravely, no question as to whether his mission in Taugtod was successful or not. When he approaches the camp he sees them all gathered around somebody, men barely glancing at him as he steps to the center to find out what has happened.

It is little Fulanito with a big, black American. The American looks more exhausted than scared. Bayani comes up the hill then and tells them to break camp, that one yanqui in the river means more are near, then goes to explain to the refugees who have joined them what may happen next.

“Sit down here,” Diosdado says to the American, who he can see is surprised to be addressed in his own language. The man, who is big but not so big as some of them, has to support himself with one arm to stay upright, even sitting.

“You are of the 25th Infantry.”

The man nods.

“And you have burned Las Ciegas.”

When Colonel San Miguel ordered the attack on the garrison, Diosdado told Bayani to stall enough getting there that they were not part of it. Since Aguinaldo’s capture the Republic has ceased to exist as such, only groups of independent raiders left, striking when they have the advantage. Why attack the enemy where he is dug in with an ample supply of ammunition?

“The people are all gone there,” says the American.

“Yes. Some have come to us.” He points to the dozen they have met on the way, sitting anxiously with the things they have carried piled around them. “And where is your column going?”

The man hesitates. “They don’t tell us the names till after we took it over.”

Subig will be next. The column must have crossed some distance upriver. Nothing to be done, and he needs to get his people to San Marcelino before the yanquis arrive.

“What is your name?”

“Royal Scott,” says the americano negro. “Private.”

Diosdado looks the man in the eye and sees only someone waiting, resigned, for what happens next. This close, their faces are only human, not like the stories from Manila or the cartoons in the newspapers. But he finds himself speaking very slowly, as if to a child.

“I must tell you, Private Scott, that you have only two courses open. Either you will come with us in silence as a prisoner and a cargador—a carrier of things—or we must shoot you now.”

Fulanito stands with his rifle aimed, unwavering, waiting for the Amer-ican’s response.

The rebels hang their heaviest supplies on a pole they lift onto the American’s shoulders. Most of the Pampanganos want to return to the burned village and rebuild, but Nilda lifts her own burden and begins to walk. The American, Roy, gives her only a quick glance and does not smile at her. The rebels are going north to Zambales, they say, and that is where she wants to be. He looks like he is wounded or sick, Roy, staggering under the load, struggling to keep up with the swiftly moving band. She walks behind, and once when he seems about to topple she puts a hand to his back and gently pushes forward. She asks the Virgin, in the familiar but respectful way that Padre Praxides taught her in Candelaria, to intercede.

Mother of God, she prays, do not let them shoot this man.