PRODIGAL

Nilda hangs the Bleeding Jesus over him in the morning.

“Para los santones,” she says.

It is two squares of cloth connected by red shoestrings, one hung down on your chest and the other in back between your shoulders, both with Christ on the cross sewed on them and some words Royal can’t read, Catholic words probably, and He is bloodied up something awful. There is a tiny stitching of blood from the thorns and from the spikes in His hands and feet and the spear in His side and little red dots of blood-tears down His cheeks. It is more of their hoodoo that doesn’t work as far as Royal can tell, meant to protect you from bullets, but he doesn’t fuss when she hangs it on him any more than he did when Mama put herbs and bird bones in a little sack round his neck. She, Nilda, cut him loose and is leading him, he hopes, away from folks who want to shoot him or cut him up, so why kick about it?

The sun is on their right the whole morning, the two of them heading north, following a foot trail that runs just below the mountain ridge. She knows where she is going, slowing to turn and look at him a few times, stopping once to share the last potato. Royal tries not to think any further ahead than he can see and not to think behind at all. It is not so bad except he’s thirsty. Royal’s undershirt is torn and his leggings stolen and his boots still on his feet only because they didn’t fit none of the rebels who tied him down. He wishes he had his hat and some wet banana leaf under it the way he’s seen them do. The sun isn’t high but already it is cooking his skull.

There is a man walking toward them on the path. Barefoot, his hair longer and wilder than any of the rebels. When the man steps aside to let them by, his eyes burning, Royal sees that his shirt is hanging open to show off a dozen of the cloth squares, different colors and pictures and words on each. Nilda keeps walking like it’s nothing so Royal follows. They come to a swaying bridge made of bejuco rope and bamboo slats suspended over a little gorge, and halfway across he feels it shudder behind him. The man is following, maybe twenty yards behind, and is muttering something to himself.

The footpath picks up on the other side and there is a little bamboo shack next to it, and then another a little farther along, the houses here roofed with grass instead of palm, and then as the path widens there are men walking alongside them, men wearing the religious squares and medals and crosses on the outside of their shirts and all of them with eyes red and burning, muttering, like a humming prayer, as they walk. These men have bolos dangling from a thong around their wrist or some gripping tight to the handle. An older man, wild hair touched with gray, stands blocking the way in the center of the little group of huts that make up the town. The old man has dozens of pictures hung on him, Bleeding Jesuses and red crosses and lots of the Holy Mother and he has a flaming cross painted or maybe even tattooed on his forehead.

Mama wear some things, some homemade and some boughten, but not like these people. There was a crazy man at home, called himself Percy of Domenica, who jingled and clacked with all sorts of hanging charms and grew his hair down long and woolly, but he never had a follower. The man with the cross on his head starts to bark at Nilda and she answers back steady while the mumbling men surround them and other people, women among them, step out from the huts to watch. Sometimes Mama go off at the Pentecostal. The first time it scared the living Jesus out of him and Jubal, Mama hollering in the tongues and her body twitching and the sisters in white not able to get down the aisle before she could knock her head on the floor a couple times. The flaming-cross man pushes past Nilda and fixes his hot eyes onto Royal’s and yanks the Bleeding Jesus out from under his shirt.

“Your Mama been saved,” the righteous sisters would say over their shoulders. “She give up on her evil ways.”

At least one of those sisters come to Mama later for a root cure to lose a baby, but that first time it felt better to know the twitches and hollers were about Salvation and not some sickness that come on her.

The mumbling men are very close, hot breath on his neck from behind and all of them gripping hard on their bolos, make him think of Junior all cut apart, think of the man he shot with the gun barrel almost touching his body and there is a desperate note in Nilda’s voice now and the flaming-cross man is shouting questions Royal can’t answer right into his face.

“You don’t call Him,” Mama always say. “You just open all the way up an in He come.”

He sees Junior at the river, hacked apart like a side of bully beef.

“Kasheeebobobobobobobobobosheegowanda!” Royal cries out, eyes rolling back in his head. “Kwasheeedavasagavasagachooogondadada!”” He sinks to his knees and the Spirit, or whatever it is his fear has called up, rattles through his body like a runaway freight train, his right arm curling up to his chest and his left shooting straight up over his head, fingers splayed out wide. The bolomen back away. Royal jerks forward, his forehead rapping hard against the ground and his stomach begin to heave, spasming his body like when he got the fever in Cuba though nothing but a taste of bile comes up and then for a little while he loses himself to it and doesn’t know what he is doing exactly. Finally he is able to right himself and sees through eyes streaming with water that Nilda is kneeling and rocking and praying and making the Sign, head, heart, shoulder, shoulder and he makes it too, again and again, the Spirit or whatever it was run through him and gone now, so he sings, as holy as he can sound, rocking back and forth—

Life is like—a mountain railway—

—being the only song he can think of at the moment—

With an engineer that’s brave

We must make the run successful

From the cradle to the grave

—rocking and singing, never the voice that poor Little Earl had, but nothing to be ashamed of—

Watch the curves, the fills and tunnels

Never falter, never fail

Keep your hand upon the throttle

And your eye upon the rail

The cross man barks something and a woman steps into a hut and then comes out with a piece of pork wrapped in a leaf and some cooking bananas and lays them beside Nilda—

Blessed Savior, wilt Thou guide us

Till we reach that blissful shore?

—Nilda gently guiding him to his feet and the cross man stepping aside and her leading him, still singing, through the sorry little village—

Where the angels wait to join us

In God’s grace forevermore!

—on down the path and away from them, Nilda carrying the food, safe now but singing because it feels good, because it puts him in mind of Mama and Jubal and himself before he ever killed anybody—

There you’ll meet the Superintendent

God the Father, God the Son

With a hearty, joyous greeting

Weary pilgrim, welcome Home

When he finishes singing Nilda stops and takes the cloth of the bleeding Jesus hung on his front in her hand and kisses it in thanks. Royal wants to kiss her back.

They leave Gallego’s band and take only what they came with, food all gone, Legaspi and El Guapo lifting each end of Bayani’s camilla and Kalaw shouldering the extra ammunition and the iron cookpot. “Every time I lift something heavy,” says Kalaw, “I’m going to miss that negro.”

“Without us he won’t survive,” says Diosdado. Pelaez leads the way down the mountain on the far side, raising his arm in warning when the slope grows treacherous. It is a clear morning, clear enough to see all the way across the misty coastal plain to the distant horizon-line of sea. “If the headhunters don’t get him the cristeros will.”

“No—if he’s with that woman he’ll be safe. I wouldn’t want to cross her. A real Zambala.” Kalaw shakes his head. “The ones still tied to that tree though—”

Diosdado shrugs. He had avoided talking to the three tied by their necks. “That is their problem.”

It is hard going down the pathway, Bayani having to clutch the sides of the litter, cursing, to keep from being pitched off it. Diosdado gives him the last of their medicine, black poppy tar they bought in Pampanga, and he chews on it grimly as they descend. They reach the bottom at noon and stop to replenish their water at the stream that crosses Don Humberto Salazar’s property, crossing fields of petsay till they come to the north road and hear the loud chok chok chok of a karatong ahead of them, someone beating the bamboo gong to announce that strangers have arrived. Diosdado waits for Fulanito to shinny up the telegraph pole and cut the line, then puts his pistol in a sack and sends the boy ahead, telling him to fire a warning shot if he sees any sign of the Americans, then run as fast as he can. Fulanito hurries away, excited as always to have a mission.

“He’s your best soldier,” says Bayani. The wounded sargento’s eyes are all pupil now as the narcotic takes effect.

“He doesn’t even know what he’s fighting for.”

“The war is his home. He fights to keep it alive.”

Diosdado looks across the familiar fields. “But one day we’re going to win,” he hears himself say, “and it will end. You’re going to live to see a Fili-pino Republic.”

Bayani holds a hand over the wound in his side as he laughs silently. “Is this a promise or a threat?”

The men spread out around them at the side of the road.

“Let me tell you a story, hermano,” says Bayani.

“Are there women in the story?” asks Kalaw.

“Not the kind you like,” the sargento answers. “These are the kind that will cut your pinga off.”

“Then I’m not listening.”

“When I left San Epifanio,” says Bayani, turning his head to the side to stare at the countryside, “I fell in with a group of tulisanes, not so different from our glorious Filipino army today—only when we robbed and kidnapped we had no great cause to excuse it.”

Diosdado’s men are expressionless, exhausted as they listen. They have all heard the rumors, legends almost, about their sargento, but he has never spoken of his past to them before.

“We told ourselves at first that we would only take from the rich, because we hated them and because they have more to steal. But it is always less dangerous to steal from the poor. One of our band was captured by the guardia civil, and he betrayed me. I would have done the same to him, I suppose, because when I was given the choice of swinging from the hemp or fighting for the Spanish, I made the coward’s decision.

“They treated the disciplinarios like the scum that we were. I don’t know how they treat their own men, the jóvenes pobres who join or are conscripted back in Spain, but five of our company were shot during the first week. One of them complained too loudly about an order to march when we were tired and the capitán stepped up and put a pistol bullet through his brain, which stayed on all of us, in small pieces, for the rest of the march. Many of us were killers already and by the end of our training we were organized, disciplined killers. They called us their tigres, and somehow I felt proud to be a member of this brigade.

“We were sent to Mindinao and barracked at Fort Pilar in Zamboanga. There were no women, of course, the moro girls afraid to even meet our eyes in public lest they be beaten or even killed by their men, and the vino we brewed there was very bad.

“ ‘Muchachos,’ said our alferez, because he always called us his muchachos indios, ‘we are here for one purpose only. To kill moros.’

“There was an old datu in the interior, Datu Paiburong, who was the devil’s own servant. The tribes along the coast were afraid of him and the ones who spoke chabacano and had come to Christ were terrified of him and it was he and his people we were sent to destroy. You know how once their kris is drawn from their belt in anger it must not be replaced before blood has been spilled? Datu Paiburong drew his when he was a young man and never put it away.

“For almost a year we raided the stockades his people lived in, but whenever we came the men would be gone. Some of our own were ambushed and some fell into the man-traps the moros dug and were killed or lost a leg, so we began to tear the stockades apart, to burn them to the ground. But they would rebuild almost overnight. The next time we raided and there were no men the alferez looked the other way and some of the women were violated. There were men among us who had done these things before. We knew that this was the same as murdering the women, that even if their lives were spared and they did not kill themselves they would be filth in the eyes of their people until the day they died. And after these violations one of our men was captured and tortured and when we found him his intestines had been pulled out of his stomach and tied to a tree and he had been forced to walk around it many times, wrapping his insides around the trunk and then left for the tree ants to eat him. They wrote on his chest in his blood—they wrote Each of you shall die like this.

“ ‘There you have it, muchachos,’ said our alferez. ‘It is a Holy War that we are fighting.’

“The order came down then to herd all the people who followed Paiburong—this is the time of General Weyler—into one guarded area where we could keep them under control. But they knew. Sometimes we thought the birds of the forest were in league with them, because whenever a new campaign was ordered they knew almost before we common soldados did, and this time when we came to the stockades they were deserted. Not a hen living, not a mouthful of food left. So we began to track them, farther and farther in from the coast, deep into the jungle, and by the time we started to climb we were exhausted and short on supplies, eating nothing each day but a tiny puñal of rice and beans mashed together and cooked in our own drinking cans and a man was bitten by a víbora and died screaming. The capitán and the teniente and the alferez no longer called us their boys, they called us indios hijos de puta or malditos criminales and kept their weapons ready all the time, afraid we would mutiny.

“Datu Paiburong’s men laid ambushes for us on the way up the old volcano. They are excellent shots, the moros, even with those ancient muskets they use, and our men who were hit in the first volley almost always died. And then they would be gone, and it was time to climb again. We could not pause to bury our dead, so we wrapped them in ponchos and tied them with mil leguas vines into the branches of trees and hoped to be back before the ants and the jaguares got to them.”

The men all sit close to Bayani now, listening. When he breathes in there is a wheezing sound, but his voice is calm, steady.

“The colonel broke us into three parties, each climbing from a different direction. We were to meet at the top in the evening.

“When we reached the part of the mountain where there were no more trees our buglers signaled and the moros fired at us from the rim and we had to charge up over the bare ground. We had started with a half-dozen field pieces but they’d been left behind so we could keep up with the chase. So we had only our rifles and they killed many of us as we charged up the slope, hating them, hating them for murdering our friends and for the jungle and the heat and for the oficiales cursing at our backs and because they were moros, though we were not, in fact, the truest of Christians.

“By the time we reached the top they had retreated down into the old crater. The crater was deep and so old that a ways down inside it there started to be trees again, and soil, a little round valley within the mountain.

“We had suffered many bajas, but it was the whole battalion and we had them outnumbered and had better rifles and knew they must be nearly out of ammunition. We had no fires that night, but they did, two huge fires where they cooked and sang and chanted and then, very late, the women began to shriek. It drilled into your soul, the noise they made. One of our guides said the singing was to their god, telling him they would soon be at his side, but he had never heard the women shriek like that. You could see their shadows, moving around the fires, but the colonel said to save our bullets for the morning.

“ ‘They’re halfway to Hell down there,’ said our alferez. ‘Tomorrow we send them the rest of the way.’

“The women came in the front. The sun rose and we heard them all making that noise with their tongues, high, like when the cicadas in the trees are singing their last notes because the day is dying, and then they came running up the side of the crater toward our positions, their faces painted and a dagger or a sword or some only with a sharp rock in hand and the men right behind, some with muskets and the rest with their kris drawn for the last time. They are beautiful people, the moros, their long hair, the colors they wear—beautiful. Beautiful targets as they ran up the side of the crater to us and we fired in volleys and then at will, hardly needing to aim, the men climbing over the bodies of the women as they fell and we were told to fix bayonets as they kept coming, muskets fired and thrown aside, screaming as they climbed up the steepest part where there was no cover and tumbling backward. Only a few survived for us to run the steel through. One of these was the old datu, who had some bullets in him and eyes like a cat and managed to hack one man in the arm before he was killed. We lifted him up on bayonets and marched around and all the men left in the battalion cheered till the colonel said to lay him down, we were taking the body back to Zamboanga for display.

“I was among the men who were ordered to go down into the volcano. On the way we finished the ones who were wounded. I finished a girl, a beautiful young girl, who was shot in both legs. She looked into my soul and cursed it and I shot her in the heart. At the bottom we found the children, the ones they thought were too little to fight, with their throats cut like lambs. The women had been shrieking by the fires while the men killed their children. They were laid out on flat stones, stuck to them with blood. I was afraid that the mountain would wake when it understood what had been done in its heart, that God or Satan would melt the rock and drown us in fire.

“The moros had thrown the last of their food into the fires so we would not get any of it. We pulled the jewelry off all the dead except for the datu and started back for the coast. All the men who had been wounded became infected and died. A man in our company who had worked in a bank in Manila and stole money from it went crazy and said he would walk no more and was left behind without his rifle. We took turns carrying the body of the datu, who was sewn up inside the canvas of a tent, two men at a time. He didn’t weigh much but he smelled like something from Hell. There were mosquitoes everywhere and no water left that was drinkable and nobody spoke except to abuse the Lord’s name or give an order. We knew we had been cursed.

“ ‘At least,’ said our teniente, ‘we left all that heavy ammunition behind in the moros.’

“When we came to the field pieces, there were lizards living in the barrels. None of the bodies of the ambushed men were where we had left them, or else we weren’t on the same path. The officers would compare their compasses to be sure we were heading in the right direction, but it took two days longer to come down from the mountain than it took to get up it, and a third of our battalion was gone.

“They hanged the body of the datu from a crane arm in the port, with his beautiful clothes and jewelry still on him, but the moros there, even the ones who had hated and feared him in life, only came to kneel and touch their foreheads to the ground. Honoring him. After a few days of this the gobernadorcillo had him taken down and stripped and thrown into the harbor for the fishes to eat.”

Bayani closes his eyes. The men are silent. A flock of birds twists over the cassava field across the road, changing shape, threatening to break apart and then flowing together.

“If we had that kind of unity,” says Diosdado after a while. “If we believed like the moros—”

“You miss the point of the story,” says Bayani from his stretcher. “You always miss the point. They believed. They believed so much that they slaughtered their own children. But they were outnumbered and outgunned and so they all died.”

Diosdado scowls. The valley is very lush now, crops growing as if there is no war. “It doesn’t matter how you die, or when,” he says. “It matters how you live.”

Bayani sighs and there is a rattle in his chest. “Say that when you are down inside the mountain, hermano. Say that when you are where I am now.”

They walk through the valley, crossing petsay bean and corn fields, and then come to his father’s vast huerta, mango trees as far as the eye can travel. These first ones are the abuelos, a hundred feet to the crown, the dark green spear-shaped leaves nearly a foot long, the trees full and round-topped and laden with hundreds of carabaos, fat and green and just about to turn. The smell, sweet and resinous, makes Diosdado’s mouth water. His mother would chop the young leaves for salad with tomatoes and onions, would shred the unripe fruits and serve them with bagoong, the salt of the shrimp paste cutting the sour of the green mango, and him out climbing the sturdy branches with the sons of the trabajadores till it was time for his lessons.

They are halfway through the orchard, in the section where the picos and the tiny señoritas are mixed in with the carabaos, when his father’s workers surround them. Diosdado is suddenly aware that he is dressed in rags like the rest of his men. He recognizes a few of the dozen trabajadores but not their leader, who points a shotgun at his belly.

“What are you doing here?” asks the man in Zambal.

“We are soldiers of the nation,” answers Diosdado. His men are ready to fight, even at such a disadvantage, but there should be no need to. “We have a wounded man.”

“This land belongs to Don Nicasio,” says the foreman. “You are not welcome here.”

A few of the workers have rifles, the rest bolos. One clutches a rusted cavalry saber. They are better dressed and better fed than Diosdado’s men, and know loyalty only to their patrón.

“We will walk with you back to where his lands begin,” says the foreman.

“Put your fucking weapons down,” snaps Bayani, whose fists are clenched against the pain once more, “and go tell Don Nicasio that his son is home.”

The plantation house is, like his father, solid and implacable, built of stone on both stories and buttressed for an earthquake that has not yet come. Don Nicasio does not embrace Diosdado when he receives him in the despacho. Nothing has changed in the room, the smell of leather and ink, the map from the shipping company displaying its myriad routes still covering the wall behind his father’s desk. The desk was Diosdado’s favorite forbidden playground when he was small, its dozens of cubbyholes and sliding panels and secret drawers revealing their treasures—a magnifying glass, a flask of Scotch whisky, the heavy pistol he was afraid to even touch.

“While you were busy running from the Americans,” his father informs him, still seated, regarding his son’s torn kasama clothing and sun-weathered face with weary condescension, “your mother, Dios le protige, has passed away.”

Diosdado feels unsteady on his feet, but that may only be hunger and the long journey over the mountains. He has guessed the sorry news already, noting the ribbon of black crepe stretched diagonally across her portrait, chrysanthemums abundant throughout the house.

“I am sorry.”

“She was a good woman. Too good for this world.”

Don Nicasio’s face is more lined than he remembers, yellowish, but his eyes burn as they always did.

“I suppose you’re here to demand tribute.”

“One of my men is wounded and needs a doctor,” he says flatly. “And an offering of food would be considered patriotic.”

Don Nicasio snorts, pushes himself up from his chair and steps past Diosdado. “Let’s see what we’re dealing with here.”

The men are in the rear garden, by his mother’s shrine to the Virgin of Antipolo. The statue is of a young, beautiful woman with her head tilted to one side, as if trying to hear something far away.

“She is listening for an infant’s cry,” his mother explained to Diosdado when he was little. “She is the Mother of us all.”

Beyond the stone bench where they have laid Bayani out Diosdado can see the panteón familiar, a tiny alabaster tomb with a cross upon it marking the grave of Adelfonso, his brother who did not thrive in the School of Survival, and his parents’ mausoleum, recently garlanded with wreaths of carnations.

That was her name—Encarnación.

The segundo with the shotgun and several of the other workers stand nearby, watching Don Nicasio’s face for instruction.

It takes the old man a moment to recognize Bayani, studying the wounds first before looking at the man’s face. Don Nicasio’s body stiffens. He turns away to confront Diosdado.

“Why have you brought him here?”

“He needs a doctor.”

“Dr. Estero is in Palauig.”

“That is ten miles farther on.”

“You have no right.”

“But here we are.”

Bayani raises an arm with some difficulty. “Don’t you recognize me, Don Nicasio?” he asks in Zambal.

Diosdado’s father does not speak. Bayani raises his voice, speaking to the old man’s back.

“Both of your boys home and this is your reception?”

The other men, Diosdado’s guerilleros, look away. Don Nicasio tells his segundo to send a carriage for Dr. Estero and to have Trini bring some food for these beggars, and then strides back into the house.

“I’m sorry, hermano,” Bayani says to his brother. “I was never taught proper manners.”

It was somewhere back in Pampanga that Diosdado guessed, but he has not found the words to acknowledge it.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I did,” Bayani shrugs. “Not in so many words, but I did. You people only hear what you want to.”

Trini comes out then, bent with age, tears in her eyes.

“God has spared you,” says his old ama, embracing Diosdado and then setting up a table for the men to eat. When the food comes there is more than enough to fill their shrunken bellies.

“We had better finish this,” says Kalaw through a mouthful of lechón, “before the Americans take it all.”

Diosdado is certain his father will have no trouble with the Americans, even if his son—sons—are insurrectos with a price on their heads. Men like his father are making their accommodations all over the Philippines, coming to an understanding, waiting in line for the positions that will be handed down by the new masters of the land. The americanistas will not look so different than those who did the bidding of the Spanish—businessmen, the wealthier politicians, the owners of plantations. Ilustrados, even many of the scribblers, especially the ones who can write in English, have begun to campaign for “wiser heads to prevail” and “the gradualist approach” to independence. He has heard of a masquerade party in Manila with an adobo prepared, quite purposely, with American tinned pork obtained from their quartermaster corps.

“I’ve never set foot in that house,” says Bayani when they try to move him into the zaguán, “and I’m not going to now.”

Finally Diosdado sends the others to sleep on the palm mats Trini has laid out, and stays outside with Bayani in the garden, covering him with a blanket. It is very difficult for the sargento to breathe now, as if he had to strain through a quart of water to find the bubble of air within it.

“The doctor will be here soon,” Diosdado tells him.

“The doctor isn’t coming.”

It grows darker in the garden, the shadow of the Virgin lengthening toward them. Bayani fights to keep his eyes open.

“I hated you,” he says after some time. “I hated your clothes and I hated your shoes and I hated seeing you in your carroza on the way to church and the times I heard you speak I hated your voice. I hated Don Nicasio too, though my mother said he was a great man, great and proud and very intelligent. But I hated you more because you were where I should have been. You wore my shoes and ate at my table, the one with the cloth covering it, with a separate plate for every dish, while I was out sneaking chickenshit from your yard to spread on our potato patch. I tried to get the Baluyut brothers to beat you up because I was too shy, too ashamed, to do it myself.”

Diosdado smiles. “I always wondered what I did to upset the Baluyut brothers.”

“When you went away to school I was already in the world, stealing from people, killing moros for the Spanish, and I forgot about you. I thought I did. But when I joined the sublevo my first thought was to come to Zambales, to evict Don Nicasio from this house in the name of the Revolution and live here, rule here, myself. And when you came back one day, looking like a maricón in your white suit with your hair full of brilliantine and speaking Spanish like a peninsular, I would say ‘Go away, boy, you are not welcome on this land.’ ”

Talking costs Bayani, and he pauses to catch his breath.

“Then you ruined my dream,” he says when he can speak again, a slight smile on his lips. “You ruined my sweet dream of revenge. ‘We have a young lieutenant from Zambales,’ they told me, ‘and we want you to look out for him.’ ”

“I am sorry,” Diosdado tells him. For confession, carefully choosing one of the friars who didn’t know his voice to unburden to, he said the words but never felt the remorse. He feels it now. “I am sorry for what was done to you and your mother.”

“She didn’t want money. She only wanted him to look at her when he passed on his horse, passed in his carriage. To look at her as if she was there, as if he had loved her. But he is not corrupt enough, our father, to love two women and be just to them both.”

“My mother must have known about you.”

“We called her La Rezadora, whenever we’d see her coming back from morning mass, muttering her novenas. The One Who Prays. Maybe she was praying for our father’s soul.”

“And you still hate me.”

Bayani laughs, coughs wetly. “Take a look at us now. We could be twins, except I have more holes in me than you do. How can you hate your twin?”

Diosdado feels himself crying now. Maybe for his mother. The shadow of the Virgin covers Bayani’s face.

“The doctor will be here soon,” he says. “We’ll regroup and make a stand here in Zambales and on some of the other islands—”

“They’re paying fifteen American dollars if you hand in your rifle. How many of our men have ever had that much in their pocket? No—the yanquis will win and all of your friends will learn their language, your children will learn their language and priests of the American religion, if they have one, will take the place of the friars.”

“Maybe.” Diosdado has had to wrestle with the possibility. Being steadfast does not mean you have to be stupid. “But one day they will leave—”

“But one day they’ll leave,” says Bayani, “just like the Spanish are leaving, and then we’ll be able to kill each other in peace, the Christians against the moros, the Tagalos against the Ilocanos, the rich against the poor, men like me against men like our father. A true Republic of the Philippines.”

One of the workers returns then, a young man Diosdado remembers climbing trees with when they were boys, the kind of young man who should be bearing arms for his country. He steps forward shyly, deferential.

“Señor,” he says, “I am very sorry to report that Dr. Estero cannot be persuaded to come. He says that he is afraid that when the Americans arrive people will tell stories. He sends this.”

The young man, Joaquín is his name, Diosdado thinks, holds out a hand to reveal a small black ball of opium.

“No more,” Bayani growls. “If it hurts enough, I won’t regret leaving.”

Diosdado sits with him into the night, the tuko lizards chirping, the moon rising slowly over the grave markers in the panteón. Diosdado is cold but does not move.

“Bury me with my mother,” says Bayani at the end. “May God forgive us all.”