Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (25 page)

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. Don’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.

Angela brought the bowl to her lips and scooped the food into her mouth with her fingers, barely chewing as she swallowed. She washed it down with water from her canteen.

Brigida said, “Now tell me what’s going on.”

They sat together on the ground and Angela recounted her morning. At times, she felt like she rambled and confused some events, but her mother didn’t interrupt. Angela finished by asking, “What happend to you?”

Brigida told her a story about taking the chickens to the market, only to find that no one was there. Father Agliplay and his men had stormed the Yanqui garrison in town. So residents stayed at home, and market-sellers fled into the fields and forest. The Yanquis, though, with their rifles, repelled the attack. Brigida arrived to see countless men – men who worked the tobacco fields, fished the sea, or grew rice in the terraces – limp out of town, wounded and in desperate need of care. So she went with them, helping those she could as they retreated into the hills.

She said, “Listen carefully, Angela: Father Aglipay is a charismatic man, but he should be leading prayers, not battles. They think they have God on their side, even if they don’t have enough rifles. Now he says he believes your kapfre story?” She shook her head. “Angela, dear, it is not safe here. You must go home.”

“But Mama, I can help.” As she said these words, she felt like the young girl she was, powerless and afraid.

“I know, of course, but you see Father Aglipay has angered the Yanquis. They want to get him, so being here is not safe. Our tiny barangay? They do not care about it. You can go home, cook rice, and eat. You can even buy some chicken or fish from Auntie Dungo. Do not ask for it; buy it. Money is hidden in a wooden box inside the rice jar. If you leave now, you will be home long before dark. You must go, my sweet, sweet Angela.”

They embraced again, quicker this time.

Her mother wrapped more rice and dried fish in leaves and gave it to Angela. Then she straightened out her hat, the shoulder strap of her canteen, and the leather belt that held the bolo in its sheath at her waist. “Look at you, my little soldier. You came to rescue me, and my heart feels rescued, my strong warrior.”

Angela slid the food into a pocket. Together, they walked through the encampment, as men with shirts on inside-out hurried to and fro.

Alone in the forest, Angela stopped walking when she smelled cigar smoke. “Señor Kapfre?”

He laughed low and deep. The tree shook. Leaves rustled. Then there he stood, a giant with a lit cigar clamped between his lips, one eye squinting to keep out smoke.

“Angela, you have to see this.” He scooped her up again and set her on his shoulder. Together, they seemed to levitate to the top of the tree, where they swayed without falling. He pointed with pursed lips to a rolling cloud of smoke in the distance.

She asked, “Another fire?”

In response, he leapt from tree to tree to get closer. The air whooshed about her ears until they stopped atop a tree that stood high on a hill and afforded them a clearer view of the rolling clouds. It was dust kicked up from the march of men, mules and horses on a dirt road.