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One day when Tarang was seven, his father came home from Malig with the carabao Bokal, which belonged to their neighbor Longinos, who lived in the clearing across the river. The carabao pulled a sled which had a lone basket for its load.

“Harao!” his father said, pulling Bokal to a stop.

As Tarang can to catch the lead rope that his father tossed over to him, Bokal flared its nostrils and gave him a good look with its big watery eyes, as if to say, “Well, Anak, here we are! Have you been good?”

He had been playing alone in the yard, in the long slack of afternoon, and had been good, except that Nanay had said why didn’t he go to the hut and do this playing there so that at the same time he could look after his little sister Cris, just now learning to crawl. But that was because Nanay had wanted to go there in the shade and pound rice, when what she ought to have done was wait for Tatay to help her, or wait for him to grow up, even! So what he had done was keep silence when she called. And then afterwards she was spanking Cris for not talking an afternoon nap; and Tarang heard her calling to him: “You will see when your Tatay comes!” And so he walked to the riverbank and gathered some guavas, and ate the ripe ones as fast as he got them; and now he was belching, his breath smelling of guava. Perhaps his hair, too, smelled of guava, for why should Bokal flare its nostrils that way?

With Cris astride her hip, Nanay came down the hut, saying, “You might give the hard-headed son of yours a thrashing for staying out in the sunshine all afternoon.”

But Tatay only laughed, “Really?” he said, and then asked, “That you would know what I’ve brought here!”

“What this time?” Nanay asked.

Tarang looked at the basket on the sled.

“If you must know, it’s a pig!” Tatay said. He had unhitched the sled and was leading the carabao away to the hinagdong tree.

“Now don’t you try touching it yet,” his mother warned Tarang.

“It’s so the boy will have something to look after,” Tatay was saying from under the tree across the yard, where he had tethered the carabao.

From down the sled Tarang pulled the basket, and indeed, two black feet presently thrust out of it. The corner of the basket had a big hole, and now there sprang forth another foot.

Tatay cut the basket open with his bolo, and the pig struggled out. “It’s for you to look after,” he told the boy.

Nanay was standing there beside him and, having swung Cris over to her other hip, began scratching the belly of the pig with her big toe.

“Do this quite often, and it will become tame,” she said. And to Tatay: “Now if you hold Cris awhile—”

Then she took the bolo and, crossing the yard, she went past the hinagdong tree where Bokal was and into the underbrush. She returned with six freshly ripe papayas: she wanted then and there to cut them up and feed the pig with them. But Tatay said, “Here, you hold Cris yourself.”

He got back his bolo from Nanay, slipped it into its sheath, and hurried down the path to the kaingin. Tarang could see the tall dead trees of the clearing beyond the hinagdong tree and the second growth. The afternoon sun made the bark of the trees glisten like the bolo blade itself.

He thought his father would be away very long, but Tatay was back soon with length of tree trunk which had not been completely burned that day they set fire to the clearing. The fire had devoured only the hollow of the trunk, so what what Tatay had brought really was a trough that the kaingin had made. Now Tatay cut the ends neatly and flattened one side so that the trough would sit firm on the ground.

They all sat there watching the pig eating off the trough. In a short while its snout was black from rubbing against the burned bottom and sides.

“Where did this pig come from? You have not said one word,” Nanay said.

“Well, there I was in the barrio. And whom do I see but Paula–when all the time I meant not to get even a shadow of her.”

Tarang stared at of both of them, not knowing what they were talking about. Cris sat on Nanay’s arm, watching the pig also, and making little bubbling sounds with her mouth.

“We shall pay everything we owe them next harvest,” Nanay said.

“Well, there I was and she saw me,” Tatay went on. “She asked could I go to her house and have my noon meal there? So I went over, and ate in the kitchen. Then she asked could I fetch some water and fill the jars? And could I split some firewood? And could I go out there in the corner of her yard and have a look at her pigs?

“She had three of them, one a boar,” Tatay went on. “And if I wasn’t really afraid that I’d be told to fix the fence or the pen, I am a liar this very minute.”

“But for a ganta or five chupas of salt, maybe. Why not?” Nanay asked.

“You guessed right. She said. ‘Fix it, for the ganta of salt that you got from the store last time.'”

“Well, there you are!”

“That’s the trouble, there I was. But she said: ‘For your little boy to look after–if you like. Yes, why not take one sow with you?’ And I said: ‘For my boy?’ Because, believe me, I was proud and happy Paula remembered my anak. She said: ‘If you can fatten it, let it have a litter; then all the better for us.’ So I’ve brought home the pig.”

Nanay threw more bits of ripe papaya into the trough. Tarang scratched the pig’s back gently as it continued to eat, making loud noises, not only with its mouth but also with something else inside its belly.

“If there is a litter, we are to have half,” his father was saying; and then his mother said: “That is good enough.”

“Well, then, feed it well, Anak!” his father said.

“And you said there was a boar in that pen?” his mother asked.

“A big and vigorous boar,” his father said.

Nanay smiled and then walked over to the kitchen to start a fire in the stove. When the pig had devoured all the ripe papayas, Tatay got a rope and made a harness of it round the pigs shoulder.

“Here, better get it used to you,” Tatay said.

So Tarang pulled the rope and dragged the pig across the yard. His father led the way through the bush, to the edge of the kaingin nearest the hut. There they tied the pig to a tree slump. Then his father cut some stakes to make the pen with.

They did not make a full-fledged pen, only one with two sides, because for the other two sides, they used the outcropping roots of an old dao tree. The rest was easy; it was Tarang who shoved the pig inside when the pen was ready. Afterward this father went back to the hut to get the trough.

He fed the pig with ripe papayas as well as green, and the good thing was that Tatay did not become cross with him whenever the bolo had to be used. He would strap it round his waist and go out there in the bush himself. Sometimes he brought home ubod from the betel nut or the sugar palm, and the soft parts of the ubod Nanay usually saved up for supper while the hard parts she allowed him to take to the pig. There was the rice husk, too. Before, it did not matter whether or not, after pounding the rice, Nanay saved the chaff; from the mortar she would take the rice in her wide, flat winnowing basket and, with the wind helping her, clean the grains right there under the hinagdong tree at the edge of the yard. But from now on it would not do to leave the rice husks on the ground. The kitchen wash mixed with rice husk was a favorite of the sow’s; and for ever so long after feeding time, you could see her wear a brown band of rice husk round her mouth.

One day Nanay came home from the kaingin with welts across her cheek and over the valley of her nose. Had someone struck her with a whip? Tatay did not seem worried. He laughed at her, in fact, and Nanay had to say something.

“I only went to the thicket for some rattan with which to fix the pen.”

“Now which pen?” Tatay asked.

“The sow’s.”

Tatay said, “You could have waited for us; that was work for us.”

“Still, work that had to be done,” Nanay said. “And but for the swelling of the sow’s belly, what do you think could have happened?”

“We had thought of the swelling of the belly,” Tatay said.

“Still, I had to get the rattan,” Nanay said.

“And hurt your face,” Tatay said, touching gently the scratches on the skin.

Tarang also touched the vally of her nose, she continued: “I stepped on a twig. Then a vine sprang from nowhere and struck me.”

Tatay laughed over that one heartily. “It was as though you had stolen something and then somebody had gone after you and caught you!”

“Next time, I will leave the pen alone,” Nanay said.

But during the days that followed they were all too busy with work in the kaingins to bother with anything else, really. In the nearby kaingins, people had started planting; and so that they would come over to help later on, Tatay and Nanay were often away out there working. That left Tarang alone in the hut, alone to cook his own meals and fetch water from the well near riverbank; although it was hardly midafternoon, he would start for the underbrush in search of ubod or ripe papayas. Before the sun had dropped behind the forest, he had fed his sow.

He was walking down the path from the kaingin one afternoon when he saw Tia Orang in the hut. He had seen her many times before, on days when Nanay and Tatay took him to the barrio, and he was not a little frightened of her then. The old midwife wore a hempen skirt dyed the color of tan bark, which is like brown clay; and so were her blouse and kerchief.

“And where would they be?” she asked the boy.

“Across the river.”

“Where exactly? I have come for the planting.”

“In the clearing of Mang Longinos, perhaps,” the boy said. “We are not yet planting.”

“Now be good enough to give me a drink of water, Anak,” the old midwife said. “Then I shall be on my way.”

She reached for the dipper of water that he brought her. She drank and then, putting down the dipper, tweaked Tarang on the leg. “If I do not see your mother, Anak, tell her that Tia Orang has come. Tell of my passing through, and of my helping in the planting when the time comes.”

For a long time afterward Tarang remembered how they spent morning after morning in the kaingin, gathering pieces of burned wood and piling them up and then burning them again. Some pieces were too heavy to lift, even with all three of them–Nany, Tatay, and himself–helping together; other pieces were light enough, and he would take them to the edge of the clearing, where his father laid out a fence by piling the wood between freshly cut staves and keeping these in place with rattan.

It was a pity to have Cris left behind in the hut, tied to the middle of the floor, lest she should crawl over to the steps, down the dirt of the kitchen, past the stove box, then over to the threshold, and finally out to the yard; often they returned to the hut to find her asleep, some portion of string wound tight round her legs.

But, one morning, instead of leaving Cris behind, Nanay took her to the kaingin. That was the day Tatay left the hut very early and returned after breakfast with a white pullet under his arm, and then he and Nanay had a quarrel.

“You have found the chicken in the river bed? Is that what you might say?” she demanded.

“I came from Longinos’ place, if you must know.”

“And that pullet?”

“Look into your hamper,” Tatay said.

Nanay pulled out the hamper from the corner and, in the half-light from the window, opened it and looked through her clothes one by one.

“The camisa that Paula gave me, it’s gone,” she said, almost in tears.

“A camisa seven years too worn out, what does it matter now?” Tatay laughed at her.

“So you bartered it for a pullet—for that dumalaga?” Nanay said.

“It will bring luck, have no regrets,” Tatay said.

They followed him to the kaingin, but when they reached the edge, where the fence was waist-high, Tatay asked Tarang’s mother to stay behind. They left Cris and her sitting on a log at the edge of the fence. Tarang followed Tatay past the dao tree where the pigpen was, and the smell of the trough followed him to the middle of the kaingin.

Tatay stopped near a tree stump that was knee-high and motioned to him to get no closer, for now he was holding the dumalaga with one hand, letting its wings flap like pieces of rag in the clearing breeze, and he had pulled out his bolo. No, Tarang couldn’t get any closer. Tatay laid the pullet’s neck upon the flat of the tree stump and without a word cut the head off. Was that a red streak that cut an arc toward the ash-covered ground? Tatay held the headless pullet higher, to let the blood spurt out a long way.

“Go, Evil Spirits of the land! Go, now!” Tatay was saying. “Now this land is ours! We shall make it yield rich crops!”

Tarang looked back in the direction where Nanay and Cris sat waiting, and at first he did not see them. Beyond the clearing’s edge loomed the half-dark of the forest, and a cloud had covered the rising sun and changed the morning to early evening.

Tatay had put back his bolo into its sheath and was calling for Nanay and Cris to come.

“Then we start planting now?” Nanay asked.

“You three wait here, for I myself am strong enough for the getting of the seed,” Tatay said, and walked down the trail to the hut.

He returned with Tio Longinos and Tia Pulin and Tia Adaug, and they were all of them provided with short wooden sticks sharpened at the ends for making holes in the ground. Tarang made one of his own, but he was not good at using it. He was as slow as Nanay, who could hardly bend from having to have Cris astride her hip. After a while his stick got blunted, and Tatay said he should sharpen it again. Tatay handed him the bolo. But when Tarang started to sharpen the stick, his hand began to tremble. Cold sweat gathered on his brow, and the ash-covered ground seemed raw with the smell of the
chicken’s blood.

“You and Cris,” Tatay said, taking the bolo from him, “you stay in the shade and let your mother work.”

And so they looked for the shadiest buri palm at the edge of the kaingin. Nanay cut some dry leaves and set them on the ground, and there she set Cris also, and said to Tarang, “Keep your sister from crying, at least.”

But, of course, he could do nothing to stop her, and Cris cried herself hoarse. She would not let him hold her; they chased each other round and round, even beyond the boundary of the leaves. It hurt his knees crawling. What stopped her finally was the sound that the wind made as it passed through and over the palm leaves; for it was a strange sound, like
that of drums far away.

Toward noon Tatay called everyone together. They gathered in the hot sun near the tree stump where the dumalaga had been killed. Already Tia Longinos and Tia Pulin and Tia Adang were gathered there when Nanay, who had gone to pick up Cris, reached the tree stump.

“Keep out of the way, Anak,” Tatay said, for Longinos was setting up a small cross made of banban reeds.

“Let citronella grass give fragrance,” he was saying, pulling a sheaf of the grass from the pouch at his waist, where he kept his betel nut and chewing things. Likewise, he took from the pouch other things. “Let ginger appease the Evil Ones. Let iron give weight to the heads of rice on this clearing.”

Tarang edged closer, using his father’s arm, which was akimbo, as a window to peep from. And he saw the bits of ginger and the three pieces of the reed cross.

“Too hot it is now to work, isn’t it?” Longinos said, grinning away his tiredness. His face glistened with sweat, and he led the way, making a new path across the ash-covered ground.

Tarang brought up the rear, and he saw many holes that the sticks had made which had not been properly covered. He stopped and tapped the seed grains gently in with his big toe. He wandered about in this way, eye to ground, quick to catch the yellow husk of the grains. They were like bits of gold against the gray of the ashy ground. He would stop and press each little mound of grain gently, now with his left big toe, now with his right. Shorter and shorter his shadow grew until it was no more than a blot on the ground, moving as deftly as he moved among the tree stumps and over the burned-out logs.

He heard much talking back and forth afterward about how Tatay had planted the clearing a little too soon, that Tia Orang ought to have come. That they might have waited for her, Nanay said. But what was done was done, Tatay argued.

That afternoon they visited the kaingin. After he had brought the feed for his sow, Tarang followed Nanay and Tatay; it seemed to him that the ground was so dry it could well be that he was walking on sand. Nanay said that ants would soon make off with the grain.

That evening they sat outside, in the yard. They watched the sky. There were no stars. Black night covered the world; somewhere to the west, beyond the mountain range, rain had come. Twice lightning tore at the darkness, as though a torch were being used to burn some dry underbrush in a kaingin up there in the clouds.

They had an early supper because Nanay said that, if a storm should come, it would be difficult to do any cooking in the stove, now that its roof of buri leaves had been dried up and had become loose shreds these many months of the hot season. They went to bed early, too.

“There, what’s done is done!” Tatay said, and sat on the mat, cocking his ears.

It was the rain. Tarang thought he might watch it, only it was rather late in the night. He was tired and sleepy still.

Tatay, of course, had rushed to the window, hoping perhaps to see the rain shoot arrows across the yard.

Now, Tarang could hardly keep himself from getting up also. He got as far as the window when his mother awoke and called him sternly back to bed. He had to content himself listening to the rain on the roof.

It proved a brief rain burst only. Before daybreak it was all over.

“There is work for us to do, don’t you know?” Tatay said after breakfast, knotting his bolo string round his waist. “The pig—your sow, understand? With the rains now coming—”

Tarang understood readily that they must have a roof over the pen. He set out eagerly, doing everything that his father bade him. Tatay gathered the buri leaves, and these had to be taken one by one to the foot of the dao tree where the pen was. So while Tatay disappeared in the bush to get some vines to use for tying the leaves onto the makeshift beams, Tarang struggled with the leaves. He dragged them through the bush one by one, making noise of a snake running through a kogon field.

They were not quite through with the roof when the sky darkened again. From afar thunder rumbled; only the storm seemed rather close this time.

It was a long dreary-looking afternoon. It was warm, but he knew that soon it would be raining very hard, perhaps as hard as he had ever seen rain fall before. When Tarang set out to gather ripe papayas for his sow, it was already drizzling, and Nanay had to make him promise not to stay long.

He came running to the house. The thunderstorm was right behind him. Panting, he strode into the kitchen, unknotting the string of his father’s bolo from his waist.

“Mind to look for mushrooms tomorrow,” Tatay was saying.

Why, do mushrooms come with thunderstorms? Tarang wondered. All through supper he asked about mushrooms, and how it seemed that with each flash of lightning the million and one mushrooms that grow wild the whole world over pushed their spongy little umbrellas an inch or so toward the sky.

The drizzle was heavier now, and an owl kept hooting somewhere beyond the bamboo brakes across the river. Then the calls stopped. Tarang and his father sat there before the stove box watching Nanay, who was starting to cook rice for supper. Already the real rain was here.

There was the sound of shuffling feet in the yard, and when Nanay looked through the open door, she said, “Why, it is Tia Orang!”

The old woman dropped the frond of buri that she used for an umbrella in the rain and clambered up the hut. Nanay called out to Tatay, who had gone to the pigpen to see that the roof they had fixed over it was firm enough and would not be blown away should strong winds come along with the rain as they often did.

“The midwife is here,” Nanay called. And to Tia Orang: “Now you must stay the night with us.”

The other said, “Then, how goes life with you?”

“The same.”

“Don’t I see a change? Don’t I see life growing with you?”

Tarang sat there by the stove fire, idly tending the pot of vegetable stew for supper.

Nanay was saying, “There’s nothing in me to be seen!” And, passing her hand up and down her belly: “Look, nothing at all! Nothing yet!”

“Cris is hardly two, that’s why? But—” the old one became a little excited—”but time enough, time enough!”

“Then, let it be,” Nanay said.

“And when it’s time, I will surely remember to come,” Tia Orang said.

Tatay appeared at the door carrying a buri umbrella of his own. He greeted Tia Orang with much show of respect.

“To be sure,” he said, “let her stay the night with us,” he told Nanay. “Now, is supper ready?” He turned to Tarang, asking, “Anak, is the supper ready?”

So Nanay came down, leaving Cris upstairs with Tia Orang, and helped get the supper ready. She removed the pot of vegetable stew from the fire and started pouring some of it into the bowls. There were not enough bowls for all five of them, including Cris, and Nanay said Tarang should use the coconut-shell dipper for the drinking water.

“But,” Tia Orang asked, laughing, “should not I first of all earn my supper, no?”

Nanay had almost everything ready—the rice, and then a little pinch of salt on a banana leaf, and the bowls of stew, all of these on the bamboo floor.

“If you want to,” Nanay said, “do I spread the mat?”

“If you want to,” Tia Orang said.

“It is bound to come, it is bound to come!” Tia Orang said, kneeling on the mat, one hand pressing Nanay’s abdomen. She beckoned to Tatay: “Be of help!”

It was as if Tatay had been waiting all this time. He was ready with a coconut shell containing the bits of crushed ginger roots soaked in oil. Tia Orang dipped her finger into the mess, then rubbed her palms together, and commenced kneading the muscles of Nanay’s belly. The smell of ginger root and coconut oil made Tarang sneeze. The shell with the medicine Tarang remembered from the many occasions Nanay appeared to be ill, and the kneading was just about as familiar. Tatay did exactly the same whenever any one of them had pains in the stomach.

Tatay had lighted the lamparilla and set it on the floor, upon an empty sardine can. In the light, which was yellow like the back part of a leaf just starting to become dry, Tia Orang’s face looked as though made of earth.

Nanay was smiling at her. She lay smiling at everyone, her eyes traveling from one face to the next. A blush reddened her cheeks.

Tia Orang and Nanay talked, but mostly in whispers. Tarang caught only a few words. Then, aloud, the old woman called to Tatay, and Nanay got up and rolled up the mat. She let it rustle softly.

“Let us have supper now, no?” Tatay asked.

Wind from the open doorway fanned the wood in the stove, and, because this was bright enough, Tatay blew the lamparilla out.

They sat round the plate of rice that Nanay had set earlier on the floor. Tarang felt his hunger grow with each mouthful of rice, and he ate heartily, sipping the broth of the vegetable stew, then mixing the rice with the tomatoes and the sweetpotato leaves and the dried anchovies, gray and headless, in his coconut-shell bowl.

Tia Orang talked a great deal. Perhaps to conceal her appetite, Tarang thought. She talked about the old days in Malig, those days when people did not go so far inland as Loob-Loob but stayed most of the time in the barrio or else went only as far as Bakawan. Tarang listened because she spoke of Evil Ones and of Spirits, and he remembered the kaingin and Longinos and the citronella and the nails and ginger root.

“Now there was that man once who lost his arm felling a tree,” Tia Orang was saying, “and another, forgetting his reed cross and all those things of gapi, who began to suffer a strange sickness.”

Tarang cocked his ears.

“That he began to throw pus instead of water, let me tell you. Do you know what happened, also, to his wife? Well, the woman was with child. And when she was about to deliver, the misfortune came. No child came forth, but when the labor was done, there were leeches and nothing else! Fat and blood-red, and they filled a whole wooden bowl.”

Nanay stopped eating suddenly. She reached out for drinking water, which was in a coconut shell laid there also upon the floor. Tatay ate in silence leaving nothing in his bowl. He looked up at Tia Orang as if to ask: “Now, what else?”

Outside, it was as though someone with a brightly burning torch were driving bees off a hive up there in the sky. Beyond the western mountains was another early evening thunderstorm.

At the corner where Nanay was spreading a sleeping mat for Tia Orang, the wind brushed the siding of buri leaves. “Mind to gather those mushrooms tomorrow, just as I’ve said,” Tatay kept telling her.

They went to bed very early. Tarang thought he should stay in one corner far from Nanay. He was a man now, he felt.

He took an empty buri suck, the one for keeping palay in, and pressed it flat with his feet. It made a nice bed on the floor, there against the wall, near the doorstep.

On her mat Tia Orang stirred wakefully, but she could be heard snoring. Many times Tarang awoke, the strange noises in the old woman’s nose and mouth frightening him not a little. It was as if she were uttering strange words to strangers, to people who did not belong to the world of men and women. Tarang strained his ears, but he could not catch even one word; yet there was no doubt that she was talking to someone even now in her sleep. She stirred and turned to the wall, and now she was talking to the buri leaves with which the wall was made.

The thunderstorm came closer. For the first time since he could remember, the rain poured with loud thuds on the roof. It must be falling all over the forest, too, he thought; all over the empty river and as far down as the swamps that surrounded the barrio of Malig by the sea.

In his mind, half-awake, Tarang thought the rain was making music now, shaking songs off the swaying treetops on the fringe of the kaingin. Then he heard Tatay get up from bed. Perhaps Tatay, too, had heard the music of the rain. Only Tatay was hurrying down the hut, knotting his bolo string round his waist as he slipped past the door.

Tarang thought he could hear something else besides—for instance, the sow in the pen, under the duo tree. He listened more carefully. He could hear the grunting. There were little noises, too. A squirming litter protesting against the cold. Surely, with wet snouts tugging at its teats, a sow could be annoyed. The belly would be soft like a rag.

“That’s something to see!” He got up quietly and slipped out of the floor into the rain.

It seemed that at this very hour the rice grains, too, would be pressing forward, up the ash-covered loam, thrusting forth their tender stalks through the sodden dirt. He thought he caught the sound that the seeds also made.

The ground was not too wet. In his haste, Tarang struck a tree stump with his big toe; and the hurt was not half as keen as it might have been, not half as sharp as his hunger for knowing, for seeing with his own eyes, how life emerged from this dark womb of the land at this time of night.