How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife
She stepped down from the
carretela of Ca Celin with a quick, delicate grace. She was lovely. SHe was
tall. She looked up to my brother with a smile, and her forehead was on a level
with his mouth.
"You are Baldo,"
she said and placed her hand lightly on my shoulder. Her nails were long, but
they were not painted. She was fragrant like a morning when papayas are in
bloom. And a small dimple appeared momently high on her right cheek. "And this is Labang of whom I have heard
so much." She held the wrist of one hand with the other and looked at
Labang, and Labang never stopped chewing his cud. He swallowed and brought up
to his mouth more cud and the sound of his insides was like a drum.
I laid a hand on Labang's
massive neck and said to her: "You may scratch his forehead now."
She hesitated and I saw
that her eyes were on the long, curving horns. But she came and touched
Labang's forehead with her long fingers, and Labang never stopped chewing his
cud except that his big eyes half closed. And by and by she was scratching his
forehead very daintily.
My brother Leon put down
the two trunks on the grassy side of the road. He paid Ca Celin twice the usual
fare from the station to the edge of Nagrebcan. Then he was standing beside us,
and she turned to him eagerly. I watched Ca Celin, where he stood in front of
his horse, and he ran his fingers through its forelock and could not keep his
eyes away from her.
"Maria---" my
brother Leon said.
He did not say Maring. He
did not say Mayang. I knew then that he had always called her Maria and that to
us all she would be Maria; and in my mind I said 'Maria' and it was a beautiful
name.
"Yes, Noel."
Now where did she get that
name? I pondered the matter quietly to myself, thinking Father might not like
it. But it was only the name of my brother Leon said backward and it sounded
much better that way.
"There is Nagrebcan,
Maria," my brother Leon said, gesturing widely toward the west.
She moved close to him and
slipped her arm through his. And after a while she said quietly.
"You love Nagrebcan,
don't you, Noel?"
Ca Celin drove away
hi-yi-ing to his horse loudly. At the bend of the camino real where the big
duhat tree grew, he rattled the handle of his braided rattan whip against the
spokes of the wheel.
We stood alone on the
roadside.
The sun was in our eyes,
for it was dipping into the bright sea. The sky was wide and deep and very blue
above us: but along the saw-tooth rim of the Katayaghan hills to the southwest
flamed huge masses of clouds. Before us the fields swam in a golden haze
through which floated big purple and red and yellow bubbles when I looked at
the sinking sun. Labang's white coat, which I had washed and brushed that
morning with coconut husk, glistened like beaten cotton under the lamplight and
his horns appeared tipped with fire.
He faced the sun and from
his mouth came a call so loud and vibrant that the earth seemed to tremble
underfoot. And far away in the middle of the field a cow lowed softly in
answer.
"Hitch him to the
cart, Baldo," my brother Leon said, laughing, and she laughed with him a
big uncertainly, and I saw that he had put his arm around her shoulders.
"Why does he make
that sound?" she asked. "I have never heard the like of it."
"There is not another
like it," my brother Leon said. "I have yet to hear another bull call
like Labang. In all the world there is no other bull like him."
She was smiling at him,
and I stopped in the act of tying the sinta across Labang's neck to the
opposite end of the yoke, because her teeth were very white, her eyes were so
full of laughter, and there was the small dimple high up on her right cheek.
"If you continue to
talk about him like that, either I shall fall in love with him or become
greatly jealous."
My brother Leon laughed
and she laughed and they looked at each other and it seemed to me there was a
world of laughter between them and in them.
I climbed into the cart
over the wheel and Labang would have bolted, for he was always like that, but I
kept a firm hold on his rope. He was restless and would not stand still, so that
my brother Leon had to say "Labang" several times. When he was quiet
again, my brother Leon lifted the trunks into the cart, placing the smaller on
top.
She looked down once at
her high-heeled shoes, then she gave her left hand to my brother Leon, placed a
foot on the hub of the wheel, and in one breath she had swung up into the cart.
Oh, the fragrance of her. But Labang was fairly dancing with impatience and it
was all I could do to keep him from running away.
"Give me the rope,
Baldo," my brother Leon said. "Maria, sit down on the hay and hold on
to anything." Then he put a foot on the left shaft and that instant labang
leaped forward. My brother Leon laughed as he drew himself up to the top of the
side of the cart and made the slack of the rope hiss above the back of labang.
The wind whistled against my cheeks and the rattling of the wheels on the
pebbly road echoed in my ears.
She sat up straight on the
bottom of the cart, legs bent together to one side, her skirts spread over them
so that only the toes and heels of her shoes were visible. her eyes were on my
brother Leon's back; I saw the wind on her hair. When Labang slowed down, my
brother Leon handed to me the rope. I knelt on the straw inside the cart and
pulled on the rope until Labang was merely shuffling along, then I made him
turn around.
"What is it you have
forgotten now, Baldo?" my brother Leon said.
I did not say anything but
tickled with my fingers the rump of Labang; and away we went---back to where I
had unhitched and waited for them. The sun had sunk and down from the wooded
sides of the Katayaghan hills shadows were stealing into the fields. High up
overhead the sky burned with many slow fires.
When I sent Labang down
the deep cut that would take us to the dry bed of the Waig which could be used
as a path to our place during the dry season, my brother Leon laid a hand on my
shoulder and said sternly:
"Who told you to
drive through the fields tonight?"
His hand was heavy on my
shoulder, but I did not look at him or utter a word until we were on the rocky
bottom of the Waig.
"Baldo, you fool,
answer me before I lay the rope of Labang on you. Why do you follow the Wait
instead of the camino real?"
His fingers bit into my
shoulder.
"Father, he told me
to follow the Waig tonight, Manong."
Swiftly, his hand fell
away from my shoulder and he reached for the rope of Labang. Then my brother
Leon laughed, and he sat back, and laughing still, he said:
"And I suppose Father
also told you to hitch Labang to the cart and meet us with him instead of with
Castano and the calesa."
Without waiting for me to
answer, he turned to her and said, "Maria, why do you think Father should
do that, now?" He laughed and added, "Have you ever seen so many
stars before?"
I looked back and they
were sitting side by side, leaning against the trunks, hands clasped across
knees. Seemingly, but a man's height above the tops of the steep banks of the
Wait, hung the stars. But in the deep gorge the shadows had fallen heavily, and
even the white of Labang's coat was merely a dim, grayish blur. Crickets
chirped from their homes in the cracks in the banks. The thick, unpleasant
smell of dangla bushes and cooling sun-heated earth mingled with the clean,
sharp scent of arrais roots exposed to the night air and of the hay inside the
cart.
"Look, Noel, yonder
is our star!" Deep surprise and gladness were in her voice. Very low in
the west, almost touching the ragged edge of the bank, was the star, the
biggest and brightest in the sky.
"I have been looking
at it," my brother Leon said. "Do you remember how I would tell you
that when you want to see stars you must come to Nagrebcan?"
"Yes, Noel," she
said. "Look at it," she murmured, half to herself. "It is so
many times bigger and brighter than it was at Ermita beach."
"The air here is
clean, free of dust and smoke."
"So it is,
Noel," she said, drawing a long breath.
"Making fun of me,
Maria?"
She laughed then and they
laughed together and she took my brother Leon's hand and put it against her
face.
I stopped Labang, climbed
down, and lighted the lantern that hung from the cart between the wheels.
"Good boy,
Baldo," my brother Leon said as I climbed back into the cart, and my heart
sant.
Now the shadows took
fright and did not crowd so near. Clumps of andadasi and arrais flashed into
view and quickly disappeared as we passed by. Ahead, the elongated shadow of
Labang bobbled up and down and swayed drunkenly from side to side, for the
lantern rocked jerkily with the cart.
"Have we far to go
yet, Noel?" she asked.
"Ask Baldo," my
brother Leon said, "we have been neglecting him."
"I am asking you,
Baldo," she said.
Without looking back, I
answered, picking my words slowly:
"Soon we will get out
of the Wait and pass into the fields. After the fields is home---Manong."
"So near
already."
I did not say anything
more because I did not know what to make of the tone of her voice as she said her
last words. All the laughter seemed to have gone out of her. I waited for my
brother Leon to say something, but he was not saying anything. Suddenly he
broke out into song and the song was 'Sky Sown with Stars'---the same that he
and Father sang when we cut hay in the fields at night before he went away to
study. He must have taught her the song because she joined him, and her voice
flowed into his like a gentle stream meeting a stronger one. And each time the
wheels encountered a big rock, her voice would catch in her throat, but my
brother Leon would sing on, until, laughing softly, she would join him again.
Then we were climbing out
into the fields, and through the spokes of the wheels the light of the lantern
mocked the shadows. Labang quickened his steps. The jolting became more
frequent and painful as we crossed the low dikes.
"But it is so very
wide here," she said. The light of the stars broke and scattered the
darkness so that one could see far on every side, though indistinctly.
"You miss the houses,
and the cars, and the people and the noise, don't you?" My brother Leon
stopped singing.
"Yes, but in a
different way. I am glad they are not here."
With difficulty I turned
Labang to the left, for he wanted to go straight on. He was breathing hard, but
I knew he was more thirsty than tired. In a little while we drope up the grassy
side onto the camino real.
"---you see," my
brother Leon was explaining, "the camino real curves around the foot of
the Katayaghan hills and passes by our house. We drove through the fields
because---but I'll be asking Father as soon as we get home."
"Noel," she
said.
"Yes, Maria."
"I am afraid. He may
not like me."
"Does that worry you
still, Maria?" my brother Leon said. "From the way you talk, he might
be an ogre, for all the world. Except when his leg that was wounded in the
Revolution is troubling him, Father is the mildest-tempered, gentlest man I
know."
We came to the house of
Lacay Julian and I spoke to Labang loudly, but Moning did not come to the
window, so I surmised she must be eating with the rest of her family. And I
thought of the food being made ready at home and my mouth watered. We met the
twins, Urong and Celin, and I said "Hoy!" calling them by name. And
they shouted back and asked if my brother Leon and his wife were with me. And
my brother Leon shouted to them and then told me to make Labang run; their
answers were lost in the noise of the wheels.
I stopped labang on the
road before our house and would have gotten down but my brother Leon took the
rope and told me to stay in the cart. He turned Labang into the open gate and
we dashed into our yard. I thought we would crash into the camachile tree, but
my brother Leon reined in Labang in time. There was light downstairs in the
kitchen, and Mother stood in the doorway, and I could see her smiling shyly. My
brother Leon was helping Maria over the wheel. The first words that fell from
his lips after he had kissed Mother's hand were:
"Father... where is
he?"
"He is in his room
upstairs," Mother said, her face becoming serious. "His leg is
bothering him again."
I did not hear anything
more because I had to go back to the cart to unhitch Labang. But I hardly tied
him under the barn when I heard Father calling me. I met my brother Leon going
to bring up the trunks. As I passed through the kitchen, there were Mother and
my sister Aurelia and Maria and it seemed to me they were crying, all of them.
There was no light in
Father's room. There was no movement. He sat in the big armchair by the western
window, and a star shone directly through it. He was smoking, but he removed
the roll of tobacco from his mouth when he saw me. He laid it carefully on the
windowsill before speaking.
"Did you meet anybody
on the way?" he asked.
"No, Father," I
said. "Nobody passes through the Waig at night."
He reached for his roll of
tobacco and hithced himself up in the chair.
"She is very
beautiful, Father."
"Was she afraid of
Labang?" My father had not raised his voice, but the room seemed to
resound with it. And again I saw her eyes on the long curving horns and the arm
of my brother Leon around her shoulders.
"No, Father, she was
not afraid."
"On the way---"
"She looked at the
stars, Father. And Manong Leon sang."
"What did he
sing?"
"---Sky Sown with
Stars... She sang with him."
He was silent again. I
could hear the low voices of Mother and my sister Aurelia downstairs. There was
also the voice of my brother Leon, and I thought that Father's voice must have
been like it when Father was young. He had laid the roll of tobacco on the
windowsill once more. I watched the smoke waver faintly upward from the lighted
end and vanish slowly into the night outside.
The door opened and my
brother Leon and Maria came in.
"Have you watered
Labang?" Father spoke to me.
I told him that Labang was
resting yet under the barn.
"It is time you
watered him, my son," my father said.
I looked at Maria and she
was lovely. She was tall. Beside my brother Leon, she was tall and very still.
Then I went out, and in the darkened hall the fragrance of her was like a
morning when papayas are in bloom.
- Maria discovered the peculiarities of the life in Nagrebcan as opposed to their life in the city where she met and fell in love with Leon.
- We should respect and be aware of the culture of everyone. We should accept that we all have different culture and beliefs.
- Respecting elders in the family or in the society is commendable.
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