Give Them This Day Their ABCs

God have mercy on the penniless ignorant whose emptiness builds the greedy liars’ altars.

It’s a not-so-unsolved mystery. How the goat, their Ticket To Salvation, ended up like that. A story that anyone could piece together, but no one can tell.

These are Nena’s thoughts as she ponders on her Lola Marcelina’s blood-stained blusa. The stains were no mystery. It was the goat’s blood. But how it ended up like that in a place like Lonoy, where every one knew each one and kept to each other’s own business or property, what happened is A Not-So-Unsolved Mystery.

October in Lonoy is poised and balmy. The days are spelled with monsoons and a forgivingly warm sun. The afternoons are dreamy. Not cold. Not hot. But the air these days is filled with Something Serious.

In this dreamy afternoon in a day like any day, Marcelina, the hilot, looks for her missing goat throughout the barrio. Nena, her granddaughter, is at home, weaving the seventh of the fifty banig which are to be picked up by the contratista the following week. Nena is a seventeen year-old whose dreams of getting a degree in Literature has to wait until when Kuya can afford it.

Kuya is Ondoy, a nineteen year-old Maritime student, who the family expects to graduate this year. The family is Nena, Ondoy, and Lola Marcelina. The main characters in almost all of the stories and poems her eternity at home weaving banig had afforded her to weave in her head. Her manuscripts are the mental notes of the everyday any day events, the very significance of which lay in its being mundane, the titles Capitalized, as the English adviser once marked on the first draft she submitted for their highschool paper. Etched in some corner of her circuitous memory, waiting to be written with the words and styles she is yet to learn in college.

When Kuya Can Afford It.

Mother and father are the strangers whose pictures hanging on the wall are their Lone Remembrance. The solitary evidence that Lola Marcelina was really their grandmother, and that they weren’t just adopted from one of the disgrasyadas the hilot had once helped. The disgrasyadas were the unwilling bunkwarmers of the uniformed gentlemen who had been encamped in the hacienda since God-knows-when, her Lola once told her, who could not bear to kill but could neither love the uniformed bastards’ spawns.

She is immersed in these thoughts when she hears a commotion coming from the neighbors.

Nong Sito, in his panic, has stumbled and stamped on her Lola’s santan. He rushes to his wife, Nang Turning, pale and gasping for breath. Three armed men in fatigue, smelling heavily of alcohol, had accused him of spying on them while he was tending to his carabao. Aiming their rifles at the poor old man, these so-called gentlemen shouted ‘Run!’, and so he ran, as fast as he could, leaving his carabao behind.

Meanwhile, Something Serious brews in the town hall. The ranchero’s contratista, standing on a platform up front, has declared that a new corporation now owned the entire 816 hectares of pandan land spanning the three adjoining barrios. In his hand are crisp white documents supposedly proving the new corporation’s ownership. Mumbles of disagreement drones throughout the town hall, but is immediately hushed as a troop of gentlemen in fatigue swarm all over.

These men have been off-and-on stationed in the hacienda for close to two decades now, supposedly to get rid of the barrio's uplands of insurgents. And with them in that assembly, it was stupid to argue with the contratista, as anyone smart and feisty enough to talk about the land reform law was dubbed as an insurgent.

With heavy grunts, the farmers walked out of the town hall, mumbling Something Serious among themselves. This grunting and mumbling procession of irate land-tillers is what greets Marcelina as she walks towards the new munisipyo.

Perhaps the stubborn goat went grazing by the grounds of the adjacent old churchyard again.

The goat isn’t lost. It can’t be lost. Not now, when Ondoy is only one semester shy from getting his diploma. Not now, when the contratista has finally agreed to take it for P700 – enough to pay for Ondoy’s misalenyos, the entrans pi to his school, which was due in two days.

The old woman makes a turn for the churchyard. But instead of the goat, she finds a troop of dark men in fatigue, their rifles slanted against the moss-covered old church wall, drinking Vino Viagro and munching on, judging from the meaty aroma, some kind of Grilled Whatever. She drew back, not wanting to catch attention to her self, lest she be branded a spy for disrupting their good time.

She spots Turning by the market across. Her neighbor was also on a hunt for their carabao.

Tired of the fruitless search, the two women decide to call it a day. They take a shortcut through the old munisipyo across the old churchyard, where Marcelina’s hunt ends with a sorry reunion.

Lodged atop the rusty gate’s tines, resembling a cannibal’s trophy, was her stubborn goat’s head.

The stubborn goat was their Ticket to Salvation. The living sacrifice they had to offer in the contratista’s altar in exchange for his benevolent offer of P700, for Ondoy’s education. But now, it was gone.

Now, salvation will just have to be postponed until God knows when, where, and how they can afford it. And Nena’s stories and poems will just have to wait.

Until God Knows When.