Tree of Smoke (10 page)

“No services until Sunday morning.” He only had to tell Pilar, and everyone would know.

“All right.”

“We’ll meet with three other datus. It’s because of the missionary—do you remember the one who disappeared?”

“Damulog missionary.”

“They think he’s been found.”

“Hurt?”

“Dead. If he’s the one.”

Pilar crossed herself. She was middle-aged, a widow, with many relatives, both Muslim and Catholic, and took good care of him.

He said, “Please bring my tennis shoes.”

A gray day, but he wore his straw hat as he hiked the ten kilometers down the red earthen road to Basig. The wind came up, the stalks shook and shuddered, also the palms, also the houses. An infestation of tiny black beetles numerous as raindrops roamed the gusts and sailed past. Children playing on the paths whooped when they saw him and ran away. In Basig he made for the market square, speculating as always that life would improve if he lived it here in a town. But the town was Muslim, and they wouldn’t have a church in it.

Before he reached the market the Basig datu and the two datus from Tanday, a village in the hills—men nearly sixty, all three of them, in ragged jeans or khakis, in conical hats like his own, one bearing a long spear—joined him on either side, and now in the safety of town the children cried softly from the shade of thatched awnings, “Pa-dair, Padair”—Father, Father…The four men marched together into the café to kill time before the arrival of Mayor Luis. Carignan had rice with a dish of goat’s meat, and instant coffee. The others had rice and squid.

Carignan bought a pack of Union cigarettes and got one going, and if these Muslims didn’t like it, too bad. But they asked him for some, and they all four sat smoking.

Mayor Luis had sent word last week that the people in possession of the corpse and its effects had been told, already, what identifying features to look for. The datus had said they’d return as far as Basig with the verdict—was this the missing American missionary?—on Tuesday. Carignan believed today was already Thursday. It didn’t matter.

The jeepney from Carmen arrived covered with passengers and shed them like a gigantic husk. The mayor from Damulog would be on it.

People walked by the café’s door and past the windows and looked in, but nobody entered. A toothless drunken old man sat alone at another table and mumbled a song to himself. Quite different music came from out back, where a few kids squatted around a U.S. Army crank radio. The clearest station came from Cotabato. Months-old American pop tunes. They went for the hot beat or the sad ballads.

Petite and potbellied Mayor Luis of Damulog came into the café smiling, clapping his hands, behaving like his own entourage. He joined them and surveyed the scene, such as it was.

“Did you ask them?” he said in English.

“No.”

Speaking Cebuano, Luis said to Saliling, the oldest, the man with the spear: “The people who found the dead man at the Pulangi River.”

“Yes.”

“We told them to look for the shoes. We sent a drawing. And the label of the shirt. We sent a drawing.”

Saliling said, “They have only bones. And the ring from the finger.”

“On his left hand? A gold ring?”

“They didn’t say.”

“This hand. The left hand.”

“No. They didn’t say.”

“Did they look at the teeth? He has metal placed in his teeth. Did you tell them?” He jabbed his finger at his own mouth and asked Carignan, “Do you have? Can you show them?”

Carignan opened wide and jutted a view of his molars at the three datus, who seemed to enjoy this display.

“Did they find metal in the teeth?” the mayor asked.

Saliling said, “We will look for these kind of teeth. But there is a problem in our barangay we want to talk about.”

“I am not the datu of your barangay. You are the datu. This is your position, not my position.”

“Our schoolhouse needs repairs. The roof keeps out the sun, but not the rain.”

“He wants money,” the mayor said to Carignan in English.

“I can speak Cebuano,” Carignan said.

“I know. I just like to talk when these Muslims can’t understand. I am a Christian, sir. Seven Day. I am Seven Day. But we are all one family against these Muslims.”

“This lost missionary is Seventh-Day too, isn’t he?”

“Yes. It’s very sad for the town of Damulog.”

“Give the man fifty pesos.”

“Do you think I have fifty pesos? I’m not rich!”

“Tell him you’ll pay it later.”

Luis said to Saliling, “How much to repair the school?”

“Two hundred.”

“I can give twenty. Not now. Next week.”

“The boards are expensive. At least one hundred fifty for the boards.”

“I have boards in Damulog. If you need boards, I can give you boards.”

“Some boards and some funds.”

“Twenty-five in funds.”

Saliling spoke with the others. Luis looked to Carignan, but the priest shook his head. He didn’t recognize the dialect.

“Ten boards of at least ten feet,” Saliling said in Cebuano. “The thick ones.”

“Yes.”

“How much will you give in funds?”

“Forty is the limit. I’m not pretending.”

“Fifty.”

“All right. Fifty pesos in funds, and ten thick boards. Next week.”

The datus went into conference. The missus of the café arrived, a hunched, worried woman bringing two bread rolls for the priest, also a metal spoon, though he’d already eaten his meal with his fingers like the others. On the belief that white men liked bread, not rice, she always headed for the market for rolls when he appeared in town.

Saliling said, “It’s fine if you wait for one week. Right now we have to travel back to Tanday, and then over the hills to the Pulangi River.”

“They haven’t gone yet to the river!” Luis said in English.

“I understand.”

“These Muslim people are slow. They enjoy wasting our time.”

The missionary had been missing since before the rainy season. This news of a corpse had come over a month ago.

The datu Saliling said, “We’ll meet here in two weeks. Or we’ll come to Damulog. We will bring an answer, and you will bring the lumber and the funds.”

“Not two weeks—one week, please! Mrs. Jones is waiting. Poor Mrs. Jones!”

The men spoke in the other dialect among themselves. “No,” the datu said, “it can’t be done in a week. It’s far and the people of the Pulangi River aren’t trustworthy. They aren’t Muslims. They aren’t Christians. They have other gods.”

Carignan felt bad for Mrs. Jones, the missionary’s wife. He had a thought: “Maybe we can go along, and arrange to bring back the body to Damulog.”

Luis said, “I’m willing to travel with you as far as Tanday, if we both go. As for crossing the Pulangi River—no. I don’t want to die. I want to live long.”

“All right.”

“Will you go with them, Father?”

“Yes.”

“By yourself?”

“If I’m with them, I’m not by myself.”

They agreed: the datus would find Luis in Damulog in two weeks. Luis ordered a San Miguel. “I like the Catholic restaurants,” he told his companions. “In our Seven Day we get no beer. It’s not healthy.” The missus urged on them some tidbits, meat from a large jar. Townspeople clustered either side of the café’s doorway, staring with open mouths.

“I can get avocado,” the missus told Carignan. “Come for lunch and I’ll make you the avocado milkshake.”

He had a bite of carabao meat tenderized in spices, incredibly gamy. He nodded his appreciation, and now they were bringing out a whole plate of it for him. It wasn’t bad. But the aftertaste was too much like a carabao’s smell. Voices from the throng at the door—“Pa-dair, Pa-dair, Pa-dair.”

Judas went out and hanged himself.

“I will say a prayer for everyone,” the priest called to them.

Saliling got to his feet and charged at the intruders. He stomped his bare foot, shook his spear. The group backed away a few paces.

The missus began striking the old drunk at the next table with her limp hand, yelling unintelligibly. He seemed oblivious.

“Hah, your followers want to confess,” Luis said.

Judas threw himself from a high place and his belly broke on the stones. He wondered if these people, merely surviving, knew anything of guilt. The gnarled mahogany creatures hobbling here to confess themselves. He left with the others, the datus shoving the villagers aside. “I am going to pray. Everyone must pray. Pray to the saints in Heaven.”

He would go with the two datus to their barangay, called Tanday. There was no jeep to Tanday and, after a point, no road. They would walk. Carignan understood only that the people holding the missionary’s remains lived by the Pulangi River. How long a journey to find them, he couldn’t guess. The datus said twenty-five kilometers, but it was silly of him to ask, because how could they know? Out of courtesy they offered an estimate: two days’ hiking. The datus insisted they leave right away in order to make Tanday by nightfall.

They walked together until noon, as far as Maginda. There the datus accomplished the kindness of borrowing for him a horse, no bigger than a pony, with a wooden saddle on its back. Preceded by the three old men, the meager animal lurched beneath Carignan’s weight for a few kilometers, to the bottom of the hill below the barangay of Tanday, and then he had to get off and climb the path behind it as the dark came down over the endless folds of the low mountains.

The pathway up the hill was wide and in that respect easy, hacked clear by the villagers, but it was steep, and he was winded. He’d grown too old for adventures—how old? Sixty, almost. He couldn’t remember exactly. Halfway along they heard a low whistle, and a fourth escort joined them. “Good evening, Pa-dair,” he said in English. “I will accompany you.” The young man identified himself as Robertson, a nephew of Saliling. Robertson’s face was invisible in the evening glow.

Thoughts of Judas, images, the monk, the dream, had come back to him throughout the day. The monk in the dream with the silver cloud for a face. Maybe he could find someone to interpret it for him.

They made the crest and went to the schoolhouse for the night. The men brought him a supper of sticky white rice and a green plant they called hwai-an, and soon, because the night was black, there was nothing to do but turn in. He lay on his side on the wooden floor like the others, without a mat or cover. He couldn’t sleep. The air smelled different from that of his bedroom by the stinking river near Basig, the schoolroom was stuffy, the huge leaves of banana plants crowded the windows, and even the lizards clucking in the eaves sounded foreign. Near midnight it started raining steadily, harder and harder, until the storm made as if to shatter the metal roof, drowning them first with sound, threatening to drown them very soon with water. The drops drove themselves through the seams of the corrugated sheets, and Carignan pulled two desks together and crawled underneath for protection. Villagers with even leakier roofs crept into the pitch-dark schoolroom until they must have made nearly two dozen. When the downpour quit, he could hear it roaring down off the hillside for hours.

He woke at dawn having scarcely slept and stepped out to relieve his bladder against the side of the schoolhouse. After the night of rain it was cool, without a breath of wind. At this hour the land seemed to lie open, ready to give up its secret.

What offering would I lay at the foot of the cross of the thief?

He passed gas, and some children peeking at him from around the corner pursed their lips and imitated the sound and laughed.

What consolation at the foot of his death?

Without preliminaries or farewells the three datus came out and resumed the journey. They carried nothing, so he carried nothing. Although they went barefoot, he wore his Keds.

They navigated a slick path downward to a long ridge and stumped along it toward another mountain. One edge of the world turned red and the sun came rolling over on them, burning away the vapors below and seeming to fashion from the mist itself a grander and more complicated vista full of hills and ravines and winking creeks and vegetation tinted not just the innumerable values of green, but also silver, black, purple. They stopped at a barangay of several huts on the adjoining hill and had native coffee and each a bowl of rice. Saliling spoke with the headman in the Bisayan dialect, and Carignan heard them discussing some gunfire they’d heard across the valley just this morning. “He has warned us of some fighting ahead,” Robertson said, and Carignan said, “I heard him say it.” They began hiking again.

They came down the other side of the mountain onto a wide, level trail beaten smooth by carabao hooves. Gradually the way narrowed until Carignan had to draw his arms to his chest in order to keep from being savaged by thorns on either side. Saliling led the march, the tip of his spear scraping the leaves overhead and knocking last night’s rain into Carignan’s face. The two others crouched behind the priest. Suddenly Saliling left the trail and lunged into a sea of elephant grass through which, somewhere in the region of their feet, traveled a six-inch-wide path. Now they had the sun bearing down from overhead and yet, beneath their progress, a thick red mud that seemed alive, clinging to Carignan’s shoes, building up on the soles, clambering up over the sides, engulfing him up to the ankles. In their bare feet the others ambled over it easily, while Carignan struggled along among them with his tennis shoes encased in red cakes as heavy as concrete. He took off his Keds lest they be stolen by the stuff, and joined them by the laces and dangled them from his fist.

As they left the mesa and descended toward a creek deep in a ravine, Carignan despairing of yet another descent, yet another climb, there came a faint crackling from somewhere behind the next peak, and they fell under the shadow of a mass of smoke in the sky ahead of them, a black column rising straight upward in the windless day. There shall be blood and fire and palm trees of smoke—from Joel, wasn’t it? Incredible how the English came back. And the scripture too, back from the darkness. Joel, yes, the second chapter, usually translated “pillars of smoke,” but the original Hebrew said “palm trees of smoke.”