COUNTING, OCTOBER 1950

AN EXCERPT FROM HOUSE, TREE, PERSON

PART 2

THE next afternoon, as they were repairing a sacristan’s robe for the parada, she looked at my sister Anita with her suha-shaped eyes and asked about Roldan, one of the men who accompanied father at work. That morning, Anita had just seen Carmen, Roldan’s wife, front- heavy and heaving. “They have to make do without a third man until I give birth,” Anita heard Carmen prattling to a choir of helpers sweeping the steps of the rebuilt St. Augustine Cathedral.

“Roldan has been home for seven months now. He’s a good, loyal husband…” Carmen trailed off as she fanned herself with a thin, Mama Mary paypay. Through the fan, she peered at Anita passing by.

“’Nang Carmen will be giving birth soon so she forbade ‘Nong Roldan to Papa’s trips,” my sister told my mother. “There’s no Manong Roldan, only Papa and Dodong. Just the two of them.” Mama looked at Anita calmly. After that, Anita thought none more of it. But after Mama’s death, my siblings and I learned she went a little further. Mama had sought the cousin of a distant relative who once lived in the same town Father frequented. She was told it was no secret that her husband strolled about the plaza with a young lass tied to his hip, with the loyal Dodong trailing behind. One, two, three, and a fourth, growing inside my Father’s mistress.

“She bore a child! The boy has your husband’s eyes, and his love for women. How the boy clings to his young mother’s breast like a tarsier.” This was what we heard before our mother awoke the entire neighborhood with her wailing.

I knocked on the door to my parents’ room. “Ma?” Sometimes she overslept. At odd hours of the night, light would still flicker beneath the space of her bedroom door.

“Ma?”

“Ma! Ma! Mama!”

Mother was hanging from the ceiling. I stood on the chair just beneath her and ached my limbs to untie her overhead. I dared not look at her face.

When her body came down, I untangled the many layers of cloth straining her neck. I crouched down with her and held her close, my arms wrapped around her to keep the warmth from leaving her body.

Panchito saw us like this. My father eventually took the handsewn cloth made of retaso when he got home a week later, and we never saw it again. Papa would cease his travels and stay home to take care of us, eventually working at a soda plant until he died in his 70s.

Through the years, his handsomeness faded until it was apparent that he was much lonelier than he liked to admit. Papa never remarried.

It was much, much later when I found out that Segundo had been waiting for me nearby when they took my mother’s body away. He must have seen me in house clothes, crying for God.

***