OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology Page 19

  Sitting with him there up on the hill in the sunlight, the biting flies were at my hands and feet, and I swatted at them while we talked. He said that before he could teach me to hunt properly, I had to have the Little-Man taken from me.

  “Today, you think you killed Civet. You did not. He gave you his life. So you took his death as well.”

  I told him I didn’t understand. The flies were distracting me, though they didn’t bother Fletcher.

  “When a thing, whether fish, or bird, or beast, gives his life, he also gives his death. The death must be spoken for, or it will always look for a chance for vengeance.”

  I slapped a biting fly. “Even flies?”

  “No. You do not understand. Listen to me. When a thing gives its life. Chooses to give it. In sacrifice. Civet gave you his death. You are a man, so his death is a man for you. A Little-Man that waits for you, waits for a chance to pierce you like he was pierced by your arrow.”

  “Where did it go?”

  “I put him in the tree. You will learn to do this.”

  “Why?”

  He looked at me with those eyes. I stopped slapping the flies. Under those eyes I felt like a fly myself. He could just swat me down, and my death would take me away just like that. It would mean nothing to either of us.

  “I understand,” I said slowly, because I did. This pleased him.

  We talked for a while. He spoke slowly, in a gravelly voice. I asked him about the tree. He smiled and touched it, both of his dry dark hands clasped around the rough grey bole before him.

  “Many deaths live in this tree. Fletcher before me filled it with deaths. And Fletcher before him. It is full of deaths, this lauan. You will fill it with your deaths when you return from the hunt. And one day, if it is your fate, you will know a Little-Man has come to a youngster, and you will teach that one to put his deaths into this tree.”

  “Do all the hunters do this?”

  “No, only the Fletcher.”

  “Why?”

  “Why should flies matter? Come. Before the day is over, we must plant a panaka-vine.”

  Everyone knew what the panaka-vine was for. “To make a bow?”

  “Yes.”

  “For who?”

  “Who do you think? Your mother?”

  “But it will take years to grow!”

  “Of course. And when you are ready, it will be ready.”

  #

  The air is better outside the dormitory. You can hear the forest awaken, before the sawmill begins. Out on the edge of the forest where the yellow earth is carved deep by the rain, the air is moist, and rich with the smell of soil. They are building again. This means they are first tearing down. Clearing.

  Soon the yellow-cap men will come out of the mess-hall and start up the great yellow machines, but for now the rhythm of the birds and the hissing of the crickets and the cicadas and tree-frogs weaves around me. The music swells and fades like a vast pair of lungs, breathing in sleep. My heart stirs with their song, and I feel the spirit of Leopard-Cat still there, crouched in the darkness of my chest.

  I breathe deep the musty scent, and catch a whiff of pig, reminding me of why I’m out here.

  Balthazar the cook gives me a two-handled stock pot, deep and heavy, filled with tailings and mash for the pigs. His back hurts him as he leans out of the back door and lowers it down to me. He complains, grinding his golden teeth as I take the pot off his hands. The dogs under the kitchen floor get up and follow me, but not all the way to the fence. I don’t think they like the smell of pig. I don’t, either, but it is better than diesel-smoke, which robs the body of its strength.

  I look around, but nobody is watching. Behind a board by the sty I have a cracker-tin. Inside I keep some money and my cigarillos. I can’t keep them in the dormitory, they get stolen, so I keep them here with some dried meat and a fire-piston. Only I feed the pigs, so my secret is safe, even the other tin, the new one. Before I dump out the pig-swill I light a cigarillo from the piston’s burning punk and blow the smoke into the roof of the sty so it doesn’t show in the mill-windows.

  The smell of tobacco wakes the pigs. They come running up, tails and ears bobbing, their little black eyes hungry. They remind me of someone, but before I can think who, Chelo calls me. He is calling me up the hill. I point to the stock pot with my chin. He shakes his head. He looks angry. No. He looks worried. He hunches forward and begins to run down the hill to me with little quick steps, his hands out, jiggling in the early light. He has grown fat here, in the mill camp. His chin wobbles. I know who I was thinking of, now. But that thought makes me worried, and I do not laugh. I stub out the cigarillo and pick up the pot as he reaches me.

  “Did you hear about Raul, big-brother?”

  “The foreman?”

  “He is in the infirmary, getting bandaged up.”

  I chuckle. “Did he cut off his pee-pee?”

  “No, big-brother, I am serious. He has been beaten.”

  The pigs are pushing each other aside to get at the peelings. “Who by?”

  “Villagers, he thinks. It was dark. He was locking up and saw people in the shed.”

  “Does he know who?”

  “No, big-brother. It was dark.”

  He calls me big-brother now and sometimes I call him little-brother, just like the villagers do. But it upsets me. More than Raul being hit would upset me, I know. Raul is a liar and a thief. I tell Chelo I suspect he has been selling the yellow-caps’ things to the villagers and maybe this time he was cheating them.

  “Is he hurt?” I ask.

  “Not much. They hit him on the face. But they took everything.”

  “Everything in the shed?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re lucky, then.”

  “Big-brother?”

  “No work today. Not until they replace what was stolen.”

  Chelo grins and snorts with laughter. More than ever, he looks like a pig. I am afraid for him. Run, little-brother. Run away. But he does not.

  #

  I never took a wife. I don’t regret it. Not now. But for a long time, I did.

  Seven years it took to make my bow. Fletcher and I tended the vine and made it grow into the right shape. When he and I hunted together, we would always go check on my vine before going to the hill to fill the spirit-tree. I had learned to make the Little-Man without kampar-leaf. I could feel each death in me. I had learned how to keep them in place so they would do me no more harm than the biting flies and I learned how to put them into the tree.

  But the days became harder. We had to walk further, then, to hunt. There were more villagers coming, and they often went into the forest, chasing away game with their boots and their rifles and their stupidity.

  Sometimes the villagers would come to the longhouse. Not often, but often enough that they learned the trade words: one, two, three, rice, knife, saltfish, yam, pork, cassava, taro, gold, glass, venison. Words like that. At first they had little to trade except gold coins and gold teeth. They were a poor people, and their hair was red and brittle because they were hungry and had nothing but millet.

  Later on, they had meat again because they brought their black buffalo from the down-lands. But before, during the hungry time, during those first years while I was waiting for the vine to grow, the down-landers were at war. The warriors of the other country, the big country in the north, had killed them with great machines like dragonflies, and the villagers were afraid to go down to their old lands or to clear fields to raise cattle on.

  Chelo learned their tongue. He told me they were poor because there were too many of them to live in the village, and not enough for everyone to eat. They were poor hunters. We traded meat with them, because they were so bad at getting it themselves. That way, I gained a good steel knife that I used to make my bow. They said it was “steel from the legs of the sledge that moves itself.” Now I know they mean “steel from the springs of a truck,” but then I did not understand.

  When I cut the vin
e and made my bow, I made it alone in the woods. I made several bows in the seven years before that. Each was better than the last, Fletcher said, but only the last one mattered. This bow was made from only one piece. It was cut with only one knife, and Fletcher warned me that if I should break it, or break the knife in making it, that I should never make another. That is how the Little-Men tell us our fate. Fate is for only one man at a time.

  That year, I almost took a wife. Or I should say she almost took me. Living with Fletcher, I did not go with the girls like the other boys did. So when it came time for me to take up my new bow, I had no woman to make the patum, the wrist-guard, from her hair. Yalai made mine and she came to me when I was alone with the knife and the bow was almost finished. Her footfalls were quiet, but not timid, and she kept her eyes high. I put down the bow and she knelt in front of me, tied on the patum to see if it fit. It did, and she laughed at her cleverness. “You must keep it now,” she said and went away smiling. The strength of her spirit warmed my heart.

  Yalai was always the only one for me, and I courted her with gold, but I did not win her over. We ran out of time for that.

  #

  Chelo and I do not want to be drawn into some other kind of work, so when Foreman tells us we are not working today, we go up onto the hill to watch the yellow-caps bring down a big lauan tree. When the charges go off, there is a flash of fire that fades before a huge crack like thunder shakes the air around us. Every bird for as far as the eye can see rises up into the air at once. It looks as if leaves from every tree are falling up into the sky. For a second, the whole forest holds its breath.

  Fletcher used to say that Death comes with every breath. Every time we breathe out, the breath-spirit waits for a sign from Death. If we do not die, we breathe again. And again. And again. But one day, Death nods, and the breath-spirit leaves forever. I waited for the forest to breathe again.

  “Was that one of them?”

  I know what he means. “A spirit-tree? No. No Little-Men in that one.”

  The tree starts to fall. Its shaft is perfectly straight, shattered on one side from the dynamite. I think of a feather, drifting softly down to the forest floor. But when it strikes a lesser tree, there is the shimmer of splinters flying, then the sound of smashing and screaming of wood. The sound makes me shudder.

  The cracking and shifting dies at last and the drone of chainsaws begins, great flies buzzing in the woods. We turn away.

  “Hey you. You guys. Hey!” says a voice from behind. It is Tommy Dos Santos, from our work-gang. He is the only down-lander in the camp, tall and yellow-skinned. We watch him approach and say nothing.

  “Raul told me to find you,” he says, out of breath, when he comes close. I’ll never get used to how the villagers smell. Sour and bitter. Fletcher used to think it was from eating beef and palm-oil. But we all eat the same now, out of cans. Tommy still smells like a villager.

  “There’s going to be some company-men,” he says.

  “You mean more yellow-caps?”

  “No, big men. VEE EYE PEAS. Foreigners. From the head office.”

  “Why are they coming here?” said Chelo. I was worried, too.

  “I don’t know. Maybe they want to see what’s going on.”

  Chelo wrinkles his brow, but I am curious. “Why did Raul send you to tell us this, Tommy?”

  He has the goodness to look embarrassed. “He wanted me to say that you are not to talk about what happened last night.”

  “You mean we are not to let them know he let the shed get robbed.”

  “He didn’t let it. They beat him.”

  I say nothing.

  “Besides,” says Tommy, “it’s Boss who says don’t tell. He doesn’t want the Company Men to be worried.”

  They must be important, then, if Boss is also afraid of them.

  “You’ve told us, then,” I say. I suspect something. I say, “You want to stay? I have smokes.”

  He looks tempted. I think it might be him who had been stealing my cigarillos, but he doesn’t give away enough in his face for me to be sure.

  “No, I need to get back. You should get back, too. They need people to help with the visit.”

  “Not me,” said Chelo, and looks up to me for confirmation.

  I don’t give it. “I think I will come. I would like to see these VEE EYE PEAS,” I say.

  Chelo puts a sulking face on, like the boy he will always be. “You can stay, Chelo,” I say to him. Stay, little-brother. Please stay.

  “No, I want to see, too,” he says, lying.

  I shrug.

  #

  Fletcher only hunted with arrows, and he forbade I should use my knife. I was not allowed spear or club or any weapon. Only arrows, and only those arrows that were made by Fletcher.

  Hunting became very bad after I had my bow. The villagers had taken far too much game and we had to make a long trek every day. There was trouble, then, among our tribe. Some wanted to move the longhouse up past the Spirit-Tree Hill, closer to where the game was. Some wanted to hunt the villagers, and to chase them from the forest.

  Fletcher would not say one way or another. I did as he did, and remained silent.

  One day, as we rested in his hut, Fletcher said “If the tribe goes upland, we will find other tribes, other villages, and we will soon have to go upland again. And again. Then we will reach the green mountains where game is sparse. In your life, maybe your child’s life, we will be gone. We need to stay where we are. But if we fight the villagers, they will soon hunt us with rifles.” A long time he thought about this. All night and into morning.

  The next evening he announced to all the people in the longhouse that he and myself would hunt Pig together, just the two of us, and there would be a feast for everyone afterwards, because we would bring back the game that had gone away.

  Every night, for seven days, he told his wives to cook yams on the embers so they became sweet to taste and sweet to smell. We went over Spirit-Tree Hill to the plateau and found a run where a great old boar had been rooting. He put the yams on a banana leaf on the ground and every day we checked that they had been eaten and placed them much closer to the longhouse.

  “When hunting Pig, you must draw your prey to the place where you will kill him,” he said, “because the Little-Man of Pig is different, and will help us. They are closer to men than other prey.”

  On the seventh night, Fletcher’s wives led the dancing, and they asked the bush-spirits to guide us. On the eighth day, we kept the yams with us and we dug a pit down near the village, where the villagers hunted. He showed me how to knot the bark of the panaka-vine into rope and from rope into a net strong enough to hold Pig. He told me this was an up-lander net. Down-landers only made nets for catching fish.

  “The up-landers are good hunters, but they are foolhardy. When they hunt Pig with the arrow, too often the hunter is killed. Pig will hold on to his life until he has put his death into you. Then he will tear you open and take his death back. Unless you hit him just right, an arrow will not kill him, and he will not give you time for a second.”

  I looked down into the pit. It was muddy, and it looked like any pig that fell in would get out easily. “So how shall we kill him when he comes? With a stone?”

  “No, you must use the arrow.”

  “So we will shoot him from here? That does not seem right. It will make him angry.”

  “Only with the arrow. But here is how it will be done: without a bow. The bow will bring the death only to you. You must not use a bow with Pig.”

  He did not explain more. Instead, he sat me down on the other side of the track with the yams between us.

  We waited for Pig. Quietly, so quietly I could barely hear him, he spoke while we waited. “Today’s hunt is different. We will not take a Little-Man to the tree. Instead, we will make him work for us.”

  We waited, listening for the racket Pig makes when he comes through the thicket. Nobody is bigger than Pig, and he moves without fear and, so, wit
hout caution.

  “Pig’s death is great,” he continued after a while, “almost as great as a man’s. It is greater than any of the Little-Men who now frighten game.”

  “But it is the villagers that frighten the game,” I said to Fletcher.

  He smiled. “But the game stays away because the Little-Men crowd the air around here. They swarm like biting-flies, without purpose, chasing away others of their kind or driving them mad, and drawing their enemies. Pig will clear the Little-Men away. That is how Pig dies. Then the game will come back.”

  “Pig too?”

  “No, Pig will never come again to where he was killed. He is too wise for that. Kill him, and you drive him away forever.”

  When Pig did come, the ropes bound his legs, and the netting wrapped him tight. It took all our strength to drag him out. Fletcher showed me how to kneel on his shoulder and to push the arrow into the vessel in his neck. All the while, Pig screamed like a child being burned alive. It was the loudest scream I have ever heard in my life. My ears hurt with the screaming, even after Pig’s last blood drained out, taking his death with him. Fletcher told me this is why you must bleed a pig. To let the death out, or it will stay there and try to get into you. It is the way of Pig, to always try to put his death in you before it takes him.

  “He is so loud. I wish he would stop.”

  “No you don’t!” he said, grinning, “The screaming chases the Little-Men. Nothing is stronger against them!”

  And for a while, the game did return and the villagers stayed away. But I never saw Pig again this side of Spirit-Tree Hill.

  #

  Emmanuel the houseboy is missing, ever since last night. Balthazaar swears he was in on the robbery, but I can’t believe it. Emmanuel is a calm man, young, and slight of build. When we left the longhouse he was half my height and he grew taller but not strong. There is no strength in him to swing a club, no fire in his heart to want to.