OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology Read online

  “Father Clemente! Senseless fool! Rise from your folly!” Father Julian shouted in anger as Father Melensio attempted to grab hold of the young priest’s arms. “Be not the blind that leads the blind!”

  “My brothers…” Father Clemente hummed, his face still buried in the wet, icy sand. “I have found my peace in the worship of this child. Leave me to my fate. Here, take my robe. I am no more the shepherd of your church than you are the representative of heaven’s grace! Here, take it!” Fathers Julian and Melensio inevitably left the throng after much entreaty, their heads bowed in prayer for forgiveness for the soul of Father Clemente. The crowd cheered.

  A quarter of an hour passed, and as the throng continued to swell as the tale of the God-Child reached the farthest ends of the village, the young Father Clemente rose from his posture of adoration and addressed the masses. “Hear me, all of you! What we have just witnessed is undoubtedly a sign and a wonder from God! And it will be a sin if we let this miracle pass us by without our neighbors hearing it. I shall leave now to tell the good news to our friends living at the farthest limits of the island. Stay with the child, protect him from harm. I shall be with you soon!”

  “Leave? Why are you leaving us?” an old woman hollered. “Stay with us and let us all worship the child!”

  “Yes, stay with us, Father Clemente!” the throng answered in unison. “We need a shepherd to guide our way as the child is yet to grow and mature! We need your guidance and holiness to assure us!”

  “You need assurance? Isn’t the miracle performed by the child enough to make you believe? You are witnesses today of a glory that is beyond words! What other signs from heaven do you need?”

  A middle-aged man whom Father Clemente once reprimanded for his ideas of insurrection stepped forward and addressed the young priest and the crowd. “I am Baraba. You all know me as the man whom the Spanish colonial authorities have jailed for treason. I have escaped from Fort Santiago. I am a wanted man, and in my hands no Spaniard is safe. I am a progeny of the lineage of fishermen who have harvested these depths untold centuries ago. I was raised in my humble home with the tale of the God-Child pouring from the lips of my mother and her mother before her. Yes, we have stood witness to a miracle today—performed by the one whom we have waited for all our lives. The prophecy stands true today—that this child will free us from the grip of our colonizers, from the poverty they have forced upon us! Who will stand by me, in the name of our Child-Savior, to fight against these marauders? The Walled City has by now risen up in rebellion against the church and its foreign king! The Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan has felled many of our enemies and is now on the verge of taking back the scepter of government! Hear me! The coming of the Child-Savior is a sign that we shall be victorious! Who will fight to stop the rape of our islands? Who will join me?”

  The crowd burst in wild uproar. “I am with you, Baraba!” a young man hollered from the middle of the horde. Every man followed suit. In that coagulating swarm of seditious rage, Father Clemente raised his hands and barked, “Listen, my children! Faith in the Child-Savior promotes peace and not the sword!”

  “Promotes peace?” Baraba hollered an answer. “There is no peace for anyone as long as these metal-clad colonizers live and rule over us!” The crowd agreed.

  “Rebellion is not the answer, Baraba,” Father Clemente whispered. “If it were so, then even without the God-Child, we should’ve fought long before any of the villagers had been subjected to torture and execution! I know what the foreigners have been doing to bridle our search for peace. But peace of a heavenly kind can not be possessed by bloodshed!”

  “Well then, if you are not with us, leave our presence and the presence of our king!”

  In the tangled wake of the initial denudation of the village, Father Clemente raised his voice and hands directly beneath the star, and said, “I am a servant of the God-Child like you! Hold your peace! I shall not leave…”

  As the priest’s eyes panned along the limits of the multitude, Father Clemente felt the onrush of rumbling from the ground, a virtual trembling of the earth and sand that sounded like the charging of soldier’s boots. From a considerable distance, a platoon of Spanish soldiers armed with rifles and swords and a number of bishops garbed in blood-red garments marched underneath a banner of the Holy See and the empire of Spain.

  Father Clemente rushed to meet the army. At the frontage of the legion walked Isidro the blacksmith in regal military uniform. “Father Clemente, I see that the crowd has swelled into a huge number. What have you been up to? Have you seen the child?”

  Father Clemente muttered with a smile stained by fear, “Isidro, these people are all my parishioners. They have come far and wide to see the God-Child despite the storm. The prophecy has come true! Join us!” He looked at the platoon of soldiers beside the blacksmith. “Come, you are all welcome to see the child.”

  “You know it is against the law to amass a crowd as huge and unruly as this one. Is there anything that I should know about? And what about this child? Are you one to believe in such heresy, Father Clemente?”

  In candid excitement the young priest replied, “We have witnessed a miracle today, Isidro! From your porch, I suppose you have seen how the storm was laid dormant by the simple wave of the child’s hand! Feel the serenity, Isidro! See how he has saved countless lives! The moment we have been waiting for, the moment of our peace has finally arrived!”

  The crowd raised their voices in agreement with the priest. From where he stood, Isidro the blacksmith saw the faint glimmer of Baraba’s face among the crowd. A wanted man among the throng of heretics? They are surely planning an insurrection, Isidro silently told himself.

  “I am looking for Baraba, Father Clemente. I was told he was seen among the crowd that worshipped the newborn infant. You are aware, I presume, that he is a wanted man by the government and the Church. If you can point him out to me, then I and the soldiers will seize him and eventually leave.”

  “Baraba? The insurrecto?” Father Clemente asked, feigning knowledge of the rebel’s whereabouts. “I do not even know the man.” Amid the dark chill that plagued the early morning, sweat poured from the forehead of Father Clemente. His voice shook. “There is nothing here but an innocent child and a mass of worshippers,” the priest managed an awkward smile.

  The patronizing tone of Father Clemente’s words was enough proof of his guilt. Loathsome as it was to possess the power over life and death, Isidro the blacksmith waved his hand and four armed soldiers of the colonial regime grabbed hold of Baraba as he attempted to run to the child. The soldiers repeatedly rammed their rifle stocks into the rebel’s face and torso, nearly killing him.

  “My gratitude, Father Clemente, for leading us to the whereabouts of Baraba! A handsome payment awaits you!” the blacksmith hollered for all to hear. The crowd began to rise in protest of what they had just heard.

  “Father Clemente has betrayed us!” a young man hollered in outraged disbelief. “That’s why he wanted to leave! Let us grab him!”

  With another wave of the blacksmith’s right hand, the horde of soldiers numbering about fifty came crashing down on the throng of worshippers with their rifles and swords, shooting and hacking at anyone who crossed their path. The bishops, strutting with their crucifixes and their red robes, began chanting prayers for the salvation of the souls of the heretics. The crowd screamed and ran and fought to survive; the others rushed to the child to save him from the fury of the guards. A Spanish friar managed to snatch the infant away from his mother, who was nearly beaten to death by one of the armed sentries. At that very moment, the eye of the hurricane began to twitch and move, bringing once more a hail of water and rifts of lightning as its tail end whipped the villagers. A single wave half the height of the coconut trees that lined the shore crashed onto the screaming worshippers and soldiers, towing nearly half the dead into the menacing deep.

  Father Clemente could not believe his eyes. “Stop this insanity, Isidro!” the you
ng priest begged the blacksmith. “This is madness! Have a care for the lives of these people!”

  “Madness? You dare call this madness? You are the one who must have a care for their souls, Father Clemente!” Isidro the blacksmith mocked. “Aren’t you their shepherd? Hasn’t it been written in the canons of the Inquisitors that death by sword and fire cleanses the soul of the heretic? Why do you then prevent me from saving your flock? If there is a true savior in your midst, no doubt it is I!”

  In the flurry of death and destruction, Isidro the blacksmith threw a purse of gold coins and some gems on the hands of the young priest. “Consider this as my endowment for your kindness and gullibility, priest! That is more than enough for your parish to be well paved in marble and granite, and for your soul and mine to be saved from an eternity of damnation!”

  Death was never quite as evil as the slaughter that had happened in this faraway village. It shall, for all time, remain etched in the memory of those who had heard the tale. As the soldiers trounced upon lifeless corpses to carry out the final blow on the dying and the hapless, Isidro the blacksmith glanced at the friar who was carrying the child. At the nod of the blacksmith’s head, the friar pulled out a dagger and slit the throat of the infant, grimly and without remorse, silencing him eternally. As he trampled on the child among the rotting dead, the friar scurried back to the procession of bishops chanting hymns.

  Isidro the blacksmith shrieked in mocking laughter. “What you have witnessed as a sign and a wonder is nothing more than a fluke of nature, ignorant priest! Even the beasts of the forest can predict the lull in the eye of a storm! With all the time you possess for study and meditation, have you not read a single book on the science of the heavens? A new messiah? Behold the child! The one you worship is now reduced to a reeking, lifeless carcass left for the seagulls to feast on! See for yourself! What divinity will allow himself to die a traitor’s death? He could not even stay the murderous hand of a naïve and pathetic friar, much less the talons of a whirlwind! Stupid fool—it is finished! Your parishioners died for nothing!”

  Beyond the trail of carnage, the cock crowed a second and third time as a thick cloud ruptured in a howl of lightning and water. Father Clemente suddenly broke his silence and seized Isidro’s knife from its sheath. The priest thereafter darted mindlessly as he searched for the star that had glimmered above his head just hours ago. It was nowhere. Before Isidro the blacksmith could once more grab hold of his weapon, Father Clemente fell on the blood-soaked sand by his own hand, with the lapping kiss of a blade across his carotid, the coins of his treason swallowed up by the ravenous waters.

  At last, earth’s final roar flung a distant star into the endlessness of space, wilting mutely into a black, hollow emptiness as it suffered its final throes.

  Ondoy

  By Laura McPhee-Browne

  Join us in the small comfortable bar in Malate where we sit, you on a couch below a photo of Mao, me beside the fan, my hair dancing.

  We are here because we are working. We are on holiday, really, but it is a holiday where we sit each day on computers at desks in an air-conditioned office to gain experience as social workers, thrown toes first into the swell of the welfare sector in the Philippines.

  I am on the edge of drunk, with four San Miguels in my stomach and smoke in my throat. We talk of the people we work with, most of whom grew up in this city and who understand it like we never will. I am already feeling envious of this—I am in this country’s clutches but it will never be my own. The night is very hot. I half realize it is raining, the roof above me has started to leak, but I don’t move immediately, enjoying the slither of the water down my arm. You comment on the rage of the rain but I can’t tell the difference in the wetness here—my ears seem blocked and I can’t seem to remember what anything was like before.

  It is 2am now and we are leaving—we borrow a broken umbrella from the bar staff and giggle as we skip out into the street and the water which still buckets down, forming huge puddles that soak our feet and legs. We begin to run, I follow the jutted bones of your back down Adriatico Street and across Remedios Circle where we stop to throw away the umbrella, for it is slowing us down more than it’s worth. There are not many people out. I don’t notice this until the last street of our journey, when I see the karaoke bar near the corner is empty, though I still hear dribbles of music. Then we are home, with the biggest puddle at the front of our apartment. We wade through to the laughing security guard who tells us to be careful; that we should not be out while a typhoon is here.

  Join us again the following afternoon, with the rain still sobbing outside. We are in our wooden-beamed apartment, with dirty fluff spilling from the seams of the pillows and baked beans clinging to the chairs. I am engulfed in the greasy couch and you are curled up on a mattress on the floor. You are not well. You say it feels like tiny razors are being stabbed into your stomach, many razors at once and with sickening force. You cannot get off the toilet much and have spent the last three hours there or on the mattress, softly moaning.

  My father calls after he sees the television news and as I talk to him I watch the rain still falling in grey streamers out the splattered window. It is not interesting anymore—after less than twenty-four hours of heavy rain we are no longer wondrous of its length and strength and want it to stop so we can dry out.

  He asks how we are and I tell him how we swam across the road that morning to get food from the still bright 7 Eleven. Two smiling, friendly men had been floating past us as we navigated the cross and had helped us with their raft, but we had also dropped our bodies down into the brown swill to get ourselves over with wading arms. My father sounds tinny and distant but I can hear the crack in his voice when he tells me to take care. He says if you are sick that it might have been the water we swam through that had made you so. We are to go to the nearest hospital and get a doctor to see you.

  The hospital is a large and mostly dishevelled building across the road and down and there are hundreds of people waiting inside and out when we arrive. You are feverish now, and I am beginning to worry that you are very ill, that your skin has imbibed a terrible sickness through the brown water that has filled the streets. I help you to find a cream plastic chair and bring you water and you sit whilst I go up to the nearest white-coated man, asking him the rules of this place. He brings us through immediately and we walk past people who I know were here hours before us, through stained curtains and over sleeping children and grandparents. I try not to look into their eyes—I feel deeply how bold our white skin is.

  We wait in a makeshift hospital room held up by poles and I tell you it will be okay. The doctor who comes to see you is kind and young, she is very beautiful too. I imagine her hands feel cool on your stomach. She takes your blood and tells us that it is some kind of virus then gives you some medication to take for five days; when the water will surely have gone, down the drains and off our street. We walk back out through the corridors past the people waiting and I find I am holding my breath—some of those waiting here look so sick and I am thinking of myself and my health. There are some children playing and adults talking and many are laughing. I let this laughter fill me, for surely those who laugh cannot be so sad.

  We can go back to the apartment now, perhaps order some food to be brought to us through the flood and up the stairs to our door. We are safe. You are okay and I see that your body is loosening and your shoulders are coming back down. You take the first of the pills with the plastic cup of water and I take your hand as we walk out into the city, smiling up at the sky.

  Rescuing the Rain God

  By Kate Osias

  THE WATERS RISE. The storm continues to rage.

  If I had more time, I would tell my daughter the story behind each of my scars. I would tell her what I remember of her father; I would try to be objective. I would impart my small learnings, like how one should drink tuba with one quart water and how one should always pack mani when one travels. I would tell her more about
gods and Majarlikans and walkers and keepers and who we are in the scheme of things. I would tell her more about our sword.

  If I had known I would not return, I would have told her, on that day that I left, to live, laugh while she can, store the moments as they come. And I would have told her to be ready. Because fate and gods will damn us all.

  SILENCE SPREADS, THEN settles in the vast hall of the luklukan, as the shadowless Datu enters.

  Garbed in an intricately woven malong rawatan, she walks slowly, confidently, each step a declaration of her status and power. The weighty gold bands on her arms, her ankles, her neck; the heavy intricate crown that rests on her head; the gold dust that outlines the tattoos on her exposed limbs and neck; all of these reflect light from the large kapis windows, the glint of gold occasionally painful. Like the sun pausing at its zenith, she stills in front of the ancient, wooden throne.

  Gat Bughaw thumps a dull metal cane once. The oripun slaves fall to their knees, hiding their faces.

  A second thump, and I, Piray, a blacksmith, kneel, along with the other timawa freemen.

  A third, and the Majarlikan nobles bow low.

  The shadowless Datu proceeds to the throne. When she sits down, we stand and straighten ourselves, cotton and silks rustling against metal and skin.

  She waits while we accustom ourselves to her brilliance.

  Her voice is loud when she finally speaks; her words spoken in Salita, the language of myth and legend, the native tongue of the burnt Majarlikans; the cadence slow, so that loremasters can repeat her words in Tsino, in Bundukin, in Bisay, and in T’glog, in the various intermingled languages of heroes, of merchants, of farmers, of freemen, and of slaves.