A Son is Born

Manuel E. Arguilla
1937
 Chapter I

It was the year the locusts came and ate the young rice fields, leaving only raw stumps
that had to be plowed under again to make way for a second planting. Harvest time
came late that year and far into the month of November we cut the hay in the fields.

Those were long nights, cutting the hay in the fields under the cold white moon, in the
month of November. My father, as soon as the last head of grain was safely in the barn,
left every day for Santiago to build the house of Don Anchong, whose son Emilio was
arriving from America at Christmas time. His son had gone long years ago to America
and there he made a great fortune, married a woman beautiful beyond words, and
now he was coming home.

My father said when he left in the early morning, before the sun came up over the
Katayaghan hills, “Today, you cut the hay in the south field.” He spoke to my mother
who was putting on the bamboo shelf the big wooden platter that held what was left
of our breakfast of rice fried in pig’s fat.

I was gulping down the last, sweet mouthful of ginger water Mother had boiled, and
Berting, my younger brother, held in his first half a cake of brown sugar.

“Give it back to me, Berting,” said my mother, extending a hand for the cake of sugar.
“Yes, take a bite. Take one now and give the rest to me,” said my mother, while my
father went down the ladder, his box of tools across his shoulder, the clink of the chisels
and the files and the plane blades and the hammer and nails inside coming up to our
ears.

“Ana,” said my father from the ground below, “you heard what I said? Let the boys cut
the hay in the south field today. Tonight when I come home we will cut the hay in the
long field near Ca’ Istac’s in the west. Berting, do not forget to water your carabao in
the Waig in the afternoon. Let him stay in the water till nightfall and see that he does
not fight with the big bull of Lacay’ Inggo.”

The clink of chisels and plane blades and nails inside my father’s tool box became lost
in the distance. The hens under the kitchen clucked to the hungry chicks. In the yard
under the camachile tree the big red rooster chased the young pullets until, screaming
and cackling and scolding, with many a frenzied flapping of their strong young wings,
they came up the ladder to take shelter in the kitchen. Beneath the ladder the red
rooster crowed proudly, three times.

With my father gone, Berting and I made a rush for the ladder, shooing away the
chickens in our way, scaring with our noise the red rooster under the stairs, much to his
annoyance.
“Baldo!” my mother called us. It was in vain. We were off, deaf to her calls, intent on the
pleasures of a day, a whole day without Father.

My mother led the carabao into the fields by the long tether of maguey rope and
drove the heavy wooden peg into the soft earth with many slow strokes of a round
piece of stone as big as my head. My mother held the stone with both hands and,
squatting before the peg, drove it hard into the soil so that our bull carabao could not
pull it out and go running after the cows.

By the railroad tracks, Bering and I played with Artemio and Inzo and Peddong. Their
Fathers had gone to work in Santiago with my father. We played tangga and cara y
cruz. We played hole-in and tangga again. By and by it was noon, the sun shone down
on our bare heads. We were as hungry as dogs.

Rice lay warm in the big wooden platter, covered with a plate, on the low table when
we got home. There was roasted eggplant and a small coconut shell dish of salted fish
seasoned with lemon juice.

Mother was not home. She was in the fields, cutting the hay. She had been cutting hay
since morning. A wide brimmed anahaw-leaf-hat shaded her from the sun and the
ends of her skirt she had gathered, pass between her legs, and tucked in at the waist in
the back.

She saw us arrive and she stood up, and I saw her wipe her face with the sleeve of her
white dress. Then she bent down again, cutting the hay that stood pale-brown and still
in the hot windless day.

His tether stretched as far as it could go, the bull carabao panted in the sun, his head
turned longingly toward the Waig where other carabaos wallowed in the cold mud. We
came home again in the evening, tired from playing, and hungry enough to eat the
wooden platter on which the rice lay white and steaming and fragrant. Mother hadn’t
fed the pig in the pen and it was squealing. It jumped up and down in its pen causing a
great clatter and it squealed so loudly that we had to stop our ears with our fingers, and
Mother went down saying the foolish beast had hurt itself.

But the pig was only hungry and when it saw Mother, it began to grunt happily and
Mother was forced to feed It then. She carried down the ladder the big black jar with
the broken lip in which she cooked the mess of tabtabocol weed and bran that the pig
liked so much. With a coconut shell she poured out the hot. Steaming mixture into the
wooden trough inside the pen and the pig started to feed so greedily that much of its
food fell out of the trough.
“Hoy, loco,” said my mother chidingly to the pig, “do not hurry like that. No one is
running after you.” She stuck her arm between the rails of the pen and scratched the
pig behind the ear and the pig became quiet, grunting contentedly.

“I am so tired,” said my mother, getting to her feet. She held to the corner of the pig-
pen a moment before stooping to pick up the now empty jar. In the dim light, she
appeared big, especially in the middle. Berting noticed it, too, and he asked, “Mother,
why is your stomach so big?”

She looked down at us without a word, the jar dangling by the mouth from her hand.
My mother’s face was small in the growing dusk of the evening, small and lined, wisps of
straight, dry hair falling across it from her head. I could see the brown specks on my
mother’s cheekbones, the result of working long under the sun. She looked down upon
Berting and me and her eyes held a light that I dimly felt sprang from the love she bore
us, her children. I could not bear her gaze any longer. It filled me with a longing to be
good and kind to her. I looked down at my arms and I was full of shame and regret.

So I turned away from my mother in the dark and cuffed Berting roughly in the head,
saying, “take the carabao to the Waig, lazy one, and don’t come back till he has
bathed well.”

Berting struck back at me, but I caught and held his hand. I walked with him beyond
the barn and in the open space of fields, the sky, high and wide above us, the round
moon beginning to shine, I told Berting the truth about Mother.

“She has a child inside her,” I told him. “That is why she is so big.”

“She is going to have a baby,” said Berting, “like the mother of Artemio, is it not so,
Manong?”

“Yes,” I said, with a short laugh. “Now go back and take the carabao to the Waig,” I
said, giving him a push, for I felt embarrassed.

When Father came home that night, the moon had made the whole world white as
day, only it was strange because it was cool and soft like fine rain. He saw how little had
been cut of the hay in the south field and he was very angry. He was all for whipping us,
saying we two were useless, shameless sons of lightning and he should skin us alive with
leather scabbard of his talunasan’.
 Chapter II

Mother sat by the southern window of our house smoking a big home-made cigar.

“Get the sickles from the barn.”

Said my father, speaking gruffly, and we both ran to obey him.

“I’ll boil some of the half-ripe bananas and you can eat when you come home,” said
my mother.

“I like boiled bananas with sugar,” said Berting, eagerly, waving his sickle so that its thin
curbed blade caught the light of the moon.

“You must be careful and not fall asleep while cutting hay,” said my mother looking
down at him. “If you do, you will cut your hand. I do not want a son with only one
hand.”

“I’ll cut faster than Manong Baldo,” he boasted.

We followed Father into south field.

Those were long nights, cutting hay under the November moon. Many others were out
in the fields, and we shouted to one another, waved handfuls of fragrant hay
overhead. Masses of clouds, clean and white like cotton bursting in the pod, moved
swiftly across the face of the moon, now east, now west, never stopping. And
sometimes when you looked up it seemed the moon was travelling across the blue sky
and you caught your breath at the white speed of it.

Sleep began to hang heavily like stone mortars on our eyelids. Berting cut his forfinger.
We plastered the wound with the wet clay to stop its bleeding. All the clouds had gone
down to the edges of the sky and lay piled up there like cotton mountains, and the
moon’s cool white light seemed to mingle with the fragrance of the hay. It was a long,
long night.

When the haying was done, Father plowed up the fields for tobacco planting. The
seedlings in the sandy plot north of the house were growing fast, December was
coming on, it was the season for the planting of tobacco, and the fields were dotted
with men and women making ready the soil.

The mornings were getting colder, and we awoke to find mist thinly spreading itself over
the plowed fields. Shivering, we went to draw up the warm water of the well in order to
sprinkle the seedlings before the sun topped the Katayaghan hills.

Mother spent hours thinning the seedlings, killing the many green worms that ate the
leaves. She was growing heavier every day and slower in her movements. I had been
going back in my mind about Mother, remembering that she had been growing
heavier and bigger for many months, only I had not thought anything about it until that
evening by the pig-pen.

Tia’ Acol, the old midwife, saw us from the street and she called out loudly, “Hoy, you
two, what will it be? Another brother?”

And Berting shouted back, “Yes, Apo’. I want a brother so that he can look after the
carabao while I go to school.”

“You talk like a fool,” said Tia Accol. “You should ask for a sister so that someone can
cook for you and wash your clothes.” She passed on with that hobbling walk of hers. Tia
Accol’s right foot was twisted at the ankle and she never walked like other people. She
hitched and dragged herself along and although you would think that she was slow,
she could really travel very fast. That morning she was on her way to the beach to
exchange a basket of rice-cakes for fish.

At midday the sun hung low, far in the southern half of the sky, and it sent down hard,
blistering rays that the cool, salty sea winds could not soften.

Father did not go to work in Santiago. We three, my father, Berting and myself, went out
to the fields, before the sun had risen above the Katayaghan hill, and stayed there till
noon. Using to guide us long lines formed from strips of bamboo of equal length joined
one to the other, we made rows for the tobacco. At each knot where the bamboo
strips were tied, we cleared away the large, sun-baked clods to form a small hollow of
fine, sandy load. The ends of our fingers became sore and hard particles of earth
pushed painfully under our nails.

After lunch, we returned to the fields and Mother came with us bearing on her head a
big basket of the seedlings that she had picked that morning. The seedlings were
covered with two layers of wet cloth to protect them from the sun. My mother walked
slowly for she had grown very big with the child inside her, and we left her behind.

Berting and I went ahead carrying between us a bamboo pole the petroleum can that
we used for getting water from the well at one end of the long field. Father followed,
walking before Mother, on his shoulder the heavy pointed stake for making the holes on
the little hollows we had cleared. Into these holes, Mother planted the tobacco
seedlings and Berting and I watched them.

Toward sundown, Tia Accol came by, returning from the beach the basket on her head
full of gleaming fish. She stopped by my mother to ask, “How are you feeling? Any pains
yet?”

“Sometimes, I feel the child kick,” she said, smiling up at Tia Accol; wrinkles appearing at
the outer corners of her small eyes.
“It will be stout,” said Tia Accol. “Look how big you are already.” She moved about,
finding it hard to stand still because of the big clogs and her twisted right foot.

Father stopped making holes with his wooden stake. He clasped it with both hands and
spoke loudly to Tia Accol: “What do you think it will be, a boy?”

“Maybe it will be a girl,” said my mother, softly, and Tia Accol looked down at her.

“Berting, here, told me he hopes it will be a boy,” Tia Accol said in a mocking voice,
and Father laughed.

Berting and I laughed and went on watering the seedlings that Mother had planted.
The turbid water that we drew from the well sank with many bubbles into the dry soul.
The seedlings looked so tiny in the midst of the big hard clods.

For two weeks we planted tobacco in the fields; Berting and I had hardly a moment’s
time to play. We were tired and irritable and quarrelled often. Many times in the fields
Mother had to make peace between us, speaking slowly in a tired, patient voice.

At night I heard my father talking to my mother where they lay on the mat on the floor
of the silid in front of the image of Virgin Mary.

“We planted 1500 seedlings,” said my father with great satisfaction. “Almost twice as
many as we planted last year.”

“If only the price of leaf tobacco doesn’t go down any further,” I heard my mother say,
and her voice sounded so tired. “Next year, Baldo must go to school, after him,
Berting.”
 Chapter III

Father went back to work on the house of Don Anchong in Santiago. He left us to tend
the growing tobacco plants. It was December now and the nights had become chilly.
In the dawn , Mother us up and, shivering in the cold breeze that blew down the misty
tops of the Katayaghan hills, we went to water the tobacco plants. It was very cold. The
sharp-edged clods hurt our benumbed feet. But the cart, sun-heated the day before,
had warmed the water in the well and it was pleasant washing our face and hands
and feet, only the wind made us colder than ever, afterward.

When we went back to the house for breakfast, Father had gone to Santiago. We
refused to finish watering the rest of the tobacco plants. We ran out of the house, deaf
to the calls of my mother.

“I’ll tell your father,” she threatened, but she never did.

We played all morning with Artemio and Peddong and Inzo by the railroad tracks. We
came home to eat hungrily at noon and Mother had finished watering the tobacco
plants.

One morning Father hitched the bull carabao to the cart and drove with him to
Santiago. He came home in the afternoon with a load of dried molave limbs. He cut
them in uniform lengths, piled them in the yard where the rays of the sun would strike
them longest.

“These are for heating your mother’s bath when she has given birth,” he explained to
Berting.

“Why?” asked Berting.

“Because the molave is hard and strong, your mother will recover her strength quickly,”
said Father.

Tia Accol, the midwife, was often at the house in those days. She chewed betel-nut
rolled in a leaf of the gawed plant with a pinch of lime, and the ground under the
window where she and mother sat talking would be streaked with many red stains from
old woman’s ceaseless spitting.

It was now the time of the misa de gallo. At dawn we walked the two kilometres that
brought us clear across the river to the town and to the mass. The late-rising moon
lighted us on our way and the cold, clear dawn rang with the rooster’s awakening
song.
The tobacco plants were growing bigger and bigger. They sent out green new leaves
that spread out bravely above the large brown clods. Crickets had bitten in two the
stems of many and we had to plant new seedlings in their place.

Mother walked slowly to the fields every day and killed the worms that made moles in
the growing leaves. Father still went to Santiago, the house of Don Anchong was almost
finished, and a letter from Emilio, the son in America had said that he was on his way
and would be home by Christmas. Father would get excited telling us about it.

“When I grow up,” said Berting “I shall go to America and make million pesos.”

“This son of mine,” said my mother, and she sounded so loving that again I felt a great
need to be good and kind to her.

I remembered how hard she worked every day and she was getting bigger and
heavier with the child inside her and I could have cried. But soon we fell asleep and at
dawn we went to Artemio and Peddong and Inzo and the young men and women
and old ones, too, to attend the misa de gallo. How cold it was walking all the way to
the church! But inside the church with many soft-breathing people around us, it was
warm and comfortable and the burning candles were good to smell. Feeding the pig
one evening, Mother spoke to it, saying, “Eat hearty, you greedy one, you have only a
few days left to this life,”

“Why, Mother?” asked Berting. He was always asking why.

“Don’t you know?” I said. “We will eat it for Pascua. On Christmas day we will make
lechon’ of it and eat it, the greedy thing,” and I thrust my arm through the bars of the
pen and scratched its belly with many a contented grunt.
 Chapter IV

The day before Christmas broke clear and cold, the sun scattering the mist atop the
Katayaghan hills and over the tobacco fields more quickly than usual.

Mother was up before everybody else in the house. She measured with a big coconut
shell the sweet-smelling diket’ for the suman’ that she would make later in the day.
When Father awoke, she told him to split open the coconuts and start grating the white,
oily meat. In the yard, Berting and I dug two long narrow trenches about knee-deep
and above them the big jars for the suman were placed.

We swept the yard, gathered the scattered rice husks and leaves of the camachile into
mounds and made smudges where we warmed ourselves. All day the air above
Nagrebcan was filled with the smoke of many trench fires where suman was being
cooked. There were few people about, for almost everyone was busy preparing for the
evening . Inzo and Peddong passed by our house to say that at nightfall they would
come for us. We were going out with bamboo flutes and bamboo drums and bamboo
guitars, a star-shaped lantern, to play before the houses of Nagrebcan. We expected a
plentiful harvest of coins and suman.

But at sundown, my mother suddenly left the side of the jars of suman which she had
been stirring and with slow, dragging steps went over to the ladder. She dropped on
the lowest rung with a sharp, agonized cry and Father ran to her side, asking what was
the matter in a voice that sounded both alarmed and angry.

He carried Mother upstairs in his arms, scolding her all while, and laid her in the silid and
piled pillows behind her.

“Get Tia Accol,” he said and I ran out as fast as I could. From the street, I saw Tia Accol
at her window and I shouted:

“Tia Accol, come quickly, my mother is giving birth now.”

When I saw that she was getting ready, I ran back home, feeling excited and happy.

Father had removed one of the jars of suman from the fire and placed thereon another
big jar filled with water. I saw the he use for fuel the molave firewood. Berting had gone
to bring home the carabao from the fields.

Three other women came with Tia Accol. Nana’ Ikkao, Artemio’s mother and Tia
Anzang and Nana Dalen came with blankets under their arms.

“This is what you have to do,” said Tia Accol to my father. “I shouldn’t need to tell you
each time, but you have the memory of a mudfish. Keep the fire burning under that jar
of water. Prepare a new small jar and bring it to the silid. Get a wide winnowing basket
and a handful of ampalaya leaves. And do not forget to cut three strips of the outer
skin of the light bamboo, cut them so the edges will be sharp like razor blades,” said Tia
Accol to Father.

It was I who gathered the ampalaya’ leaves from the fence north of the house which
was covered with the bitter-tasting vine. I went to borrow the winnowing basket from.
Nana Petra, the wife of Lacay Inggo. By the time I had brought these home, there were
many people in the house.

Several young women had taken charge of our suman jars and were ladling it out onto
banana leaves spread on our low dulang’. Then they rolled the suman in pieces of
banana leaves, tied each roll with rice straw and placed them all again in the jars to be
boiled further. By midnight, the suman would be ready for the people who were sure to
drop in on their way back from mass.

From inside the house, from the silid, came Tia Accol now and then and the women
asked her questions which she answered with only two words: “Not yet.” She spat out
reddish saliva and shook her head when offered suman to eat. In the pig-pen below,
the hungry pig squealed and squealed but no one paid attention to it.

For a long time I sat with Berting on the ladder, Trying to answer his many questions,
straining my ears to hear the cries of my mother that at intervals rose above the chatter
of the women in the kitchen.

“Why did you get a winnowing basket, Manong?” asked Berting.

“I don’t know,” I said. But I knew, Tia Accol had told me.

“What will they do with the winnowing basket, Manong?” asked Berting.

So I told him. When the baby is born at last, they place it on the winnowing basket and
roll him there.

“Why?” asked Berting, but I could not tell him why.

“Why did Father cut those sharp strips of bamboo, Manong?” Berting asked again.

I kept silent for I had heard my mother moan and the voice of my father with her in the
silid.

“Why, Manong?” Berting repeated, beginning to whimper. It was dark and the women
in the kitchen threw quick-moving shadows over our heads in the yard below.

“With the sharp cutting edge of the bamboo strips, Tia Accol will free the baby from our
mother – that’s what I was told,” I said, for I had asked Tia Accol.
Artemio and the other boys came for us later but we remained home, seated on the
ladder. We could hear them playing in the distance for a long while and we continued
to sit there on the ladder.

Many of the young women went home and, passing us on their way down the ladder,
they touched out heads and told us to go up and eat our supper. They were going
home to prepare themselves for the midnight mass. It was late.

Father came down and he did not see us on the ladder. He went down the street to
Lacay Inggo’s house and when he came back he smelled of basi’. He told us to go to
bed, but we remained there on the ladder and he left us alone.

When the bells began to ring announcing the midnight mass, Berting raised his head
which he had laid on my knee and rubbing his eye with his fists, he asked, “What are
the amplaya leaves for, Manong?”

Before I could answer him, a great cry of pain came from inside the house. My heart seemed to
stop bearing. I wanted to run away from the sound. It was repeated, rising higher and higher
until it was piercing scream. Berting began to cry.

“Nanang, Nanang,” he mumbled through his sobs.

“The ampalaya leaves,” I told him, “are crushed in a small stone mortar and the bitter juice is the
first thing that touches the lips of the baby when it is born.”

“Why?” asked Berting, forgetting to cry.

“So that when the baby begins to suckle he will find the milk sweeter.”

The bells were ringing, we could hear them in the still air, ringing, ringing until the world seemed
filled with their sweet, joyous sound.

And then it came, the first shrill cry of the baby just born. We heard it above the sound of bells,
Berting and I. We got up and climbed the ladder and went softly into the house, into the silid
where my brother lay in the light of a petroleum lamp placed at the foot of the Virgin Mary.

The three women – Nana Ikkao, Nana Dalen, and Tia Anzang – were around my mother, silently
covering her with many blankets.

On the winnowing basket, between Tia Accol and my mother, lay the baby. It was very small.
The eyes were tightly closed, they seemed mere wrinkles in its tiny face. It kicked and thrusts out
its little fist furiously. It cried without ceasing and from its red open mouth dripped the green juice
of the ampalaya leaves.

There was no noise except that which the baby made in the room. Tia Accol wrapped it up and
placed it inside the folds of the blankets that covered my mother.
My mother bared her left breast and raising with her arm the head of the baby, gave it her
nipple, and before our eyes, the baby began to suckle.

“It is a boy,” said Tia Accol, getting laboriously to her feet. It was then that my mother’s tired
place face broke into a smile and said, “Yes, his name shall be Jesus.”

And that was how my brother Jesus was born, in the year the locusts came.