(story written in Creative Writing 111 under Prof. Francis Paolo Quina in 2019-2020) Only the distant sounds in the far edges of the fields were my company as I put one foot after another, aside from the sounds of the wet ground. The partially leveled paddies, almost promising relief to the waves of ache in my legs and lower back as they flattened. For me, the long hot hours on the fields I had understood to be my family's only way to avoid starvation, and I had patiently and dutifully done a good day’s work toiling on the wet earth, even as the acid shoots had long begun lapping at the hollowness of my belly, or at the last good meal shared with my family, _bagoong_ and rice, and my vision had often focused too hard on the gray-brown soil, such that I would suddenly feel my throat and mouth boil and I would dry-heave onto the ground without notice. The blistering heat I grew to endure even as the stale smell of the earth mixed with my own sweat, and during these times in the summer I could expect more effects of a heatstroke not lessening my will to carry on, despite the momentary plunge of extreme fatigue after. In my situation one could not choose to lay on the dirt in defeat, for I could not expect to get anything in this life if I did not swallow my own hunger. _Hunger._ I had escaped the worst of many kinds and it was only with my hands and the steady work I could find that I had managed to eat more than two meals a day for most of the week and provided the same for my family. For the longest time I thought I had been immune to any sad idea that our situation could not be improved, that we could manage as long as we kept looking up. But it was when my house had been destroyed by Yolanda that I could not help but cry out to the heavens as to why no God had cared to spare my family's dwelling, even though I had been grateful that not one of us had perished, and I had seen my children, Belen and Alfonso, look to me for any sign of hope, and then to their mother, because I could no longer anchor them anywhere. It was then when I had experienced what it was like to have absolutely nothing; I could not even provide a glimmer of a future as I knelt in front of the remains of our former house surrounded by debris from other people’s homes, and the stench of bodies, waste, and useless possessions strewn everywhere, on the roads and in front of buildings where aid and relocation and relief vehicles had parked nearby. It had been a year since the flood. The new house we had built in place of it, while not much bigger, was something I was proud of, for I had gone to great lengths to build around its two small rooms partly with cement walls, and we had recently saved up for a new TV set, which sat at the center of our _sala_ which also doubled as our kitchen and dining area. My wife and I brought home enough earnings to save at least one thousand pesos per month, which had been a far cry to what we could earn years ago. Lucinda, my wife, who was a dressmaker, had accompanied me to the cooperative in our barrio on a balmy Monday to open an account and deposit our savings of five hundred pesos. Lucinda prodded me to do this out of her concern that any extra money we had was better stored in a place that kept a secure record of its existence, and she had worn a red dress she had sewn herself that in my memory seemed to cast an energetic glow about her dark hair and finely lined face, and on our way home we shared a kiss under a tree whose branches stooped low enough for shade. Now, I thought about the next season's harvest five months away. Another leveled portion of land, my arms guiding the _carabao's_ left turn, and the cramp on my neck extended to my upper arm and shoulders, repeatedly bringing my vision back to the last stretches of unfinished ground. With the way it was the last five years, I would set out at dawn, for two weeks with my fellow workers plow the land with a _carabao_ to prepare the soil after the previous crops have been harvested, harrow the fields using our bodies’ guiding movements and the _carabaos'_ plodding to ensure better growth on even land, level the land even more with _carabaos_ attached to plows, and then finally distribute the seeds onto the wet fields, and we would be working down against the sun's heat, our backs strained forwards until the last rows of rice had been transplanted from the seed beds and then harvested after four months. In between those hours, I would often rest under a mango sapling. I had been listening to the radio as I ate my lunch, when my phone rang. The voice on the other line was Lucinda's. "Gideon," she said. "Edgar's visited." My throat tightened when I heard Edgar's name. I had not seen my former _amo_ in twelve years. I rubbed my warm eyes and wiped my forehead with my _labakara_ underneath my cap. "Gideon," Lucinda's tone was weak, when it was normally even and melodious. It was as though she had been crying, "Hannah is gone. They lost her in the Yolanda flood and her body—" Edgar's voice had crept up in the background that I was back at the poultry again, and not in the rice fields, although I could not tell if he had spoken or whispered something to my wife. I remembered our previous house in Tacloban with walls and floors made of rattan, and a roof that seemed to bend inwards whenever it rained. Edgar had given us incentives if the chickens met more than the required weight, and although most seasons we could not meet more than the standard live weight that the broiler company set, our work had been bringing our _amo_, the contract grower, enough profit that we had received pay from him for three years, and my income had been four hundred pesos a day. From chicks in crates to fully-grown chickens in coops, my son, Alfonso, had pointed out that they were lucky to have warm floors above the dirt that smelled underneath of waste, and how they all seemed happy, huddled together and clucking loudly like they were gathered for some special game that we could not know. Alfonso, who now worked with me in the rice fields and had since become accustomed to a different kind of happiness, which was often relief from hunger and temporary security from the elements, would play with Edgar’s son, Joseph, who was not much older than twelve. Everyone had a time in their lives they could call happy days, and this had been robbed from the young ones and for Edgar’s family when the bird flu spread in the poultry farm a few months before Christmas twelve years ago. On the evening when Edgar got drunk and cursed us workers for supposedly causing the death of his son, Joseph, Hannah and I could only exchange pained looks, and I could not have anticipated it when Edgar lunged at me, fingers twisted around an empty dark bottle, dealing a heavy blow to my left temple and eye, and I had felt as though I had lost more than some growing sense of goodwill between two men, never mind all the days when I thought I had worked for a kind _amo_ who did not use force. Not one child in the poultry families died, as the bird flu variant had been weaker, and had only affected young children, and Edgar must have seen and felt an evil he could not help but try to ward off. "Gideon, please forgive me... Everything I did and said—" "It's good to hear from you, Edgar." A sigh of relief sprung out of me. Twelve years had passed and within those years it had crossed my mind so often that he would never let go of what had transpired between us, that he would go to his grave having the sense that I had murdered his two children. # We had been forty workers manning poultry houses built on a wide field with level stretches of soil, and enough sunlight had that filtered through the tall palm trees that uniformly surrounded the property. I had once seen Alfonso and Joseph, trying to hide behind the same trees on the day Edgar brought me to talk inside the passenger seat of his car, and beforehand I had a small hope that I could ask for higher pay, but Edgar had wanted to talk about Marlon, and I let the thought go. I had only worked for him for a year, and I realized it had been too soon to ask, and I had mainly thought about my daughter Belen, who had asked me for a bit of money to buy a prom dress, as she did not want her mother to make her one. I had asked her why, and my eldest, who was then sixteen, said none of her classmates even considered going to Lucinda to have her make their dresses, and I had remembered Lucinda crying to me not because of the dress—that she understood as young people’s pride—but because Belen would seldom talk with her about anything anymore, and I had wanted to give Lucinda money for her and Belen to go dress shopping. Belen had gone with Marlon’s son, King, and in hindsight I thought about how I should have told him off when he would visit our house in the afternoons when he walked Belen home and lingered on our yard. To my faint knowledge from memory alone and talking with my wife over the years, Edgar, who had assigned Marlon to be in charge of keeping the storehouse for chicken feed, along with three others, Randy, Peter and Harold, and Edgar had told me to keep an eye on him. I had probably betrayed some kind of discomfort in my response and led Edgar to solidify his own opinion. I said that I had once walked over to Marlon after all the chicken feed sacks had been unloaded from the trucks, and he had seemed conflicted and cut me off as I spoke because he had to go to town before the stores closed. Edgar said that the chickens had been noticeably underweight after thirty-five days—which I had come to notice myself when I had been tasked with the weighing and dressing, or the pulling of feathers, and the draining of blood and fat—also said that with my being new to the poultry farm, it would be to my advantage to keep a clear, unclouded head in the event that Marlon would try to convince me to shut up about his activities, and try to warn them indirectly that Edgar will not hesitate to fire them if the incidents continued. It seemed to me that Edgar had not wanted to confront them himself out of his own suspicions that he could be wrong about Marlon, and it could have been the others, as he had no clear evidence. Regardless, I had not suspected him before I was told, and I had not revealed to Edgar that I had known Marlon in grade school and witnessed what he had been like, although I had decided to keep my own mouth shut for the time being. Marlon had been the kind to hang out with the older kids who were out of school, those who had entered the adult world too early. My wife, who was Marlon’s second cousin, had also known him in her girlhood as someone who had been prone to fits of anger, and he had been in the same grade as both my wife and I even though he had been five years older. None of us had finished high school, and Marlon had scraped by working in a junk shop before he worked for Edgar, and that he had reportedly fathered a son through rape, which I could not believe as the wife had stayed with him and seemed to have good relations with him. One day, I had confronted Marlon himself, acting on behalf of Edgar, because I had not quite believed that any man was too far gone to be able to do this to his _amo_ who had provided him with a salary. Marlon had seemed sincere when he said it was possible the delivery people had stolen the feeds, and that he could report this to Edgar himself, and even offered to hand me the position of overseeing the feeds. I thought he was joking and told him so, believing his pleading insincere, but he had looked at me seriously, although I could only be convinced partway. It was around this time that Joseph and Alfonso had chanced upon a wild rooster that had swollen legs, and an engorged comb and wattles with brown splotches. The rooster immediately signaled disease when I saw it. When I asked where they found it they replied they just found him weakly lying on the grass near the edges of the poultry. Alfonso had wanted to keep it, and I had objected, but Joseph looked at me and squarely told me that since it was on his father’s property then it was rightfully his. Edgar had told Joseph he could not bring home the rooster, which seemed to get better the next few weeks, its strength seemingly coming back to it twofold, and it had been allowed to stay with the domesticated hens we kept. Lucinda had told me that the rooster had gotten a hen pregnant, and it laid two eggs in a day. One was softer than the other. It had been Alfonso’s idea to have Lucinda cook them, along with the eggplants she had bought from the market, and he had told me that Joseph had also eaten after they had worn themselves out playing with the other children. I had asked Alfonso, and he said himself that Joseph seemed eager to eat that he had done so with his bare hands, and had asked Hannah for juice to give to both himself and my son. Lucinda told Hannah, and Hannah did not hesitate to tell Edgar to quarantine the place because she had wanted to stop it from spreading to the other children. Within the next five days I had noticed Alfonso had developed a fever, constantly coughed, vomited all his food, and seemed to babble about things we could not understand as his fever rose. It had been the same with the other affected children of the poultry families. The next day, a doctor arrived to conduct a checkup on my son and the other children, and they had been given pain relievers, flu shots, and instructions on what to do in the event that the flu symptoms do not improve. Joseph from then on no longer visited the poultry farm with Hannah and Edgar. # I came home to find Lucinda sitting on a chair outside our house, her eyes seemingly wrung of life, and we had a conversation about Hannah. I told her it was not the best time to see Edgar, as my other sideline in the town market, fixing watches, took up most of my time in the evenings, and I had told Edgar, who stayed at a local inn nearby, to come back tomorrow. In the middle of our talk she had looked at me as if I had spit out her cooking, and that I did not understand her grief. I simply asked her if her supposed friendship with our former _amo’s_ wife who had gone out of our lives more than ten years ago was really a friendship at all. To me, Hannah had transformed into a kind of saint who had made the recovery of my son and the other children at the poultry possible, and as she was my _amo’s_ wife, she couldn’t be anyone other than a kinder version of Edgar, and I supposed she knew her strengths at managing workers, and keeping a clear head whenever there was an emergency of life and death. Lucinda told me one of the reasons she had continually believed there was a God was because of Hannah, and the news that she had been killed in the flood despite being the person she was had made her look back and see how no one can earn themselves out from their destiny, as God had willed it. When she would not stop worrying even when we had lain down on our bed, I held her and whispered, “We survived, didn’t we? That must mean something.” Her breathing slowed to a calmer rhythm, and she was fast asleep. I had often found nights where my mind would not let me rest, with no relief from burden upon burden of what tomorrow could not bring, and I had thought about the time when Edgar had finally made up his own mind after a season near Christmastime, when the harvested chickens had not reached even the minimum standard live weight, and he had fired Marlon and nine others on the grounds that he could no longer afford to pay them. I had not the heart to talk to Marlon—my doubting his innocence when it had all along been the bird flu’s doing had seemed at the time so small compared to what his son, King, did, not long after they had been fired, and I had felt like I lost Belen after almost losing Alfonso, and I could not find any way to contact her after she had run away with King to Tacloban. The last I heard of Marlon from my wife was that he had moved with his wife to Luzon. I thought about Belen, Maryfe, her daughter, and Alfonso sleeping soundly in the other room. Belen had returned a year later with Maryfe, a beautiful girl who had thankfully inherited a mind from Belen and a talent with teaching me how to read and write numbers and letters, and somehow I knew she would become successful as all her teachers and medals say. I remembered I had wept at the sight of Belen with Maryfe in her arms when she had returned. King, who had died of liver cancer, had treated Belen badly, and I had mourned with her when she said he had beaten her when she was pregnant with Maryfe, and she had tried to escape but he had always made promises to be better, and she could not have saved up to go back when she had found a hidden stash of money after his death which she did not know of. # I had woken up a little over eight in the morning on a Sunday, and after drinking a cup of coffee I had wanted to take a walk to a small chapel that was not far from the rice fields where I worked. Maryfe had wanted to come with me but Lucinda had said they were all going to mass later in the afternoon at the town church. During the walk my slippers had snagged at some stones on the dry soil where I had traveled alongside the small road, and I had not taken notice of the path before, for it now had various plants that sprung up seemingly overnight, flower buds glistening in the sun, folded in slumber. The chapel with its off-white and blue paint was the same one I went to after seeing Edgar inside the poultry house, lying near the chickens and letting them surround him as their clucking drowned out his whimpers. I had not known what to do at the sight, but I decided to leave him for his pain must have been too great to help. I had knelt down at the front pew and thought of Hannah, seeing her on the same spot that day I saw Edgar, and I had thought of what he had said to me and the workers, how it had been our fault for bringing in God’s wrath on his poultry farm, for what did he do but help us in our livelihoods? Hannah had seen me after she rose and explained to me, apologizing with a guilt-stricken face for her husband. She said that before his death, Joseph had told them that he felt bad for all the pain he caused the children, and that he should have let me kill the rooster when I said so. And then it had been Edgar’s pleading voice, ringing in my ears for years, “You knew better than a child, Gideon!” as if I were bound with the knowledge of what I could not have helped but could have prevented. And it had not only been this knowledge only, and if I could cover up my ears it would not have disturbed me so greatly if I had not found out that a woman in the _barrio_ told Hannah that she was pregnant even before she could tell, even before anyone could tell, and it had been to Hannah’s joy to have another child growing inside her after more than ten years, and on the night Edgar hit me I had spoken back in anger that his unborn son would die. Lucinda had said she swore she saw evil overtake my face when I said it, and I had said it in such a way to make it come true, “How could every single one of our children, underfed and poor as we are, survive, and yours could not? It must have been allowed by your blood.” It had been to my horror when Hannah had gone back two weeks later to give us our severance pay and had confided with Lucinda that she had miscarried, and I had longed to go back to a time when I could not speak up to anyone, if I could help it, and I had become quiet for a time when I worked for Hannah’s relatives, who had treated us with not much more kindness than Edgar and Hannah when they had paid us to work for them. And with my nerves quaking in my throat, I was brought back to the front pew, my vision of Jesus on the cross stilled by my damp eyes and the silence of the walls, and I had not noticed the man to my right, Edgar, in a white polo-shirt, his head bowed in prayer. END