by: Lakambini Sitoy

When they were young he used to beat them, rapidly, one after the other, as they scrambled and slipped on the wooden floors. It had been one of those peculiar rituals that families often find themselves locked into-- most of the year when their Father was at sea the children could do as they pleased, but for the month or so that he was home they had no choice but to obey him. At the slightest mistake the house would resound with a peculiar rhythmic thwacking, like strips of meat being processed on the butcher's block.

It had been a good belt, fragrant and heavy, from "abrod" as so many of her father's things had been in those days. Wound about his hand, it had been a deadly weapon. She remembered him when she was five years old, remembered the broad brown dace with the cheekbones so prominent they seemed to have been stuck onto his skin, the wide, dry, lips, the long ridge or his brow bone. His chest had been massive next to his short pipe-like legs. Without the belt his black double-knit pants would sag open; he administered bearing with his nylon briefs bulging through his fly. Her brothers have screamed. As Ciso and Joey had grown older the screams had turned to curses. Phrases, fragments of cries still drifted up through the layers of Dora's consciousness from time to time. She couldn't remember who'd said what and when. The one that had survived the years without distortion was that of leather on flesh, like baseball slamming into mitts in the children's park back of her apartment block. In the park the kids practiced on weekends under the feeble spring sun.

She felt good about falling asleep, exhausted from her night shift, to the sound of suburban baseball game. It was a good neighborhood. No blacks, no Chicanos - it was a litany she would repeat quietly to herself several times a day. A place where for the first time in her life she didn't have to live in constant fear of having something valuable wrenched from her person.

The letters came two or three times a year, long wilted envelopes bearing her elder brother's angular Practical-Arts teacher-script. Diplomatically-worded requests for money, suggestions that she come home for a month or so. News of their father, how his wet, trudging feet had worn a pale path from the bathroom to the bedroom where he now slept alone, of his gratitude for their gift of the walker, how one morning he had done a little dance upon the back porch stairs and slid five risers down on his tailbone. How he had sat there for 20 minutes trying to fathom a hand that urgently caressed the worn wood of its own volition.

She read these letters once or twice before slipping them into the plastic-mesh berry basket on top of the refrigerator. On her way to and from the nursing home where she worked, in twilight half the time, coat bundled about her short, dumpy figure, she would think of their contents, wondering at her own silence. On Saturday mornings, she would take the letter down and pass her fingers over their surfaces. Vague body memories, the leather belt descending to stripe her flesh.

Dora made herself a cup of coffee, fitting the containers of Nescafe and Alaska Evap back into place on the dining table tray. She willed the tepid liquid about her mouth, trying to work up some enthusiasm for the tasks at hand. The quiet of mid-morning had descended upon the house. A singular odor pervaded the air, an odor from her childhood, a blend of the kitchen smells of dank wood, mossy earthen jars, residual detergent- and now, the rank odor of urine and antibiotics.

She nudged aside the curtain hanging in the door to the sickroom. On the bed that Ciso and Joey shared when they were boys, her father lay on his side, head turned toward the wall, legs together and bent. She thought of the babies, fully formed but not quite human, floating in the formalin jars on the shelf of her long-ago college classroom.

The old man had wet himself. The fresh warm odor of bodily discharge taunted her nostrils, mingling with the sharper, richer stench of the mattress. He wore a T-shirt that said Plaza Central School on the back and which most certainly belonged to Ciso. The T-shirt was so ancient and grubby that the urine had soaked through the hem and up her father's back.

She suppressed a shudder at the sight of his bare buttocks. They were round and brown, like something you would eat for breakfast. They belonged to a much younger man.

"Narciso," her father said.

Dora started; he was awake.

"Ciso's out," she said quickly.

The old man grunted. Even in his illness his voice was heavy with the old irritation.

"When will he be back?"

Dora did not answer. Of course it was Ciso he would want; good stolid Ciso, who never married, fearing the father he might become, who survived the blows to be... what? A Practical Arts teacher at the local elementary school, sunburnt from bending among rows of vegetables. The man who made the school's Christmas lanterns and fiesta tableaus, mouth set in the perpetually kindly grin of the powerless.

Dora moved to the bedside table and took up a glass half-filled with water, last night's dinner plate with clumps of desiccated rice still on it, used syringes, a crusted face towel.

"There's a mess " the old man said. 

She stood and looked at him.

"It needs to be cleaned up," he pressed on.

It was easier when they both pretended it was someone else's body they were dealing with.

In the kitchen she found the rags draped on the wooden shutters above the sink, where Ciso had left them the night before. She took them up, sluicing water over them from an earthen jar, as had done when she was a child. The household had had running water for years, yet still kept these ancient relics. She felt dazed, enervated.

The urine had traveled some distance down her father's thighs, and there was a warm blot of

excrement, too. Ciso had forgotten to put the bedpan within his reach. There it was, she saw, partway under the bed, still gleaming dully from the scrubbing eye she had given it yesterday. It was amazing how incompetent her brothers became the moment she took over.

With a fresh towel she pursued a blotch of shit over the old man's skin. A fresh sore was forming in the small of his back. She found a clean edge of the towel and dabbed around her father's groin; his penis, walnut-like, wobbled at her touch. The old man suffered his ministrations with contempt. His face burned.

A fly alighted on her lips. She brushed it off with her sleeve, a sensation of wet. The creature had teast on the clean liquid from the sores that had magical bloomed across her father's helpless limbs in the past weeks.

In the bathroom she flung the rags under the lone tap and turned the water on.

She did the laundry, hers, her bachelor brother' s, a few of the soiled sheets, and took them out into the backyard, dodging the branches of the sapling guavas. Trudging across the trampled-down earth, she couldn't resist sneaking a glance back at the house. Small, and dingier than it ought to have been, the nipa roof bleached almost white, so that at long last it blended with the galvanized iron rooftops of the neighbors. Once when she was in college she had overheard her mother pleading for him to build a new one, the woman's voice rising to a shriek, aimed at the lawanit walls, the chalky dust caking the leaves of the gumamelas: The field hands live better with their dollars from Saudi!"

He remained silent at this taunt, she remembered. It was he who had instilled in his family the difference between a trained seaman like himself and the ignorant worker escaping from the surrounding haciendas to the Middle East. She had known the meaning of dollars from early childhood, when her father had been away all of the year and they lived in the other house, the bigger one. He's abroad, her mother, dead 15 years now, used to say, eyebrows arched finely, to the neighbors. He's in Germany, she might add, or in Panama. Growing up, Dora had known what it had been to be both blessed and despised.

He sent them checks, parcels, letters. He sent his brother enough money tor a jeepney-transport business; his sister's property he rescued from a heavy mortgage. No one talked about his life, the years aboard the ship. As a child she had been fascinated by the way he would come home every year Smaller, angrier, more leathery, until one day in her teens, he fell into bed and lay there glaring up at her and her mother, unable to rise, enraged, knowing that at the end of his furlough they expected him to pull up his carcass and make his way back to the dungeon of his vessel. Not once did they ask him how he felt. After all he was a man. Men endured.

Ciso was in the kitchen when she came back with the empty basin. Since her return he had stopped taking a packed lunch to school; he would bike the five blocks to the house in search of her insipid cooking. He ate the watery adobo, the salads she insisted on, as though it were he who were to die within weeks.

Dora greeted him with a nod and, without preamble, scooped rice out of the cauldron and set the cold platter of beef on the table. She had fed the family feds with the same grudging tenderness years ago. Cats and dogs quivering in corners, traumatized by the most recent explosion: Joey, gone bad in the fifth grade, caught sniffing glue and strung up in a sack over the stove; the marmalade kitten, her favorite, thrown twisting through the air for being sick on the sofa. Brother and sister ate together, cautiously glancing from time to time at the door to their father's room, waiting for the gravelly voice to summon them. Two abandoned children. Dora thought, middle-aged by 35.

Lola Cedes will be coming tonight," Ciso volunteered at last.

"Lola Cedes?"

"The mananambal. The herb woman."

"What do you need her for She said. "Dr. Perez comes every week."

"It is only after Lola Cedes's massages that Papa can sleep."

She mulled this over for a while, before saying almost routinely, "Massages are the last thing he needs. There's so much fluid in the tissues."

"Of course, you would know. "You are the nurse." Ciso laid his spoon and fork down and gave her his sad, resigned smile. She felt the ghost of an old irritation: that inability of his to hold to an opinion, even with his own sister.

"He left the dishes on the table for her to clean up, guided his rusty bicycle through the front gate, went off squeaking down the street, listing perilously from side to side.

When the mananambal arrived it was evening, the cicadas singing in the bushes, the acacias black blurs against a murky lavender sky. She stood on the top step and knocked gently: an old woman in a faded print skirt and a shapeless blouse. A thin, staring girl, about 14, trailed after her. Ciso came to greet the healer, and they spoke in quiet voices. Lola Cedes made her way to the sickroom, nodding casually at Dora. She had brought with her a faint odor of herbs and lemongrass; it hung in the air, mixed with the scent of her sweat.

The younger woman stood in the doorway and watched them. Ciso had gotten down on his knees by the bedside, was murmuring something to himself or perhaps to the little chapel formed by his clasped hands. Some vernacular prayer, rote. Over her brother's bowed head, Lola Cedes's eyes met hers. "Your father will not be healed unless you, too, pray," the mananambal said. Dora took a couple of steps forward to accept a well-thumbed booklet from her.

The prayers were in Cebuano. She would never be able to read them aloud; it had been too long.

 

"And how are you tonight, Tio Tinong?" the herb woman said, making conversation, easing the thin shirt off the old man's back, manipulating the flaccid limbs with a certain tenderness. Feebly, he tried to move his arms; they flailed in the air, the hands loosely balled, like a baby's. Dora had never seen her father in this room with any woman but her mother. Lola Cedes poured liniment into her palm from a brown bottle. With a hand like a piece of sentient rubber, now pliant, now assertive, the herb woman described circles across the old man's flesh. He didn't look at her. He looked instead at Dora, eyes black hollows under the ridge of his brow bone. Dora matched the stare. The herb Woman's hand stroked him at the periphery of his vision, devoting equal time to the nerveless parts of his body; under her touch his face softened, his shoulders lost her rigidity. His eyes closed and his lips stretched in what could only be a smile.

Dora advanced upon the little tableau by the bed, cold all of a sudden. but fascinated. His face had never looked so unguarded, so content.

She would have worn the same look as a baby, and it would have been he who would have stood over her in this fashion and perhaps tickled her smooth belly and her little furled hands tenderly. This same moment of peace, before she wriggled beneath his touch and gave out thin wailing cries of distress, and he, helpless, would have thundered for her mother to come and shut her up, berated her for allowing the infant to go hungry. Later she would learn to quiet down at his approach and glare at him from under a heavy shelf of brow so like his own, and he would curse her and curse his fate for having fathered such a sullen child -such sullen, worthless children for whom he would have to go back to his ship in a few more weeks, risking life and limb.

And you would beat us! Dora cried silently. You kicked us around the floor! The arching length of that old leather belt had brought her child's flesh to life and simultaneously blanched it of all feeling forever. His eyes opened and he saw the pity and hatred in hers, and as Lola Cedes worked gently over his shoulders, he let his head loll to one side in resignation.

Dora clenched her rough nurse's hands, brought them protectively up to her chest. An image of greenish-white hallways rose up behind her lids. For ten years, in a fevered orgy of giving, she had mopped up shit, smiled briskly into pale parchment faces, put the warmth of lifetime's intercourse into her voice. I could make you happy now, she thought frantically, to the defeated face. I could stretch out my hands, feel you, heal you.

But she knew it was too late; it no longer mattered; she and her father they were beyond all help. There was only her life, and a sense of bitter regret, for never having known him. She thought of her apartment, dark and silent now in her absence, bereft of a bridegroom, its pristine air shattered from time to time with the voices of children, raised in what were almost cries of love. And she crossed her arms and pressed her fists tight, to her breast,

lest she burst open, spill away, bleed at the sudden contact with his skin.