This story happened when I was nine. I grew up in the busy streets of Manila, away from the legends and folklore of the surrounding provinces but every year, I would encounter stories of elves, goblins, ghosts and other supernatural beings when they are featured on some documentary series. A television screen apart, that was the closest I would get to these monstrous beings. I never imagined that one day, I would truly meet one of these creatures in real life.
That year, when I was nine, my father died of an unusual blood disease and in an instant, my mom was a single parent. Times were hard in the 90s and so my mother decided to move back to the country side. I had no choice but to obediently come along.
At first, I had a hard time adjusting to life in the province. I couldn't live on a diet of spinach and beans and anything green. I'm a born carnivore. I love bacon, steak and burgers. I hate it when she tries to wake me up at four in the morning and lectures me about the bird and a worm and getting early. My grandparents often scold me, saying I was a spoiled little brat. Maybe I was.
Eventually I came to the conclusion that my city life is over and I will never return to Manila. My beloved Manila. It's so sad but I found solace in this untamed environment I was in. It dawned to me that I could do almost anything here. It's the province, no one would give a shit because no one knows who I am. So I did what every grade school student would sometimes do. I broke the rules.
It was summer in my grandfather's ranch. It was very much of a farm but I'd like to call it a ranch. By this time, I had grown close to my cousins, uncle and aunts. One of them in particular was pregnant with her would-be sixth child. Things happen so fast in the province as I had learned. One day we were all getting to know each other and the next I was off to my first swim in the river. There was a river that incidentally flowed through a part of the ranch that my grandparents owned. It was so cool. This was the first time I would actually go swimming in a real river. From the perspective of someone who grew up around concrete soil and towering buildings, this was a big thing.
Some of my older cousins showed me the way, it was a long winding downhill slope. This would truly describe the songs with lyrics like, "down by the river I went". It was really way down the hill. Still in the end, I had the swim of my life but I never thought this experience would forever be etched in my memories and scar me for life.
We went to the river at eight in the morning, we had fun playing in the water. We had lunch by the river bank. We had Barbecued fish with tomatoes and onions as the main course and Bamboo shoots in corn and coconut milk as the side dish. I was a gourmand at a tender age but back to my story, at around two, some of my cousins wanted to go back to the ranch. They were adamant about it, saying that we were not supposed to be caught in the river by twilight.
I wanted to stay. I wanted to savor the moments in the water, the greenery around us, and the sound of nature. They were still trying to convince me to come back to the ranch at that moment but I had my ways to influence others to see things in my favor and in the end of the argument, seven of us stayed.
My elder cousins relinquished but warned us not to stray away from the boundaries of the ranch, especially not to go upstream to the near by farm. Although this caught my curiousness, I heeded their warning. An hour later, my eyes were drawn to the tall trees swaying beyond the bamboo groves in the eastern part of the river. It seemed like they were waving at me. I pointed them out to the rest of my cousins and they said it was a Tiesa tree. I've never seen a Tiesa tree or fruit before.
Then I broke the rules AGAIN.
I urged my remaining cousins to cross the boundary with me and take some fruits. They were very much eager to join me in my "kids will be kids" adventure spree. We went through the barbed fence and on to a clearing near the tall trees then we picked up stones and started throwing, hoping we would knock down some of the Tiesa fruit. Our hopes were answered when we started picking up fruits instead of stones and before we knew it, we nearly had two kilos of tiesa.
We had two baskets, one was already full and I intended to fill the other one too. I started to pick up a stone when we suddenly heard some one screaming profanities at us and we simultaneously ducked out of view. There was an old man standing in front of a house. It was a two storey house made of wood that seemed to be from the Spanish colonial era. What's weird about it was it wasn't there before. I mean we no one noticed it before.
But then again maybe I never noticed it because my attention was on the tiesa trees. He continued to curse at us, calling us thieves and all sorts of things until we all decided it was time to bail out of there. We head back to the ranch around five in the afternoon. We weren't interrogated by the elders. No one seemed to question our whereabouts and we promised no one would tell and we gave away what was left of the tiesa fruits. No one told or spoke about it until the following evening.
Our pregnant aunt went into labor and she had this feeling that she would be giving birth that night. She labored all well through the evening and so everyone in the ranch was worried. Our grandmother who was a midwife, was the one who monitored her up to the point when she decided that it would be best if our aunt was brought to a nearby hospital.
It never happened.
They said that around three in the morning she went into labor again, she was screaming in agony, crying in pain, the baby seemed to be thrashing in her womb. Blood, sweat, tears, were everywhere and then the pain just finally stopped. That's what they said, it all just went dead calm. My aunt gave birth to a still born child. We never saw it, we never lit candles for it. They said there was something wrong about it, so wrong that they had to bury it at once.
After a year, our grandmother told us that the child was indeed still born but what she saw chilled her to the bones so much so that she kept quiet about it but we were curious and maybe our grandmother wanted to finally share the burden of this knowledge with someone. She said that the baby was a boy and would have been healthy if not for the odd appearance of his skin. She said that his skin was baggy as an elephant and black as coal, he already had a few strands of hair when he came out but they were all white, he had no blood, as if it all dried up the moment he came out and what stroked me the most was the last thing she said. He had a small crater on his chest, right where his heart should have been.
This sight was so gruesome that our grandmother kept it from almost everyone. She was the one who buried the child in a small spot near our aunt's house. She even brought us there and pointed out the spot, we all looked at each other in horror when we saw what she was pointing at. There next to the Durian trees stood a sapling with familiar leaves. She said that the last thing our aunt remembered eating that night was a few pieces of that mouth watering tiesa fruit.
-THE END