Pale Horses and Old Churches

Subbed to 'The Collagist' on 10/6/09 -- Rejected
Subbed to 'Tayo Magazine' on 06/16/10

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Pale Horses and Old Churches

Simbahan
a short story by Robert Aquino Dollesin

During the Grandfather‘s service the boy shuffled his feet and studied the grief-stretched faces of everyone around him. Standing next to his mother, he felt no emotion. Nothing. Not the slightest sense of bereavement.

Once the slings had been hoisted, the boy's mother took his hand and they fell in line with the others to file past the Grandfather’s grave.

He stood a moment at the edge and struggled to catch a final glimpse of the brown casket before it disappeared beneath a sea of white petals. He opened his hand and released the rose he’d been holding.

The procession trudged past long rows of skyward-spiking headstones. The boy, looking over his shoulder, marveled at the way the moss-covered pathway sprung back to form after being trampled.

A rumble from above brought his face upward. An American jet was crossing the rust-colored sky. The boy raised a thumb into the air in front of him and blotted the airplane out. It was something he’d learned from his cousins. But no matter how far he held his thumb from his eyes, he couldn’t hide the white contrail left in the plane’s wake.

He was twelve, almost thirteen, and whenever one of the planes from the nearby Air Base flew overhead, the boy imagined himself in the cockpit. He pictured himself now, peering down through the window at the procession below. From high above it resembled a long dark serpent, writhing toward the graveyard exit.

A fleet of vehicles crowded the rutted road outside the cemetery. Jeeps and sedans, horse-drawn carriages, motorbikes with sidecars.

The boy climbed aboard the carriage his mother had hired to haul them from the services to the Grandfather’s celebration.

His mother slid onto the wooden bench next to him. She said, “We call this vehicle a kalesa.”

He ignored her. What did it matter if it was called a buggy or carriage or kalesa?

“Kalesa,” she said again. He remained quiet. Even though his mother’s eyes were screened behind dark glasses, the boy knew his silence grated her. She often reminded him that he needed to take more seriously her efforts to teach him the language and customs of her native country.

But why should he bother? Neither the decision, nor the desire to divorce his father and return to his mother’s homeland had been his. It had been hers. Completely hers. He could hardly stand, much less understand the people of this country. He felt not the slightest inkling to be a part of their culture. Moreover, why should he bond with people who gave him wide berth and kept him at a distance simply because he was different?

Fanning herself with the Grandfather’s funeral program, the boy’s mother gestured with her chin to the kalesa driver and said, “The coachman we call a kutsero.”

The boy glanced away. The gritty morning breeze struck his face. On the opposite side of the heat shimmer, the cemetery workers labored to fill the Grandfather's grave. Kalesa. Kutsero. Kutsero. Kalesa. Who cared?

In her gutteral tone, the boy’s mother gave the kutsero directions to the Grandfather’s house.

When the old driver stooped for his reins, the torn brim of his straw hat threw dappled shadows down the back of his neck and across the whole of his steeply sloped shoulders. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and pulled back hard on the ropes until they were taut in his hands.

Those hands. The boy paid close attention to them. The gnarled fingers. The blackened knuckles.

“Mano,” the driver shouted to his horse. “Mano. Mano.” But the horse did not spring forward. The old man clicked his tongue again. The horse swung its lowered head side to side and swished its tail, slicing through the cloud of flies behind it.

The kutsero then reached down and took up a bamboo switch resting at his feet. He brought the switch up and snapped it forward.

The crack against the horse’s flank startled both the boy and his mother.

The boy’s mother said, “Was that really necessary?”

Grinning over his shoulder, the kutsero replied, “The more stubborn they are, the more severe a shock they need.” He turned back to the horse and raised his lash again.

“Don’t!” cried the boy’s mother.

But the second blow had been delivered. This time the horse raised its head, rolled its lips back and whinnied. And then the kalesa’s big wooden wheels began to turn in the dust.

The boy watched his mother shake her head in frustration the same way she shook her head earlier in the chapel when she’d asked him to show respect by kissing the Grandfather's cold, motionless hand. He protested, but she insisted.

Gray scarves of clouds drifted above. The boy recalled the Grandfather’s hands; the trenching folds of pale skin, the same sterile odor of freshly washed clothes drying on a line, and the way the Grandfather's fingers burned stiff against his lips.

And now, with the cemetery rolling past, the boy asked himself why those hands had never reached out to touch him, to gently knead his shoulders, or to playfully rake his scalp.

The morning breeze and the kalesa’s gentle sway lulled the boy. He closed his eyes and focused on the rhythmic clip-clop cadence of the horse’s hooves striking the dusty pavement.

The last time he visited the Grandfather's home he was bothered by the cruel jokes his cousins shared. Each time the Grandfather kissed one of them, they soured their face. They scrubbed at their damp cheek with the ball of their palm. Later they complained about the way the Grandfather’s grizzled chin rasped sharp against their skin.

It was during those moments, while he stood listening to his cousins laugh in the courtyard, that the boy told himself if the Grandfather had nuzzled him, he would not have made such remarks. Never. He would not have wriggled free of the Grandfather’s grip and raced out the door onto the sun-scorched courtyard. He would not have moaned about the way the Grandfather’s old-man-odor clung to his clothes and skin.

His mother nudged him. He opened his eyes. Ahead, smoke from burning garbage was eating up the sky. In the distance, bells from twin belfries rolled plangent and empty through the sultry morning air.

The boy’s mother reached up and pushed her dark glasses onto the top of her head. She touched her son’s arm, gently. “Bakit?,” she asked. “Bakit umiyak ka?”

“I’m not crying,” he said. He looked down at his hands resting folded in his lap.

His mother’s arm slid across his back. Without raising his head, he said, “ Did he hate me because my father was white?”

She did not respond right away. When she finally did, she said, “He didn’t hate you. He was protecting himself from the day he’d lose you to another world the way he lost me.”

The boy felt his throat constrict. He heard church bells tumble through the air and he looked past the kutsero, past the pale horse that pulled the kalesa, to a great cathedral looming ahead.

He raised his trembling thumb and tried to hide the old and weathered Spanish structure from his frame of view. It was much too large.

As the kalesa drew alongside the spear-tipped rails of the high iron fence, the boy could feel the walls of the church leaning close. For an instant the sky cleared and everything surrounding the boy was dusted in gold. He swung his head around. Brilliant colors streamed from the stained glass windows. Unlike the American plane he'd earlier watched soaring overhead, the church did not shrink and fade.

He heard his mother‘s voice: “Simbahan.” He turned to face her. She reached out and thumbed the corners of his eyes and said, “In the Philippines we call a church a simbahan.”

“Simbahan,” he repeated. “Simbahan.” He kept his gaze on his mother‘s face. “In the Philippines we call a church a simbahan.”