Carpooling Loonies
Death On All Hallows Eve
(Part Two)
(Editor's note: These are excerpts from 'The House on Burgos Street' by the same author.)
There it was again-the lonely moon and the feeling of consternation it would bring to the people of Burgos Street. Children could only watch the sunset from their windows, and each of the family's preggo would be kept in their garlic-wafted rooms. The herb is believed to protect people from supernatural beings that gorge on human flesh and fetuses inside the womb. Talks about these underworld beings have no ending, yet no one has claimed to have met the nocturnals face to face. There are visions, but even visions sometimes don't become real.
Tang Tasio, the old man who sells wooden rosaries outside the capilla would often say, 'Why will you wait for them to get you before you believe in them? Even these rosaries will not do you good when they come to harm you. Only the power of the young woman who lives behind the bushes can trap them and take their power away from them. He would tell anybody who would stop by to look at his rosaries. He makes them at night with one candle lighting his paltry house while continuously rattling about 'them'. His only audience was a young girl who looks up at him from the other side of the table not quite comprehending Tang Tasio's loud thoughts. The roughness of each bead was an analogue of his half-hearted belief in the saints and their power in warding off evils.
Iyay Caring would sit beside her bedroom window mostly staring at her wrinkled hand than reading the Orasyon, the only thing left of her father's belongings. He passed away with nothing in his pocket and a small house just enough for one girl and desolation to grow up together in. She would sit by the window at sunset to watch the fire-colored flowers disappear from her sight. Every night when darkness would fall, a veiled woman would walk by the dark street outside. Iyay Caring never saw her with company. People whispered behind her back and spoke of her as the woman with the silent curse. No one spoke to her and townspeople claimed she would only come out when it's dark. Iyay Caring felt a certain familiarity towards the mysterious woman because even in her silence, her father told stories about Gumba with no end.
Iyay Caring would flip the pages of the Orasyon whose pages have become sullied over the years. When her father gave her the booklet on his deathbed, he made her promise never to part from it. 'Tang, did you go to see her? Iyay Caring asked her before his last breath. Her father clasped her hand tightly and then silence, a piercing pain, became the answer.
Until creases on her skin revealed her ripening age, she lived wondering if Tang Tasyo went to see Gumba. Iyay Caring came back from the church one day and found their house empty. How could he leave the house when his legs and arms have been twisted by the devil? He can't walk. Iyay Caring thought to herself. The old man was not ready to face the nightly visits of death. Night after night, he would feel burning pain all over his body, until one morning he woke up with his legs and arms bent like cloth wrung to dry . 'Tang! Iyay caring cried in horror but that was all she could say, covering her mouth with shaking hands.
It was almost midnight when Tang Tasyo returned to the house that day he left. Iyay Caring dropped the candle she was holding when she met him at the door. Her father stood still on the doorstep with no traces of the pains he went through during the past nights. The shinning moon outlined his body and Iyay Caring stood in disbelief. He went past through her without saying a word and since then has become awfully silent. Tang Tasyo also stopped talking about Gumba and would go about the house as if not seeing Iyay Caring. Every night since then, Iyay Caring would hear her father silently leave his wooden bed and walk outside the house towards darkness at midnight. She would get up at the last creak of the floor and peep through the window to watch her father disappear among the bushes. In fear and anguish, Iyay Caring would go back to bed to wait for the next languishing sunrise.
Many years have passed and memories of her father would only lead her back to the very mystery that cured him, then led him to his demise. Now Iyay Caring sits by the same window, weaker, but still holding the Orasyon. She would still see the veiled woman pass by. There was nothing left of Lola Gumba, but her weeping soul. She walks by when it's dark but she has left her body which the townspeople burned after her death. The ghost of Lola Gumba lived among the others but her presence bedeviled by revenge. She still goes back to the place where her house once stood, and Iyay Caring sees her. She sees her all the time and others don't, unless they stand on the ground Lola Gumba claimed as her own, her only possession.
(To be continued)