Collected Philippine Short Stories

Big Sister | Corsorcio Borje

"Your Tata Cilin's house is in Nagpartian, very near the high school. You will stay with him. And," Inciang said, "I don't have to accompany you to Vigan, Itong. You'll ride in the passenger bus where your cousin Pedro is the conductor. Your cousin Pedro will show you where your Tata Cilin lives. Your cousin Merto, son of your uncle Cilin, will help you register in school. He is studying in the same school. Will you stop crying?"

Itong looked at Inciang, and the tears continued creeping down his cheeks. Itong was so young. Inciang began to scold him. "Is that the way you should act? Why, you're old now!"

Then Itong ran into the house and remained inside. His father laughed heartily as he pulled at his pipe. Inciang started to laugh also, but her tears began to fall fast also, and she bent her head over her washtub and she began scrubbing industriously, while she laughed and laughed. Outside the gate, standing with her face pressed against the fence, was Nena, watching the tableau with a great wonder in her eyes.

Inciang had watched Itong grow up from a new-born baby. She was six years old when she carried him around, straddled over her hip. She kept house, did the family wash, encouraged Itong to go through primary, then intermediate school, when he showed rebellion against school authority. When he was in the second grade and could speak more English words than Inciang, her father began to laugh at her; also her Tia Orin and her brood had laughed at her.

"Schooling would never do me any good," Inciang had said lightly.

She watched Itong go through school, ministering to his needs lovingly, doing more perhaps for him than was good for him. Once she helped him fight a gang of rowdies from the other end of the town. Or better, she fought the gang for him using the big rice ladle she was using in the kitchen at the time.

And her father had never married again, being always faithful to the memory of Inciang's mother. The farm which he tilled produced enough rice and vegetables for the family's use, and such few centavos as Lacay Iban would now and then need for the cockpit he got out of Inciang's occasional sales of vegetables in the public market or of a few bundles of rice in the camarin. Few were the times when they were hard pressed for money. One was the time when Inciang's mother died. Another was now that Itong was going to Vigan.

Inciang was working to send him away, when all she wanted was to keep him always at her side! She spent sleepless nights thinking of how Itong would fare in a strange town amidst strange people, even though their parientes would be near him. It would not be the same. She cried again and again, it would not be the same.

WHEN she finished tying up the tampipi, she pushed it to one side of the main room of the house and went to the window. Itong was with a bunch of his friends under the acacia tree across the dirt road. They were sitting on the buttress roots of the tree, chin in hand, toes making figures in the dust. And, of course, Itong's closest friend, Nena, was there with them. Strange, Inciang thought, how Itong, even though already twelve years old, still played around with a girl.

And then, that afternoon, the departure. The passenger truck pausing at the gate. The tampipi of Itong being tossed up to the roof of the truck. The bag of rice. The crate of chickens. The young coconuts for Tata Cilin's children. Then Itong himself, in the pair of rubber shoes which he had worn at the graduation exercises and which since then had been kept in the family trunk. Itong being handed into the truck.

Lacay Iban, Tia Orin, and Inciang were all there shouting instructions. All the children in the neighborhood were there. Nena was there. It was quite a crowd come to watch Itong go away for a year! A year seemed forever to Inciang. Itong sat in the dim interior of the bus, timid and teary-eyed. Inciang glanced again and again at him, her heart heavy within her, and then as the bus was about to leave, there was such a pleading look in his eyes that Inciang had to go close to him, and he put his hand on hers.