Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(46)

He kept talking, expounding, while caressing the severed claw. He explained that just hours ago, he had pawned his wristwatch, sold a couple of his fighting chickens, and gave Milo to the sheriff’s son. “Sheriff was gonna padlock the house. I had to pick between the dog and the mansion, Strong Will. And besides, my chickens were frightened of that mongrel.”

I sucked in my lips, scrunched my shirt’s hem with my fists, flared my nostrils, and shook my head from side to side. I stepped into a wider stance, breathed in, and aimed my forehead at Norman, like a bull about to charge. And right as I was about to lunge, he turned and walked away, and resumed singing about catching rabbits and me not being a friend of his.

He was no friend of mine either.

I swiveled back to face the faucet and breathed through my teeth. I stared at the spout and prayed water into existence, mouthing, “Please.”

The school chaplain once said at Wednesday Mass that Jesus walked on water and another time he turned water into wine. I figured that Jesus was well practiced in hydromechanics, and that he wouldn’t refuse showing off his holy powers to a thirsty girl like me. That Friday night I learned that Jesus sometimes said yes in ingenious ways.

“Have faith,” Papa had said. Jesus was God, after all.

“Neng! Neng!” I heard the call of a friend and the footsteps of an eager playmate.

“Elma! You’re back! What are you doing here? Look at you,” I said, studying the bends and bows that now outlined her body.

Her uncle’s rice farm had no harvest at all. They tried to save the little bit of grain they could, but everything had dried up. They sent her back to Manila because they had no food or water to pay her family with and because Mama said she could use some help—and that I could, too.

“It’s not any easier here,” I said. “Norman cut off the water. See?” I reached my cupped hand under the tap.

“My mama told me. But at least you and I are together, right?”



The next morning, I woke up to the smell of peanuts.

“You hungry?” Elma said, holding a pan de sal roll over my face, teasing me with the scent of freshly ground peanut butter. “It’s your favorite—pan de sal with peanut butter from my mama’s mortar and pestle. Mmmmm-mmm-mm.”

I reached for my favorite sandwich.

“Not so quick, friend,” she said as she snatched the roll away from my hand. “You gotta work for it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Today is the day you will learn how to fetch water.”

When we reached the back lot—where Manang Biday’s family’s shack stood amidst the vestiges of Norman’s failed fight-and-gamble business—Elma handed me a family-size ice-cream bucket and a gallon gasoline jug. She told me that I could start with two small containers and work my way up to three, maybe four, vessels, if I managed to learn how to balance wooden beams on my shoulders. For a good part of the morning, Elma bossed me around like I used to boss her around, enticing me to work by dangling the highly coveted, cellophane-wrapped peanut butter roll from her belt clip. She said that I could have my breakfast if, and only if, I brought home two full containers of water from the pozo.

“You’re taking me to the pozo? Are you crazy?” I said, dropping my jug and bucket on the concrete ground.

“No choice. It’s the only way you can have clean water. Do you want drinking and bathing water, or don’t you?” Elma said, picking up my containers.

“I do. But you know . . . You know that . . .”

“That only poor folks fetch water from the pozo?” she said. “Look, nobody will even know. We aren’t so bad, you know.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just that I have nothing left.” It was true. I had no food, no money, no parents really, and now, no water. I had enough trouble pretending at school. And now I’d have to lie about this, too. I’d have to pretend I’d never fetched water on foot with an old ice-cream bucket and a gasoline jug.

“You have no choice now. I won’t always be around to bring you peanut butter rolls or water or whatever, you know?” Elma wanted to go to vocational school and maybe become a secretary, or learn math and open her own sari-sari. Her mama said we all needed to learn to survive while we lived at the forsaken house and that we all needed to find a way out. So I started here, fetching my own water.

“Thank you,” I said, reaching back for my bucket and jug. “You’ve changed, by the way. You’re starting to act and look like a grown-up.”

“I’m a lady now,” Elma said, hands on waist. “While I was away at the rice farm, I got my first period.”

“Oh, my!” My eyes widened and my hands pressed on my abdomen. I had forgotten that Elma was a couple of years older than I was.

“It’s not too bad. It hurts sometimes, but not too bad. As long as you keep yourself clean, you’re good. And soon you’ll get yours, too. So that’s another reason why you need water, diba?”

We walked two and a half kilometers, past the rice paddy and the convent, deeper and deeper into lower-class country. My hands hurt from gripping onto the bucket and jug, and they hadn’t even a drop of water in them yet. My flip-flops turned black from the road dust that had collected under my soles. My stomach ached for the roll still cellophaned and tied to Elma’s waist. I sweated what I couldn’t afford to sweat.