Dusk: A Novel (Modern Library Paperbacks) by F. Sionil Jose Read Free Book Online

sleep,” he told her. “My mat has not been rolled yet. You can go up to the house.”
    Gratitude shone in her face. She went toward the house and disappeared within. He heard his mother call out to him to go to the woodshed and bring up an armful of firewood.
    The candle at the foot of the coffin had burned out and Istak lighted another and stuck it in the soft warm wax. As he turned for the woodshed, An-no came down and followed him. Istak was about to draw wood from the stack when An-no gripped him on the shoulder and spun him around. Surprised, Istak dropped the dry acacia branches and turned to his younger brother, who now confronted him, brawny as a bull and just as headstrong.
    “I don’t like the way you move about in this house,” An-no said, throwing away the respect a younger brother should always give to an elder.
    Istak was stunned. “You act like you are the best man here,” An-no continued. “Not just in the house, but in the entire village. That is perhaps correct—you are the learned one. But don’t forget, it is now we who feed you.”
    Istak recovered from his shock. “What nonsense are you talking about?” he asked sternly. “Have you forgotten I am the eldest?”
    “I have not forgotten that,” An-no said quietly. He was eighteen but farm work had made him appear older. “But there is no younger or older when it concerns a woman.”
    “What are you talking about?” Istak asked. Anger had coiled in him.
    “You know what I mean,” An-no said. “I found her, I brought her here. We made her husband’s coffin. Bit-tik and I. You did nothing but snore …”
    Istak moved away from his brother. “She is a widow, have you forgotten?”
    “Does it matter?”
    “And she is much older than you. A full five years!”
    “And you say that she is about your age and just the woman for you? I found her first,” An-no reiterated sharply. “And she will be mine. You must not stop me. I will take her and if she won’t come, I will make her.” He turned and marched away.
    For some time Istak stood immobile, unable to think, unable to respond to his brother’s sudden anger. It was not real, it did not happen at all—this aberration. Slowly, he stooped and groped for the branches that had fallen and, finding them, placed them one by one in the crook of his arm. His hands started to feel numb and he paused and stood up with but three branches. An-no would do what he threatened and he would not be able to stop him. He would never be able to be firm, to be a rock before anyone because his hands were like the dead branches he carried. He was like his father, and even more like the dead man they were to bury, a cripple to himself and to all the creatures in this miasma called Po-on.

CHAPTER
2
    T he Darkness began to lift and the eastern rim of the world was tinted with silver. In a while, the cocks dropped from their roosts in the guava trees with a noisy flapping of wings and chased the cackling hens, and the sun burst upon the land in a flood of dazzling light, flowed over the foothills, and its rays impaled the mists upon the kapok trees.
    They sat down to a breakfast of corn coffee and bowls of rice fried in fresh coconut oil. Dalin sat at one end of the low eating table, taking sips from the coconut bowl which Mayang had passed to her.
    Istak could see her clearly now, the brooding eyes, the thick eyebrows. Even in her gray, shapeless blouse of handwoven Iloko cloth, the contours of her body—her bosom, her shoulders—were as lovely as those of Carmencita, the eldest ofCapitán Berong’s daughters, whom he had taught the
cartilla
. His brother stared at him, bothering him with his unspoken enmity. Istak left the table quickly and went down the yard to make a hearse of the bull cart. His mother followed him. Some of the neighbors who had come in the night—mostly relatives, cousins, and second cousins—had returned. Istak scraped off the candle smudge on the tamarind stump and put the