The Witch by Edilberto K. Tiempo

The Witch By Edilberto K. Tiempo When I was twelve years old, I used to go to Libas, ab aside nine kilometers from the town, to visit my preferent uncle, Tio Sabelo, the head teacher of the barrio school there. I like going to Libas because of the many things to eat at my uncles house cane sugar syrup, candied amount of young coconut, corn and rice cakes, ripe jackfruit, guavas from trees growing wild on a hill not far from Tio Sabelos house. It was through these visits that I comprehend many strange stories about Minggay Awok. Awok is the word for witch in southern Leyte.Minggay was known as a witch even beyond Libas, in fin outlying sitios, and considering that not uncommonly a mans nearest neighbor was two or common chord hills away, her notoriety was wide. Minggay lived in a small, measly chanty as the back of the creek separating the barrios of Libas and Sinit-an. It squatted like a soaked hen on a steep incline and below it, six or seven meters away, two trails forked, one going to Libas and the other to Mahangin, a mountain sitio. The hut take to the woodsed dangerously to the side where the creek water ate away gigantic chunks of earth during the rainy sea tidings.It had two small openings, a small door through which Minggay probably had to stoop to pass, and a window about two feet jog facing the creek. The window was screened by a frayed jute sacking which fluttered eerily even in the daytime. What she had in the hut nobody seemed to know definitely. One move fellow who boasted of having gone inside it when Minggay was out in her clearing on a hill nearby give tongue to he had seen dirty stoppered stores temporary removal from the bamboo slats of the cogon thatch.Some of the bottles contained scorpions, centipedes, beetles, bumble bees, and other insects others were filled with ash-colored powder and dark liquids. These bottles contained the paraphernalia of her witchcraft. Two or three small bottles she always had with her hiatus on h er waistband with a bunch of iron keys, whether she went to her clearing or to the creek to flummox shrimps or gather fresh-water shells, or even when she slept.It was said that those who had done her wrong never get away her vengeance, in the form of festering carbuncles, chronic fevers that caused withering of the skin, or a certain disease of the nose that eventually ate the nose out. Using an magic trick known only to her, Minggay would take out one insect from a bottle, soak it in colored liquid or roll it in powder, and with a curse let it go to the body of her victim the insect might be removed and the disease cured only rarely through intricate rituals of an expensive tambalan. Thus Minggay was feared in Libas and the surrounding barrios.There had been attempts to murder her, but in some mysterious way she always came out unscathed. A man lay fire to her hut one night, thinking to burn her with it. The hut quickly burned down, but Minggay was unharmed. On another occasi on a man openly declared that he had killed her, showing the blood-stained bolo with which he had stabbed her a week later she was seen hobbling to her clearing. This man believed Minggay was the cause of the rash that his only child had been carrying for over a year. One day, so the story went, meeting his wife, Minggay asked to hold her child. She didnt want to offend Minggay.As the witch gave the child back she said, He has a very(prenominal) smooth-spoken skin. A few days later the boy had skin eruptions all over his body that never left him. Minggays only companions were a lean, thriftlessness sow and a few chickens, all of them charcoal black. The sow and the chickens were allowed to wander in the fields, and even if the sow dug up sweet potatoes and the chickens pecked rice or corn grain wrying in the sun, they were not driven away by the neighbors because they were afraid to arouse Minggays wrath. Besides the sow and the chickens, Minggay was known to gravel a wakwak a nd a sigbin.Those who claimed to have seen the sigbin described it as a queer animal resembling a kangaroo the forelegs were shorter than the hind ones its fanlike ears made a flapping sound when it walked. The wakwak was a nocturnal bird, as big and black as a crow. It gave out raucous cries when a person in the neighborhood had just died. The bird was conjectural to be Minggays messenger, and the sigbin caried her to the grave then the witch dug up the corpse and feasted on it. The measure when I passed by the hut and saw her lean sow and her black chickens, I wondered if they trans organize themselves into fantastic creatures at night.Even in the daytime I dreaded the possibility of meeting her she might accost me on the trail near her hut, say something about my face or any leave of it, and then I might live the rest of my life with a harelip, a sunken nose, or crossed eyeball. But I never saw Minggay in her house or near the premises. There were times when I thought she was only a legend, a name to frighten children from doing mischief. But then I almost always saw her sow digging banana tree roots or wallowing near the trail and the black chickens scratching for worms or pecking grains in her yard, and the witch became very real indeed.Once I was told to go to Libas with a bottle of medicine for Tio Sabelos sick wife. I started from the town at half past five and by the time I saw the balete tree crossways the creek from Minggays hut, I could hardly see the trail before me. The balete was called Minggays tree, for she was known to sit on one of the numerous twisting vines that formed its grotesque trunk to wait for a belated passer-by. The balete was a towering monstrous shadow a firefly that flitted among the vines was an evil eye plucked out searching for its socket.I wanted to run back, but the medicine had to get to Tio Sabelos wife that night. I wanted to push through the thick underbrush to the dry part of the creek to avoid the balete, but I was afraid of snakes. I had discarded the idea of a coconut frond torch because the fainthearted would catch the forethought of the witch, and when she saw it was only a little boy Steeling myself I tried to whistle as I passed in the shadow of the balete, its overhanging vines like hairy build up ready to hoist and strangle me among the branches. Emerging into the stony bed of the creek, I saw Minggays hut.The screen in the window waved in the faint light of the room and I thought I saw the witch peering bum it. As I started going up the trail by the hut, each contemptible clump and shadow was a crouching old woman. I had heard stories of Minggays attempts to waylay travelers in the dark and suck their blood. Closing my eyes twenty yards from the hut of the witch, I ran up the hill. A few meters past the hut I stumbled on a low stump. I got up at once and ran again. When I reached Tio Sabelos house I was very tired and badly shaken.Somehow after the terror of the balete and th e hut of the witch had lessened, although I always had the goose flesh whenever I passed by them after dusk. One moonlight night going home to town I heard a splashing of the water below Minggays house. I thought the sound was made by the witch, for she was seen to bathe on moonlit nights in the creek, her loose hair falling on her face. It was not Minggay I saw. It was a huge animal. I was about to run thinking it was the sigbin of the witch, but when I looked at it again, I saw that it was a carabao wallowing in the creek.One morning I thought of bringing home shrimps to my mother, and so I went to a creek a hundred yards from Tio Sabelos house. I had with me my cousins pana, made of a long steel rod pointed at one end and cleft at the other and shot through the hollow of a bamboo joint the sizing of a finger by means of a rubber band attached to one end of the joint. After wading for two hours in the creek which meandered around bamboo groves and banban and ipil clumps with only three small shrimps strung on a coconut midrib dangling from my belt, I came upon an old woman taking a bath in the shade of a catmon tree.A brown tapis was wound around her to three fingers width higher up her thin chest. The brink of her left was a foot-wide ledge of unbroken boulder on which she had set a wooden basin half full of wet but still unwashed clothes. In front of her was a submerged stone pile topped by a platter size rock on it were a heap of rip up coconut meat, a small discolored tin basin, a few lemon rinds, and bits of pounded gogo bark. The woman was soaking her sparse gray hair with the gogo suds. She must have seen me attack because she did not look surprised.Seeing the three small shrimps hanging at my side she said, You have a poor catch. She looked harming. She was probably as old as my nan smaller, for this old woman was two or three inches below five feet. Her eyes looked surprisingly young, but her mouth, just a thin line above the little chin, see med to have tasted many bitter years. Why dont you bait them out of their hiding? Take some of this. She gave me a handful of shredded coconut meat whose milk she had squeezed out and with the gogo suds used on her hair.She exuded a sweet wood fragrance of gogo bark and the rind of lemons. Beyond the first bend, she said pointing, the water is still. Scatter the shreds there. Thats where I get my shrimps. You will see some traps. If you find shrimps in them they are yours. I mumbled my thanks and waded to the bend she had indicated. That part of the creek was like a small lake. One bank was lined by huge boulders showing long, deep fissures where the roots of gnarled dapdap trees had penetrated. The other bank was sandy, with bamboo and catmon trees leaning over, their roots sticking out in the water.There was good shade and the air had a twilight chilliness. The water was shallow except on the raspy side, which was deep and murky. I scattered the coconut shreds around, and not long after they had settled down shrimps crawled from boles under the bamboo and catmon roots and from crevices of the boulders. It did not take me an hour to catch a midribful, some hairy with age, some heavy with eggs, moulters, dark magus, leaf-green shrimps, speckled. I saw three traps of woven bamboo strips, round-bellied and about two feet long, two hidden behind a catmon root.I did not disturb them because I had enough shrimps for myself. No, no, iti. Your mother will need them. You dont have enough. Besides I have fresh water crabs at home. She looked up at me with her strange young eyes and asked, Do you still have a mother? I told her I had, and a grandma, too. You are not from Libas, I think. This is the first time I have seen you. I said I was from the town and my uncle was the head teacher of the Libas barrio school. You remind me of my son when he was your age. He had bright eyes like you, and his voice was soft like yours.I think you are a good boy. Where is your son now? I have not heard from him since he left. He went away when he was seventeen. He left in anger, because I didnt want him to marry so young. I dont know where he went, where he is. She spread the length of a kimona on the water for a last rinsing. The flesh hanging from her skinny arms was loose and flabby. If hes still living, she went on, hed be as old as your father maybe. Many times I feel in my bones he is alive, and will come back before I die. Your husband is still living? He died a long time ago, when my boy was eleven. She twisted the kimona like a rope to wring out the water. Im glad he died early. He was very cruel. I looked at her, at the thin mouth, wondering about her husbands cruelty, disturbed by the manner she spoke about it. Do you have other children? I wish I had. Then I wouldnt be living alone. A woman her age, I thought, should be a grandmother and live among many children. Where do you live? She did not speak, but her strange young eyes were p robing and looked grotesque in the old womans face. Not far from herethe house on the high bank, across the balete. She must have seen the fright that suddenly leaped into my face, for I thought she smiled at me queerly. Im going now, I said. I felt her following me with her eyes indeed they seemed to bore a hot hole between my shoulder blades. I did not look back. Dont run, I told myself. But at the first bend of the creek, when I knew she couldnt see me, I ran. After a while I stopped, feeling a little foolish. Such a helpless-looking little old woman couldnt be Minggay, couldnt be the witch.I remembered her kind voice and the woodfragrance. She could be my own grandmother. As I walked the string of shrimps kept brushing against the side of my leg. I detached it from my belt and looked at the shrimps. Except for the three small ones, all of them belonged to the old woman. Her coconut shreds had coaxed them as by magic out of their hiding. The protruding eyes of the biggest, which was still alive, seemed to glare at meand then they became the eyes of the witch. Angrily, I hurled the shrimps back into the creek.