Butterfly People

3 Half the Money to China

3

Half the Money to China

Lim Po won Vicenta’s heart in increments. He spoke Ilokano badly. She spoke no Cantonese. When she arrived in Baguio, scarred and

covered in bruises and cuts the last thing her husband had given her she was at the end of her thirteenth year. At thirtythree, he was an old man compared to her.

Right away he took them in, the runaway girl with the baby. He looked at the note from the priest and asked no questions. Then he fed her soul. Small kindnesses, like hemming the edges of flour

sacks to make the baby’s diapers. He always bought the flour brand, ‘Angel White.’ There was no difference between that and the cheaper one, which he’d bought in the past,

but it gave him a laugh to wrap that print of a cherub around this baby’s butt. When Vicenta put the baby to her breast, he’d bring her tea. “Young mother must drink, for plenty

milk, for this beautiful baby angel.” Each time he referred to Gloria as ‘Beautiful Baby Angel,’ Vicenta opened to him a little more. He was not attractive. He had nearly nothing

in this world. She liked him because he was utterly the opposite of Raul.

Raul Vega lived on in her nightmares. When she woke screaming, Lim Po was there. He had mentholated Chinese medicines and he rubbed her temples gently. “These are the points of forgetting

what you don’t need,” he’d say, as she fell back into a more peaceful sleep.

Baby Gloria learned to walk by holding onto Lim Po’s queue. She toddled around the little general store giggling, holding onto his pigtail. The pigtail hung down to the back of Lim

Po’s knees. In the streets of Baguio, he was ridiculed for it. “Go home Pake bastard or we’ll cut your pretty hair for you.” Vicenta waited on customers and watched.

This man was short and sturdy, like a tree, and he never let the baby fall.

Raul had been handsome, tall and cruel. Unfortunately, Vicenta had learned from the monster husband what a man was. She pondered the softness of the c******n. Sometimes, in her mind, she thought

him weak. She felt he wanted her, yet they’d shared the upstairs apartment of the general store for over two years, and Lim Po had never been inappropriate with her. She wondered if, had he

been Christianized, would he have become a priest? Or was he bakla, the kind of man who preferred to love men?

The day he tied a tiny imported India bell to the end of his queue, for the pleasure of her little daughter, Vicenta decided she would be his lover.

That night, after the baby was asleep, Vicenta felt herself already sixteen. She felt her body was now ready for love. What Raul had done to her was s*x, never love. And so she went to Lim

Po’s bed.

“Are you sure?” he asked. Once he was convinced that she really wanted this, he loved her with tenderness. Over the weeks, he added strength to his lovemaking, letting her coax him

on. This surprised and pleased Vicenta.

Less than two years later, she gave him a son, and they called him ‘Little Owl,’ because he often made the sound whooo just before he smiled.

Lim Po wasn’t Christian, so Vicenta never talked of marriage.

Father Enrique came one night, to tell Vicenta that her mother, Rory, had died. “It’s my fault. She should not have had another baby, not at her age.” Vicenta listened, while

hot tears wet her face and clothes. “God knows, she nearly died giving birth to you. The Lord didn’t spare her this time. It is all because I am a selfish man.”

“Was the baby yours?” Vicenta asked.

The priest sobbed, “She was my joy. I lived each day in the small hope of earning one smile from her. When you disappeared, I comforted her. Aye, my child, I comforted me. We began a

relationship we were both helpless to end. It was bigger than the sum of our souls, this love. She never let me proclaim it publicly. Rory didn’t want me to choose her over the priesthood. I

took it all… her love, and the respect due a priest from his people. When she became with child, she threatened to run away if I renounced my vows.”

Lim Po made his old friend tea. Vicenta touched him here on the face and there on the knees and shoulders. When their tears were nearly dry, more tea would come to replenish the water in their

bodies, so they could cry some more.

“Father, I’m not a Catholic anymore, I think.” She cut her eyes, lovingly, toward the c******n. “I don’t want him to be Christianized due to me. But, will you

baptize our baby?”

Father Enrique cried more and harder. “You would still consider me your priest, after I have sinned against God and your good mother?”

“I still consider you my priest and my father. You, Enrique, were always there to catch me when I fell. It would have been a pity to be a girl who had no father. I had you. Now dry your

tears and give me news of my brothers.”

The priest brought out a bundle. “This, your brother Denise asked me to return to you.” It was the rough wooden statue of Saint Vincent that had been hers since birth.

The next day, the c******n took his friend and his family into the garden behind the store. It was a riot of vegetables and flowers. Lim Po had made it for Vicenta, because she loved everything

that grows. In the center was a young persimmon tree, bearing its first fruits. “This seed, I brought from China,” he said. “I would like our son to be baptized under

here.”

Enrique blessed the child with water and the Holy Ghost. When he salted his tongue, the baby did not cry. “He’s strong,” said the priest.

“He should be,” the young mother said. “We made him with love.”

“Well, Little Owl, what will your Christian name be?” the priest asked.

“You choose, Enrique,” answered Lim Po.

“Well then, I’ll call you Nicodemus, after the good and brave Pharisee. That was the name Rory had chosen for our baby boy. Your life will honor their deaths.” Father Enrique

let his tears come easily.

“Old friend, can you bless our marriage, without making me a rosary man?” The two men stood face-to-face, one wearing his brown Padre robes, the other, a c******n’s black

dress.

Enrique took Vicenta’s hands; he took the small hands of Gloria and the rough hands of Lim Po. Together, with the new hands of the baby, he joined them. He made the sign of the cross over

them and said, “Heavenly Father, you have consecrated this union with true love and friendship. Today, I ask you to respect that love, as a marriage.”

“Who owns these hands now?” Vicenta asked.

“They all belong to God,” said the priest.

“No, my friend, they all belong to our children.” Lim Po shook his head and smiled widely, looking at the tangle of fingers. “Is that good enough for you Catholics? Are we

really married now?”

“I’m not a very good Catholic anymore, old friend. I feel it is more than enough. If God needs more, well, we just don’t have anymore.” They all laughed.

“Now, wife,” said the c******n, “would you like to serve our priest some of your excellent adobo? I didn’t kill that noisy rooster for nothing.”

Lim Po made more money gambling than what the store brought in. He was a card counter, but no one in this country had seen one before. He was careful to lose sometimes, so he would not be

suspected. “That Pake has luck from his lovely wife,” he heard the men often say.

The only violence he ever did happened one night as he was gambling. Gloria, child of his heart, was with him. “Your brothers I had to work for,” he’d say to her, “but your mother brought you to me for free.”

She was small for her age, which was adding up to five years. Her nose just reached the edge of the table. One of the other gamblers was always smoking sigarilyo. “Watch out, or

you’ll burn my daughter!” Lim Po had said more than once. The gambler was also drinking from a rum bottle. A little yelp from Gloria, and Lim Po saw his fear had come true. The

child’s nose had a perfectly round, red and black cigarette burn, right in the center of it. Her tears came quietly, her chest heaved. As he bent to comfort his child, Lim Po delivered a blow

to the gambler that sent him flying backward out of his chair. The c******n had done it so quickly that nearly no one could believe it had happened. The gambler bled from his ears, nose and mouth.

They had to carry him home.

For years to come, men argued as they played mahjong or cards. “That c******n kicked with his foot,” one would say. “No,” said another, “it was a punch with the

fist.” Some say old Lim threw the man across the room with only a look from his eyes. After that, people were extra cautious with the children of Lim Po.

Each time he won, he’d spread all the money out on the bed for Vicenta. “Half for you. Half for my number one wife in China,” he’d say. She would gather it all into her

moneybag that she kept folded and tied with a bandanna, between her breasts. In the morning, she would go out to market. “Don’t forget to post number one wife’s half to China

today,” her husband would say as she left.

“Don’t worry, old man,” she’d say, as the store door banged closed.

“Ina,” Gloria would say, “why we never post half the money to number one wife in China?”

“Because our old husband never gave me her address. Anyway, I pray for her and her two sons every day. I say to God, bless her for nailing Lim Po into a wooden box and sending him to me in

the Philippines.”

“But Ina, why she want to ship off her husband like that? He one good father. I heard him say he nearly died coming here. Don’t number one wife love him?” the girl

asked.

“She loved him enough to say good-bye. There was war always going on in China, that’s why your Po-pa is always reading the Chinese newspapers and talking, talking, talking to me

about it. He says the Japanese took Taiwan. The British, the Germans, the Russians, even the French wanted to control trade in Canton. Yes, the Chinese even fought each other. Po-Pa’s own

parents barely survived the bloody civil war between the Taiping rebels and the Manchu ruling class. Everything was coming to ruin, the Manchu were falling.

“Our Lim Po was a high teacher of mathematics there, very successful. People became confused and crazy. The school in his village was burned. With so much killing going on, it was no

longer safe for this teacher. Number one wife made plenty of food. She put everything she could think of in that box for her man, and fresh water. Just enough. She shipped him out like cargo on a

junk. The next night, when the rioters came to kill the teachers, he was gone. She told them he had drowned himself.”

“And is it true that Father Enrique was at the Lingayen harbor in Pangasinan, the day our Po-Pa’s ship arrived?” asked Gloria.

“Ah, yes. It was 1896, the same year Jose Rizal was executed by the Spaniards.” The mother spit. “He saw it from afar and had a feeling that box had a strange origin:

Guangdong, China. He came close and heard a weak moan, then bribed the harbormaster to get the Chinese cargo box. When he opened it, he found a half dead, stinking man. It took weeks of washing and

Father Enrique’s warm soups before he was again with the living. Then he helped him to find his first work, washing up for merchants in Campeo, Baguio.”

“Should we not send a little of that money to number one wife in China? Just for thank you?” Gloria insisted.

“Do you like to eat?” Vicenta hastened her step. “Because this money is enough for food only. Our old c******n says it’s because so many Americans, Japanese, Irish,

Chinese and Mexicans have come to build a road through the mountains, that food at the market is too dear. So many foreigners are so generous in helping us Filipinos with this road. The Chinese

newpapers say it begins in Manila, you know. Po-pa thinks the foreign devils like the copper and gold in our mountains. He gets angry and says, they will mine all these metals and become greedy. I

worry more foreigners will come here and make war on someone, somewhere, sometime soon.”