Gathering (1973)

It's a pig. Again. Last summer, it was a goat led by a rope around its neck. I don't remember who held the knife then, but recall moments in the scene: a streak of silver across the throat, a gush of red pouring into a large bowl, the last gurgling cry. I turn away from the window to see my mother busy in the kitchen with the other women, chopping and frying, oil spattering. Dishes covered in foil on the kitchen table. Preparation before celebration. A familiar scene in my Filipino community in Ketchikan, Alaska.

The butchering committee stands in the front yard, voices directing and confidant. An hour before noon, as the July sun climbs a cloudless sky, two pairs of hands hold down the jittery animal. Others watch with crossed arms, nodding and chatting, laughter rising high above the forest treetops. I peer out from behind the sheer curtains of the living room window. The men occupy our small lawn, the grass a bright summer green. A few feet away, on the other side of the swing set where they’ve tied the animal, stands a metal barrel used to burn my family’s garbage, small mounds of refuse stretching beyond it, a topographical map of scraps of tired magazines, plastic odds and ends, and whatever else metal and fireproof, remainders of old dreams and no longer of use. Today though, the fire is burning elsewhere.

Like the first time it happened, I run into my parents’ bedroom closet and kneel under my father’s hanging suits until the slaughter is over, my hands clapped over my ears so hard, creating an airtight seal, though I can hear it still, a ceaseless squealing that makes my heart beat faster. The closet smells of mothballs and my father’s shined leather shoes. I stare into a dark corner. The pig’s cries follow me there, haunting me like a ghost. Then, silence. Here, I remain for a few more minutes under the shelter of my father’s suits and a history of survival I have yet to learn.

I am not alone. The Virgin Mary stands on top of a cabinet next to my father’s closet. In a light blue robe and a white head covering, she gazes down at me, smiling gently, a small brown serpent frozen in mid-glide by her feet. This statue gives me the creeps and I’m scared of the dark and places where monsters hide and statues come to life to eat children.

Slowly, I return to the living room, to business as usual in the kitchen. I dare myself to look out the window again, feel the goose bumps on my arms, even though I’ve seen this before: the gutted pig mounted whole on a metal pole, its legs wrapped tightly together with thick wire, and roasting over an open fire in a fireplace my father constructed from stones and cement. The men of the committee—my uncles and my father—stand in shifts to turn the animal over the fire until its skin is charred, meat cooked to tenderness. One of them tousles my hair as I walk past. I circle the swing set where the animal had been tied earlier. Blood stains and smears an outcrop of rock and patches of grass. By mid-afternoon, the pig is displayed on the kitchen table with an apple wedged in its mouth. Soon after, it is partitioned like countries on a map, and doled out from a serving tray.

When the pig comes to the table in this form—absent of fur and eyes, motionless, silent—my sympathy fades. It is not the same animal, the sheen of its skin like plastic. Yet, out of something akin to respect for a dead pet, I refuse to eat the meat.

“You don’t want to try?” asks one of my aunts. “Not even a little bit?”

I shake my head.

Instead, the crunchy skin of one, two, then three lumpias crumble in my mouth; inside each of them is the savory union of shredded cabbage, carrots, and ground pork, prepared and rolled the night before in an aunt’s kitchen. (This pork I will eat.) The staple mound of sticky white rice tempers the garlic and onion. I fork pancit noodles onto my plate too. When I return to the table, more dishes appear and I find myself immersed in the swirl of women’s instructions in English as they speak amongst themselves in Ilocano and Tagalog:

“Nita, have more rice!”

“Mangan!”

“Eat the tomatoes with bagoong.”

“The green beans are good. Try them!”

“Ito ay masarap!”

“Don’t be a picky eater!”

Picky? Maybe it’s because my American tongue is winning. I would choose to eat hotdogs and spaghetti every day if I could over fish head or tripe soup. Though the beef tongue sandwich my mother stuffs in my lunchbox, which passes for a thick slice of Oscar Meyer bologna, is delicious. Some things pass muster, others not. Soon, convenience makes its way into my diet. Oscar Meyer bologna replaces the beef tongue in my sandwiches for lunch and when my mother gets her first job at a senior care facility, leaving us children to fend for ourselves in the kitchen or reluctantly eat our father’s cooking, I make my own frozen dinners. Not right now though. Right now, I am enjoying food made by strong, precious hands and taste-tested to be “masarap.”

These numerous “Aunts” and “Uncles” chatting and laughing, standing in the kitchen and sitting in the living room, are not actual blood relatives, but that is how I address these older Filipinos who are close friends of the family. Many are Ninongs and Ninangs, or godfathers and godmothers, but the English and Filipino titles are interchangeable in my mind. Uncles Pete, Eddie, Vincent, Mateo and Joe. Aunts Eleanor, Theodora, Priscilla, Anastasia, and Clara. They have children of their own. Those around my age play with my sister and me in the yard. Then, we chase each other down the dirt road and hide behind the tall, broad patches of stinky skunk cabbage leaves on the roadside like little creatures in Richard Scarry storybooks, Huckle Cats and Lowly Worms on an adventure.

In the front yard, the men relax with their plate of food or can of Rainier beer in hand. They talk of the salmon they’ve caught so far that season, of the rising cost of gasoline, of the latest news from relatives in the Philippines. My sister and I sit on the swings. Bellies full, we rocket in the air, straightening our bodies like planks of wood so our heads skim the grass on the downswing. Someone has hosed off the pig blood from the ground.

“Marcos is like a king now,” remarks Uncle Pete.

“He has been president for eight years,” my dad exclaims.

He works at the post office as a janitor and maintenance man during the week. On the weekend, he plays rummy with the uncles in the back room of the Diaz Café. He and Uncle Pete smoke cigars while Uncle Matt talks excitedly about the moves and footwork of Mohammed Ali. Matt was a boxer in the Philippines. I’ve seen a photograph of his younger self in boxing gloves and shiny shorts. A glimpse of youth. A fighter. All of these men around the table had to be. They play cards long into the night, surrounded by a thickening wall of cigar smoke, its pungent peppery odor filling every corner of the room.

“Dictator Marcos!” Uncle Pete clarifies, “In his third term.”

“Aie, all those politicians are corrupt,” Uncle Matt observes. “They just want to line their pockets, compadres!”

“Yeah, but the roads are better. There is more electricity in the villages,” my father claims, “and more schools. That is all Marcos’s doing.”

“But there are no jobs,” Matt argues. “Families back home, they are still poor.”

“And they are stealing the money we mail back home to family! You can’t trust the post office. Not even this man’s martial law will stop the thieves!” Uncle Pete insists, waving away a mosquito from his ear. He lives in a trailer with his wife, my aunt Eleanor, a white woman, and their chubby son Pete Jr. who’s a year younger than me.

I listen to the committee’s conversation as my sister and I continue our daring swings. Much of what they say about the Philippines escapes me. Martial law? Whatever it is, it doesn’t sound all that good. It is a country I barely know and only then through my parents’ photos.

The soles of my feet kiss the sky. My sister swings harder. She’s younger than me by two years and smaller than me by five inches so she has to tip toe to touch the ground. Her thin hair waves back and forth as she shoots upward trying to meet my swing height. But I have stronger, longer legs and can pump more into my swings. I am winning the swinging contest.

“Oh, Filipinos will keep eating rice and butchering their pigs,” Eddie declares.

This uncle lives in the house next to ours. He invited my dad to build our house on his property. “As long as we are fed, we’re happy.”

“Aie, look at us!” Uncle Pete chides, mouth full.

Sky. Swing. Grass. Swing. Dirt.

“We are not kings here, but we are better off,” Matt surmises. “Even with the cold weather.”

A crow’s squawk rises from the middle of the forest.

Sky. Grass. Dirt.

“Better watch out,” my fathers warns, “you might acquire a taste for the birds here, too.”

“Better to eat a bluebird than to be a jailbird,” Pete says.

Laughter floods the yard. Then, something else at the heels of this release—relief, was it? Sadness?

Sky. House.

Next summer, my family and I board a gigantic Pan Am airplane that flies us across the Pacific Ocean to the Philippines. There, my sister and I wilt in a thick suffocating heat and stare at people in flip-flops or bare feet, crossing the streets flooded by monsoon rains. Our relatives, so excited to see our parents, to meet their American-born children for the first time, butcher a pig and roast it to celebrate our arrival. Did I recognize this as a familiar scene then? No. They are all strangers, and I am a stranger in a strange land. My sister and I yelp then I complain and then she complains. Because it’s too hot. Because the food tastes weird. Because we can’t sleep. Because of the bugs. (We’ve never seen cockroaches before.)

I return home from this trip, unaware of how memories can be stored away to appear out of the blue in refractions, in rememories: forty years later at another pig roast while visiting my aunt’s village on the island of Mindanao or during dinners with Filipino American friends in New York City, my home of the last twenty-six years, mimicking our parents’ accents, joking in puns, lamenting and growling about the current strongman President of the Philippines whose nickname is “The Punisher” and passing plates of roast pork and white rice around the table—every feast and grief turned into connective tissue.

But not yet. It’s still 1973, and I’m a kid, swinging higher and higher. Not my sister though. She’s grown tired of this contest and comes to a full stop.

“I’m thirsty,” she declares before darting across the lawn back into the house.

I jump off the swing too and stroll towards the fireplace. The metal spit that once held the pig for this ritual of sacrifice and communion now lies bare atop the low stonewalls.

I lean over the fireless pit, feel the heat on my face, and blow gently on the smoldering briquettes. These cindery remains, gray-black lumps, flicker like bright orange gems, like a sudden burst of life, a resurrection under my breath.