In 1975, I was reassigned to Don Carlos and the family had to move again. We rented a room for nine months before we found a house vacated by the owner, Mr. Loplop, after the death of his wife. Pat, who thought she might have a kind of “third eye”, reported of seeing ghosts, if a fleeting appearance of some amorphous shadows could qualify for ghosts. Whatever, Pat appeared unbothered and unafraid.
A shallow well at the front yard provided the water for our domestic use. The town, although more urban than Dangcagan, had no water system. Fruit trees that became the roosting places of our ranged chicken scattered at the back of the house. Native chicken can survive on their own but we have to feed them early in the morning and late in the afternoon to make them tame and to ensure that they return to our place after the day’s wandering. Our neighborhood was sparsely populated and soon we had plenty of chicken roaming around until our gallinaceous birds started falling from the trees like overripe fruits. Only a few survived the avian pest virus.
The house, a plain structure of concrete, lumber and GI sheets, evoked happy and lasting memories with our children. To relieve my back pains, I would lie prostrate as the kids playfully perform foot massage on my back, walking back and forth from the soles of my feet to my nape. The whole family of seven slept on a communal mat, tucked inside a large mosquito net, safe from mosquito bites. Pat and I slept at one side with Faith, the eldest, at the other side. In the middle were the other four children, arranged according to age with the youngest nearest to us. I can recall telling made up stories to our attentive kids. After dinner, we retired to the lone bedroom upstairs and the kids would squat in semi-circle facing me seated on the tikog(sedge grass) mat, my back against the wall. My stories were different from the fantasy stories I heard in my childhood. Instead of castles and princesses, I told stories with a social milieu, stories of ordinary people, real life stories that were consciously or subconsciously drawn out from my childhood experience or my community development work. Faith would cry when I told stories about poor families eating banana or sweet potato for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Midway in these stories, she would start sniffing and I would shift to a happier episode.
The kids also enjoyed listening to nursery rhymes over our suitcase-type phonograph, our first record player, particularly the one about “Don Gato” the cat. Charity adored cats. She was particularly mad when I accidentally poisoned Don Gato, our orange stripe tomcat. The cat licked its fur that I sprayed with household insect spray to kill the lice. The cat survived. This happened in our second house. But the piglet in our first house died. I accidentally strangled the piglet that was let loose in the house. I forced the piglet to swallow an emulsion of anthelmintic, holding its head up by the rope tether. When I let go of the tether, a chorus of wails ensued. The piglet lay motionless and silent on the concrete floor. I made a fatal mistake and was at the mercy of five pairs of accusing eyes. The kids stopped crying only after I assured them a replacement of their dead pet.
The first major health crisis of our children happened in Don Carlos. It was Charity’s blood clot in her left eye that impaired the optic nerve and skewed her left eye’s vision. Closing her right eye, she could see the floor by looking at the ceiling. The EENT specialist successfully treated the blood clot. Eventually her left eye regained the normal line of sight. However the tiny black dots in her left eye’s vision remained to this day. The streptococcal infection that caused the blood clot also led to rheumatic fever. Charity, then five years old, had to endure months of penicillin injections to prevent the scarring of her inflame heart valves.
We acquired our first refrigerator, a 7-cu. ft. Winner, before we left the house of Mr. Loplop. On our fourth year in town, we acquired a lot with a modest two-storey building and we transferred there. The property was owned by Gabriel Dayondon, an old friend back in the MSU. We sold the residential lot we acquired earlier for the P20,000 down payment. The balance of P16,000 we loaned from the Rural Bank of Don Carlos. The first floor (living-dining area, kitchen and twin toilets) was concrete (floor and wall) with glass jalousie windows. The second floor (twin bedrooms, aisle-living area) was wood (floor and wall) with framed plywood windows that open outward. It was accessible by a wood staircase from the front corner of the first floor. The front door faced the street eastward; the rear door faced the backyard westward. There was a dug well equipped with a water pump nearby, after a makeshift dirty kitchen. The jungle of fruit trees and cacao that enveloped the yard imparted a ghostly ambiance to our new abode, so I thinned out the vegetation.
Just in time when the kids lost interest in my storytelling, we acquired an 18-inch cabinet-type black and white television set. In due time they got hooked to the idiot box, notwithstanding that the rooftop antennae captured only two local channels (ABS-CBN and GMA-7). Cable TV was unheard of at that time. Pat got a job as a day care teacher and was no longer confined in the house. It was a big break for her, although she had still to do most of the housework. Two sons, Emeterio, Jr. and Emmanuel, were born in Don Carlos. It was in this town – carved out of the once vast forested areas, pasture lands and ranches of the Elizaldes, Guingonas and Roceses – that I joined the Knights of Columbus and became a charter member of the local club of Lions International.
