Best Australian Yarn: Kalabaw by Cal Guino

I. I’d always been a little bit afraid of my father. He was a big man, standing nearly a foot taller than my mother. So, his seat at the head of the table was a practical decision as much as it was a patriarchal gesture, for the elbows at the end of his thick farmer’s forearms touched the corners of the plastic covered wooden furniture. Like the kalabaw he reared, his head hung from his broad shoulders as he ate, stooped over his piled plate of adobo. “Alon,” he called to me, breaking the muggy silence of our meal. His voice, permanently flat and low in timbre, brought to mind the rumbling of the country’s frequent earthquakes. “Follow me outside.” Normally, March was the coolest, driest, and most pleasant time of the year. But La Niña had retreated, making way for mercury-rising near-forty-degree weather. The sun, coaxing the earth’s moisture into the air, created the kind of humidity that lodged itself in your throat and fixed your clothes to your back with sweat. A great bovine plague had swept across our province, Bukidnon. Both of my parents’ families had herds older than living memory. The animals were now dying of the disease, or pre-emptively killed. Though I was still a boy, I knew well enough that the kalabaw sustained us as much as we did them. In my dreams, the weather anomaly happened because the spirits of all the slaughtered animals remained in the atmosphere, tethered to the earth. Their bodies would jostle together, a dense herd, thickening the air to incredible monsoon heights with their startled stamping and their hot, heaving breaths. “Your kuya,” my father said, ending my reverie, “is useless. He won’t help me slaughter the sick animals. I need you to help.” The animals were killed in a stone shed a short walk away from our squat bungalow. There were already three kalabaw in a fenced area outside. Two calves, so young they were still unnamed, huddled next to their mother, who wearily kept watch. Thick, white, snot bubbled on her quivering nostrils, saliva dribbled from her stuck-out tongue and down her swollen jaw. Her children suffered alike: snotty-noses and wheezing breaths from pink panting mouths. My father took a calf by its hind legs. Mama bellowed woefully, voice breaking. She tried to rise, but collapsed, having refused food for days. Her hooves scratched weakly at the piss-sodden dirt. The shed was poorly lit by a single, yellow lightbulb hanging from the ceiling by its wire. It swung to and fro. Shadows danced on the wall, light reflected off sharpened blades. “There are too many, I can’t do it myself,” he explained, rummaging through a box, as I struggled to keep the animal still on a wooden workbench, “so watch. Then you’ll do the same.” He returned with a sledgehammer. Without so much as a warning – I was still holding the calf – he gripped the tool with both hands, raised it above his head, and brought it upon the calf’s skull. A dull, wet thud. Bits of brain landed on my lip. I swallowed the vomit in my mouth. The body, still warm, twitched once, twice, before going still. It was kind of pretty, I thought, the way the wet blood caught the light as it gathered in pools by my bare feet. Bullets, he later told me, were a privilege saved for older animals who could bear blunt force trauma. Calves, on the other hand, had soft bones. A single blow with a heavy weapon could kill them. My father brought in the second calf. Sensing the danger, it tossed its head and twisted wildly in resistance. Holding the kicking animal down by its neck with one hand and passing the sledgehammer to me with the other, he instructed, “you try, anak.” Acutely aware of the heft of the weapon and the taste of puke and guts sitting on my tongue, I pathetically replied, “I can’t.” “Be a man, Alon,” his voice rose, knuckles whitening, fingers pressing into grey hide. “You’ll raise kalabaw just like me, and you’ll have to slaughter them too. For food? For sickness? It makes no difference!” In imitation of my father, I raised the hammer above my head. “Good boy.” Suddenly calm again, sweat dripping from his creased forehead as he nodded encouragingly, “now down.” I brought the hammer down. But I hesitated. The skull caved, but the calf was still kicking, weakly crying. “Ay, puta! Again!” I swung again, but the lacquered handle was unsteady in my sweaty hands. The animal was still alive. So, with a sigh, my father took the hammer from me and used a cleaver to sever what remained of the mangled head off the twitching body. Before I ran out the shed, I caught a glimpse of myself in my father’s narrow eyes: snot-nosed and teary-eyed, the face of a sickly calf. I ran crazed ’till I tripped on a piece of hardened shit in the middle of the field where the kalabaw used to graze only a few months ago. Too tired to stand, I stayed down. Through my blurred vision, I watched ants march between blades of grass and climb up between my sticky fingers. Then, a distant gunshot. II. “Alon, you’ve gotten fat, na!” I laughed as I ushered my kids to greet their grandparents with the mano, “There’s not enough time to exercise without a yaya!” I had to admit, it was true that I had grown noticeably bigger since moving to Australia a decade ago. Though my diet mostly consisted of chicken, rice, and vegetables these days, late nights tending to crying toddlers and early mornings spent rushing for rarely-punctual Sydney trains left little time for self-care. But since the pandemic had prevented us from travelling home for nearly three years, we knew we had to make time to travel. There was nowhere in the world where we felt at home but amidst ceaseless thrumming of life in Davao’s myriad streets and alleys and in the rolling rice fields of the country, blanketed by the thin dawn mists which clung to the mountains of Bukidnon. Of course, we had grown to love Sydney in our own way. I especially adored the chorus of birds that accompanied the passing of the day: kookaburra-laughter heralding a busy morning, myna-song at high noon, and magpie-warble at the setting of the sun. But the Western suburbs we’d raised our children in will only ever be able to ape the hawker markets and back-alleys of our South-East Asian metropolis. Today, we would be travelling from my parents’ new city condominium to our old land in the province. A few months before I left Australia, my family finally left the farm. With no more sons living under his roof and poor lungs rendering him physically unfit, my father sold the property to our neighbours and moved to Manila in search of jobs that required less labour. In that sudden and unremarkable way, our family had let go of our centuries-old charge of the land. Through the four-hour drive, the looming skyscrapers of the city eventually gave way to shorter, squatter houses, which grew both larger and further apart. The dull smoky sky of the city turned hue by hue to a brighter blue; birds, which tended to avoid the bustling centres of human life, now speckled the sky in v-formations. Farmers in translucent cotton singlets and worn baseball caps tilled the earth or picked the crop. Sometimes, kalabaw still laboured by their side. As we turned into the familiar dirt road of our former estate, I caught a glimpse of the old slaughter shed. Or at least, what was left of it – the building was now little more than a pile of stones surrounding a floor of rotten wood. Anything that could have been of use had already been stripped off the building. Even the windows had been removed, revealing walls barren of the tools that had once hung from them. The fences outside had tipped over, keeling from old age. It had taken nearly a year after the disease had swept through Northern Mindanao for the death toll to be publicised in a single paragraph in the Manila Bulletin. The seven-sentence paragraph was sandwiched between a longer article about Ferdinand Marcos’ election into his third term and some pictures of a town Tropical Storm Daling had left ravaged. Over eighty-two thousand animals had died, of which my family’s kalabaw accounted for only thirty-three. Back then, weeks of sweltering weather, slaughters, and meagre sugar-and-rice dinners had brought my parents precariously close to a breaking point. As if the heat wasn’t enough, the tension between them stirred up the violent static of a tropical tempest within the confines of our already small home. It was difficult for my siblings and I to speak if not in whispers, or to walk if not on tiptoes, should a random irritation set either of them off in a wild storm that would end in smashed vases followed by days of stifling silence. Eventually refusing to sleep next to my mother, my father began to sleep outside in a hammock crafted from tarp that he had fixed between two poles on the porch outside, so you could see him swinging gently back and forth from the kitchen window whenever he slept. In those days, his neck and arms were permanently covered in mosquito bites, and the tips of his middle and index fingers had begun to darken because of the cigarettes he had started to smoke. One restless night, the broken electric fans had rendered sleep impossible, as the stifling heat of the season warmed the house like a hearth. The evening was completely still – no breeze shook the sunburnt boughs, rats stayed in their cool underground burrows, cicadas continued to cry their noisy complaints well past midnight. Inside, the bedroom air congealed with each exhale of my three sleeping siblings. I’d had enough – I needed fresh air. I slowly unzipped the flynet around our mattress. Careful not to wake anyone, I tread carefully on the balls of my feet and headed outside, when I saw my father through the kitchen window, sitting upright, barely illuminated by the feeble silver light of the moon. Like most men, my father cried quietly. His broad back trembled, his head shook, the wood from which the hammock hung groaned softly under the weight of his movements. I watched for a few moments, careful to keep my breaths shallow, before returning to my room. Back in bed, lying on my side, I stared out the window, waiting for my heart to stop beating in my throat. For weeks after, I couldn’t look him in the eye – all I could remember were his shaking kalabaw-wide shoulders. I wonder sometimes if he had cried in secret like this before, when he first lopped the head off a calf in one fell swoop, or when he sliced his thigh on a barbed wire fence, or on the day his brother died. Because I didn’t hear him crying in the slaughter shed. And not a single tear fell when he doused his wound in rubbing alcohol, though he had grit his teeth so hard, I thought he’d bite right through his lip. His eyes hadn’t even watered at the funeral. He only fixed his hard gaze on his brother’s open casket, hands clasped in prayer. In fact, my father was always the same: narrow eyes under a frown-creased forehead, a set square jaw, and arms crossed over a broad, proud chest. He had stood over me just like that when he finally found me lying in the field, before picking me up like a bag of rice to carry me to my room. He never spoke about that evening, nor asked me to slaughter kalabaw again. Yet, I’d become increasingly fearful of closed spaces over the past few years. It started out innocently enough. I was always the first to be found in hide-and-seek because the best hiding spots were always wardrobes and closets, which made me feel dizzy to be in. And I remember feeling faint, clammy hands leaving fingerprints on the photos I was handling in the school’s red-lit darkroom. Most of all, I remember the evening I spent at my friend’s house in my first year of college. American TV had totally dominated Filipino broadcasting stations and kids like us couldn’t get enough of the cheesy teenage dramas, so we wanted to imitate what we saw. It was meant to be fun – after the seven minutes in heaven, the couple was meant to emerge rosycheeked out of the dark room and the rest of us would crowd around them, pressing eagerly for every saucy detail. So, when my turn finally came around, my partner had first mistaken my breathlessness for bashful nervousness. She giggled and told me to relax as she slipped her hand under my shirt and leaned in to kiss my neck. Though my strained heaving and flapping hands quickly sent her back outside. When I finally calmed down, I quietly excused myself, smoked a cigarette, and hailed a tricycle home. My move to Australia wasn’t so much a choice as it was a necessity. I needed to get away from the farm, the animals, and above all, my father’s constant presence, which felt like the noisy panic of birds in the moments before a storm. Passing through the old property, I looked outside. The sky was completely clear; trees hissed as a passing breeze disturbed their leaves. In the verdant, sloping hills in the distance, I could see black figures moving slowly through the tall grass. “Kalabaw!” my daughter squealed, sticking her head out of the rolled-down window to have a better look. Like her older brother, she had only ever seen the province in faded photographs. “Yes, my apo,” my father said, slowing the car, squinting his eyes as he followed his granddaughter’s pointing finger, smiling slightly when he saw the cattle. With age, he had lost the low rumble in his voice. “The kalabaw still graze here.”