Ang Lata ng Biskwit

Every family keeps something. Some keep land titles, some keep grudges, some keep a saint dressed and fed on her feast day. My family keeps a diwata, and has since 1897, and if you think that sounds romantic you have never had to explain to a diwata why the electric cooperative needs to trim her tree.

She lives in the last acacia on the provincial road, the enormous one at kilometer eleven that the road bends around — and the road bends around it, you should understand, because in 1963 my Lolo Underong stood in front of the bulldozer for six days with a packed lunch, and the story made the papers as SUPERSTITION HALTS PROGRESS, and the diwata, who reads everything over your shoulder, thought the headline was very funny and has called herself Superstition in conversation ever since.

I inherited her the way you inherit everything in this country: suddenly, at a funeral, with paperwork. Lola Amparo's notebook came to me in a biscuit tin — sixty years of entries in four handwritings, the bargain on the first page in ink gone brown as bark: ANG PUNO AY NAKATAYO, ANG BAYAN AY UMIINOM. The tree stands, the town drinks. Under it, in my lola's hand, the operating instructions: Last night of the month, sit with her. Bring nothing. Believe everything. Do not sign anything she gives you.

I was nineteen and had a scholarship in the city and I want it noted that I tried to give the tin to my mother, who raised both hands like the notebook was a summons, and then to my Tito Bayani, who suddenly remembered work in Cebu. The notebook chooses, my lola had written on the last page, in the shaky letters of her final year. It has chosen four times. It is about to be very funny a fifth time.

The last night of that month, I walked to kilometer eleven with a flashlight and my lola's tin and the specific anger of the newly chosen. The acacia at night is not a tree so much as a district — four hundred years of branches, a barangay of shadows — and I sat down between two roots the size of carabaos and said, out loud, to no one, feeling like an idiot: "Ako na raw. Ako na ang bahala sa'yo." It's me now. I'm in charge of you now.

The laugh came from directly overhead, warm and old, like the ember-end of a bonfire remembering itself. "Ay," said the last diwata of the ridge, unseen, delighted, in the voice my family has been writing down phonetically for six generations. "The scholar. Sige. Sit up straight, apo ni Amparo — and get out your notebook, because I am going to tell you what your lola was too polite to write down about how this bargain actually ends."