couldn’t move. His arms, his legs—they didn’t respond.
Another gunshot cracked from the island. A bullet smacked into the deck a few inches from Rasul’s face.
Another gunshot. The bullet ripped through the plywood on one side of the banca and blew out a fist-sized hole on the other side.
More gunshots, more gaping holes. Some of them were below the waterline, and the sea rushed in, mingling with the blood. The banca was swamping now, slowing as it filled. Rising seawater sloshed into Rasul’s face, and he struggled to push himself up. But he couldn’t move: he felt pinned by a great weight. He gagged at first on the water, but it quickly became all too much to resist. He surrendered and let the seawater course down his throat. He tasted it, the salty tang that he had known every day of his life.
Rasul knew that he was dying. He thought of their families, wives and children, waiting. They would never know what happened. He thought of bright sunlight on the sea, a cooling breeze on his face as he steered the banca over crystal green water. He thought of JoJo standing up at the bow, agile and complete.
And as the light faded, he saw JoJo peering down at the water where the fish were feeding, then almost jumping back in fright, the shock on JoJo’s face.
And again the question, now the very last thought that ever passed through Rasul’s mind:
What did JoJo see?
What?
Harvest Day
–10
One
In the cool darkness before a Sunday morning dawn, Marivic Valencia stood beside the coastal road that ran beside Leyte Gulf and waited for the Manila-bound bus that would carry her away from her family. She was eighteen years old, slim and pretty and demure, with long black hair bound in a ponytail behind her head. She used no makeup. She wore denim jeans and a loose T-shirt.
A large duffel, stuffed full, sat in the gravel beside the road. Marivic had never been more than an hour away from home; now she was beginning a journey that would take her to a job thousands of miles away, and she didn’t expect to return for at least a year.
Her family huddled around her. Lorna, her mother, held her tight. The five little ones, arrayed from fourteen to two years old, clung to her. They attached themselves wherever they could find a handhold: one at each elbow, one at a shoulder, the two smallest wrapping their arms around her legs. Her twin brother, Ronnie, stood a couple of steps away, looking perplexed and helpless.
She and Ronnie had always been close. Each understood the other like nobody else. They hardly needed words. Marivic met his eyes and shot him a smile that was supposed to say It’ll be all right, and Ronnie nodded and smiled back weakly.
Now others were appearing, aunts and uncles and cousins wandering over from the small village across the road where she had grown up, the place called San Felipe. They gathered around Marivic and her family, murmuring low, sad words. Marivic felt dampness at her cheek: her mother was weeping. A couple of aunties began to sob too.
Marivic wished the bus would hurry and get there. She wasn’t eager to leave, but she wanted this to end. It felt too much like a funeral, and it was all too familiar.
Departures were a way of life for San Felipe, as for all other small towns and villages in the rural Philippines. People left all the time. They left to find work, to make money. Some headed for Manila. Others, more adventurous and more fortunate, were hired for jobs abroad. At least a dozen of the sons and daughters of the village worked overseas, sending home remittances that sustained their families. Marivic’s father had been one of those. The duffel was his old sea bag.
Until his sudden death two years earlier, he had been a seaman, a chief mate who spent nearly a year at a time on a Norwegian freighter, returning home for only a few weeks before going out to sea again. Each time he left, the family had gathered here beside the road, just like now, weeping and clinging as they waited for the northbound bus.
Marivic could remember each of those departures. Until this moment, she had never realized what an ordeal it must have been for him.
Now twin lights appeared down the road, growing bigger and brighter. A breeze from the south carried up the rumble of a diesel engine. “Here it is,” somebody