He often does not return

PEREGRINE NOTES / Alegria A. Imperial

If simply shot in a skirmish, his chances of a burial would be high but if captured and secreted away, rumors about the place and manner of his execution could rise as legends. If the widow traced the map in grooves said he had hidden, she could entangle herself in a spider web; sightings would soon gift him with bilocation.

Years later, a neighbor claiming authority revealed he had seen him dragged to the river banks of Laoag, made to kneel and lay his head on a boulder—there a sword fell, though he spared the widow the gruesome detail that followed. His corpus never turned up, as life without him took over though for years, his eldest son peered into dusk just in case, one of those shadows would be him.

Not the widow or the children but a son-in-law, who had never known him, and much later his daughter, would not let up bringing him back to life. As he began to pry open the walled-in silence of his wife, she would rather his memory remained buried at first.

But unrelenting, my father drew out a profile through a tangle of some townspeople’s and her memories, starting with their life in Laoag, where as reserve officer-turned-supervisor of Northern Luzon Transit, he settled the family he had moved from Fort McKinley, befriending town leaders and the Japanese bazaar owner who sold fine pieces of porcelain and muslin his wife loved.

One day, he begged the daughter next to my mother, then due to study in Manila, not to proceed or she might never come back. No one knew he had been expecting his new commission and would soon leave for training in Camp John Hay; then the bombing of Pearl Harbor shattered the world’s glass-pond peace.

In the chaos that followed a forced evacuation to a remote barrio, my grandfather, as the daughter had so wished, could not be persuaded to be like an ostrich; where some men surrendered to women’s pleas to hide when the war broke out, my grandfather with nine children including a baby boy in tow, reverted to being a soldier, nay incognito. At an impending roundup in Bacarra of town officials by the Japanese he strode to the enemy and vouched for their allegiance, laying down his life if found otherwise.

But guerrilla units had swarmed as iron-sealed rosters leaked nonetheless; his inevitable capture happened one morning at breakfast amid the squalling of the baby boy. A more weighty charge awaited him in Laoag; the day the Japanese bazaar owner marched to his cell as a high official of the Japanese Imperial Army, my grandfather aware of how much he knew of his life, no matter his repeated denials of suspected Ilocos guerilla leader, then-Governor Roque Ablan’s whereabouts under torture, he submitted to his fate.

Declared hero by the National Historical Institute, accorded a spot at Bacarra Heroes’ Shrine where his bust had been installed four decades later, only then did I look up what “hero” really means, zeroing in on the word, “protector” more than exemplar, “not choosing his own life and what’s within his small embrace that must have broken his heart a hundred times for the freedom of many.” How tempting to repeat this to my mother, who had misgivings about his heroism for years.

My grandfather, a farmer’s son who left as a young recruit for the Usaffe, finally returned to Bacarra four days ago with the naming of the street where he must have romped with his siblings, after him. Still, I remember this: at a gathering for WWII veterans, I walked up to Congressman Roque Ablan, Jr. and had introduced myself as the granddaughter of one Capt. Ceferino R. Acosta, captured and executed “protecting” his father. He said, “Oh, many did the same.”