Free Dwellers by Eliza Victoria Page B

Auntie stepped forward and asked in a clear, crisp voice, “What is your name?”
    The farmer said his name. Auntie glanced over her shoulder, and Grandfather looked at her and shook his head.
    “When did you start working for us?” Grandfather asked him. The farmer replied, and Grandfather scoffed. “You’re off by about eleven years.”
    “What is your daughter’s name?” Auntie asked. The farmer couldn’t reply.
    “Why do you continue to lie, Manolo?” Grandfather said.
    Manolo, my Father’s youngest brother. One of my uncles. But I knew him as a tall young man with the sarcastic grin, the rebel at the dinner table who kept ruffling Grandfather’s
feathers. He was definitely not this old man with the sunburnt face.
    Manolo’s body was found in one of the sugarcane fields three days ago.
    “You couldn’t blend in,” Auntie said. “The farmers gave you up.”
    “It was an accident,” my uncle Manolo said through the old farmer’s mouth. “Father.”
    “An accident that you find yourself in someone else’s body?” Auntie said.
    Manolo ignored her. “Father,” he said. “Just let me go. Let me leave the estate. Let me live my remaining days as this old man. No one has to know.”
    “The old man knew, Manolo,” Grandfather said. “His daughter knows. His
grandson
knows.”
    “It was an accident!” he said. “I swear to you.”
    Later, when we were old enough and brave enough to talk about it, Louis and I decided that Manolo had planned to take a younger man’s body but ended up with the old farmhand by mistake, so
it really was “an accident.”
    He tried to run, that fine morning in the garden. Manolo bolted to the trees, nearly dragging the servants with him. Auntie lifted a finger, and we heard a soft crick, like the sound of a gate
swinging shut or a twig split in half, and Manolo fell on the grass.
    “Return the body to the family,” Grandfather said, and we walked back, dry-eyed, to the main mansion. Breakfast was waiting.
     
    GOSSIP CIRCULATED AMONG us cousins about our uncle, speculations on why he did what he did: he met a girl in the town proper, he wanted to move to Manila, he learned that he had
a tumor in his brain and would be dead in a fortnight. We never found out. It didn’t matter. What he did was
wrong,
and if we did the same thing, Auntie would break our necks and our
family wouldn’t even shed a tear.
     
    LET’S SAY MY name is Jonah and he is Louis.
    Even here, in this story, I can’t make myself tell you our real names.

16
    TEN YEARS AGO, the estate was bigger than this city. Bigger than this city twice over. Five families lived on the estate—my grandfather’s sons and daughters, and
their spouses and children. My grandmother had passed on when Celeste was still an infant. I have no memory of her. Leonora, Auntie, lived alone in a house near the farmers’ housing complex.
My father was the eldest, and our family lived with my grandfather in the main mansion. My uncle Manolo was unmarried, and so he also lived with us. When he died, my father turned his room into an
adoration chapel.
    Surrounding the main mansion were the vast sugarcane fields. A sugar mill. Our own little hospital, a marketplace, a church, housing for the farmers, even a school for their children. It was its
own country. Grandfather ran it the way it was run by his father, and his father’s father: like a welfare state, providing free food, education, and healthcare to everyone employed within its
confines. But for many years, Grandfather ran the sugar mill at a loss. Fortunately, he had other investments, other businesses outside the estate, and the money coming from those ventures
sustained the family’s sugar business.
    Most of the house servants, the farmers, the grounds superintendents, the gardeners, the drivers—my Grandfather’s longest-serving and most treasured employees—knew what our
bloodline could do. But they kept this information to themselves either out of