Firewood

Chapter 9

Alone in his room, Captain Lao started to remove the bandage on his legs which was placed by Elena. It stayed there for two weeks already. Two weeks after he was shot near the river and his troops ran and hid for their lives as a he was lying on the side of the river, asking them to pick him up; but they didn’t.

“Those fraidy-cats!”, he yelled, referring to his soldiers, when he remembered how they left him unaided. “How can my troops say that they need me and my command if they left me there?”

As he was untying the bandage, he again remembered how that old lady, the name still unknown to him, helped him…

“How are you feeling now?”, asked an old lady who was carrying a bowl of soup for him. “Oh, yea, I forgot, you can’t understand English, can you? But whatever it is, I am here to help you because that is my work and my obligation”.

He continued to listen to her and almost laughed when the old lady pointed to him, and said “You…”, stretched her eyes, and said “You are Japanese! But I am Filipino; but we are brothers and sisters!”

               He shed a tear when he heard this. He looked the other way just to hide it from the woman.

“We… have some…thing in common… That is the reason why I helped you”, the woman continued to speak, slowly, though she was not sure if he understood her.

But he could.

“Thank you”, he said to her softly.

“Wow! You can speak English! That’s nice!”, said the old woman who seemed like she’s the happiest on earth when she heard him spoke.

“You are different than them”.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“We are enemy. We fight each other but you helped me. You did all of these for me”.

“It’s our countries that only fight, not us”, answered the woman tenderly. “The peace seeking people ought not to join that war started by the idea of only few. Let them fight until they all die but we will never join them. And when they all die, both of us and all of us who desires peace, will all live in peace”.

When the woman noticed that he stopped talking, she went outside but turned again, and said “Make sure to eat all of that before you sleep”.

“Before I sleep?” he thought. “I will not stay here anymore”.

Fearing that the woman and her family are one of the revolutionaries, he immediately limped from his bed and crept outside the house. He knew that no one saw him. As he was pacing to the forest, he constantly looked behind him, just to make sure that no one is watching or following.

The bandage dropped to the floor and he felt the air touching his healing wound.

He survived, but the woman who saved him died.