The Seven Humpbacks.
Narrated by Teofilo Reyes, a Tagalog from Manila.
Once there lived seven brothers who were all humpbacks, and who looked very much alike. Ugly as these humpbacks were, still there was a lady who fell in love with one of them and married him. This lady, however, though she loved her husband well, was a very stingy woman. Finally the time came when the unmarried humpbacks had to depend on the other one for food. Naturally this arrangement was very displeasing to the wife; and in time her hate grew so intense, that she planned to kill all her brothers-in-law.
One day, when her husband was away on business, she murdered the six brothers. Next she hired a man to come and bury a corpse. She told him of only one corpse, because she wanted to deceive the man. When he had buried one of the bodies, he came back to get paid for his work. The woman, however, before he had time to speak, began to reproach him for not burying the man in the right place. “See here!” she said, showing him the corpse of the second brother, “you did not do your work well. Go and bury the body again. Remember that I will not pay you until you have buried the man so that he stays under the earth.”
The man took the second corpse and buried it; but when he returned, there it was again. And so on: he repeated the operation until he thought that he had buried the same corpse six times. But after the sixth, the last humpback, had been buried, the married humpback came home from his work. When the grave-digger saw this other humpback, he immediately seized and killed him, thinking he was the same man he had buried so many times before.
When the wicked woman knew that her very husband had been killed, she died of a broken heart.
Notes.
A Pampango variant (c), which I have only in abstract, is entitled “The Seven Hunchbacked Brothers.” It was collected by Wenceslao Vitug of Lubao, Pampanga. It runs thus:—
There were seven hunchbacked brothers that looked just alike. One of them married, and maintained the other six in his house. The wife, however, grew tired of them, and locked them up in the cellar, where they starved to death. In order to save burial-expenses, the woman fooled the grave-digger. When he had buried one man and returned for his money, she had another body lying where the first had lain, and told him that he could not have his money until the man was buried to stay. Thus the poor gravedigger buried all six corpses under the impression that he was working with the same one over and over again. On his way back from burying the sixth, he met the husband riding home on horseback. Thinking him to be the corpse, which he exactly resembled, the grave-digger cried out, “Ah! so this is the way you get ahead of me!” and he struck the living hunchback with his hoe and killed him.
This Pampango variant, although it is a little more specific than the Tagalog, is identical with our second version.