How the Stars did Fall (10 page)

“What are your names?” she said.

“I’m called Faraday and my companion is Dr. Tennyson.”

“Do you know why you are here?”

“No, not at all.”

“My father, chief of the Ohlone, has found the three of you guilty of trespassing upon and desecrating the sacred site of Oushanis. The penalty is death.”

“What do you mean?” Tennyson said, but the girl had already walked away. “What is Oushanis? Surely we will be allowed to plead our case.”

When the chief finished his discourse, a few of the guardsmen slung rope ladders onto the pit and descended. With short knives they persuaded Faraday and Tennyson to climb those ladders and then they ran. They ran a long distance down the mesa and into the rocky plains, the swift pace enforced upon the prisoners by the swinging of whips. They ran so fast that Tennyson struggled to keep up and more than once fell on his face, his hands tied behind his back, unable to soften his fall. When this happened, the Indians would yank on the ropes tying Tennyson and pull him forward, raking him over the rocks. Rips opened up in his clothes and wounds formed, the blood smearing the ground. And they passed through badlands and then they climbed a hill, the Indians finally slowing down the pace to a walk. They climbed until the temperature dropped and the air dried out and the walk turned into a crawl. Then they came to a narrow pass. The Indians made Tennyson cross first, using their spears to encourage the doctor over.

Warily, Tennyson hugged the side of the mountain and dared not look down at the precipice before him. Then he walked sideways and did not stop, but one of the Indians poked him with a spear anyway, drawing blood and nearly causing Tennyson to fall to his death. For that stunt, the Indian took a good scolding from another Indian, one of higher ranking. Faraday took that to mean that whatever manner of death awaited him, it was not falling down this mountain. So when it came his turn to cross the narrow pass he did so in a few motions, unafraid and full of defiance. It did not take long after that pass for them to reach the very crest of the mountain, and when they did Tennyson fell to the ground and sobbed and held on to his side where the Indian had wounded him, his clothes no more than bloody rags now.

At the summit, they were led to a sandstone quarry where workers with picks hacked at the ground. At the Indians’ urging, Faraday and Tennyson lumbered into the quarry, climbing down the indented walls of the pit like the stairways of giants. So began the first of their days of labor. They worked all through the rest of that day and into the night until they thought they could work no longer and even past that. Their hands were blistered and their throats parched, and the men around them fared no better. Blacks, most of them, but a few were white and some even Indian, belonging to some distant tribe no more kin of the Ohlone than the white men. One of these Indians lifted his pick with such violence that the head slid right off and flew into the air and impaled one of the black men, killing him instantly. The Ohlone carried the body away and handed the Indian slave another pick.

At night the slaves slept together in the same place they worked. The Ohlone allowed a bonfire to be lit in the center of the quarry and brought the slaves water and pine nuts and cornmeal in abundance. After eating the food the Indians gave them, the slaves arranged themselves in a circle and began to fight. Two by two they fought, the result determined by officiating, the loser remaining in the circle and taking on another, and so on until every man in the quarry had won at least one match. Soon it was Faraday’s turn to enter the circle. At first he refused, saying he would not fight. But a few of the biggest and strongest black slaves forced him in. Once he was inside, the viciousness of his opponent gave him no choice but to fight back, and he did, parrying the attacks and retorting by kicking the other slave in the leg. Faraday had noticed his opponent clutching the leg before, so he knew it was injured, and by going for that weak spot he won in a matter of minutes.

Then it was Tennyson’s turn and even though he was exhausted, injured and in terrible shape, he was still fitter than the short Indian before him, who could now barely stand up of his own strength. In a fit of rage, Tennyson mauled the Indian and kept going even after being declared winner. It took three other slaves to separate the two lest Tennyson kill the loser with his bare hands. After Tennyson, the only slave left to fight was an old bearded white man sitting off to the side by himself. Faraday kept looking toward that old man, waiting for him to come, but he never came. He did not have to fight. And so the short Indian had no one else to brawl and he had not won a single match. Sensing his complete loss, the Indian pleaded for his life in what few English words he knew. It availed him nothing as the black slaves fell on him with closed fists and the loser abandoned English in favor of his mother tongue as he yelled and shrieked while the blows kept coming and coming until the Indian went silent. Faraday watched in horror as the black slaves took a pick at the body, roughly chopping the limbs and the head off. Then they ran spits straight through each piece of flesh and held them over the fire, turning them as they cooked and then parceling out the chunks for all to savor like the sacrament of some new religion. When it came time for Faraday and Tennyson to taste the meat, they refused. All of this the old white man watched from afar, until he saw that refusal and it compelled him up from the ground and forward.

“You fellas new,” he said, approaching Faraday. It was not a question. “My name’s Turnbull. You don’t have to eat that foulness if you don’t want. They ain’t gonna force you.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Faraday said.

“Don’t pay no mind to their works. The yoke is heavy and these men have chosen their manner of coping.”

“Coping? Their masters bring them plenty of food and water, yet that is not enough. They must slaughter each other. And you call that coping?” Tennyson said.

“Yes. Blind as they are, there is thought behind their actions. They still have hope and through the practice of their superstitions they are able to feed that hope, to let it grow inside of their hearts.”

“And why is it you do not have to fight?”

“When I first came here, I acquainted myself with the one who leads them. He had been a shaman in his country but here he was made to work in a mine. I spoke to him of the gospel and he heard me and rejected me. But he saw in me a counterpart to himself and, respecting my beliefs, has never forced me to take part.”

“You are a man of the Bible. Is that how you cope?”

Turnbull brought out of his trousers a thin little tome. “The good book is my relief, yes. Don’t have all of it here, only the most important parts. The rest I keep in my head. Once I was a preacher, but now I preach only to myself.”

“How did you end up here?”

“I came up out of Texas some ten years ago. Worked as chaplain to a platoon of men during the war. After that I took up a post as pastor in Nacogdoches. But the people there are blasphemers. Good white men they may once have been but time has corrupted them. One among them spread vicious rumors about myself and those beasts took it as true. I fled. Lived alone in the wilderness. Always moving, but one time I must have trespassed on the wrong tribe’s territory, because they took me in and made a slave out of me and sold me to another tribe and then another, until the Ohlone came and bought me for a pittance.” Turnbull spat. “Truth is, slavery is the best thing’s ever happened to me and it could be for you too if you listened to the gospel.”

“No man deserves to be a slave,” Tennyson said. “Not even Negros.”

“I’ll give you that, but if that slavery serves as the opening through which a man comes into the kingdom of God, then surely some good has come from the evil. For in the good book it is said that all the rich man’s belongings cannot save him from condemnation, and I tell you that every man is that rich man and those belongings are all of the pernicious little wants that the heart of man covets, each one being incapable of shoring up what is broken and imperfect inside of himself. But here in the pit of slavery a man is forced to choose. Forget those belongings and find the one true treasure, or spend the rest of his life searching for a way to recover them, no matter how mad or far-fetched that possibility may be, as these Negros do every day, succeeding only in defiling themselves further. I chose the former.”

“Yet what virtue is there in your choice if the only alternative is horrible?” Tennyson said.

“All alternatives are horrible. But every man comes to this understanding in the way that the Father deems best. Slavery was my fate and it may or may not be yours. Now, tell me how it is that you fellas came to be captives of the Ohlone.”

Faraday told Turnbull the full story, omitting only those little details involving their way of making a living that could be construed as criminal, and when he was done, the old man took a long drink of water from the cup he held and frowned.

“That is a most curious coincidence that the Indians would appear so late in the forest, precisely in the same moment you were there, sleeping and unaware.”

“The daughter of the chief called the place Oushanis. Have you ever heard of it?”

“I’ve heard mention of it before. Some tribes pray to it as they would pray to a deity. Navel of the world, they consider it. Omphalos.”

“I was told the penalty should have been death.”

“If they sent you here, I don’t believe they intend to kill you. At least, in all the time I’ve been here I ain’t never seen them bring someone here only to execute them later.”

“Perhaps they expect us to die without their direct intervention, as fodder for the games these slaves play,” Tennyson added.

“That may be.”

The next day the elder Indian with the golden disc hanging from his neck came to the quarry accompanied by a retinue of Ohlone. He sat on the edge of the quarry and watched the slaves work, paying particular attention to Faraday.

After the elder left, the Ohlone brought a handful of new prisoners in and deposited them in the quarry. They ordered that all the slaves stand in a line and counted out how many there were, and when they found that only one was missing, they dispersed the assemblage. At night, the battles resumed and another slave roasted at the fire, killed so others might live.

On the third day, the elder came by again and the Ohlone counted the slaves and Faraday reasoned that the night killings were condoned but limited to one slave per night lest they be unable to replenish their workforce. Like the husbandry of some endangered fish.

And so went the fourth and the fifth day, the hours stretching out, each day no different than the last until Faraday felt his actions in the quarry becoming routine. This terrified him even more than the cannibalism he was forced to watch unfold every night. By the sixth day Faraday’s hands bore yellow and purple calluses and he felt himself resigned to his fate for the first time. That night he stood close to the bonfire, where the strongest black slaves congregated, and when the first fights broke out he matched them blow for blow and won his match. Later, with the meat of the night cooked, he took some of it in a bowl and sat looking at it for a long time. But he did not eat.

On the seventh day, Faraday woke before dawn, the morning star shining above him pale and audacious. He took up his pick and worked for over an hour before any other slave joined him. He worked to empty his mind and with every smashing motion he worked to put aside all memory of his past life piece by piece until all his previous striving appeared Sisyphean and sad and he replaced those memories with thoughts of an older kind, of the sky and the ground beneath his feet and the sustenance of the air that surrounded him and the movement of the stars and the mien of the animals and the swaying of the trees. All of these things seemed to him exceedingly precious. Until he remembered Olivia and his mother and his father, and despite believing himself utterly incapable of helping them, he still felt a strong desire to try. To plead his case in some way, to try and free himself from his bondage and ride to his father’s farm and save his family from their fates. But there was only one way down the mountain that he knew and it was guarded day and night by men of the Ohlone bearing bows and arrows and spears.

Faraday let his pick fall to the ground and thought hard, closing his eyes and trying to figure a way out. It took much of his strength to keep himself from crying. Somewhere in that darkness a way appeared before him. He took it. Like a waking dream, he walked into the space between his thoughts, striding over streams of time and space and memory and knowledge as if he had fallen through a crack in the world’s foundation. He sped downwards, past whole universes of green and gold and purple, of floating gasses and diffracted light, of alien constructs forged into shapes universal, five-pointed, six-pointed and seven-pointed. Then, as if piercing a veil, a single blue spot appeared on his horizon and all the force of the universe compelled him towards that spot. As he approached it he saw that it was Earth and into its atmosphere he fell. At the height of his fall he could see almost the whole continent of America. Falling further, his trajectory carried him on towards the western coast of that continent. Then all he could see was California, its diverse topography, its mighty northern mountains. At the end, the ground reached him suddenly and he stopped. Immediately he recognized his surroundings. He had come to the very quarry he wished to escape. Without his volition, he continued to move in a general westerly direction, away from the quarry and the road they had taken to get up there. Then, as he reached the very edge of that mountain, he looked down and beheld carved against the side of the mountain a clear path. A secret road down that peak. A way to escape, Faraday realized, and with that thought he opened his eyes and he was back where he started, the pick lying abandoned in front of him.

Faraday sat on the ground pondering what had just happened. Was it real? Was he going mad? The only way to find out was to go to that spot on the mountain, so he resolved that he would wait until everyone was asleep and in the cover of night attempt to walk to the path he had seen in his vision. While he considered how dangerous such a walk would be with no light to guide him, he realized the Ohlone elder had not come to the quarry that evening, and as he wondered why, a different retinue of the Ohlone ascended the peak. This one guarded not the elder but the chief’s daughter. To Faraday’s surprise, she approached him immediately upon arriving. Him and no one else.