Sacred Ground (15 page)

A quick, nervous cough. “Well, you see, my clients don’t want the cave just to be protected, they want it sealed… permanently.” He spread his hands on his expensive briefcase, as if to hint of precious contents inside, and said, “Let me emphasize, Mr. Black, that money is no object to my clients, not when it comes to the prevention of sacrilege being committed in their burial grounds. It has happened too many times in their history. And of course, they are aware that you have a personal interest in these matters. Your wife…?” He let his meaning hang in the air.

“Yes,” said Jared. “My wife was Native American, and the preservation of burial sites was one of her causes.” He thought for another moment, frankly sizing up his visitor while the man kept a fixed smile on his face. “Mr. Xavier,” Jared said, going to the screen door and pushing it open, “could you come with me for just a moment?”

Xavier’s smile fell. “Go with you? Where?”

“Just to help me clarify a few points. It won’t take long.”

* * *

“By looking into the historical record,” Erica dictated into her cassette recorder, “I have been able to determine that the owner of the spectacles was most likely a crewman sailing with Juan Cabrillo who, in 1542, anchored somewhere around Santa Monica and Santa Barbara and had brief contact with the Chumash Indians. But why had the man’s eyeglasses been buried in the cave? Was
he
buried there, too? Why would a European be buried in a sacred Indian cave?”

Hitting the stop button, Erica closed her eyes and massaged her temples. She couldn’t concentrate. The destruction to the skeleton. Even though Sam had praised her for having prevented a truly disastrous calamity, she felt responsible. She had had a premonition that something bad was going to happen and all she did was put a simple baby monitor in the cave. Sam had said that was smart thinking. Luke and all the others were patting Erica on the back for her foresight. She was a hero to everyone involved with the Emerald Hills excavation.

With one exception.
“I hope you’re satisfied.”

Her thoughts shifted again to Jared and how he had looked last night, his bare chest smeared with dirt and sweat. Slender but muscular, which made her wonder again where he went every night for two hours, out of reach by phone or pager. But more than that was the look she had seen on his face when he had said, “I hope you’re satisfied.” First there had been fury— the same dark anger she had seen when he had stood out beyond the gazebo in a silent argument with the ocean— but in the next instant he had looked dumbfounded. Was it because of what she had said? Erica could barely remember the words that had poured from her lips as she had lashed out at Jared Black and his arrogance. She was surprised she hadn’t thrown the baby monitor at him, she was that angry. And then, to her amazement, he hadn’t said anything in retort. What had made him stand there so mutely and let her march out without trying to get in the last word?

She was still furious with him. Erica rarely stayed mad at anyone or any situation for long. Anger was a waste of energy and time and accomplished nothing. But in this instance, the demon had hold of her.
“I hope you’re satisfied.”
Blaming her for what she alone had tried to prevent from happening! Whatever she had said in her tirade, it wasn’t enough. Erica had half a mind to march back over to his RV, and shout, “And another thing,
Mr.
Commissioner—”

When she heard footsteps nearing her tent, she set aside her work, thinking it was Luke coming to give a damage report on the cave. Erica had tried earlier to go back in and make a thorough evaluation of the vandalism, but she had been so overcome with emotion that she had had to leave and put Luke to the task.
Just don’t say you found more broken bones.

To her shock, she heard Jared calling her name.

She went to the doorway and squinted out into the sunshine. He was dressing more casually these days, she noticed, thinking that the chambray shirt and blue jeans suited him, and immediately wishing they didn’t.

“Dr. Tyler?” he said. “Can we interrupt you for a moment?”

She looked at Jared’s companion, a stranger who had a puzzled expression on his face. Erica noticed that the man tugged nervously at his shirt collar.

She didn’t invite them in. “What is it?”

“This is Mr. Xavier, an attorney representing a Native American group who wish to retain my services.”

Erica waited.

Jared looked at the man. “Mr. Xavier, would you mind repeating to Dr. Tyler what you told me a few minutes ago?”

A red tide flushed from the man’s collar right up to his receding hairline. “Well, I—”

“Just repeat what you said to me. Something about money being no object, I believe?”

Xavier stood flustered for a moment, and Erica thought he was going to collapse from apoplexy right there. Then he abruptly turned on his heel and hurried away.

Erica looked at Jared. “What was that all about?”

“Some hireling sent by the homeowners. Offering me a bribe to get the cave sealed.”

When she started to go back inside, Jared said, “Dr. Tyler, I want to apologize for what I said last night. I was out of line and had no business talking to you that way. I was just so upset when I saw what the vandals had done.”

She looked at him for a split second, taking in the honest, open expression in his smoky gray eyes and remembering Sam’s words: “Jared’s wife? You mean you don’t know?” So she said, “I was just about to make some coffee, if you’d care to join me.”

He followed her inside.

“I was upset, too,” Erica said as she took a bottle of cold Evian from the fridge and poured it into the coffeemaker. “And I probably said some things to you I shouldn’t have, although I don’t really remember what I said.”

He smiled. “You put me in my place, is what you did.”

“Mr. Black, we both care about the woman who is buried in that cave. You and I should not be adversaries.”

But he shook his head. “I still think what you are doing is wrong. You can call it excavating in the name of science. But it is still robbing graves. And for what? A display in a museum?”

She faced him, hands on hips. “I’ll tell you what I’m doing. When the Spaniards first arrived and established the missions here 230 years ago, the Indians were rounded up from their villages and either bribed or frightened into converting to Christianity. They weren’t allowed to practice their old religion or continue their traditions. And then most of them died of white men’s diseases. The conquest happened so swiftly that within two generations the customs, history, and even languages of these tribes were lost. But archaeology is starting to reconstruct those lost cultures. And if you take all those artifacts away from the museums, like the Native Americans want to, and bury them again, it will be a step backward. When we take school groups to museums, we teach children how the people who were here before us lived. If we don’t do that, children will grow up ignorant of what went before.”

Her words hung in the air as Jared’s eyes met hers.

Then she turned to her coffeemaker, which had finished brewing, and filled two mugs with cartoon characters on them. “Shamelessly expensive amaretto,” she said as she handed him the Daffy Duck mug. “My only extravagance,” she added with a smile, trying to dispel the tension.

It was Jared’s first time inside her tent, and he looked around now, trying not to be obvious about it, looking for clues that might shed some light on this woman who continued to be a mystery to him— hard one moment, vulnerable the next, hard again, but always passionate about her work. What he saw surprised him. This tent looked as if it had been lived in for years. She clearly had an ability to move into a place and make it instantly her home. He thought of his own RV, which he was leasing and was only temporary. The Winnebago was filled with luxuries and conveniences but lacked the personality he saw here: a foot-high Statue of Liberty with a clock in her stomach; a miniature Eskimo totem pole; a theater lobby card from the movie
King Solomon’s Mines
; a “Malibu Lifeguards” calendar; what looked like a flowering cactus in a pot but which was in fact a candle; an open box of Oreo cookies; finally, an autographed picture of Harrison Ford: “To my favorite archaeologist.” It was signed “Indiana Jones.” He looked at her computer. The mousepad was a Ouija board. When he finally stared at a shelf crammed with Beanie Babies, Erica said, “My pets. I take them with me everywhere.” He saw name tags on them: Ethel, Lucy, Figgy. “They all get along well,” she added with a smile. “Most of the time.”

But there were no family snapshots, no pictures of parents or brothers and sisters. Then he saw the pile of mail on the bed— magazines, bills, letters, circulars— all addressed to Erica at a post office box in Santa Barbara.

When he caught her watching him he reddened slightly and stirred his coffee in a self-conscious way. “So your home is in Santa Barbara?”

She leaned against her worktable and sipped the fresh brew. “That’s where my mail is delivered. I don’t have a permanent home. Actually” —she held out her arms— “this is my home right now.”

He drank his coffee, watching her over the rim of his cup, trying to hide his perplexity. This was
it
? Everything she possessed was contained in this small space? “I visited a friend once who was on a dig in New Mexico. His tent was full of artifacts. His own private collection. He never traveled without it.” Jared looked around the tent. “I guess I expected to see the same here.”

“I don’t collect artifacts. I don’t believe in private antiquities collections.”

He gave her a surprised look. “But you said a minute ago—”

“I believe in
museum
collections, because they are shared with the public and because they advance learning and understanding. I am opposed to the private collecting of archaeological objects. It promotes pilferage. As long as there are collectors who will pay top dollar for tomb objects, then tombs will be forever ransacked. Trafficking in relics only encourages the very grave robbing that you denounce.”

Jared found himself suddenly thinking of the few items in his house in Marin County, genuine pre-Columbian artifacts for which he had paid top dollar. It had never occurred to him to wonder at what cultural expense those objects had been obtained.

As he was about to remark on the desperate tactics of Zimmerman and the homeowners, and that everyone was going to have to be extra-vigilant in the coming days, they heard boots thumping on the dirt outside, and suddenly Luke burst in, saying, “Erica, you’ve got to come see this!”

She put her cup down. “What is it?”

“In the cave! I started doing a bit of cleaning up— no no, I haven’t touched anything but— Erica, you have got to see this!”

The three hurried to the edge of the canyon and climbed down the scaffolding. Inside the cave, Erica dropped to her knees and gently brushed soil off the newly exposed object. “It looks like it might have been wrapped in some sort of cloth,” she murmured. “Rotted away, but microscopic analysis of the fibers… Good heavens!” she said suddenly. “It’s a reliquary!”

Jared bent for a closer look. “A reliquary?”

“A receptacle for relics. Usually the bones or hair of a saint.” She gently brushed more dirt away, exposing a hand and forearm made entirely of silver. “Definitely a reliquary. Well, it looks as if someone other than the Lady is buried in this cave.”

“Which saint is it, Erica?” Luke’s voice was electric with excitement. “Whose bones are they? Can you tell?”

“And how did it get here?” Jared wondered aloud.

Erica chose a softer brush. “After Cabrillo in 1542 there was no further contact for the next 227 years. I am guessing that whoever brought this to America, didn’t bring it earlier than 1769.”

She brushed away more dirt and brought the light closer. When she read the name inscribed in the silver, she gasped. Then she looked up at the others, utter disbelief on her face. “I’m afraid our little excavation is about to become an international issue.”

“Why?” Jared said.

“Because I am going to have to report this,” she said, pointing to the half-buried silver arm, “to the Vatican.”

Chapter Six

Tersa

1775 C.E.

Teresa had two wishes: that she could learn what troubled Brother Felipe so, and that she could find a way to ease it.

“We harvest only the leaves of the foxglove plant,” Felipe was saying in his voice that always sounded to her like a summer wind whispering through a canyon, calming and soothing. Everything about Brother Felipe was calming and soothing— the way he walked, so unhurried as some of the Fathers were, his manner as serene as the garden he moved through. The way he ate, taking minutes between bites as if savoring the bounty of the earth. When he would pause at his labors, hands folded into the voluminous sleeves of his robe, and bend his shaved head for a moment of prayerful reflection. But the most soothing aspect of him was his eyes, Teresa thought, gentle and doelike, doorways into a quiet, faraway place where there was no anger or violence, no pain or death. Sometimes, when Teresa could no longer bear the suffering of her people, who were falling sick at a frightening rate, she would look into Brother Felipe’s moss green eyes and feel her spirit fly away into them, into that precious, peaceful solitude.

At least, this had been so until recently. But a disturbing change had come over Brother Felipe of late, a change perhaps so subtle that only Teresa, who worked daily at his side in the herb garden, could sense it. It was not so evident in his mannerisms and speech, but there were new shadows beneath his eyes, and a strange haunted look that had not been there three years ago, when he had first arrived at the Mission.

Teresa ached with love for the young friar but she could never tell him so. Brother Felipe was a holy man whose life was dedicated to his god and to the purifying of spirits. Like the Fathers at the Mission, he did not think upon matters involving man and woman, love and sex. He had even sworn an oath of celibacy. Although there was no celibacy among Teresa’s people, there was a wonderful Topaa myth that told of a hero who came out of the sea one day and fell in love with the clan medicine woman. This was generations ago, and the medicine women of that time were not allowed to marry but had to remain chaste all their lives. After the hero married her, however, all subsequent medicine women were permitted to take husbands, which was why Teresa’s mother had married, and why Teresa herself hoped someday to marry, even though she was destined to be the clan medicine woman. But it could not be just any man. She wanted Felipe.

“The foxglove,” he was saying, and Teresa detected a new tension in his voice that surely had not been there yesterday! Was he homesick? Was he yearning for the land of his ancestors? Teresa had never known anyone, Topaa or stranger, to be happy for long away from his tribe. Yet the Fathers had been here for six years already, building their strange huts and growing their strange food and grazing their strange animals, and they were giving no indication of leaving soon. But Brother Felipe wasn’t like the Fathers, who seemed made of sterner spirit. Felipe was a gentle man, barely out of his youth, with a pale complexion that was quick to blush, and a smile that was shy and sweet. There were times when Teresa thought Brother Felipe wasn’t a real human at all but a guiding spirit sent from the ancestors to watch over the Topaa while the Fathers were here.

Teresa had come to the Mission three years earlier when the people of her village had been enticed by the offer of food. Teresa and her mother had expected to return to their village by the sea afterward, but her mother had taken unexpectedly ill and, despite the kindly ministrations of the Franciscan Fathers, had died. When Teresa, only fourteen years old, grief-stricken and filled with pain, had prepared to return to her village, and Brother Felipe had invited her to stay at the Mission, as the Fathers were inviting Topaa, welcoming any who wished to live with them, she had looked into his gentle green eyes that made her think of forest pools and misted glades, and accepted.

It was because of Brother Felipe that she had allowed herself, a few months later, to be baptized.

Teresa didn’t really know what the water on the head meant, like the other baptized Topaa who lived at the Mission, learning to grow and harvest crops, to milk cows, to weave blankets and make pottery. They had found Mission life easier than life in the village, where people had to fish for food or go into the woods to gather acorns, often coming away empty-handed. At the Mission the Fathers provided plentiful food and a roof to sleep beneath, as long as the people said, “Our Father,” and “Jesus,” and “Amen.” They followed the priest during the morning ritual, standing, sitting, kneeling, touching their foreheads, chests, and shoulders when he signed a cross in the air, taking the little piece of bread on their tongues and reciting words that they didn’t understand. Brother Felipe said that those who had been baptized were now saved. From what, Teresa wondered?

Was it because they had been “saved” that they could never leave the Mission? Although many of the people liked staying at the Mission, many also wanted to return to their villages, but the Fathers said they couldn’t once they had been baptized. Which was why they were locked up at night, and why soldiers were sent to bring back the runaways. A lot of the people said that if they had known that the water on their heads meant being prisoners at the Mission, that they were to have been kept from the traditions and their religion, they would never have submitted to it.

Teresa wondered if this was why her people were falling sick and dying.

After her mother’s death, Teresa was to have taken over the care of the cave at Topangna, but she had never completed her initiation into the secrets, the myths and spells, the proper prayers and rites. Was it because the First Mother had not been visited in three summers that the people were dying? But Teresa was afraid to attempt the cave rituals without guidance. Some taboos were so strong that the slightest mistake could bring calamity, such as an earthquake or flood.

But wasn’t her people dying also a calamity?

“We must be careful not to bruise the leaf,” Brother Felipe was saying in his mellifluous voice.

Teresa tried to pay respectful attention. She had been chosen to help Felipe in the medicinal garden, where he grew healing herbs, because she had knowledge of such plants herself. Unfortunately, neither she nor Brother Felipe was able to find curative herbs for the sickness that was claiming more and more Topaa lives.

“Like this,” Brother Felipe said as he delicately harvested the foxglove leaves. He spoke in his own language, Castilian. Teresa had learned the Fathers’ language, as all the Topaa and Tongva and Chumash were required to do. The language was new, as was the flower Felipe was showing her, which contained a spirit that eased heart ailments. This garden was full of new flowers brought from a place called Europe— carnations, hellebore, peonies. And beyond the fence there were new animals— cattle, horses, sheep— grazing on grass also brought from across the sea. The fields where her people and members from other tribes now stooped at bent-backed labor, hoeing, weeding, planting, were filled with strange new plants— wheat, barley, corn. All this new brought into a place of old made Teresa feel vaguely troubled. She hadn’t seen the Fathers ask the land permission to plow it up, or to bring heavy beasts to tread upon it, or to alter the course of the river by digging canals where no canals had been. Would order break down and chaos come in its place?

Teresa remembered the day the strangers first came. She had been eleven summers old and word had spread through the villages that travelers from the south had entered ancestral land and were not paying the proper respect. The intruders were helping themselves to water without first asking permission from the river, they plucked fruit without asking permission from the trees, they cut branches and lit campfires without any of the proper respectful ritual. It was agreed among all the tribes that the strangers must be made to understand the Peoples’ ways.

But when the multitude approached the newcomers, showing them their spears and arrows to let them know the people intended to protect the spirits of the land, the strangers suddenly lifted a woman into the air and held her up for all to see. Thinking she was a medicine woman, the people fell silent, waiting for her to speak. But she did not. Neither did she move. Was she dead? they wondered. But her eyes were open and she smiled. Thinking that the intruders were presenting a holy lady, the chiefs laid down their bows and arrows out of respect, and their mothers and sisters came forth to offer beads and seeds. And when the strangers built a shelter for their lady, and laid flowers at her feet, the Topaa and Tongva and others likewise came and left offerings for her. Teresa had wondered at the time how the lady could remain still for so long, but she had since learned about paintings, and that it had not been a real woman at all but a representation of one on something called “canvas.” However, they all agreed on one thing, intruders and people alike: that she was called the Lady.

After six years, Teresa and the Topaa were still wondering why the intruders were here. Surely it couldn’t be for much longer, the chiefs and medicine men and women speculated, because no people can stay far away from their ancestors for long. And according to the Fathers, they had traveled a very great distance. But there was something about the visitors that, despite their generous ways, troubled Teresa. In the spring, the chief of the Fathers arrived for a visit. A very short man— the Topaa towered over him— he called himself Junipero, after the juniper bush. And Teresa overheard this Father Serra discussing a people called Indians who had revolted at a Mission called San Diego, and that this was a very disturbing thing. Then Teresa heard Junipero say to the Fathers: “The spiritual fathers should be able to punish their sons, the Indians, with blows.”

So much about the Fathers’ way of thinking confused her. For example, when the priests discovered that the women used concoctions of herbs to prevent conception, they were severely punished. But everyone knew that controlling conception was vital to the health of the tribe for otherwise the tribe would grow beyond the capacity for the land to feed the people. It was what the gods had taught the Topaa generations ago: that too many people meant not enough food and therefore famine. But the Fathers’ answer was to grow more food. They showed the Topaa how to plant seeds and water them and care for them, and then harvest the corn and beans and squash that they had brought with them from their faraway world. As there was now enough food, women should no longer prevent conception. But Teresa saw chaos in this, undoing a pattern the gods had woven at the beginning of Creation. Food and population growing until not a handspan of space was left in the land.

And anyway, the Fathers’ plan
wasn’t
working because they weren’t growing enough crops to meet the demands of the soldiers in the presidios, and now in the villages the people were dying of starvation. Every day, more and more Topaa, Tongva, and Chumash arrived at the Mission, their empty baskets held out for food. The Fathers gave food if the Indians stayed and became Christians. And so Teresa’s people filled their bellies with Jesus and wheat, and allowed their names to be changed to Juan and Pedro and Maria.

Her thoughts returned to Brother Felipe and her growing worry that a sickness was eating his spirit.

If Teresa could look into the young man’s soul, she would see a yearning so great that it was consuming him like fire. Felipe had come to the New World for one thing: to experience rapture. So far, it had eluded him.

Like Blessed Brother Bernard of Quintavalle who lived five hundred years ago, Felipe thought now as he stared at the bell-shaped flowers in his hands, having forgotten for the moment what he was supposed to do with them. Ever since Bernard took the habit of St. Francis, he was often rapt in God through the contemplation of celestial things. Oh Blessed Grace, to experience that sublime gift from God! Felipe dreamed of it often, wondering how it must have felt for Brother Bernard when, in church one day hearing Mass, his mind had been so lifted to God that he had become transfixed and enraptured, remaining motionless, his eyes gazing upward from Matins till the hour of Nones! For fifteen years afterward, Brother Bernard was rewarded with this celestial treasure, his heart and countenance raised daily to God. So completely was his mind detached and withdrawn from all things earthly, that Bernard soared like a dove above the earth, and remained sometimes thirty days at the top of a high mountain contemplating things divine.

Felipe dreamed of being rewarded as Brother Masseo, companion to St. Francis, had been when, after shutting himself in his cell and punishing his body with fasts, whippings, and prayers, he entered a forest and asked the Lord with cries and tears to grant him divine virtue. Whereupon the voice of Christ called from Heaven, “What wilt thou give in exchange for this virtue thou seekest?” And Brother Masseo replied: “Lord, I will willingly give the eyes out of my head.” And the Lord said, “I grant thee the virtue, and command that thou keep thine eyes.”

To hear the voice of Christ! Felipe shuddered beneath his heavy woolen robe. This was what he had come to this savage land for— to be blessed with divine revelation, to gaze upon The Sacred Countenance. When God had called him to missionary service, Felipe had eagerly answered. What rejoicing there had been in his village back home, when it was announced he had been chosen to join the mission to Alta California! How proud his father had been. How everyone had crowded into their small church to offer prayers for Felipe’s safety and for the success of his mission. And how Felipe’s heart had beat with hope and the sure knowledge that in that distant land his lifelong dream of meeting the Savior in person was certain to come true.

All during his long sea journey halfway around the world Felipe had imagined what it must have been like that first day of contact six years ago, when the Fathers had arrived at the River of Porciuncula and were threatened by a multitude of savages brandishing their war spears and bows and arrows. Fearing that they were about to be killed, the Fathers had produced a canvas painting of Our Lady of Sorrows and had held it up for the savages to see. God’s blessed miracle! The heathens instantly recognized that they were in the presence of the Virgin and had laid their weapons down.