Sacred Ground (21 page)

As he poured drinks, they suddenly heard a soft, whispering sound. The
tink-tink
of raindrops hitting the roof of the RV. They both looked up, as if the ceiling were transparent and they could see the unexpected rain clouds in the night sky. The intimacy within the small space intensified. Erica cleared her throat. “Do we really have something to fear from the Red Panthers?”

“They think I should have shut down your operation weeks ago.” He held out her drink to her. “Did you know that there are now nine tribes claiming possession of the cave?”

Her eyebrows rose. “I didn’t know anybody wanted it!”

“There are eighty California tribes currently fighting for recognition by the federal government. The problem is in proving a legitimate historical bloodline. A local tribe that can claim connection to the cave and therefore to the skeleton has a stronger case for getting on the federal Indian tribe register, and therefore qualifying for funds.” He dropped ice into his scotch. “Unfortunately, the rest of the tribes don’t want new tribes to be recognized because then there would be fewer federal dollars to go around. Which puts you and me in the middle of a very nasty battle.”

They tasted their drinks in silence.

“So why fencing?”

He leaned against the kitchen counter. Neither seemed to want to sit down. “It’s for anger management. It’s an outlet. If I didn’t cross swords with someone, I might do something I would regret.”

“What are you angry at?”

“Me.”

She waited.

He looked into his drink and listened for a moment to the rain, weighing his thoughts, coming to a decision. Finally: “Netsuya was like no one I had ever met before.” His voice was soft, like the rain. “She was exotic, angry, passionate. But she was not easy to be married to. She didn’t like Anglos and had a hard time reconciling her love for me with her crusade. She often went to meetings that I was barred from.”

He drew in a deep breath that made him grimace, then he sipped his scotch. Erica had the feeling he was about to open a very private door. “When Netsuya suspected she was pregnant,” he said, “she didn’t go to a regular doctor. Among her circle of friends was a Pomo woman who was a midwife. Netsuya wanted to have the baby at home, which I agreed to, but it wasn’t until later that I learned I wasn’t to be taking part in the birth. Something about women’s secret rituals and men not being allowed. I had to respect that.”

He took another sip of his drink, but he wasn’t relaxing into his story. Erica heard the tension in his voice. “I wanted her to see a medical doctor but she wouldn’t go. She said that white men took over the practice of obstetrics two hundred years ago when they were jealous and took it out of the hands of white women. She said that her people had been having babies for thousands of years without the intervention of white male doctors. When I suggested a female physician, she still refused. We argued. I told her it was my baby, too, and that I had a voice in this. But Netsuya argued that ultimately it was her body and, therefore, she got the final word.”

Jared took another drink, his eyes grazing the roofline of the house model as if wondering how the Arbogasts had handled the births of Muffin and Billy. “When her labor began, she called the midwife who arrived with an assistant, also a full-blood Indian. The three women went into the bedroom and closed the door.”

Jared paused long enough to add another splash of scotch to his glass, another ice cube. “The labor went on for hours. Once in a while I was allowed to go in and sit with Netsuya while the midwife made herbal tea and the assistant filled the room with sacred smoke and chanted native prayers. When the baby came, I was barred from the room because my presence was taboo. So I waited outside the door and listened. Netsuya screamed, and then she was silent. I kept listening for the baby’s cries. When there was only silence I went in.”

The ice rattled in his glass. The rain on the roof intensified.

“There was—” He clasped the crystal tumbler and looked into it, like a man about to fall. His voice grew tight. “There was too much blood. And the midwife— I’ll never forget the look on her face. She was terrified. I bundled Netsuya into blankets and drove her down the hill to the hospital. I don’t remember the drive. I know I had my hand on the horn and I ran red lights. The doctors did what they could to save my wife and son, but it was too late.”

Silence rushed in behind his words while Erica stood immobilized. “I am so sorry,” she finally said.

A vein stood out on Jared’s forehead. He choked out the words. “There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t think about my son and wonder what he would be like now, three years old. I can’t forgive Netsuya for what she did. I can’t forgive myself.”

“But it wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t anyone’s fault. These things happen.”

“These things do
not
happen.” He turned a furious look on her. “It was preventable. That’s what the attending physician told me afterward, when he asked me if Netsuya had been taking drugs during her pregnancy. I told him she wouldn’t even take an aspirin. She wouldn’t let people smoke around her. Netsuya was so health conscious that she drank only herbal teas and took herbal supplements. Then the doctor asked me about the supplements.

“I remembered that Netsuya had gone regularly to the midwife to get a compound of ginkgo biloba, garlic, and ginger, which the midwife had prescribed to prevent blood clots. It turns out these herbs also prolong bleeding. The doctor said that that was what had most likely caused the hemorrhaging.”

Jared turned haunted, shadowed eyes on Erica. “He said that people think that because they’re taking natural herbs they’re doing something healthy when in fact they could be doing something lethal to themselves. He said it’s a growing problem as more and more people are taking herbal supplements, and it has now become a routine question for surgeons to ask their patients preoperatively, because certain herbs cause bleeding problems, and that if Netsuya had gone to a licensed physician, she would have been warned about this. She and the baby would not have—” He turned away, and for a moment Erica thought he was going to dash his glass against the wall.

Now she understood his nightly appointment with swords, his ordained rendezvous with sharp blades and points. Of course he would wear padding and a face mask and the swords would be blunt, but that didn’t matter. It was the fight itself that was needed, cutting the air with his fury and grief, slaying his demons over and over in an endlessly repetitive dance of guilt and anger and self-recrimination.

“Dear God,” his voice broke. “I killed them—”

She took a step toward him. “You didn’t. Jared, it wasn’t your fault.”

He spun around. “It was! I should have intervened. He was my child, too. He deserved the best medical care. Instead I left him at the mercy of ignorance and superstition.”

Erica searched for words, desperate to help. “Netsuya was educated, she knew the facts, and that was what she chose. You did the right thing in respecting her wishes.”

Jared looked into his scotch, fist clenching the glass as if to crush it. “I have nightmares,” he said quietly, “I’m running, trying to get somewhere, always arriving too late. I wake up in cold sweats.”

They fell silent then, listening to the rain. Erica’s emotions were raw, as if they had been peeled and left exposed to the elements. She didn’t know what to feel. Jared and his pain, his guilt. And her own demon, hunched malevolently behind her heart. She wanted to comfort Jared, ached for him, wanted to feel his arms around her, his mouth on hers.

“In three years I haven’t discussed this with a soul,” he said. “You’re the first.”

Erica wanted to comfort him but didn’t know how. Foster mothers telling her to stop crying because she wasn’t the only person with troubles, teachers telling her that if she stood up for herself the kids wouldn’t tease her, social workers accusing her of whining and sniveling. If Erica had ever been comforted by someone, she couldn’t remember. Perhaps in the hippie commune, when her mother still loved her. Children needed to be taught how to comfort, just as they were taught how to love and hate. They needed to be let in on the secrets of these skills.

“Well,” Jared said, suddenly aware of his empty glass. “I’ve kept you too long.” A ragged sigh. “I hadn’t intended to tell you my life story.”

Erica realized in horror what she had done. She had hesitated.
That
was the secret to comforting someone— you did it without thinking, you didn’t stand there wondering what to do next. She wanted a second chance. She wanted to roll the clock back a mere minute, back to when he said, “You’re the first,” and then go to him, slide her arms around him, press her warmth to him and let him know that someone cared.

Instead the moment had stretched too long, it became cold and hollow, Jared with his back to her now, his hand reaching for the scotch bottle. “I’d better go,” she said, putting her glass down. “I left my windows open.”

She waited.

And then she let herself out into the rainy night.

* * *

By the time Erica changed out of her evening clothes and into comfortable sweats, the storm had increased, creating a muffled roar inside her tent. She pictured the grunion hunters running for their cars— and the fish riding the waves as they had done for thousands of years, unthreatened by capture. Then she turned her attention to the object on her worktable, the astonishing find from Level IV that afternoon.

At the time of discovery, she had been overwhelmed by it, her mind centering on the object like a dog on a bone. But now she almost wondered what the thing was and why she had attached so much importance to it. All she could think of was Jared.

She forced herself to address the task at hand. It was what she had done all her life, it was what kept her from drowning in her own pain.
Don’t think of the demon that haunts you and it won’t exist.
“The hair is black with no signs of gray,” she dictated into her recorder in a voice that sounded a little too loud, “plaited into a fourteen-inch braid which appears to have been cut off at the nape of the neck. I am surmising that it is a woman’s braid.” Using tweezers she plucked out what looked like a pink flake. “The braid appears to have been buried with petals,” she said, turning the brittle flake over in the light, examining it under a magnifying glass. “Bougainvillea,” she pronounced after a moment.

She swallowed hard. The heaviness in her chest was still there, like a sinister black-feathered creature that had been waiting for her in the shadows beyond the Dimarco pool deck, watching for a moment of weakness when Erica’s guard was down and it could fly in and take roost inside her rib cage.

“As the bougainvillea plant wasn’t introduced into California until after 1769, and since the braid was found at a lower level than where we found the American one-cent coin, but at a higher level than where we found the tin crucifix, whatever strange ritual took place in the cave involving the severing of the braid happened between 1781 and 1814.” She paused, her eyes went out of focus, her hands froze over the specimen, and she thought,
We’re coming closer in time.

She picked up the braid in both hands, felt the heavy hair in her fingers, tresses that had once crowned a young woman’s head, and she wondered why such a brutal act had been committed— for surely shearing off a woman’s hair in a century when all women wore their hair long had to have been a punishment, or an act of discipline or humiliation. The victim wasn’t American, Erica knew that for certain. Not at the level where the braid had been found. So she had been a Spanish lady who had been dragged to the cave by morally outraged brothers, where they had cut off her hair for soiling the family honor. Or perhaps they were the Mexican sisters of a young man who had committed suicide when she scorned his love. Or had she been a martyr in a forgotten Indian sacrifice?

Erica closed her eyes and felt tears run down her cheeks. This hair had once lain warm upon a woman’s back, had bounced when she ran, flown free in the wind; had been brushed, washed, caressed, perhaps kissed. And finally, lovingly braided with bougainvillea petals to be hacked off in a savage act.

Pressing the braid to her chest, she thought of Jared lifting the curl off her neck and tucking it back into its rhinestone clip. Such an intimate gesture, powerful in the responses it evoked. Pain suddenly washed over Erica like a tide of cold, hard grief. A sob escaped her lips. The heaviness expanded inside her chest. She pictured Jared alone on the island, running from his rescuers, wanting to be left alone. And earlier, in a mad drive to the hospital, guilt and fear stabbing him like swords.
“It was preventable…”

And suddenly she knew what it was, the thing roosting behind her heart like a malevolent hobgoblin. It was reality. Jared’s. And her own. Now she knew why she had been thinking about him lately. It was because of his aloneness.

We all need someone to watch over us, but not all of us are so lucky as to have someone. Me. Jared. The Lady in the cave. We are alone and vulnerable to those who would attack us.

She suddenly wanted to protect Jared from the Ginny Dimarcos of the world, just as she was protecting the Lady from vandals. But she had no idea where to even begin.

Chapter Ten

Luisa

1792 C.E.

They were going to run away. Doña Luisa and her daughter, Angela.

Except that Angela didn’t know it. Nor did Captain Lorenzo, Luisa’s husband. Neither did the padres at the mission nor the other colonists living in and around the village of Los Angeles. Luisa alone harbored the secret, and she planned to keep it thus until she and Angela had reached Madrid in Spain. Once there, they would stay, never to return to Alta California and their life of bondage there.

It occurred to Luisa that people might consider what she was planning a sin because she was deserting her husband. But this was not so. She intended to write to Lorenzo once she reached Spain and ask him to join her there. If he refused, then the sin would be upon him for deserting his wife and child.

And anyway, the Blessed Mother, who saw into everyone’s heart, would see that Luisa was doing the right thing. That was all that mattered.

She was in her garden harvesting botanical herbs, and because the sea voyage was going to be long and perilous, she was gathering more than her usual amount of opium. The medicine was for Angela.

The sixteen-year-old girl had suffered from debilitating headaches and fainting spells ever since the day Lorenzo had brought her, a foundling, out of the mountains. The opium was not so much to ease the pain during the spells as to keep her from talking. The first time Angela was stricken, she had cried out suddenly, clutched her head, and fainted. In a strange delirium that alarmed her new parents, the little girl had screamed, “They are on fire! They are burning up!” And then she had cried hysterically. When she awoke later, Angela had no memory of the incident and Luisa had dismissed it as a bad dream. But when a fire broke out in the Saint Monica Mountains that evening, and had raged for seven hellish days until it was extinguished by a summer storm— and it was later learned that several Indio families had perished in the inferno— Luisa had looked at her adopted child in alarm. Because Angela had been wearing Mission clothing and spoken Spanish when Lorenzo found her, Luisa had assumed she was a baptized Christian. But all the holy water in the world, Luisa knew, could not wash away a person’s race. If the child was Indio, then might not there be accusations of witchcraft should her gift of prophecy be known? Although witches were no longer burned in Spain, who knew what the Mission Fathers, who had a penchant for severely punishing their Indios, would do? So Luisa had begun to keep a supply of opium on hand to sedate the girl whenever she had a spell. As a consequence, although the headaches still came, there had thankfully been no more prophetic utterances.

Luisa paused in her garden of bright pink poppies and, laying a hand on her lower back, stretched. Stiffness in her joints reminded her that she had recently celebrated her fortieth birthday— her nineteenth year away from Spain. Luisa had gone with her family to Mexico City in 1773, when she was twenty-one. Her father had been appointed Professor of Sciences at the University of Mexico, a very prestigious post, and because her uncle also happened to be the Viceroy of New Spain, and another uncle the
alcalde
of Guadalajara, Luisa had enjoyed the privileged life of the upper class. Less than a year later she met the dashing and handsome Captain Lorenzo, married him, and gave birth to their first child. Luisa had thought her life was perfect.

And then they had left New Spain to come north to follow an insane dream and had buried their daughter along the way. That was when Luisa had begun planning her escape from this godforsaken colony. Now, eleven years later, her dream was about to come true.

She had had to obtain Lorenzo’s permission to travel, and he had at first refused to grant it. Who would run his household while she was away? Who would supervise the Indian women and make sure he and his men got fed? Luisa had told Lorenzo he could choose from among the women, one he trusted, even hinting that he could bring such a woman into the house, because Luisa knew Lorenzo had Indian mistresses. Luisa had then sought the support of Father Xavier, offering to bring back rosaries and prayer books, and saying that she would be happy to carry objects from the mission to be blessed by the bishop in Compostella, where the bones of blessed St. James were buried. But it was when she promised Lorenzo that she would bring back money from her brother and cousins in Madrid to invest in Lorenzo’s rancho that he had finally consented. Next had been the problem of finding a ship captain who would take two female passengers. The master of the
Estrella
had agreed only when he heard the price Luisa was willing to pay. So Luisa and her daughter now had written permission to travel, they had paid for their passage, and tomorrow they would set sail on the
Estrella
, currently anchored off the Palos Verdes peninsula.

As Luisa turned to the next row of poppies, she saw Angela on her silver-gray Arabian, Sirocco, galloping across the fields, her black hair streaming back. Wearing a divided skirt so that she could ride like a man instead of sidesaddle, she rode with her arms around the stallion’s neck, her flying black hair mingling with his silver mane. Angela and Sirocco were inseparable. Every day at daybreak, before her morning chocolate, Angela would saddle up the horse and ride into the rising sun. Together they would gallop, horse and girl, for an hour before coming back, breathless and elated, Sirocco to his stall, Angela to her breakfast and lessons with her tutor. When informed of the impending journey to Spain, Angela had asked if they could take Sirocco with them. But Luisa had explained that such a journey would be unpleasant and possibly harmful to the horse, and had assured Angela that he would be well taken care of while they were gone. It pained Luisa to know that her daughter would never see her beloved horse again, but the sacrifice was worth their freedom. In Madrid, she would offer her daughter the choice of any horse, hoping that in time she would forget Sirocco.

Luisa watched Angela finally bring the horse into the compound and dismount, handing him over to a groom. As Angela walked toward the house, tall and willowy, carrying herself with dignity and grace, Luisa thought what a beautiful young girl she was. Well educated, too, in reading and writing, and history and even basic mathematics. But Angela was innocent about the ways of the world. Perhaps too innocent, Luisa thought in concern. The power of the Mission Fathers was strong in the colony, and their dictum that women should be submissive and sequestered in the home was followed by most families. As a result, Angela had rarely ventured from her father’s land. Except for visits to the Mission to attend Mass on holy days and brief rides through the small village of Angeles, Angela knew a world that was restricted to four thousand acres.

Luisa wanted more for her daughter. The Angeles Pueblo consisted of a mere thirty adobe buildings surrounded by a wall. Angela had never seen a city, or cathedrals and palaces, universities and hospitals, fountains and monuments, or crowded narrow streets that opened suddenly upon sunny plazas. And people everywhere, in the marketplaces and on the roads! Here, one could ride for miles and not encounter a soul. Well, Indios roaming about, but that wasn’t the same thing.

Luisa wanted Angela to have experience, culture, knowledge of independence, and free will, and power in her own right and not just through a husband. Such was not possible in this backwater colony where, in Luisa’s opinion, the padres wielded too much power.

Look what happened to Eulalia Callis, wife of Governor Fages, who had publicly accused her husband of infidelity. Fages denied it, and when Callis continued in her accusation against the advice of her priest, she was arrested and locked in a guarded room at Mission San Carlos for months. While she was a prisoner there, Father de Noriega condemned her from his pulpit and repeatedly threatened to punish her with shackles, flogging, and excommunication. Although the rest of the colonists denounced the woman for scandalizing her husband’s good name, Luisa had privately believed Callis’s petition for divorce was a strategy for survival. Pregnant four times in six years, Eulalia first gave birth to a son, miscarried a year later, made the perilous journey to California while pregnant again, fell seriously ill after the birth of her daughter, and buried a baby only eight days old just a year later. Luisa knew what had prompted the woman’s drastic action: Eulalia Callis had hoped to be allowed to return to Mexico and thus ensure her own survival and that of her two remaining children.

In Alta California a woman did not have sovereignty over her own person. Both civil and church law gave male family members authority over a woman’s sexuality. Apolinaria del Carmen, a widow on a neighboring rancho, had been nearly beaten to death by her son when he found her in bed with one of her Indian
caballeros.
Apolinaria was ostracized by the colonists and excommunicated from the church; her son inherited the rancho when she died a year later.

And then there was the sad tale of Maria Teresa de Vaca, betrothed on the day she was born to a man named Dominguez, a soldier serving escort duty at the San Luis Mission. On the day she turned fourteen, Maria was forced to wed Dominguez, by then a man of nearly fifty and almost toothless! It was the talk of the Pueblo how the poor girl ran away three times until, beaten at last into submission, she resigned herself to her fate and was now pregnant with their fourth child.

Luisa vowed that these fates were not to be for Angela. The Blessed Mother did not intend for Her daughters to be sold and owned like cattle.

Angela entered the garden, shining black hair tumbling over her shoulders and down her back, her eyes bright with the excitement of having just ridden Sirocco. “Good morning, Mamá! Look!” She was carrying a basket of the first of the jicama she had been growing. A tuberous root with the texture of a potato and the flavor of a sweet water chestnut, the large turnip-shaped vegetables were produced on underground stems of vines bearing beautiful white or purple flowers. Angela had planted the seeds six months earlier and was clearly proud of her first harvest. As Luisa took the basket, she decided she would serve the jicama raw with lemon, chili powder, and salt— a popular snack back in Mexico City.

“And I found the perfect spot to plant my new orchard, Mamá. I hope Papá will let me have it. It’s only a few acres, down by the marshes.”

Luisa had no idea where this notion of Angela’s had come from, to plant fruit trees on the rancho. The Mission Fathers were introducing oranges to Alta California, and Angela seemed quite taken with the idea of covering Rancho Paloma with orchards. There were a lot of things, mysterious things, about her daughter that she didn’t understand. Such as the inexplicable restlessness that came over her every autumn. Angela would ride for hours on Sirocco, not talking to a soul, just galloping as if to fly off the ends of the earth. And then she would suddenly stand very still and stare off in the direction of the mountains. These strange actions usually coincided with the time of the Indians’ annual acorn harvest. They would be seen for days tramping along the Old Road, coming from villages far away, carrying babies and all their worldly goods, a strange, savage parade.

“By the way, Mamá, I encountered Father Ignacio. He asked if we could bring back paper for him. And books to write in.”

Everyone was asking for something from home. In this remote outpost, where it sometimes took a year to receive supplies, the people tried to manufacture needful items such as candles, shoes, blankets, wine. But they couldn’t make paper. Or silk. Or objects made of silver and gold. Some of the colonists had given Luisa letters to take home, and gifts for families in Spain.

Angela gratefully accepted her morning cup of hot chocolate from an Indian servant and, after taking a sip, said, “Oh Mamá, a flock of seagulls appeared in the sky from out of nowhere! They circled overhead, making a great noise. And after I had watched them for a moment, they all turned as a body and flew westward to the ocean. It is an omen that our journey is going to be a safe one, I am sure of it, Mamá!” Luisa felt a sudden pang of fear. If Lorenzo found out she was planning never to return, he would lock her away for the rest of her life. She prayed that Angela’s seagulls were indeed a good omen; however, she didn’t trust solely in signs or portents but relied also upon prayers for the intercession of saints and the Blessed Mother.

When Angela slipped into the house to finish her breakfast, Luisa returned to her work, feeling the benevolent California sun warm on her back. These were special poppies, grown from imported seeds since the poppies native to Alta California did not produce opium. Luisa cultivated them with great care, always planting after the autumn equinox, feeding the young plants with plenty of water and manure, pinching back the first flower stalks so that many buds flowered instead of just one. And then she inspected them daily since it was vital to begin milking the seedpods at precisely the moment when the gray band where the petals had been turned dark. Luisa always began the milking in the morning, incising the pods with a sharp knife and then returning the next day to scrape off the white ooze and leave it in the sun to dry.

The secret to a plentiful opium harvest lay in the precise incising of the capsule: cut too deeply, and the plant quickly died, but cut just sufficiently, and the plant could continue to manufacture milk for another two months. Doña Luisa of Rancho Paloma was known for having the most delicate touch in the Los Angeles Pueblo. Her laudanum— a tincture of alcohol and opium— was in constant demand.

As she gently scooped the sticky white substance off the seedpods and deposited it in a small leather bag, she thought about how back home in Madrid if a person needed something for pain, he or she would simply go to the neighborhood apothecary. But there were no apothecaries in this distant outpost of the Spanish empire. Medicinal supplies had once come up from Mexico along the overland route from Sonora, but the bloody uprising of the Yuma Indios on the Colorado River, eleven years ago, had closed the land route. And since foreign ships were not allowed near the California coast, the colonists were forced to rely upon the occasional, undependable supply ship from Mexico. So they turned to their own gardens for remedies. Some secretly visited Indio shamans and healers, but many came to the home of Doña Luisa, where her solarium was always well supplied with fresh herbs, ointments, salves, tinctures.