Sacred Ground

by Barbara Wood

  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.

  It was a sign, Felipe was certain, that here was where humble men might find grace.

  Grace…

  Forgetting the flowers in his hands and the Indian girl at his side, Felipe lifted his eyes and stared for a long time out to the horizon. A voice sounded in his head: Blessed St. Francis, who spoke with the Lord on a daily basis, as he lay dying at Porciuncula in Italy begged to be buried in a criminals’ graveyard. I wish for the same. I want my body to be laid in the humblest grave in the most detested piece of ground.

  Saint Francis had called himself the “vilest of God’s creatures.” Felipe ached to humble himself so, to degrade himself as the Blessed Saint had. He wanted men to spit upon him and rain him with dirt as he welcomed the humiliation as St. Francis and his brethren had. But…

  And now Felipe’s heart lurched with the new pain that had invaded him and was growing within him each day, the pain of doubt and guilt and self-loathing. Because he had had a revelation one night in the stable, as he had lain prostrate in the cow dung, praying for rapture, and his inner voice had suddenly whispered: Arrogant man! Isn’t the wanting of humility an act of pride? How can you be humble and proud at the same time?

  Most Blessed Lord, Felipe wanted to cry out right here and now, in this garden where he toiled and in the presence of the heathen girl so recently come to Christ. Look upon me as your most wretched servant! Witness the punishment I inflict upon this miserable corpse which is called Felipe. Observe my loathing of food and drink. See these marks of daily wounding of my unworthy flesh! And reward me with but a glimmer of Your Blessed and Divine Countenance!

  His shoulders slumped. It wasn’t enough. After three years of denial and hard work and humbling himself, Felipe realized in utter misery that he had not done enough to be rewarded with the vision of Christ. He had to do more. But what? If only I could go home, back to Spain, I would crawl upon my hands and knees across Europe to pay homage at Porciuncula, where my Blessed and Perfect St. Francis died.

  Wondering what had Felipe’s attention so, Teresa looked out past the garden and the pastures and wheat fields to where the river meandered across the plain. “What do you see, Brother Felipe?”

  “Porciuncula,” he said in a strange voice. “We named it that, to keep the memory of Blessed St. Francis.”

  “Named what? Do you mean the river?”

  She waited. Her alarm grew. “Brother?” she said, lightly touching his arm.

  As if beholding a vision that no one else could see, he said in a distant voice, “There is a humble little church near Assisi, called Porciuncula, which means ‘little piece.’ It was named so because it was such a small structure, standing forsaken and in ruins. Blessed St. Francis came upon it one day, and when he learned it was named for the angels who lifted Our Lady to the heavens upon her Assumption, he decided to repair the church and live there for a while. It was while St. Francis was at Our Lady of the Angels of Porciuncula, in the Year of our Lord 1209, that he experienced a divine revelation and his way of life was revealed to him. Years later, when he was in his final illness, he asked to be taken to Porciuncula so that he might die there. And now we have come here, to this place, five hundred years after his death, and we have named a river for that church St. Francis bore so much affection for.”

  He closed his eyes and swayed slightly.

  “Brother Felipe?” Teresa grasped his arm and was shocked to feel its thinness beneath the woolen sleeve. “Are you not well?”

  When he opened his eyes he had to bring himself back to earth. He looked down at the strong brown fingers clasping his arm. Then he remembered: Teresa. He was harvesting foxglove with Teresa. He squinted at her with pain-filled eyes, finding curious relief in her tranquil round face, her soul of patience that made him think of centuries. There was something about this girl— his first convert. But he couldn’t put his finger on it. She looked not quite like the other Indians at the Mission. The larger nose, the hairline across her forehead as it came down in a peak, the limpid black eyes waiting for his questions. She stood there like the embodiment of an answer, but she was as beyond his reach as the stars and the sun and the moon.

  * * *

  The Mission was built around a square, four long thatch-roofed huts with an inner arcade that connected the chapel, workshops, cooking and dining facilities, storerooms, the priests’ quarters, and a room called the monjerio— nunnery— where the females over the age of six were locked every night and not released until morning. Through one small window the imprisoned women could hear the men of their tribes enjoying life beneath the stars as they smoked their pipes and tossed gambling sticks into the air. The Fathers had tried to discourage these games of chance but with little success, and in the end allowed the men their recreation— as long as they adhered strictly to the daily regimen of prayer, work in the fields, more prayer, more work.

  It was late, and the door to the nunnery was locked. Teresa moved among the women stretched out on mats, each with one blanket. The number of sick was higher tonight. They coughed and wheezed and burned with fever. None could eat and few could take water. The flesh was melting from their bones as their lungs spewed blood. No matter how hard Teresa tried to help them with Brother Felipe’s teas and decoctions, and her own Topaa remedies, the sickness was spreading. A sickness like none her people had ever known. It was because of spirits, Teresa knew, brought by the white men, spirits that did not belong here but in another world far away. The white men did not die when these spirits entered their bodies. Some never even got sick. But the Topaa and the other tribes had no power against the invading spirits.

  Many of these women had come to the Mission for the protection of the Fathers because they were afraid of the soldiers— lawless men who liked to get drunk and ride on horseback after defenseless native women, lassoing them like animals and raping them. The women’s husbands and brothers, with spears and arrows, were helpless to protect them against the soldiers’ musket balls. And so it was safer to leave the villages and seek safety at the Mission. But at what sacrifice? Teresa wondered as she looked around the crowded hut and heard the babel of dialects as Tongva tried to talk to Chumash, and women tried to quiet babies crying in their arms, and young girls sat with haunted looks as they wondered how they were going to find husbands, who was going to study the family lines? In another era, another life, the words “breakdown of the social order” might enter Teresa’s mind. But all she understood on this night of many questions was that things were suddenly not right in the world.

  She came to the farthest bed and knelt quietly beside the woman who lay on her side, facing the wall. Her baptism name was Benita and she had been raped by soldiers, to later discover that she was pregnant. When she suffered a miscarriage, the Fathers suspected her of having committed an abortion because she was unmarried. And so they had punished her by strapping irons to her legs, publicly flogging her, shaving her head, forcing her to dress in sackcloth and cover herself with ashes, and to carry a wooden image of a child, painted red to symbolize abortion, as she went about her daily duties. At Sunday Mass she was made to stand before the Mission church to receive the taunts and jeers of churchgoers. This punishment was designed to force Indian women to keep unwanted children because the Fathers said abortion was a sin. But what the Fathers couldn’t seem to understand was that it was the sicknesses that were causing so many miscarriages among the Topaa. Like the evil spirits that tormented the women with fevers and lung con
gestions, a sickness the Fathers called “pneumonia,” there were spirits that caused sores and rashes, which Teresa had heard the Fathers call “syphilis” and “gonorrhea.” These were new spirits to the Topaa, like the new grasses and the new animals and the new flowers. And the people had no resistance to them.

  Benita was dying. Her sickness was not of the body but of the spirit. She had not caused the unborn child to leave her body. But the Fathers did not believe it. She must be set as an example, they had said. Just as they set examples with baptized husbands and brothers who wanted to return to the old life: they were hunted down by soldiers and brought back, and locked in something called a “stock” for people to make fun of them.

  Teresa sat back on her heels and thought about the women and girls crowded into this cramped shelter, with no ventilation, no warm fire, no shaman to keep the spirits from jumping from one body to another. It took only one woman to be possessed by the measles-spirit, or the typhus-spirit, to make all the women ill, as the evil spirit took possession of them, one after another.

  The Fathers didn’t seem to understand. But there was so much they didn’t understand.

  Why did they insist on sweating in the summer heat in their itchy woolen robes when it made more sense to go about naked? Why did they make the women cover up, saying that their breasts were shameful? Why did the Fathers call the people “Indians”? There were many tribes, their languages and myths and ancestors different. That woman there, Teresa thought, she is Yang-na. She and I descend from different bloodlines. I do not know her ways, she does not know mine. And those women over there, they are Tongva, no relations to my own race. But the Fathers do not understand this.

  Teresa had tried to keep up the tradition of telling stories at night, the tales and myths that linked the generations all the way back to the first ancestors. But the Fathers divided the clans and even families, taking brothers to one mission, sisters to another, grandparents were separated from grandchildren, cousins from cousins, so that the stories that were told at night weren’t always those of one’s own tribe. Teresa was worried that if this continued, the elders would die without having passed the stories on to the younger ones. So she sat with her fellow prisoners and told them about the First Mother coming from the east, how she caused an earthquake when she stepped on a tortoise burrow. She told the story of the stranger who came from the sea, how he brought magic eyes to the Topaa. But Teresa’s myths meant nothing to many of these women because they had their own. And when she told the story of the man who came from the sea, one of the little ones asked, “Was that Jesus?” The people’s myths were becoming mixed up with the Christian ones, and worse, some of the little ones were having a hard time understanding Teresa at all because they were learning to speak only Spanish. And when they were baptized they had all been given Spanish names so that the young ones were starting to forget their tribal names.

  Teresa curled her hand around the leather pouch that hung from her neck on a cord. It contained the ancient spirit-stone handed down from the First Mother.

  Was this why there was so much illness among the people? Her own mother had died of the lung disease, and others were now coughing and burning with fever. Was it because the stories weren’t being told? When she looked at the sick and frightened women, Teresa blamed herself. I should not have stayed here. I should have gone back and taken care of the cave. Who is looking after the First Mother? No one, and that is why this curse has fallen upon us.

  She knew what she had to do. To save her people she must go to the cave, even though it was forbidden and her punishment would be severe. She would simply have to make certain the soldiers didn’t find her, for surely they were going to search, as they did for all runaways. She wasn’t as fearful of the punishment as of the fact that she would never again have a chance to return to the cave.

  Finally, Teresa thought of Felipe. It tore her heart to think of leaving him, because once she ran away she could never come back. But her people were sick and dying. To help them she must leave her beloved Felipe and never see him again.

  The window opening was just wide enough. Her friends helped her up, and spoke blessings and good wishes to her, in Topaa and in dialects Teresa did not understand. She promised that she would not get caught. She promised that she was not going to let the old ways be forgotten. And then she dropped down, silently and catlike, into the night.

  * * *

  Teresa went first to the medicinal garden, moving in and out of shadows, each darker than the last, her way lit by stars and moon. Among the herbs and plants she plucked flowers and dark green leaves. Then she hurried past the stable, toward the east, where she would find the ancient track that led to the mountains.

  She stopped when she heard a strange sound.

  Peering through a crack in the stable door, she could not at first make out what she was looking at. And then suddenly she drew in a sharp breath. In the pigsty between two stalls, Brother Felipe was on his knees, stripped to the waist, and whipping himself with six knotted leather strips tied to a wooden handle. His back was streaked with blood.

  Flinging the door open, Teresa rushed in and dropped to his side. “Brother Felipe! What are you doing?”

  He didn’t seem to hear her as he continued to flagellate himself.

  “Stop!” she cried, seizing the whip and pulling it away. “What are you doing, Brother?”

  Felipe stared down at his empty hand, then he brought his head around and looked at her with hollow eyes. “Teresa…”

  When she saw how badly his back was torn, and scarred from old wounds, she started to cry. “Why are you doing this?”

  “I… want God to find me worthy.”

  “I do not understand! If your god created you, then are you not worthy? Does he create unworthy beings?” She reached out and gently touched the red welts on his white skin. She wanted to lay herself across his back and let her tears heal him, let her love pour over him like a balm.

  Felipe began to sob. How to explain to her that he yearned for rapture? He wanted to be afflicted with the stigmata as Blessed St. Francis was. He wanted to tame wild doves and preach to the fishes in the sea. He longed for a vision— the Lord and Mary had appeared to St. Francis and his companions, why not to him?

  Fetching water from the trough, Teresa did the best she could to bathe his wounds. She tore off the bottom half of her skirt and dried the blood, gently patting the places where the skin was broken. She wept the whole time, seeing Brother Felipe’s abused body through tears.

  He remained kneeling, submitting to her ministrations like a child, his bony chest racked with bitter sobs.

  Finally, when she had washed away the blood and his skin was dry, Teresa helped him to his feet and drew the sleeves of the gray robe up his arms, restoring to him a portion of his dignity. Then, in the darkness of the crude stable, she looked into his eyes, and said, “Tell me what it is you want, Brother Felipe.”

  His throat was raspy, his voice dry. “I seek perfect joy.”

  “And what is that?”

  “I will tell you. One winter day, St. Francis was traveling with Brother Leo from Perugia to Our Lady of the Angels, and both were suffering from the bitter cold. St. Francis called to Brother Leo, who was walking ahead of him: ‘If it were to please God that the Friars should give a great example of holiness and edification in all lands, this would not be perfect joy.’ After another mile passed, St. Francis called out a second time: ‘Brother Leo, if the Friars were to make the lame to walk, give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the dumb, this would not be perfect joy.’ A little while later, he cried out again: ‘Brother Leo, if the Friars knew all languages and were versed in all science, if they could explain all Scripture and possessed the gift of prophecy, and could reveal all future things, the secrets of all consciences and all souls, this would not be perfect joy.’ After another mile, he cried out again with a loud voice: ‘If the Friars could speak with the tongues of angels and could explain the c
ourse of the stars and knew the virtues of all plants, if they were acquainted with the qualities of all birds, of all fish, of all animals, of men, trees, rocks, and waters, this would not be perfect joy. And if the Friars had the gift of preaching so as to convert all infidels to the faith of Christ, this would not be perfect joy.’

  “So Brother Leo stopped on the road, and said to the saint, ‘Father, teach me what is perfect joy.’ And St. Francis replied, ‘If, when we arrive at Our Lady of the Angels, drenched with rain and shivering with cold, plastered with mud and weak from hunger, and if when we ring the gate bell and the porter comes and we tell him that we are two of the brethren, and he says angrily that we do not speak the truth, that we are impostors deceiving the world so we can rob the poor of their alms, and he leaves us outside in the snow and the rain to suffer from hunger, and if when we knock again the porter drives us away with blows, and if, urged by cold and hunger, we knock again, entreating the porter with our tears to give us shelter, and if he knocks us on the ground, rolls us in the snow, and beats us with a stick— if we bear all these injuries and cruelties and iniquities with patience and joy, thinking of the sufferings of our Blessed Lord which we would share out of love for him, this then, Brother Leo, is perfect joy.’ “

  Teresa was speechless.

  “When St. Francis died,” Felipe added miserably, “he was nearly blind from having wept so much during his life.”