Sacred Ground

by Barbara Wood

  Jared had then asked: “Is your family still in San Francisco?”

  “I have no family,” she had replied. “Just me.” Not exactly a lie, since Erica didn’t know.

  Later, in another room, the kindly social worker saying, “Any luck?”

  And the baldheaded man, unaware that little Erica could hear them: “My hunch was right. I figured the kid most likely came from one of the hippie communes. The woman’s drug overdose, the guy that brought her in, the way he was dressed. Well, I found the commune. Apparently the kid was abandoned. They said her mother took off with a biker. As for the biological father— the mother arrived at the commune pregnant and had the baby there. She never mentioned the father. I doubt she was married.”

  “Did you get the mother’s name?”

  “She went by Moonbeam. That’s all I could get. I don’t think you’re going to find her or the father. I doubt they were even married. Probably don’t even have a birth certificate for the kid.”

  “I’ve had one drawn up. We recorded the place of birth as San Francisco.”

  “What now?”

  “Well, she’s going to be hard to adopt, being five years old.”

  “You think so? Some couples want older kids, especially a pretty little girl like that.”

  “Yes, but there’s something strange about her…”

  It was growing up knowing that her mother had abandoned her, being moved from foster home to foster home, her social workers changing with frightening regularity, that made Erica retreat into fantasy. Stories became her life raft, fiction her sanity.

  In the fourth grade she had fantasized about a handsome man in a military uniform striding into the classroom and saying in a commanding voice, “I am General MacIntyre and I’ve come from a field of battle to claim my daughter and take her home.” They would hug in front of all those kids— Ashley and Jessica and Tiffany, the barracudas of Campbell Street Elementary— and go off hand in hand, Erica’s arms full of new toys. In the fifth grade she saw herself lying in a hospital bed after brain surgery, on the brink of death because she needed a blood transfusion that only a close relative could give, and her parents rushing to her bedside, saying they’d been searching for her and then they saw her picture in the paper and the headline that said, “Can Anyone Help This Little Girl?” They were very wealthy and donated money for a new hospital wing that was to be named after their daughter.

  In the sixth grade Erica started a family album of other people’s photos. She labeled them: “Mom and me at the Beach,” and “Daddy teaching me to ride a bike.” In the seventh grade, when puberty brought a new sense of urgency into her life, she began calling child welfare services on a regular basis to see if her mother had contacted them.

  The social workers came and went, the foster homes changed, the schools, the neighborhoods. Erica felt as if she lived in a pinball machine, bouncing off bumpers and flippers and never stopping. She grew resilient, imaginative, affable. Some group homes were filled with tough delinquent girls. But Erica survived because they liked her stories. She pretended to read palms and tea leaves and always predicted happy futures.

  She never stopped believing her parents would come for her.

  Looking at the crucifix in her palm, she thought: did it commemorate a birth? But whose? And then, as she looked around at the restored buildings, wondering again why she had come to this old heart of Los Angeles on an impulse, she saw a bronze plaque that read: Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument— 1781 A.D. And suddenly Erica knew.

  The crucifix commemorated not the birth of a person but of a place….

  Chapter Eight

  Angela

  1781 C.E.

  What kind of place was this to found a settlement? Captain Lorenzo thought in ill humor. The river was leagues away, there was no harbor, no natural defenses along the shore. All the world’s great cities were built on rivers or defensible harbors. But this place was in the middle of nowhere!

  Lorenzo knew that Governor Neve had in fact purposely chosen this area to establish his new pueblo. It didn’t matter that there was no harbor, no navigable river. The settlers were here to plant crops and raise cattle, and this flat, smoky plain was perfect for the purpose. Lorenzo thought that Neve was looking very satisfied. As well he should, having accomplished his mandate to establish two settlements in Alta California, one in the north and one in the south, one named for St. Francis and the other for the Virgin Mary.

  Dios mio, Lorenzo thought philosophically. To name the town after the river here, which was itself named after a chapel in faraway Italy! Such a grandiose name, such a mouthful that a man could not say it and eat his beans at the same time. El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Rio de Porciuncula. The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the River of Porciuncula. People were already making fun of it. They laughed and said Porciuncula was ironic because it meant “little portion” and wasn’t that what the government was granting them for settling here? And what of the Angels? Nobody saw angels here, just a ragtag group of colonists brought up from Mexico, a mere eleven families of racial mix: Indian, black African, mulatto, mestizo, even a Chinese from the Philippines! Lorenzo’s Mexican soldiers, plus the Spanish Fathers with their gaggle of Mission Indians, completed the total audience for Governor Neve’s founding of a new city. But there were no angels.

  Lorenzo had been one of the recruiters assigned to bribe men from Mexico to settle in Alta California. Each colonist was to receive a house lot, two fields of irrigable land, and two fields of dry land. Each was also to have rights to the common pueblo lands for grazing and the storage of firewood. Each family would receive a three-year salary of ten pesos a month plus clothing and tools, two cows and two oxen, two ewes, two goats, two horses, three mares, and one mule. The colonists, in return, had to work the land for a minimum of ten years.

  Although Lorenzo thought the enticements were generous, nonetheless he and Captain Rivera had found it impossible to recruit the required number of colonists. What was there for them in that godforsaken place? people asked. And surely communication with home would be impossible. Ultimately they had fallen short of their quota and had struck north on an arduous journey with only twenty-three adults and twenty-one children, one of whom, Lorenzo’s own daughter, had died along the way.

  And now here we are, he thought as he waited for the speeches to end, setting his squinting eyes out to the distant mountains and the ocean, where a smoky haze hung perpetually in the air. A lonely place, he thought, cut off from civilization, and where we are outnumbered by the natives thousands to one. Although himself a criollo, being of Spanish descent born in Mexico, Lorenzo did not scorn the Indians the way some of his fellows did. In fact, he admired their penchant and skill for gambling and thought that the only saving grace in his promise to settle in this untamed place. He had accepted the assignment to recruit colonists because his compensation was release from military service, and Lorenzo, once he established his homestead here, planned a leisurely retirement engaged in cattle breeding, hunting, and gambling.

  Lorenzo’s mood darkened. What sort of a life was it going to be now? His wife, Doña Luisa, couldn’t stop grieving over the loss of their daughter. Worse, she would not allow Lorenzo into her bed.

  He brought his thoughts back to the ceremony taking place beneath the blazing sun while a pair of red-tailed hawks circled overhead. The new plaza had already been laid out with boundary posts fixed to mark the building lots that faced it. A formal procession, headed by the Governor of Alta California, with Mission Indians bearing a large banner of the Virgin Mary, had marched solemnly around the periphery of the plaza while, from a distance, the Indians of Yang-na, whose land this was, watched passively.

  “We are here on God’s errand to save souls,” the padre from the Mission was now saying. Souls! Captain Lorenzo thought cynically. It is the concern of the Crown that the Russians are increasing their hunting in Alta California and are settling in the north that
we are here. It is because the British have their greedy eye on the California coast that we need a notable Spanish presence in this place. For is it not our mandate to create as many Catholic Spanish citizens as possible in the quickest time, to encourage conversion among the heathen and encourage them to be fruitful, because the more Catholic Spanish citizens there are here, the harder it will be for another nation to lay claim to this land? Captain Lorenzo had been at court in Spain thirteen years ago when the Spanish ambassador to Russia had reported that the Russians were planning to occupy the Monterey Bay area. The King of Spain took immediate action.

  And we are the result of that action, Captain Lorenzo thought as the Father said a prayer over the new plaza. Lorenzo didn’t care a whit about bringing Jesus to the heathens. His interest was in cattle and horses. All this land, as far as the eye could see, free for the taking. A man could get rich…

  His gaze fell upon his wife, Doña Luisa, seated with the Governor’s wife and the wives of the other officers beneath the shade of a thatch roof on four poles. A beautiful woman, he thought with a pang, possessing an inner fortitude that would be needed in this wild frontier. Creole like himself, Luisa descended from Spanish nobility. It was apparent in her stiff posture, the reserved expression on her face. She saved her weeping for the privacy of their quarters. If only they had had more children. But Selena had been the center of Luisa’s universe, and now that center had been snuffed out like a candle. What was a highborn lady going to do here, where all labor and occupations were performed by Indians? Not that Luisa would put her delicate hands to the tasks of cooking and sewing. Her role was to raise her husband’s children, to teach them and guide them. But there were no children. Nor did it appear there were ever going to be.

  Lorenzo tried again to pay attention to the ceremony, after which there was to be a feast commemorating the founding of the pueblo. He would make his exit then, with as little offense as possible, he prayed, to the governor and the padres.

  Across the new plaza, standing on a plot of ground where someday an adobe church would be built, the Mission Indians paid respectful attention to the ceremony. They wore the tin crucifixes stamped with the year and strung on hemp strings that had been given to them as an incentive to join the nine-mile procession from the Mission to the site where the new Pueblo was going to be built. Teresa had asked permission to be part of the festivities, even though she was ill and needed to rest, because it was an opportunity for escape.

  She had brought with her her five-year-old daughter Angela, so named because she was the daughter of a saint and because she had been conceived in the cave of the First Mother.

  Teresa’s thoughts often went fondly to Brother Felipe, who had vanished nearly six years ago and who, it was whispered, had stolen the bones of St. Francis from the Mission. He had gone back to Spain, everyone said. He had turned his back on God and gone home to sell the blessed relics and live the life of a rich man. But Teresa knew the truth. Brother Felipe had gone to join his god.

  As she tried to draw shallow breaths because of the pains in her chest from the white man’s illness, she looked at the soldiers and the new colonists, who were impressed with their achievement of having “claimed” this land, while the Yang-na stood off to the side, uncomprehending, not realizing that their ancestral land was being taken from them. Teresa was appalled. We thought these people were our guests. But now they will build homes on land belonging to someone else’s ancestors.

  Teresa kept a keen watch for an opportunity to escape.

  From the moment they had realized she was pregnant, the Mission Fathers had kept an eye on the errant girl, assigning a dutiful baptized Indian woman to watch her at all times. They knew she had somehow gotten out of the nunnery, but they couldn’t prove it. If one Indian could get away with it, the Fathers said, they would all try it, and there would be a mass exodus back to the villages, leaving the Fathers with no one to toil in the fields or to build their churches. In the six years since Teresa’s visit to the cave the rules had gotten stricter, the punishments more severe. There had been several violent outbreaks among the Mission Indians, rebelling against their subjugation by the Fathers. Soldiers with guns were brought in and the Indians, having no defense against such weapons, were again subdued.

  And so Teresa had realized that this would be an opportunity, when the Fathers were distracted with the soldiers and the colonists. Despite the fever that burned her skin and the pain in her lungs, Teresa was determined: she and Angela were going to escape once and for all.

  * * *

  Armed with his deed from the Spanish Crown, Captain Lorenzo rode the boundaries of what would one day be his new rancho: south to the creek which had no name and which he christened Ballona after his father’s hometown in Spain, east to the marshland, identified as la cienega on the deed, and north to la brea, the tar pits, with an ancient path running east and west along the northern border. He hadn’t been given the land right off, but rather grazing rights with the proviso that in a few years, if he had improved the land and occupied it, he could petition for and receive a full grant in his name. When that day came, he had already decided, he would call his new home Rancho Paloma.

  It covered four thousand acres and already teams of Indian laborers were making adobe bricks, one group in a massive mud pit, stomping the clay-and-straw mixture with their feet, another group pressing the compound into wooden molds, while a third was breaking sun-dried bricks from the molds and stacking them in readiness for building. The Indians worked cheaply, mainly for food and for beads, which they gambled away in their interminable games of chance. They had left their villages and built huts on the border of Lorenzo’s property. He wondered if, once the homestead was completed, they would return to their old life. He hoped not. He was going to need hands to take care of his cattle and horses.

  What a fine rancho this was going to be! Soon there would be a house here, with stables and other outbuildings, shaded by trees, which Captain Lorenzo was having shipped from Peru. He pictured the rose arbors and fountains, the tiled walkways and breezy arcades. Inside, there would be polished wooden floors and Luisa’s big heavy furniture, which had been hauled up from Mexico on sledges drawn by oxen and currently waiting, under canvas tarps at the Pueblo settlement, to be moved into their final home: ornately carved four-poster beds, dressers, armoires, tables. Luisa had brought silver and tapestries, pewter and quilts, candlesticks for the fireplaces, platters for the kitchen. It was going to be a home fit for a queen, Lorenzo thought in pride.

  But then he recalled how he had left Luisa, back at the settlement, snapping orders at her Indian servants as they worked with oil and cloths to polish and preserve their mistress’s furniture. Ever since they had buried their little girl in the Sonoran desert Luisa had become fanatical about the care of her chairs and chests. Were these to become her children? Lorenzo wondered bleakly. Was she going to worry more about the condition of her precious writing desk than her husband’s comfort?

  Suddenly he had a grim vision of the future: Doña Luisa, childless and friendless— the colonists’ wives were hardly fit companions for a highborn Spanish lady— growing more and more bitter as the years passed, moving silently among her furniture, inspecting for tarnish and dust, resenting her Indian maids for their fecundity and taking it out on them in unseen smudges and specks. Lorenzo saw himself ignored, forgotten, seeking comfort in the arms of brown-skinned women but finding no joy in his own home which, Dios mio, every man was entitled to! This was not what he had come to California for.

  Another baby was needed. But Doña Luisa was spurning his advances and, being a gentleman, Lorenzo would never force her, nor was it to his liking to make love to a woman who lay still as a corpse.

  His good mood ruined, Lorenzo decided that he would go hunting. As he steered his horse in the direction of the Mountains of Saint Monica, he thought: something big. Only a deer or a grizzly bear would satisfy him today.

  * * *

  While t
he Fathers and the governor were celebrating, and the new colonists began looking around at their new land, talking about what they were going to build here and plant there, Teresa quietly took a mule and, with her daughter riding in her arms, followed the ancient track to the mountains.

  By late afternoon they reached their destination, where they dismounted and, with each breath a labor, causing sharp pain in her chest, Teresa led Angela past the markings of the raven and the moon, up the small canyon and into the cave.

  The setting sun was at such an angle that it sent slanting rays of light upon the painted wall. “Here is the story of the First Mother,” Teresa said. The stories were being lost. Fewer people lived in the villages so that someday the villages weren’t going to exist at all. The tribes were all mixed together at the Missions: Tongva with Chumash, Kemaaya with Topaa, and the Fathers were calling them Gabrielino and Fernandeño after the names of the Missions. The wrong stories were being told at night, or they were not being told at all. Instead the stories were about Jesus and Mary so that the ancestors of the Topaa would soon be forgotten. But Teresa was going to teach Angela the stories, and tell her that she must continue to pass them on so that their story was not forgotten.

  “You will not live by the ways of the intruders,” she said as she lifted the crucifix on its string from around her neck. “They do not understand our people.” The looks on the Fathers’ faces when she had told them she was pregnant, the hours of interrogation— who was the man? —their insistence that whoever the father was he be brought to the Mission to be baptized. But Teresa had proudly kept her silence. What she did with her body was her own concern, as every Topaa woman knew. These men who called themselves “father,” even though in their celibacy they could not sire children, tried to dictate to the native women how they should act, how they should conduct themselves sexually. No Topaa man would dare such impertinence.