Sacred Ground

by Barbara Wood

  “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.

&
nbsp; 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 captai
n 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.