Sacred Ground

by Barbara Wood

  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.

  As she neared the end of her morning labors, having also harvested pennywort stems to go into wound ointments and henbane leaves for rheumatism poultices, Luisa saw men arriving on horseback from the direction of the Old Road. A cloud crossed the face of the sun, briefly casting the landscape in shadow and sending a ripple of fear through Luisa’s bones. She knew why the men had come.

  Lorenzo did very little work around the rancho. Most of the rustling and herding was done by Indios trained to be vaqueros, leaving Lorenzo and his friends to spend their days gambling, hunting, and lounging in the sun.
But the men arriving today had come not to roll dice or to hunt deer, but to bargain with Lorenzo for possession of his daughter.

  Angela was a prize to be fought over.

  As word of Los Angeles spread south toward the lower Mexican provinces, more settlers were coming to the Pueblo in search of a better life. The problem, however, was most of the newcomers were unmarried men. The governor, anxious to tame this wild frontier by providing wives for the men, had sent several desperate requests to the Viceroy of Mexico to send doncellas— “healthy maidens” —to California, but with no success. Then he asked simply for “a hundred women.” When this produced no results, the governor resorted to accepting foundlings— orphaned girls— who were rounded up in Mexico and brought to California, where they were distributed among families.

  These men today, whom Lorenzo was welcoming with happy shouts and cups of wine, wanted Angela not so much because she was available or beautiful, but because she was hispana. By marrying a woman of pure Spanish blood a man of mixed blood could apply for an official decree of legitimidad y limpieza de sangre— “legitimacy and purity of blood” —for his children, a decree certifying that the bloodline was untainted by Jewish, African, or any other non-Christian blood, thus assuring them of prominence and high social standing in the colony.

  No one knew the truth: that Angela wasn’t hispana at all, but Indio. Luisa’s “gift from God.”

  Luisa remembered the day, the hour, when Lorenzo brought the angel home. Luisa’s knees had been raw from kneeling in prayer to the Blessed Virgin. Her child, buried in the Sonoran desert, was gone but her love was not. She had needed an outlet for her maternal love. Luisa hadn’t even had the comfort of a grave to visit, to tend and weed and nurture, no headstone upon which to lay flowers, no gentle mound of grass to go to when the soul needed solace. Lorenzo, being a man and having his duties, filled his hours with work. Luisa had only Selena’s little dresses that would never be worn again. As she spoke her vow to the Blessed Mother— help me to have another child and I shall devote myself to good works in thy name— there was Lorenzo with a child in his arms. The girl was crying, “Mama! Mama!” And as soon as she put her arms around the child, Luisa felt the dammed-up love flow from her heart like a cleansing brook. She knew that this was Blessed Mary’s answer to her prayers, and while she would always grieve for the little one buried in the desert, Luisa would love this angel with all her heart and devote her life to good works as she had promised.

  No one had questioned the sudden appearance of a child in Captain Lorenzo’s small adobe house. Everyone in the colony was too busy trying to survive to wonder about the private affairs of others. If people remarked upon Angela’s dusky coloring— Luisa being fair-skinned— Luisa simply said that the girl favored Lorenzo’s mother, who was olive-complected. Luisa did not consider this lie a sin because she believed it to hold a kernel of truth. Luisa secretly believed Angela wasn’t a full-blooded Indio. While the girl did bear a resemblance to the natives who lived at the Mission, her skin was lighter and her face wasn’t as round. Luisa wondered if perhaps the child was the offspring of a Spanish soldier.

  The voices of Lorenzo’s visitors drifted on the breeze and swirled around the garden where Luisa toiled. She held these men in contempt. Arrogant braggarts, and yet not a drop of pure racial blood ran in their veins.

  Luisa was a highborn Spanish lady who had been raised in a country where the lines of social class were clearly drawn: there was the noble class, the wealthy merchant class, and the peasants. Rarely did they mingle. Bloodline meant everything. Even in New Spain, where the Spanish had ruled a bare two hundred years since conquering the native populations, strict racial boundaries were maintained. The new aristocracy in Mexico were the peninsulares— whites born in Spain— which caused resentment among the whites born in Mexico— the criollos. Only peninsulares could be addressed as Don and Doña and they did not marry outside their class. Next came the mestizos, those of mixed Spanish and Indian descent— a large, amorphous class of people who were shopkeepers, artisans, servants. Comprising the lowest social stratum were the indígenas— the native Indios— used mainly for hard labor. So strict were the rules of race and class that an indígena caught wearing European clothing was punished by the lash. Luisa, being a peninsulara, had been very comfortable with Mexico’s class structure.

  But in Alta California there were no clearly drawn social lines. Nearly everyone here was of some sort of racial mix, with very few white Europeans. It was hard to know one’s station. Although Doña Luisa had no doubts about her and Lorenzo’s place in this frontier society, there were wealthy rancheros of Indian and Spanish mix who had been peasants in Mexico! It was like a soup in which all the bloods were being stirred. It troubled her sense of class. Lorenzo, as a patrón with five hundred head of cattle, a member of the Spanish aristocracy, and a retired military officer, was treated with respect. But in the insanity of the frontier mind, the same respect was accorded to Antonio Castillo, a man of Mexican and African blood, married to a local Indian woman, simply because he was the blacksmith at the Pueblo! Here a person’s occupation counted as more important than his ancestry, which to Doña Luisa was backward thinking and unhealthy for a young society.

  Feeling her fears prick her anew at the sight of Lorenzo’s visitors— her flight from California was less than twenty hours away— Luisa left the garden and delivered herself into the coolness of the solarium, where she kept her vast store of herbs and medicines.

  Her home was not as grand as Lorenzo had promised a decade ago, but sufficient to reflect their higher station. Made of adobe with a thatched roof, the structure consisted of four sleeping chambers, a dining room, a hall for entertaining visitors, and a massive kitchen that fed not only the captain and his wife and daughter, but the Indian women who laundered and sewed and cooked and made candles, and their husbands the vaqueros and caballeros.

  Men and their empty promises, Luisa thought contemptuously as she sorted leaves from stems and separated them into storage baskets. Not only had Lorenzo not given her the grand house he had promised, but the struggling pueblo was not conforming to Governor Neve’s original vision. Here was an opportunity, he had declared at the dedication ceremony eleven years ago, to plan a city unlike any in Europe, for it would be a planned city before the first inhabitant even took up residence. He had drawn up a blueprint for the Pueblo, showing the layout of plaza, fields, pastures, and royal lands. There would be no unfettered growth for the Los Angeles Pueblo, Neve had promised. And yet already new arrivals were building where they pleased! Luisa could see the sprawl this homely town would someday be.

  As she laid the opium out to dry— later it would be rolled into a sticky black ball and stored in a leather case— Luisa examined her conscience once again and found no reason to feel guilty about running away. Hadn’t she fulfilled her promised to the Blessed Virgin?

  Luisa was proud of the number of Indian women she had converted to Christianity. They attended chapel every Sunday, dressed modestly, and when one wished to marry, the prospective husband was required to convert. Because she was a fair and generous mistress, most of her servants were loyal. Many even emulated her. Doña Luisa wore her long black hair in a braid pinned in a coil at the back of her head, covering it with a small mantilla of black Spanish lace which she removed only at bedtime. And so her servants covered their hair with scarves. They recited the rosary and named their daughters Maria and Luisa. Only rarely did one run away back to an Indian village and the old life. More and more camps were springing up on the ranchos, built by Indios who had left their native life to work for the colonists, becoming expert horsemen, cattle wranglers, silversmiths, and carpenters. With beef provided at every supper, they saw no need to make the annual trek into the mountains to gather acorns. A few still went, to hear the stories and to arrange marriages, but the gatherings in the forests were growing smaller each year. The five-day festival that for generations had been held in honor of Chinigchinich, the
Creator, was being replaced by Christmas holidays and the Feast of Santiago, patron saint of Spain.

  The solarium was filled with baskets made by Luisa’s Indian women. Some were quite exquisite and supposedly the patterns told stories. The women who wove the baskets had cheerfully told these myths to Luisa— explaining to the Señora how the world was created and how Grandfather Tortoise caused earthquakes. Little Angela had told the same stories at first, about coyotes and tortoises and a First Mother who came out of the east to start a new tribe, but Doña Luisa had replaced these heathen tales in Angela’s mind with Christian stories and Spanish fairy tales: the story of two sisters, Elena and Rosa, who lived in the Kingdom of Sapphires and how they were transformed by their godmother, the Fairy of Happiness; the tale of young Gonzalito, who, with the help of magical animals, saved a princess and her kingdom from a wicked dwarf; and the adventure story of four princes on a quest for the hand of Princess Aurora. Stories Luisa herself had grown up with and which now were Angela’s.

  She looked through the open window and saw that Lorenzo and his guests were still drinking in the shade of the rose arbor. One man, a head taller than the rest, caught her attention: Juan Navarro. Luisa didn’t like him. There was something strange about his eyes. They lacked warmth, making Luisa think of the eyes of a cold sea creature. And his smile was not so much a natural smile as a drawing back of his lips to bare his teeth. Rumor had it that Navarro was in Alta California fleeing the Inquisition, who had brought him up on charges of reading forbidden books. He made his living off the dead. Navarro had plundered the tombs of the Aztecs and found fortunes in gold, silver, turquoise, and jade. Granted, they were heathen tombs he robbed so no desecration had taken place. Nonetheless, it seemed ghoulish to Luisa to take a ring from a corpse and wear it on one’s own hand. She knew what his ambition in California was: Navarro was a man of low birth who wanted to marry into aristocracy.