Sacred Ground

by Barbara Wood

  Feeling a chill despite the warm day, Angela quickly scanned the compound for signs of Navarro. It would take very little— a few cups of wine, an imagined insult— for him to decide to challenge D’Arcy to a duel. Navarro had done it before. His opponent had lost.

  As she watched how D’Arcy now doted on his little girl, Angela suspected his motives for coming to the wedding were less to please Carlotta than to amuse his little “princess.” Named for Grandmother Angela, the six-year-old was watched over by a dour-looking Azteca who was more than just a nanny, she was a curandera— a healer— possessing ancient Aztec medical secrets. The dour-faced woman wore strange clothes: a long colorful skirt and a sleeveless tunic of another colorful fabric that reached to her thigh. Her long hair was tied up in two fabric-wrapped bundles that looked like horns over her forehead. Her earlobes, inserted with gold plugs, were so long they brushed her ears. Carlotta had explained that the woman came from a village where they still lived the way their ancestors had, before the arrival of Cortez, and where they kept secrets of healing which they had never shared with their conquerors. Carlotta and D’Arcy had hired her because of Angelique’s falling sickness, the same affliction that plagued Angela. And Marina.

  Of all her children, only Marina had inherited the fainting curse. Poor little Marina! The first time it happened and she had seen frightening visions. How she had cried and clung to her mother. It was their special bond. No one else could understand what it was like. Pablo Quiñones had assured Angela that he was ready to take care of Marina during her spells. But Angela felt she was the only person who could help. And that was why she was thankful the girl had fallen in love with a local boy, so that she would not be far from home.

  A mother shouldn’t have favorites among her children, but Angela’s heart had a mind of its own. Here were her two most loved daughters, the eldest and the youngest. Carlotta had been her first, born when Angela was only eighteen years old. There were many in between, some of whom had not survived and now slept in the small family burial plot beneath a pepper tree. There were the strong and sturdy boys, men now, three of them arrogant like Navarro, one shy, one who never stopped laughing, and there were the other girls, two sensible women who had made good marriage matches. Nine surviving children out of fourteen pregnancies. Marina was the youngest, born to Angela when she was thirty-six years old. Three more had been conceived after that but two had not made it to their first birthday, and the third Angela had lost in miscarriage. After that, Angela could no longer get pregnant and so Marina remained her precious “baby,” especially after the others had grown up and married and moved away.

  Marina’s name had come to Angela in a dream while she was still pregnant with her and before she could possibly have known the baby was a girl. A special name. But she couldn’t hear it clearly in the dream. She saw herself in a frightening dark place, a strange painting on the wall, feverish hands burying a crucifix in the earth, and a muffled voice calling her— Was it Marini? Marini? They didn’t sound like names. Marina! Yes, that was it, the name in the dream. A beautiful name.

  Unable to stand the bear’s shrieks of terror and outrage any longer, she turned away from the unsettling spectacle— the poor beast was on his back trying to break free from the ropes— and an unexpected thought entered her mind: the bear did not give permission to be lassoed and dragged here for our entertainment.

  Where had that come from? Strange notions entered her mind at the most unexpected moments. A quick flash of thought, like a fish jumping in a stream to be seen in a bright glint only to disappear back into the water. Sometimes these errant thoughts were so fast that she couldn’t remember them, couldn’t hang on to them. Occasionally they were words, other times images.

  Shrugging off her strange thoughts, Angela brought herself back to the monumental task of feeding so many guests and workers on this festive occasion.

  Rancho Paloma was now a grand hacienda: an economically diversified estate that employed a huge labor force, combining agriculture, grazing, and other production. Navarro had made good his wedding night promise to become very wealthy. The village of Los Angeles was also prospering. There were now farms everywhere, with orchards, gardens, and vineyards. Rancho Paloma had neighboring ranchos now: La Brea, La Cienegas, San Vicente y Santa Monica. And farther out, the larger ranchos of Los Palos Verdes, San Pedro, Los Feliz— hundreds of thousands of acres owned by families with illustrious names: Dominguez, Sepúlveda, Verdugo. The population of the Pueblo had grown to nearly eight hundred.

  When Angela saw Marina abruptly put her hand on the window frame, a sudden, anxious gesture, Angela looked out to see what had caught her daughter’s attention. Had Pablo arrived? But no, the rider coming through the gate was not Quiñones but an Americano Navarro had lately been having dealings with.

  Daniel Goodside, a ship’s captain, who made Angela, for reasons she could not name, uneasy.

  Navarro’s dealings with the Yanquis used to be illegal, when he had met secretly with American traders in the coves of Santa Barbara to exchange beef hides for gold. But now it was all legal and done in the open. Ironically, Navarro despised Americanos even more than he despised the French, but he deemed them a necessary evil— little better than parasites but a rich source of trade and income. Angela herself thought Americanos a strange breed. She remembered when the first one came to Los Angeles twelve years ago, when California was still under Spanish rule. “Pirate Joe” had been captured during a raid off the Monterey coast. When it was learned that he was a gifted carpenter, he was spared from prison and sent down to Los Angeles to oversee the construction of a new church at the Plaza. Angela had been forty-two years old at the time and had glimpsed blond hair for the first time in her life. Everyone crowded around the work site as Indios hauled in timbers from the mountains and the tall blond stranger gave orders. When the church was finished, Joseph Chapman married a Mexican señorita and settled down in Los Angeles. Seven years later, after Spain had given up her holdings in California, a mountain man named Jedediah Smith presented himself at the San Gabriel Mission, but he had not been arrested because by then it was no longer illegal for foreigners to enter California.

  Eight years ago, when the people of California learned that Mexico had seceded from Spain, they pledged allegiance to the Mexican government, which had immediately opened up the province to international trade with English and American vessels. Hide and tallow became the major economy. Steer hides from Rancho Paloma were shipped to New England where they were made into saddles, harnesses, and shoes, and Rancho Paloma tallow was melted down for ultimate conversion to candles. The booming new trade was bringing more and more Americanos to California so that today, the sight of an Americano in the streets of Los Angeles was not unusual.

  Angela wondered what her mother, Doña Luisa, would think of these changes as she slept in her grave in the family cemetery plot. Luisa had died the year Mexico broke away from Spain, as if her own ties with her beloved homeland had been irreparably severed and she did not wish to go on living. Luisa had been sixty-nine years old. Lorenzo was also buried there, having been killed in a gambling dispute.

  Angela watched Captain Goodside dismount from his horse and remove his hat. Like Pirate Joe, his hair was the color of ripened wheat. Then she said to Marina, “Pablo will come,” when she saw the look on her daughter’s face. The poor girl had been waiting all morning for her fiancé but instead only strangers had come through the gate.

  “Oh, Mamá,” Marina sighed, turning away from the window to dash impulsively from the room.

  After exchanging a glance with Carlotta, who was supervising the preparation of dulce de calabaza— candied pumpkin— and who remembered what it was like to be eighteen and impatient, Angela left the kitchen and entered the outer colonnade, where graceful arches opened onto gardens filled with flowers and shrubs and the low-hanging branches of willows and pepper trees. She paused to inspect a row of chairs hidden beneath a protective blanket.

&nb
sp; A surprise wedding gift for Marina and Pablo, they were a set of four upholstered antique armchairs crafted back in 1736 and styled after a suite of chairs made for the Royal Palace at Madrid. Influenced by the French Louis V style, the pieces were veneered in rosewood with ebony inlay and upholstered in crimson silk brocaded with gold thread and trimmed with gold fringe. Doña Luisa had brought them to Mexico in 1773 and then had had them hauled by oxen along with her other furniture to Alta California after she married Don Lorenzo. They had been declared the most exquisite pieces of furniture in the province, and now they were going to pass to Marina.

  As Angela continued along the arcade, she espied three men standing by the stables, admiring a horse Navarro had recently acquired. Although in his sixties with silver hair, Navarro was still as robust as a bull. Angela saw that her future son-in-law was with him, Pablo with a boyish face, short and tending to stockiness. She wondered if Marina knew he had arrived. Then she saw that the third man was Captain Goodside, standing slightly taller than Navarro, his curious wide-brimmed straw hat shadowing his features.

  As she observed the men, Angela tried to read Navarro’s mood. He had canceled one wedding before, on a whim at the last minute, making their son smolder with silent fury and the bride’s family threaten violence. But Angela could detect no dark currents in her husband’s behavior. In fact, Pablo Quiñones was making him laugh.

  Then she saw Marina, hiding in the shade of an arbor, watching the men. Angela tensed. She knew her impulsive daughter wanted to run to Pablo, but there would be plenty of time for that after the wedding. Be careful, my child, she silently cautioned. Do not let your father see you.

  There was something in Navarro that detested other people’s happiness, even that of his children. Too much joy soured him.

  Angela noticed that the Yankee had the square, thin box with him again. He carried it everywhere, slung over his shoulder from a leather strap. What was so important that he could never be parted from it? Even though Americanos were now permitted in California, she still did not trust them. After years of illegal trading, a man did not turn honest overnight.

  As she was about to go into the house, her eye caught a figure approaching along the path from the Old Road. Recognizable by his gray Franciscan habit, he was a padre from the Mission, arriving on his mule. And when she saw how he slowed his animal and searched the faces of the vaqueros, she knew why he had come. Some of his Indios must have run away again.

  It was easy to find willing workers for Rancho Paloma’s four thousand acres. The Indios found life on the rancheros preferable to that in the Missions, and many were even starting to leave the Missions for town life. There were now several hundred residents in the Los Angeles Pueblo, many of them needed servants and hired workers. To keep the Mission Fathers from losing their Indios— for then who would be left to tend the cattle and vineyards belonging to the Church, and weave the cloth and make the candles that the Fathers needed? —the Governor of California had prescribed ten lashes for any baptized Indian caught in town without permission from the Fathers.

  As Angela watched the visitor dismount, she wondered if he and his religious brothers were fighting a losing battle. There was talk that Mexican officials were going to abolish the Mission system, which the Spaniards had revered, and sell the land to private parties. Where, then, would the Indios go? Most had lived at the Missions all their lives and knew no other way of life. Although, Angela had to admit, she didn’t really understand the Indios. They were just figures that blended into the landscape— men in sombreros and blankets, women in long skirts and shawls. Yet there were still brutal fights between the Californios and the Indians over the land. Recently a rancho in San Diego had been attacked, the daughters kidnapped and never seen again; there had been a Chumash uprising in Santa Barbara, and the Temecula Indians had gone on a pillaging spree in San Bernardino.

  She saw by the way the padre looked into the face of each Indio that he was searching for a particular one.

  Shading her eyes from the sun, she scanned the gardens where men were pulling weeds and spreading fertilizer, swept her gaze over the corrals and animal compounds, the dairy and granary, the tanning and laundry sheds— all bustling with human activity. When she came to the olive press, she watched the old man who was patiently urging the burro to go round and round as the big stone crushed the olives into pulp and oil. Bent and white-haired, he was not familiar to her. And when he moved from shade to sunlight, she saw his distinct Indian features.

  Before she could react, the old man looked up and saw the padre. He froze. Then he broke into a run.

  The priest, lifting his robes to reveal bare feet in sandals, gave chase, shouting at the man to stop, and immediately a crowd of workers, family members, and visitors ran to see what had the padre in such a state.

  Angela was the first to reach them, the priest having cornered the Indian under the archway that led to the lavanderia. The old man had fallen to his knees and was raising his clasped hands imploringly to the padre.

  “Please, Father!” Angela said breathlessly. “Do not handle him too harshly.”

  “This man is a baptized Christian, Señora. He belongs at the Mission.” The padre softened. “They are like children, Señora, and must be corrected. When you raised your sons and daughters, did you not punish them when they needed it?”

  “But this man is old, Father, and he is frightened.”

  She was startled when the old man began frantically tugging at her skirt, begging for help in a mixture of Spanish and his native tongue. He was clearly terrified.

  “Perhaps, Father, he can go back to his village.”

  The priest sadly shook his head. “When the Sepúlveda family received the San Vicente y Santa Monica land grant, they cleared the land for grazing. This man was found scavenging among the ruins of a deserted village near the foothills. He was naked, Señora, and near starvation. He was brought to us so that we could feed him and clothe him and bring him to Christ.”

  Angela looked at the priest and thought, He is not a bad man.

  Then she looked down at the old man and thought: He just wants to be free.

  It occurred to Angela that she had the power to save him. If she told the padre she wanted the old man to stay here, he would listen to her. After all, she was the wife of Juan Navarro.

  But in the next instant she saw Navarro approaching, fury in his stride. He had already assessed the situation and Angela’s role in it. Giving the padre permission to take the old Indian away, Navarro barked at everyone to disperse. When they were momentarily alone beneath the archway, Pablo having gone to Marina and the Americano having tactfully returned to the stable, Navarro gripped Angela painfully by the arm and said in a low voice, “I make the decisions on this rancho, not you. You have humiliated me.”

  * * *

  As Marina silently made her way across the yard, her slender body casting a tall shadow in the moonlight, she soundlessly felt her way along the stone walls, taking care not to trip on the uneven ground or stumble over a tool. She dreaded to think of what her punishment would be should her father find out what she was up to. But Marina wasn’t thinking with her head, it was her heart that had driven her out of the house at this late hour, her young body feverish with love, her mind dizzy with thoughts about the ceremony tomorrow night and the bridal chamber afterward.

  She skirted the slaughter yard where, by day, cattle were skinned and butchered, their skins scraped clean of meat and stretched to dry in the sun. The smell wasn’t as bad at night, and the flies were asleep. The only evidence of the day’s bloody enterprise were the great stacks of stiff hides— “Yankee dollars” —waiting to be taken to the holds of trading vessels. Outside the tallow room were the enormous iron pots where fat from slaughtered steers was melted down for the manufacture of candles and soap, and stored as tallow in large skin bags to be traded with foreign ships. Marina slipped inside the tallow shed, where hundreds of long,thin tapers hung in rows on the walls and
from the ceiling. In the center of the room stood the ungainly candle-dipper, its wooden arms draped with strings coated in various thicknesses of tallow. The contraption was still and silent now, but during the day its creaking never ceased as, hand-cranked by an Indian, it turned, dipped, turned, and dipped, producing hundreds of candles at a time.

  Marina thought it ironic that a room with so many candles should be so dark. “Are you here?” she whispered in the darkness. “Did you come, my love?”

  Bootheels scraped on the stone floor. A moment later, a match flared and then a lantern came to life in a soft glow.

  Marina gasped when she beheld who stood there— the Americano, Daniel Goodside. She was held momentarily transfixed by the sight of him— the pale light casting a halo around his blond hair, the blue of his eyes as bright as the noon sky, his lips parted as if in surprise. And then she was flying across the small space between them and delivering herself into his arms, receiving his kiss and holding desperately to him never to let go.

  She would never forget the day, three months ago, when she had gone out riding and had come upon a stranger at the edge of the property, sitting on a stool and sketching in a large book. His jacket was folded neatly on the grass, his shirt shone blazingly white in the sun, and a large straw hat had concealed his features until, hearing the sounds of her approach, he turned, slowly stood, and then swept his hat off his head to reveal hair the color of ripened wheat and eyes the blue of cornflowers. And his beard! Like fleece it was, closely cropped and framing a secret smile. His cravat was loosened, revealing a sunburnt throat, and the fabric of his breeches strained against strong, well-muscled legs. He had looked like a young god.

  And then he had greeted her in Spanish! Marina had thought Yankees spoke only English. And with what ease he spoke her tongue, and almost without accent. More than a god— a magician, a wizard. A magnetic silence had captured them that day in a speechless moment as the summer breeze ruffled his sunlight-colored hair, and Marina felt her heart expand within her chest like a morning glory opening to the sun. And then the stranger had said, “Forgive me for staring, Señorita, but when I visited your village of the Angels, I wondered what angels it had been named for. Now I know.”