2.

September 1, 1784:
A Search Party Looks for the Heart

from The Reeducation of a Turd Peddler
by John Henry Peabody, based on his
interviews of Fornay storytellers

WWHEREIN A FORNAY INDIAN SEARCH PARTY, INCLUDING TAI FUN’S BROTHER AND A LOCAL SALINAN GUIDE, LOOKS FOR TAI FUN, THE DOG, THE HORSE, AND THE HEART.

*

“The search party didn’t have to go far to discover the fate of Tai Fun. Word of mouth led them to J’Topet and J’Topet led them to the spot where Tai Fun, Mup Gao and the horse met their end.””

 

TWHEN SUMX TAI FUN AND THE DOG Mup Gao failed to return with Serra’s heart, two Fornay were called upon to look for them—one was Tai Fun’s brother, Sumx Tai Muhu, or “Owl,” and the other was Monsow, his escort.
It was rare for California Indians to have access to horses in 1784—Tai Fun rode one of twelve horses the Fornay owned—so the two of them headed on foot, north towards Mission Carmel to look for traces of Tai Fun and the heart.
  At the time, Indian networks still existed. The Spanish, their explorers, soldiers, and padres, hadn’t a complete foothold in the land and often met with desperation in their attempts to feed themselves and exert total control over the area. A small, furtive band of Fornay agents could still negotiate their way along the back trails and native villages—apparent and hidden—without detection.
  Word of mouth was easier. The Fornay received message within a day that Tai Fun had successfully removed the heart and left the area heading back south. His last contact—a Salinan Indian, J’Topet—placed him some thirty miles east of Mission Antonio de Padua the first night.
  Tai Fun and the dog were taken in by his group and given lodging. While some of J’Topet’s people had gone west to the mission, most of them had stayed within the village, tucked far up a valley, avoiding the Spanish.
  J’Topet was a trader and had been introduced to the Fornay and the Fornay network by his father and uncle who, like themselves, had been brought up as travelers and traders. The life of a trader and its responsibilities put J’Topet in the position to learn the Fornay language—as well as other dialects—making him an interpreter for the tribe.
  In the effort to collect as many hearts of defunct padres as possible, the Fornay had called on their interpreters to help organize these networks. No single, overarching California Indian language or political group dominated the area of Spanish missionization, outside of the Fornay.
  The geographic and cultural advantages of the tribe offered a more homogenized linguistic group of up to 3,000 speakers. Most bands and tribes of local Indians could only claim 500 to 800 speakers of a similar dialect. Often a valley would hold a mere 200 speakers of a dialect not easily understood by outsiders. Even fifty people could speak a language that sub-dialected between generations.
This was a part of the undoing. Outside of seasonal trading villages, the establishment of the missions was likely the first time that so many natives came in contact with one another on a daily basis. Therefore, the grander scheme of organizing any kind of pandemic insurrection was not possible, particularly with contemporary hindsight (“Why didn’t they fight back?”).
  They didn’t speak the same language.
  If one were to divide the Central and Southern Coast Indians of California into four groups—men, women, children, the elderly—only a fraction of the populace was capable of dealing a violent blow to Spanish occupation. And if adult males divided themselves between those who came under the spell of the aliens that landed amongst them and those who resisted, they would have been split again.
In addition, not every adult male was a warrior. Unlike tribes of the east, like the Huron and the Iroquois, or even the Yuma out west, who waged specific and painful conflicts upon one another, the native Americans in the California mission system, while still human and capable of organizing the splitting open of heads, were not front-loaded warriors.
  The revolts of 1776 at Mission San Luis Obispo, and two years afterward, involved a couple dozen men. Once they were driven away to live in the backcountry, or sent to Monterey as prisoners, that was essentially it for opposition to Spanish rule, outside of disease, depression and despair, themselves a kind of guerilla movement that ultimately undermined the Spanish.

The search party didn’t have to go far to discover the fate of Tai Fun. Word of mouth led them to J’Topet and J’Topet led them to the spot where Tai Fun, Mup Gao and the horse met their end.
  A week had passed since their deaths. The group prayed for them, finding a necklace of Tai Fun’s in the grass, a plot of maggot-filled earth where his blood had spilled and then, a short distance away, one of his hands. His brother Muhu collected the hand and bundled it up in leaves. He and the others in the party then set to killing bears. Instead of eating the meat or taking their pelts, Muhu and his cohorts defecated on the bears’ bodies and urinated on their faces, smashing the heads at the end.
  “That shows the bear,” Muhu said with anger.
  Still they didn’t find Serra’s heart.
  J’Topet was aghast at Muhu’s anger and became afraid that their activity would be noticed by the Spanish. After all, locals knew that they were killing bears because killing bears is noisy business. They howl and fight and roar before going under.
  “We have to leave!” J’Topet exhorted them in Fornay dialect. “The soldiers will come. They’ll get us.”
  “To hell with the soldiers.”
  “Where is the heart?” They muddled around one last time looking for it. They figured that if the bear that took Muhu’s brother had gotten to it, fragments of the ceramic pot should be right where the encounter took place.
  “No bear can swallow a pot that big,” Monsow said. “It walked away. Spirits took it.”
  “Spirits are on our side!” the cousin retorted.
  “Look, Fornay,” J’Topet reasoned. “I’m sorry that Muhu’s brother is dead. And I am happy, uh,” he fumbled with the language as his strength with the dialect was in trading not politicking. “Happy?” he looked at them.
  For a moment, their seriousness stopped. “Happy,” Monsow laughed. “Happy is okay.” The lot of them joined him in laughter.
  “Okay,” J’Topet continued. “I am happy that the Fornay have set out to take Spanish hearts, especially from the holymen, and especially from this holyman . . . He beat my brother, still . . .” J’Topet wrung a hand over his brow. “Let’s go home. I have a wife who is already angry at me.”
  Muhu and Monsow looked at J’Topet in the sun. Muhu, who had been distraught for two days, raised his head and agreed.
  “I didn’t want to lose my brother. For whatever reason, the bear took him. And we don’t want to lose the heart—not this one. I myself prevented that holyman from coming into our Pass and home. But we’ve entered a place where there is nothing. Nothing exists here. And now that we have killed these bears, we have made less than nothing.” He nodded. “It’s time to go home. J’Topet is right.”
J’Topet thanked Muhu for being reasonable. “Thank you,” he said. “Like you, this is not where I’m from. We Salinan like to say . . .” he demurred.
  “Say what?” Muhu encouraged him.
  He switched to his dialect. “We gotta blow.”
  A footstep sounded from down the meadow.
  “What’s that—"
  Monsow ducked. “Soldiers!”
  The lot of them fell to the ground. Across the savannah between the scattered oaks, two Spanish soldiers on horseback were leading an Indian tied to a rope. The Indian walked along quietly, hands bound behind. Both Muhu and Monsow pulled short wooden boughs out of their hide bags and looked through them, adjusting the ends. J’Topet paid more attention to the contraptions than the Spanish and their prisoner.
  “So it’s true,” he marveled. “The eye sticks are real.”
  Muhu concentrated through the lense. “They’ve beat him.”
  Monsow looked closely as well. “He must’ve run away.”
  “Yes. You run away and they come and get you. They break you down.”
  “You see, J’Topet. That’s why we have to find this heart. We have to take all of their hearts.”
  “May I look through it?” J’Topet reached.
  Muhu looked at him and Monsow. “Alright,” he handed the device to J’Topet. “Just this once.”
  J’Topet took the lense and put it to his eye.
  “Move the front of the stick around until it’s clear.”
  J’Topet moved the front, round wooden part in a circle until the soldiers and their neophyte were in sight. It wasn’t as sharp as he had imagined it might be, but they were larger and closer than seeing them without the stick. The horses were big and he could see the rope on the neck of the Indian.
  “So it is true,” J’Topet said to them, dropping the lense to look back and marvel. “The eyesticks are real.”
  “No, J’Topet.” Muhu took it from him. “They’re all made up. Everything else is real.”
  “Ah, Fornay,” J’Topet laughed. “If you’re not being so serious, you’re making jokes all the time.”
  “What do we do for this poor cousin?” Monsow looked through his lense. He was frustrated and digging his elbows into the dirt.
  Muhu continued to watch the soldiers lead their captive by the neck. Like Monsow, Muhu was coming out of his skin. “Ah!” he turned his head. “You know what we can’t do. We have a charter.”
  J’Topet looked from behind the berm of earth where they were hiding. “What are you saying, Fornay? What is it?”
  “Muhu is saying that unless we were sent for this then we have to let it go.”
  “If we kill the Spanish, if we help this cousin escape,” Muhu explained to J’Topet, “Then we’ll be found out. They’ll follow us back, one way or another. We have to be invisible.”
  “We only came here for the heart.”
  “We’re not even here,” Muhu finished. “We’re not even here.”
  The three of them watched the two horses with the soldiers atop lead the rebel neophyte past the edge of the meadow, towards the mission village.
  Muhu held onto the bundle at his side holding his brother’s hand.
  “We’ll find the heart,” he assured them. “We’ll get it back.”
  J’Topet looked at the eye stick in Muhu’s hand. “Muhu, can I just try it one more time?”.

NEXT
3.
September 1, 1784 REDUX
The Heart is Found—and Owned—by Others