3.

September 1, 1784 REDUX
The Heart is Found by Others

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

WHEREIN SERRA’S HEART IN A JAR IS FOUND BY A BAND OF TRAVELING CENTRAL COAST INDIANS, SUCH AS THEY WERE

*

“The tall one stood straight up with the jug still in his arms. `We will keep it with us, nodding. `And one day we will trade it back to the holy men . . . I think that if we wait long enough we will be able to trade it to them for land. Much more than we can think of now. This is bigger than cloth or glass. Bigger than metal pots. We can say that we have the heart of the head holy man.’ ”

 

WHEN TAI FUN’S BROTHER, TAI MUHU, and Monsow his escort, followed J’Topet the Salinan, down to the spot where Tai Fun met his end, they were too late to retrieve the heart, although it was only a quarter of a mile away.
  As they fuddled about the meadow, looking for the jar, a small band of mixed, marginalized Obispeno Indians watched them.
  They were well aware of the Fornay and their habit of taking the hearts of their enemies and had seen the aftermath of the bear attack upon Tai Fun, the horse and dog. After the bear had left, they wandered down to look things over only to find the jar.
  “What is this thing?” one of them popped and clicked in dialect. “Is it what I think it is?”
  “Is it a white man thing or a cousin thing?” sounding shtick-cho, the other asked.
  “This is the work of the Fon-tay—what we have heard about” he said, using his dialect’s term for the Fornay. “They are trying to collect the hearts of all these holy men who have come to live here.”
  They poked the jug. “The Fon-tay send a man to cut out the holy man’s heart when he dies and put it in a container. I think that’s who that bear killed.”
  “Ha!” one jumped. “The Fon-Tay always have something good going on. They have the Salamander People from the ocean with them. Now, these holy men will walk around forever. They will never rest.”
  “Like us.”
  The tallest one picked up the jug. “This has the heart of one of the holy men in it?” he held it in a kind of headlock, looking over the seal.
  “The trader we met three days ago said the heart of the holy man from Monterey Mission was coming this way. The head holy man.”
  “The head holy man?” he looked at the jug.
  “Yeah, the head man. Chterra.”
  “Well,” he gave it a shake and they turned their heads down to hear it chug back and forth. There was a collective wince.
  “What will we do with it?”
  The tall one stood straight up with the jug still in his arms. “We will keep it with us,” nodding. “And one day we will trade it back to the holy men or their soldiers. I think that if we wait long enough we will be able to trade it to them for land. Much more than we can think of now. This is bigger than cloth or glass. Bigger than metal pots. We can say that we have the heart of the head holy man.”
  “Do we even want it?”
  “Instead of fighting them, we will trade them the heart back.”
  “And in return we will get the whole valley.”
  “At least a canyon. Or two.”
  “Or three.”
  “You think so?” the last spoke. “I tell you what, we won’t get a single quail, frog or acorn out of this thing.” He looked at his companion holding the jug with the heart. “We’re going to end up just like you are now—holding the heart in our arms and nothing else.”
The wind came from the sea, blowing onshore. A final gust made its best to keep the flow even, but it was too late in the afternoon. A final static charge stood all the dry grass on end, hair floating for a moment as the warm oxygen rose. The angle of the sun and the temperature of the land came into agreement, to cause a shift. Like a truck dumping hay, the load slid down and the air lifted towards the ocean. At the coast, the tops of waves began wafting spray as they fell.

The entrepreneurial spirit of the day presided for a few weeks as the group returned to their main encampment with the heart, an unexpected grail, hidden up the way towards modern day Harmony, San Luis Obispo county, contemporary population 72. Rarely did Spanish pass through the niche. Unless a neophyte ran off and found the village, or if the soldiers had enough to eat and their energy allowed them to ride up the canyon to look for Indians, the increasingly motley group—intermarried amongst adjacent bands nearly sharing common language and customs—held itself together in the woods.
  They lived off of rabbits, toyon, chia, birds, deer, stream fish, crayfish, acorns, and squirrels. The shaman who remained continued to mix the datura and engage its dose during ceremony in the hills where sandstone outcroppings made caves and overhangs.
  The shortest day of the year was still recognized. Red hematite, yellow limonite, white chalk, blue serpentine burned to azure light, mixed with bear fat and egg yolk, made mark on the surface of the rock. Incantations accompanied the renderings.
  The shaman worked to bring the world back they had known. These priests now had more responsibility than the small and ruined warrior class that had once been relied upon. What could warriors, the few undead or remaindered that there were, what could they do against the soldiers? While a shaman could change the direction of the wind, even the world, warriors seemed only to be able to change the direction of other warriors, and the occasional deer.
  Now, like Drake’s plate cast from the trunk of a chauffeur’s car, the heart sat in the jug, off to the side, in the sun, the wind, the rain and the cold. Months into years went by. It slowly drank the brandy, fermented spirits soaking up cells and cell walls, penetrating organ flesh and pickling.
  When the band moved—and they really weren’t a tribe anymore—the heart would move with them to new canyons or higher to mountain hideouts. Other times it was stored underground and left for a season. In 1790, the shaman even took it for a solstice celebration to summon up its ability to continue to have trading power.
  They indulged in datura, chanting and marking the sides of the cave with the symbols of the season. To this day, the image of the water walker, Gerris remigis, can be seen on this sandstone wall. The wings of a condor are there too in white above the water walker. Scattered about are four-legged creatures with arrows coming from their faces, jig-sawed patterns of orange, black, white and mint green mark the edges.
  Images of suns with concentric circles spiraling outward balance the side. In the middle is the turtle, round shell, small head, nobs of feet at the corners of his body. Head-dressed insects flutter about the turtle with other bodies, headless, accompanying the entourage. Then, upon a horizontal line depicting the earth, a rendering of the ceramic jug holding the heart is clearly visible, the Mission Carmel notches shown at the bottom. The configuration sits next to two orange depictions of men on horses, holding reins as they approach the jug.
  Could this have been the imagined but highly practical mathematics of presenting the heart back to the Spanish?
  One can still visit this cave and see the renderings, far up a canyon on the windward side of the southern part of the Santa Lucia Mountain range, near present day Santa Margarita.
  Slowly the tribe began to wear out. One spring, Spanish soldiers, out looking for a runaway from San Luis Obispo, came upon their camp. In the altercation three Indians were killed, two of them the shamans, and one of the soldiers received an arrow through the neck. After the incident, the chance to trade the heart back to the Spanish seemed distant.
  Only six members of what was already a mixed band survived. Only one of the original discoverers of the heart, a man of twenty-six years, Makal, was still alive. He led the small group farther inland, heading north, in possession of the jug and its occupant. The year was 1796.
  Makal was the Beryle Shinn of his time, the second discoverer of Drake’s brass plate. He was filled with the notion of trading the heart back to the Spanish but he was not certain what they would trade it for. And how, he wondered, could he prove that it was the head holy man’s heart, this Chterra?
  Makal held onto the heart and its ideal like a man who, some two hundred years later, would keep a 1956 Ford pick-up in his front yard up on blocks, waiting for the day he could restore it and drive it into town.
  The winter of 1796 going into 1797 was difficult. It was wet, the wind blew, mud ran, and the mountain fell apart in the rain, running down the creeks and into the canyons.
  By May, only Makal and a woman with her son, nine years old, were left. Makal and the woman had never spoken the same dialect, so much of their communicating was done through hand signs and common words they knew. The boy had spoken only to his mother and two of the older men, his uncles, now gone—one dispatched in the altercation with the Spanish, and the other sick the winter before, dying in the rain. The woman was called Puluy and the boy was called Tupnek.
They ate well. There was no problem finding roots, seed, berries, nuts and trapping small animals and fish. The boy was particularly good at finding fish.
What they lacked was belonging. Their universe was the three of them. Makal detected the occasional fractured group of men, even women, fires burning in the distance, looking at them through the thickets as they made their way north down the east side of the Santa Lucia, following the path of what would later become Highway 101.
  All the while, Makal carried the jug on his back.
  As the three pushed into spring and then summer, they encountered a path with parallel divets on either side. They followed this road in the day, surrounded by small yellow blossoms and their smell of light onion. Between the yellow was the orange of the qupe, the poppy. Once they ran off seeing that Spanish were passing through, the wheels of their cart drawn by horses—the cause of the divets.
  At night, they left the road and camped in the woods. Around them were small Indian bands but they kept away, moving forward. Makal had in his mind the idea that he was still going to find the Spanish, and in the right situation, offer the heart to them.
  As they passed up the road, it became harder and harder to not avoid other Indians. It was late in July, 1797. It seemed to Makal that the Indians they encountered were heading to the same place. Finally, he and Puluy spoke up to one of the groups. Puluy found a man who spoke a dialect close to her’s. He told Puluy that they were heading up to a place where the Salinas River met another, called Vahca by the locals. Tomorrow, the man told them, the Spanish would be holding a ceremony to start a new village. Makal and Puluy decided to follow the man and his group and see what they could of the new place.
  Would they accept the heart? What rewards could Makal receive by presenting them the heart of Chterra?
  Makal, Puluy and Tupnek followed the group for the day and by noon arrived at the site of the Spaniards’ new village. It wasn’t much, just a field. They could see that many Natives were present amongst the Spanish, who numbered about two dozen. Most were soldiers. While the group they had followed went on, Makal, Puluy and Tupnek stayed back. It was July 25, 1797. Horatio Nelson, having already lost three hundred men fighting the Spanish over the island of Tenerife, was seven seconds from losing his right arm. “Adios, amigo.”
  Blam! History being a series of blams.
  Makal looked down at the jug. He knew that he and Puluy and the boy were likely to stop at this spot for some time. She nodded to Makal. Tupnek chased a lizard in the brush.
  The heat rose as the padres began to talk and pray. They sang sweetly in a language not understandable. Makal looked at the horses. They were like deer, he thought, more muscular, without antlers, long noses like the Spaniards. They moved their hooves and shook the flies from their coats. It was so hot that fleas laid on their backs in the dirt trying to catch their breath. At that moment, Makal decided that he would not present the heart to the Spanish right away. He would keep it back, hidden, until the right moment came along.
  The Spanish, with the help of neophytes who had come from Missions San Antonio de Padua to the north and San Luis Obisbo from the south, held their ropes and pulled the wooden cross up off the ground. Mission San Miguel Arcangel had arrived. The camino was more real than ever.
  The bell, a single bell, rang, right at the slight northern curve of what would become the 101 highway.

NEXT
4.
August, 1794
Makal, Tupnek and Puluy Carry On,
The Heart Hidden in a Cave