5.

1800
To the Mission and A New World

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

WHEREIN TUPNEK, HIS MOTHER, PULUY AND MAKAL MAKE A DECISION ABOUT MISSION LIFE—AND WHAT TO DO WITH SERRA’S HEART.

*

“It had a big, round, fruity smell. It did not smell like death. At first they had to turn their noses away. The jar was filled with a kind of water that burned their nostrils. It had a smell of elderberries and smoke, some ash mixed with sour fruit perhaps. The heart itself looked no different than a deer’s heart, probably bigger, but not by much.”

 

AFTER PULUY’S CHILD, a girl, was born to Makal, the decision was made to move to the new village. It wasn’t an easy decision, but on a number of occasions the soldiers had nearly found them out and once three Indian men, black-stained travelers from a tribe they didn’t recognize, attempted to rob them of their food and skins. Makal killed one while Tupnek got another one good in the back with an arrow. There were bad feelings all around. Makal had never killed a man before and Tupnek was not sure how he should feel. For a moment, when the men were threatening them and taking away their things, it seemed as if they were going to make off with Puluy and the child. They were desperate and sick, Tupnek thought. Makal explained that they could be nunasis, or monsters, demons that had come from the forest. They could come back because they knew where Puluy, Tupnek, Makal and the baby, Ksen, were living.
  Before dark that day, Puluy took the child and hid far up on the butte, in one of the highest caves, while Tupnek and Makal took the dead man two canyons away and buried him. The entire time they looked over their shoulders, wondering if they were being watched.
  “If they weren’t demons, Tup,” Makal said to him, on the way back. “Then they were people just like us, who lost everything, too, their children and wives, in this new life. It drove them crazy. There’s no way to keep the old life forever. If we go to the new village, maybe you can learn to use the tools they have—or even ride one of their animals. Think of that.”
  “What about the heart?”
  “I think that we should hide it where it is, don’t you, Tup? We should keep some of our old life hidden up there. We may not like it at the new village.”
  “But I thought we were going to trade that old, nasty heart for something?”
  “Yeah,” Makal said, with a bit of disappointment. “Maybe we still can. For something. Someday.”
  Tupnek looked at him. They could see the caves up ahead. “You know, Makal. I promise you that one day I will trade the heart for something.”
  “Oh, yeah,” he smiled. “What for?”
  “I don’t know yet. But someday I will.”
  They arrived back at the caves and climbed up to the top to find Puluy and Ksen. Together they came back down to the lower caves where they ate. As darkness settled in, Tupnek went up to his cave and made a small fire, looking at his masks and bows. He straightened some arrows he had been working on and looked at a collection of half-made points he had begun flint-knapping the day before. They would make good points, he thought to himself, if he finished them. Then he leaned back farther into the cave, pulling the flattened brush and stones aside, and peered at the container. He remembered the day last year when Makal took the top off and pulled out the heart. It had a big, round, fruity smell. It did not smell like death. At first they had to turn their noses away. The jar was filled with a kind of water that burned their nostrils. It had a smell of elderberries and smoke, some ash mixed with sour fruit perhaps. The heart itself looked no different than a deer’s heart, probably bigger, but not by much. Tupnek supposed that, yes, it might as well be the head holy man’s heart. That was as good a guess as any. And it seemed like a better story than it being just any other man’s heart. If he was going to trade it one day, Tupnek reckoned, the heart needed a good story to go with it.
  “I saw ‘Chterra’s heart in this container . . .”
  Tupnek extinguished the fire and looked out into the darkness as he lay down to sleep. He imagined the day that he presented the heart to the white men. They would be impressed, he thought. He could see handing the container over to them as they thanked him. But he could not see what they would give him in return.
Within the week, the four of them left the caves, hiding their best things high in the cliff’s nooks. Within the hour, they made it to the new village where Indians dressed like white men were growing plants in rows. They greeted them warmly. White holy men were with the Indians and the soldiers were there, too. They took them in. The women were immediately fond of Ksen. Puluy could speak the dialect of some of the Indians at the village. Makal spoke with others who knew his dialect. The white men took their bows and arrows. Within a week they were baptized. The family name became Justo. Ksen was first; she became Dolores. Puluy became Juana. Makal became Esteban. And Tupnek became Miguel. The year was 1800. Tupnek—Miguel—was eleven years old.
  As Makal had said, Tupnek learned to use the Spanish steel tools, carving the wood from trees. Makal learned to work with the large animals—the horses and cattle. Puluy learned to weave.
  Years went by at Mission San Miguel Arcangel. Quietly, between themselves, Tupnek, his mother and Makal, still referred to themselves using their original names. Ksen, however, was too young to remember the old names and went by Dolores all of her life. Tupnek and Makal occasionally visited the old caves. Tupnek married, had children, and on occasion showed his two sons the caves where the heart and many of his childhood belongings remained hidden.
In 1831, both Puluy and Makal died—Puluy first and then Makal three weeks later. Their graves are still there, a stone’s throw from Highway 101, and you can visit them on your way between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Tupnek, nee, Miguel Justo was forty-three years old. Two days after he buried his mother a governor from Mexico, Jose Echeandia, came to visit and explained to them that “freedom” was coming. He asked then that those who wanted to be free should stand on the left side and those that did not want freedom should stand on the right—although a century and a half later that combination would reverse.
  By 1832, Mission San Miguel had 2472 baptisms, 764 marriages, 1868 deaths and 658 “neophytes.” With them were 8282 sheep, forty-two goats, fifty pigs, 700 hundred horses and 186 mules.
  Two years later, the mission was taken from the padres and given to the Indians. Tupnek and his family, including his sister Dolores, now married and with children, stayed on. Many scattered and with them the cattle and sheep, the horses and mules. Tupnek and his family continued but in the ten years that passed from its height in 1832 to 1844, the mission grounds began wanting. Tupnek spent more time with his sons back at the caves. Then “Father-President” Duran wrote, “Mission San Miguel Arcangel is today without livestock, and the neophytes are demoralized and dispersed.”
  In 1849, when he was fifty-eight, Tupnek saw an opportunity when the American, William Reed, bought part of the property. Reed and his family were looking for servants and foremen to run the house and grounds. Miguel Justo, his wife Maria, Dolores and four of their children were hired by Reed. They had worked for him but a few months when Reed, a man who established himself, it would turn out, with his mouth, boasted of hidden monies to a group of men who had pulled in for the afternoon on their way north to the gold country. Tupnek had taken the day off with one of his sons and was visiting the caves. There they hunted and Tupnek taught the boy some of the old ways, telling him the story of his life as a boy living with his mother and Makal before they joined the mission.
By the time the men had left the grounds and then doubled-back to take Reed up on his suggestion of hidden treasure, all of Reed’s family and six of Tupnek’s family—his wife, his son and daughter, his sister and her two daughters—were murdered. Their graves are still there, a stone’s throw from Highway 101, and you can visit them too on your way between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
  Tupnek, earnestly saddened by this recent turn of events, lived off and on at the mission through the years, returning to the caves every other month to think and pray. His only remaining son, Jose, returned once from the caves with some of Tupnek’s boyhood things, the bear mask, some arrows—and the heart. Tupnek, now seventy-five years old, realized that he should take the things in right away. At his age, he wondered, how many more times could he go to the caves?
  Tupnek put the mask up on the wall of his cottage on the mission grounds. The arrows he put next to them. On the shelf he put the heart.
  That spring, 1864, an Irishman, John Kennedy, and his wife, a Spanish woman, Maria Aliso, bought the property and moved in. They grew tomatillos on the land surrounding the mission buildings. They opened a tavern which they refurbished with existing furniture that they found in the buildings around the property. Tupnek asked if he could put Serra’s heart on one of the shelves in the tavern. Without knowing what was inside it, they agreed, Maria liking the glaze on the ceramic.
  He almost offered it to the two Fornay agents that visited one night in 1865. Their names were DeSheng and Antonio and they knew what it was—Tupnek knew they were on to it. But what could he get for it then? He had promised Makal that he would get something for the heart beyond a nod and a handshake.
  When John and Maria moved back to El Fornio, they brought Tupnek, the heart, their tomatillo business and the dogs. It was 1866. Tupnek was seventy-seven years old. John and Maria had perfected a tomatillo recipe, mixing in onions, oregano and other spices. Sometimes the concoction was green and sometimes it was red, depending on how the tomatoes grew. But they still hadn’t come up with a name for it.
  The week Tupnek died, he gave many of his things away. To John Kennedy, he gave the bear mask and his boyhood arrows. To Maria, he gave the ceramic container holding Father Serra’s heart. In exchange, he asked them that they name their new tomatillo-tomato relish the Spanish name for sauce. They obliged and Aliso-Kennedy Farms went on to turn El Fornio, California into the Tomatillo Capital of the World, the birthplace of “salsa.” To this day, visitors on the factory tour can still buy and sample “Miguel’s Special Blend.”
  The mask and the arrows stayed on the wall of the Aliso-Kennedy house for decades. The heart sat on the high shelf above the mask and arrows. When visitors to the house asked about the arrows and the mask, they were told the story of the old man, Miguel, that they brought from Mission San Miguel. Sometimes, the ceramic jug was mentioned. When Maria died in 1900 at the age of sixty-four, her daughters stored most of her things in an old barn on the property.
  The heart sat amongst this collection for twenty-five years, amassing dust, occasionally moved, sometimes nudged. A hundred generations of black widow spiders built webs and nests between it and a crate of old red roof tiles.
  In 1925, the old barn was to be torn down. The family brought in workmen, an antiques dealer and the director of the local historical society. As each item was taken from the barn and laid out to be assessed, the director from the historical society spied the ceramic jar, remembered a story he had heard from a Fornay elder, and asked if he could bring it back to the historical society for further examination. He also asked for a handful of arrows and a mask he found wrapped in paper.
  An hour after he left, two Fornay Indian agents came to the scene to ask if they could, through prior agreement, go through any of the estate. While the agents poured diligently through the objects that had come out of the barn, the heart in its ceramic container entered the door of the El Fornio Historical Society, where it stayed for the next seventy-six years.

NEXT
6.
1865
Read about the Visit of Two Fornay Indian Agents
in 1865 to Mission San Miguel Where They Spy
Serra’s Heart in the Ceramic Jar.