6.

Good Friday, 1865:
Two Fornay Agents Visit
Mission San Miguel on the Night
of Lincoln's Assassination

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

WHEREIN ANTONIO AND DESHENG, TWO FORNAY INDIAN “AGENTS,” SHOW UP AT MISSION SAN MIGUEL ON WORD THAT JUNIPERO SERRA’S HEART IS LOCATED THERE.

*

“Antonio kept an eye on the heart in the jug. `It’s as they said it would be,’ he whispered to De Sheng. `Made of clay. The markings at the bottom are Carmel . . . Monterey.’
De Sheng nodded. `Yeah. But how’re we going to get it out of here?’ ”

 

THE TWO FORNAY AGENTS EYED Junipero Serra’s heart as it sat on the shelf behind the bar in the tavern at Mission San Miguel Archangel. They had come down from the Pass up north, looking for the old padre’s ticker in its ceramic jug.
  “There it is, De Sheng,” Antonio told his half brother in Fornay dialect.
  “Yup,” De Sheng replied.
  It was around four o’ clock in the afternoon, Good Friday, April 14, 1865. Two thousand miles away, President Abraham Lincoln was just a few hours from being shot at Ford’s Theater while attending “Our American Cousin” with his wife Mary Todd. With the news provided by General Grant to Mr. Lincoln, the American Civil War was coming to an end as Antonio and De Sheng left the Fornay Pass and headed towards the mission. With intelligence that the padre’s heart could be found in the tavern at San Miguel, they picked up horses from an out-of-pass contact and aimed south.
  Founded in 1797 by Padre Fermín Francisco de Lasuén, taking over the mission system upon the death of Junipero Serra, Mission San Miguel was the last of the California missions to be secularized in 1834. Lasuén’s tenure doubled the number of missions and the number of converts, introducing “mission architecture,” with its red tile roofs and white walls, after many years where the buildings were mere holes in the ground with thatched roofs.
  This was it. Today it would be difficult to imagine Taco Bell, or any of California’s mission-style shopping malls, as the thatched roof, hole-in-the-ground operations that were the mainstay of Father Serra’s existence (falafel franchises in the late 1960s and early 1970s would pick it up later). Fray Serra may have founded the California mission system, but Fray Lasuén’s engineered the Bell Beefer.
  Although San Miguel was sold in 1845 and returned to the church in 1859, its location away from what would end up being the larger metropolitan areas of the state caused it to be a bit of a wayward structure. Not that it didn’t have its culturally significant artifacts—there was the cannon from the Spanish, forged in 1697, and used against John C. Fremont and his troops in 1846—Mission San Miguel remained an outpost even after the outpost status of places like San Diego, Santa Barbara, El Fornio, Carmel and San Francisco changed from colonial fort to vacation spot. No one wanted to live in San Miguel, it seemed, and because of that the old mission grounds went begging.
  In 1846, General Pio Pico, the governer of California—about three days from losing the state to the Americans . . . listen to the cannon sound—sold off all of San Miguel, excepting the priest’s lodgings and the church itself. One William Reed, the purchaser, moved his wife and two children into a wing which they occupied for a number of months.
  The area saw people come and go as they passed through the countryside—disenfranchised Indians, Spanish Leathercoats, newly arrived Chinese laborers, late wandering Chinese mariners, Yankees, soldiers and gold seekers.
  In 1849, gold rush tramps—and they were all tramps in the Gold Rush—came to water their horses at the old mission. According to records, Reed entertained them with stories, one of which involved a bit of braggadocio about his personal store of hidden treasure. The visitors thanked him for his hospitality and moved on. But as night fell, they doubled back, returned to the old mission and killed Reed, his family and six servants in search of the treasure.
  There was no treasure—at least none that any of them could find. The next day, a posse caught up with the group, killing one in the ensuing gun battle. Then, as they made their way to the coast, one jumped into the ocean trying to escape and drowned (YMCA swim classes were still decades away). The other three were taken prisoner and sent down to Santa Barbara where they were executed.
Which, of course, is the romance of the missions.

Antonio kept an eye on the heart in the jug. “It’s as they said it would be,” he whispered to De Sheng. “Made of clay. The markings at the bottom are Carmel . . . Monterey.”
  De Sheng nodded. “How’re we going to get it out of here?”
  Antonio looked around. The bar maid, a woman of European descent in her mid-twenties, was on the other side of the room straightening chairs and tables. There were three empty bowls on one of the tables.
  “Well,” Antonio figured. “It would be a trick to do it quietly.”
  “I don’t want trouble. Not the way to do it.”
  The door to the tavern opened and two black dogs of medium size spilled in with two men following quickly behind. The dogs sniffed the room excitedly. The younger of the two men, a white man with red hair, hoisted a large cloth bag up and onto one of the tables, emptying its contents into one the bowls. The older man, an Indian in his seventies, tried to corral the dogs.
  “Oh, my darling,” the young man said to the woman. The dogs jumped up and down between them.
  “Hello, John,” back to him.
  Antonio looked at De Sheng. “I guess they’re together.” The dogs ran up to Antonio and De Sheng.
  “Hey,” De Sheng reached out to them. “These are Black Dogs,” he said in dialect to his brother.
  Hearing them speak, the woman looked over. “Are you Fornay?”
  Antonio said, switching to accented English. “Yes, mam.”
  “Fornay Indians, John,” she came across the room to greet them. “Fornay Indians. We’re from El Fornio, my husband and I.”
  “You are, huh?” Antonio leaned back with a smile. “That would explain the dogs.”
  “We brought them with us—Sally and Seamus,” he extended a hand to each of the men. “Greetings. I’m John Kennedy. This is my wife, Maria Aliso.”
  “Aliso?” Antonio asked. “You’re the Alisos from the land just north of the river.”
  “I am Jorge Aliso’s youngest daughter. We have the north bank of the Santa Maria,” she stopped. “Well—“
  “That’s okay,” Antonio assured her.
  “I’m sorry,” she said.
  “No, no,” Antonio shyly.
  “You call it something else. Jaung-ho . . . ” she turned her head attempting to come up with the word.
  “Very good!” De Sheng complemented her.
“Jtung-hoh,” Antonio filled in. “It’s the `middle river’ to us. It, well, at one time, it was the dividing line between us and the tribe to the south. It still is, I suppose, to many. Farther east it’s called the Cuyama, above the spot where it comes together at the Sisquoc, but those aren’t our names.”
  “Cuyama,” the old man said.
  Maria introduced him to them. “This is Miguel,” she said.
  He smiled and bowed. “Miguel,” with an extended hand. “Or Tupnek.”
  “Tupnek?” asked Antonio. “Obispeno?”
  “Yes,” he drawled. “At first. Then we became San Miguel.”
  “How long have you been here, old man?” Antonio asked him.
  “Since I was ten years old. The first time they rang the bell.”
  The dogs sniffed at De Sheng’s boot. “Seamus! Sally!” Maria called them off.   “Miguel, can you . . .” she pointed to dogs.
  “Yes, Miss Maria.” Miguel gathered up the dogs and went to take them outside.   “Goodbye, Fornay,” Miguel told them in their own dialect as he led the dogs back out the door.
  “He speaks Fornay,” De Sheng smiled. “That old man knows something.”
  “He came with the place,” Jack said. “For everything he says, I’m convinced there are two he keeps to himself.”
  “Or three,” De Sheng said.
  Antonio looked at Jack. “You’re not one of the Americans.”
  “I’m Irish. Came west some years ago for the gold.”
  “How’d that go?”
  “It was alright,” he looked down.
  Marie held her husband’s arm. “John’s a good man and going for the gold doesn’t really suit him.”
  “It worked for a short while then I took a ship south out of San Francisco and ended up in El Fornio. That’s when I met Maria.”
  “John worked for my father.”
  “How’d that go?” Antonio continued.
  “Well,” they all looked at one another. “Much better.”
  “How have you come here?” De Sheng asked.
  “We thought we could make it on our own,” Maria explained. “And bring the family name farther south by getting on to the old mission land here.”
  “We’re growing here. Tomatillos,” John said.
In dialect De Sheng asked Antonio about the tomatillos. Antonio explained the tomatillo to him and he nodded.
  “The Aztec tomato,” De Sheng smiled. “We call them lu’k gwa,” he told them.   “But they come from Aztecs.”
  “I had heard,” John said to him, pointing the big cloth bag. “Here’s a fresh batch I just fetched.”
  “We make a savory jam out of them,” Maria continued.
  “I call it chutney. She calls it jam. But it’s really neither. We were thinking of using a Spanish word for it. The one that means sauce.”
  “Sounds tasty,” Antonio patted his belly with a smile.
  De Sheng, the lankier of the two squeezed his brother’s shoulder. “He will eat anything. Owls, fish, snakes, roots, qasi yu—“ he stopped and looked to his brother for a translation.
  “Abalone,” Antonio said. “Oh, I like abalone, yes.”
  “Anything!” De Sheng reiterated with exasperation.
  “Well, perhaps we can treat you to a batch when we finish,“ Maria told him. “It takes a few days for it to sit, but then . . .”
  “Very good stuff,” John said. “Chutney or no chutney.”
  “What do you keep them in?” Antonio asked.
  “Clay pots are just fine,” Maria said.
  Antonio pointed to the shelf above the bar. “Like that one?” he asked, with a nod to the heart.
  “A bit like that,” she said. “But that one’s a bit big. I’m not even sure what’s in it. It’s one of the things that came with the place.”
  “Have you opened it up to see?”
  “Oh, good God, no,” J0hn laughed. “One could only imagine what’s inside that. I figure it’s some kind of spirits and fruit. We like it for the glaze on the jar.”
  “Yes, very nice,” Antonio agreed with him.
  “I wanted to establish a little kingdom of the tomatillo down here,” John explained. “But after this season, I think that we are moving on.”
   “That’s it?”
  “The church is coming back to take the grounds,” Maria reasoned. “Which I think is the right thing to do. And my father is too old now. In the coming months, we will have packed up and moved back to El Fornio.”
  “So much for the little tomatillo kingdom,” John considered. “We’ll bring it back up to the ranch and start it over from there. I think our tomatillo idea will work itself out. We’ve experimented with red tomatoes, and they are just as lovely. It makes the chutney even sweeter.”
  “I’ve recommended adding peppers!” Maria let in. “Onions! Nothing too fancy. Eventually, it would look nice to put it in glass jars with an advertisement of some sort.”
  John ran his hand through the air. “Aliso-Kennedy tomatillo jam—or chutney—which ever one.”
  “Or Spanish for sauce,” Maria chided him. She looked at Antonio and De Sheng.   “We’re not sure which direction California is going. Spanish? English? Indian? What do you say?”
  “We say je-ung for sauce,” De Sheng told her.
  “I don’t think that it’s going in that direction,” Antonio sighed.
  “As long as it says Aliso-Kennedy, it can be whatever it ends up being,” John said.
  Antonio looked back up at the heart. “What are you taking with you when you leave?”
  John looked around. “We bought everything except the buildings. So we will take everything with us. Chairs, tables. She laughs at me, but I think that someday someone will care about this old furniture.”
  “I sure like that clay jug up there,” Antonio pointed. “What do you think about it?”
  “That old thing!” Maria looked at her husband. “Miguel said something about it once.”
  “I like old things like that,” Antonio said.
John looked at her and then at the clay jug. “I’ll make you an offer. Let us do our final work here, with the whole place intact—now I’m being Irish. Because it’s bad luck to break the place up too early. But let us finish here and then take everything with us back North. Then you can visit when we’re back in El Fornio, by the start of summer season.”
  “We’ll even keep the old jug for you,” Maria looked at her husband.
“What say?”
  Antonio looked at De Sheng. Being Irish, as John said, was also kind of being Fornay as the Fornay believed in the same thing: don’t break the set, don’t break the line, don’t disturb charms arranged in a way that makes the world around them work.
  Antonio and De Sheng’s journey down was preceded by an encounter with a saxlupus yan, an enchanter, who arranged charms in line with the meaning and luck they would need for safe passage. The enchanter had placed one of the old padre’s hearts in line with a sycamore twig, gall wasp’s nest, two family stones, datura and a beetle, for mobility. Now, it seemed to Antonio and De Sheng, that their charm line was parallel to Maria and husband John’s.
  Antonio turned away from De Sheng, after a nod. “Alright, we’ll see you this summer in El Fornio. We’ll know when you arrive,” he assured them. “And then we’ll come down and see if that old jug is still for sale.”
  “How will you know when we arrive?” Maria asked.
  “We see,” Antonio said.
  “An eye stick,” De Sheng curled a fist in front of one eye.
  “We can see for a long, long way.”

NEXT
Follow the Story of Junipero Serra's Heart
in the Modern World
When It is Stolen During a Street Festival
By Reading CHAPTER ONE
of
The Reeducation of a Turd Peddler