Landmarks
New Almaden on July 22, 1854 and 2011
Written while MINE: El Despojo de María Zacarías Bernal de Berreyesa was a work in progress.
At daybreak I cross my own wild borders to walk along the northern edge of hers. I carry a copy of the 1850 diseño, a rough map sketched by her murdered husband’s hand, that indicates the rancho’s vanished buildings and corrals. A midsummer breeze ruffles the chaparral as I follow the foothills toward what was once her home. Boulders protrude from the slopes above me, crisscrossed with wrinkles and scabbed with rusty moss. Horse manure interrupts the path. Crickets croak and hum their electric songs, blithely ignoring the closing call of dawn.
San Vicente was a small rancho by Californio standards, a single Spanish league, but its 4500 acres produced enough cattle and corn to provide for the aging Doña Maria Zacarias Bernal Berreyesa. There was far greater profit in the rich veins under the property’s southwestern corner, where squatting miners extracted her quicksilver ore, but her first concern was only to evict the trespassers who defiled her land. “They have opened quarries and mines and removed limestone and cinnabar therefrom,” reads her complaint, and “also cut down and destroyed trees upon said land.” As legal fees piled up, she would also seek her share of the mercury wealth.
I reach the cleft in the hills where the casa stood over a stream, knowing that it was within that now-absent adobe that the widow arose each day to feed her staff and set them to their tasks. By six o’clock the rancho proper would already have been bustling with neophyte laborers and fragrant with breakfast tortillas, hot chocolate, and the scrappy, pungent foliage of these hills. To intensify our connection in this space I gather the scents of both our centuries, a tangy bouquet of wild rosemary, ragweed, sticky-monkey, foxtails, manzanita, laurel, and sage. I close my eyes and breathe in slowly. Night elicits aromas different from those the sun will arouse later on; I smell a spicy mix of damp herbs and wet wood.
My cheek warms, and I open my eyes. Sunlight slants through the oaks, making spiderwebs shimmer. Swarming gnats become a fistful of glitter caught up in a column of breezes. From her doorway facing south, Zacarias would have seen what I see now: a broad field of burr-laden daisies, enclosed by a rusted-wire fence and a yellow border of starburst thistles. Beyond the flatlands she would have seen the same rise of golden hills, kindled with morning light and specked with black cattle like flecks of charcoal. Behind those hills stands the verdant, eternal Sierra Azule. Today, a smear of fog shadows its southeastern spurs, but the sky is perfectly clear to the southwest, where Nemesio Berreyesa, a hundred and fifty-seven years ago today, had been watching the Almaden mines at his mother’s request.
The tension between her large family and the squatters had risen with the discovery of a murdered gringo in a gulley of New Almaden, and I imagine her standing beside me under the oaks, looking toward the mountains that held the mines, her wrinkled hands working the beads of her rosary. I stare at those ridges, one of which sequesters my own home, and try to guess what Zacarias felt. Perhaps she kept her thoughts on what was good. It was -- it is -- that time of summer when life and death comingle, when neon poppies flare among blackened thistles, when spotted fawns wobble across dry meadows, when almost invisible pewter slivers bask on sun-bleached logs. But it is more likely that the ever-present vultures caught her eye, swirling as they are now in vast silent circles over both her hills and mine, canvassing for carcasses.
A breeze melodically brushes against the trees. A dog barks. A rooster crows a wailing, woeful cry. The wind sends whispers through the tasseled weeds.
Did she hear the hoofbeats before she saw the cloud of dust at the curve of the road? Did she start and clasp her beads with a mother’s fear? I can almost see the messenger galloping up to the casa, his horse’s slowing gait, his lowered eyes. I think I feel my own heart race with hers. Now in my mind the rider stands before her, head bowed, holding the slack reins behind his back, while the sweating horse stands quietly behind him, breathing, knowing.
I hope he did not tell her the details – how a dozen masked raiders had dragged Nemesio from his bed over the screams and pleadings of Benita, six months’ swollen with their fourth child, and six-year-old Paula, and little Feliberto who would be three soon, and Celestina who was just fifteen months old. How the mob had roughly tied his hands behind his back, thrown him over a horse , and galloped off into the dark edge of the following day. How he had been discovered early this morning by a townsman who was taking a walk in eastern San Jose, who saw “ a man suspended by the neck to a tree with a rope with his hands tied behind him,” his hat and coat beside him on the ground. The dead man’s tongue was hanging out, black and swollen.
“The perpetrators of the deed are not publicly known,” wrote the editor of the Alta California the next weekend, “but it is rumored that they were a vigilance committee. If so that vigilance committee deserves to be hung. When vigilan(ce) committees must go, like thieves, at night and in disguise, it is time for them to be hung. It is of no use to be mealy mouthed about such affairs. When honest men take the law into their hands they don’t steal about in the dark. It is said that Berreyesa was accused of some crime. If so, it was no excuse for a secret assassination. If not, the murder was doubly foul.”
I am back at my home in the hills where Nemesio lived; all day I have thought of this land as both a cause of his death, and an embodiment of demise and decay. It is the land for which his mother fought and lost, a land eventually scalped of trees and gutted of cinnabar ore. A land depleted. A matriarch impoverished. Ten sons reduced by tragedy to one.
The epic story of Zacarias is written in these hills, and my own life’s tale on her fading palimpsest. The meadow where my house meets the minelands is brittle and yellowed -- our open book left too long in the sun. The fallen leaves are curled and crisp, or faded green and pocked with fungal scabs. Poison oak strangles a hapless trunk. Empty seed-pods dangle from weed stems like fragile flags of ivory tissue, and sheer leaves twist like pieces of raffia twine. Among the airy weeds a dark, dead thistle stands out, an ogre trying to blend unseen with fairies. When I pluck at the downy remnants of its blossom, blonde slivers waft away and disappear. The book of Zacarias, though she once owned much of Almaden, has faded away.
But each day I see her through the sights and sounds of our common land. On this page, something hungry scratches by the creek, and something angry jabbers in the trees.
At daybreak I cross my own wild borders to walk along the northern edge of hers. I carry a copy of the 1850 diseño, a rough map sketched by her murdered husband’s hand, that indicates the rancho’s vanished buildings and corrals. A midsummer breeze ruffles the chaparral as I follow the foothills toward what was once her home. Boulders protrude from the slopes above me, crisscrossed with wrinkles and scabbed with rusty moss. Horse manure interrupts the path. Crickets croak and hum their electric songs, blithely ignoring the closing call of dawn.
San Vicente was a small rancho by Californio standards, a single Spanish league, but its 4500 acres produced enough cattle and corn to provide for the aging Doña Maria Zacarias Bernal Berreyesa. There was far greater profit in the rich veins under the property’s southwestern corner, where squatting miners extracted her quicksilver ore, but her first concern was only to evict the trespassers who defiled her land. “They have opened quarries and mines and removed limestone and cinnabar therefrom,” reads her complaint, and “also cut down and destroyed trees upon said land.” As legal fees piled up, she would also seek her share of the mercury wealth.
I reach the cleft in the hills where the casa stood over a stream, knowing that it was within that now-absent adobe that the widow arose each day to feed her staff and set them to their tasks. By six o’clock the rancho proper would already have been bustling with neophyte laborers and fragrant with breakfast tortillas, hot chocolate, and the scrappy, pungent foliage of these hills. To intensify our connection in this space I gather the scents of both our centuries, a tangy bouquet of wild rosemary, ragweed, sticky-monkey, foxtails, manzanita, laurel, and sage. I close my eyes and breathe in slowly. Night elicits aromas different from those the sun will arouse later on; I smell a spicy mix of damp herbs and wet wood.
My cheek warms, and I open my eyes. Sunlight slants through the oaks, making spiderwebs shimmer. Swarming gnats become a fistful of glitter caught up in a column of breezes. From her doorway facing south, Zacarias would have seen what I see now: a broad field of burr-laden daisies, enclosed by a rusted-wire fence and a yellow border of starburst thistles. Beyond the flatlands she would have seen the same rise of golden hills, kindled with morning light and specked with black cattle like flecks of charcoal. Behind those hills stands the verdant, eternal Sierra Azule. Today, a smear of fog shadows its southeastern spurs, but the sky is perfectly clear to the southwest, where Nemesio Berreyesa, a hundred and fifty-seven years ago today, had been watching the Almaden mines at his mother’s request.
The tension between her large family and the squatters had risen with the discovery of a murdered gringo in a gulley of New Almaden, and I imagine her standing beside me under the oaks, looking toward the mountains that held the mines, her wrinkled hands working the beads of her rosary. I stare at those ridges, one of which sequesters my own home, and try to guess what Zacarias felt. Perhaps she kept her thoughts on what was good. It was -- it is -- that time of summer when life and death comingle, when neon poppies flare among blackened thistles, when spotted fawns wobble across dry meadows, when almost invisible pewter slivers bask on sun-bleached logs. But it is more likely that the ever-present vultures caught her eye, swirling as they are now in vast silent circles over both her hills and mine, canvassing for carcasses.
A breeze melodically brushes against the trees. A dog barks. A rooster crows a wailing, woeful cry. The wind sends whispers through the tasseled weeds.
Did she hear the hoofbeats before she saw the cloud of dust at the curve of the road? Did she start and clasp her beads with a mother’s fear? I can almost see the messenger galloping up to the casa, his horse’s slowing gait, his lowered eyes. I think I feel my own heart race with hers. Now in my mind the rider stands before her, head bowed, holding the slack reins behind his back, while the sweating horse stands quietly behind him, breathing, knowing.
I hope he did not tell her the details – how a dozen masked raiders had dragged Nemesio from his bed over the screams and pleadings of Benita, six months’ swollen with their fourth child, and six-year-old Paula, and little Feliberto who would be three soon, and Celestina who was just fifteen months old. How the mob had roughly tied his hands behind his back, thrown him over a horse , and galloped off into the dark edge of the following day. How he had been discovered early this morning by a townsman who was taking a walk in eastern San Jose, who saw “ a man suspended by the neck to a tree with a rope with his hands tied behind him,” his hat and coat beside him on the ground. The dead man’s tongue was hanging out, black and swollen.
“The perpetrators of the deed are not publicly known,” wrote the editor of the Alta California the next weekend, “but it is rumored that they were a vigilance committee. If so that vigilance committee deserves to be hung. When vigilan(ce) committees must go, like thieves, at night and in disguise, it is time for them to be hung. It is of no use to be mealy mouthed about such affairs. When honest men take the law into their hands they don’t steal about in the dark. It is said that Berreyesa was accused of some crime. If so, it was no excuse for a secret assassination. If not, the murder was doubly foul.”
I am back at my home in the hills where Nemesio lived; all day I have thought of this land as both a cause of his death, and an embodiment of demise and decay. It is the land for which his mother fought and lost, a land eventually scalped of trees and gutted of cinnabar ore. A land depleted. A matriarch impoverished. Ten sons reduced by tragedy to one.
The epic story of Zacarias is written in these hills, and my own life’s tale on her fading palimpsest. The meadow where my house meets the minelands is brittle and yellowed -- our open book left too long in the sun. The fallen leaves are curled and crisp, or faded green and pocked with fungal scabs. Poison oak strangles a hapless trunk. Empty seed-pods dangle from weed stems like fragile flags of ivory tissue, and sheer leaves twist like pieces of raffia twine. Among the airy weeds a dark, dead thistle stands out, an ogre trying to blend unseen with fairies. When I pluck at the downy remnants of its blossom, blonde slivers waft away and disappear. The book of Zacarias, though she once owned much of Almaden, has faded away.
But each day I see her through the sights and sounds of our common land. On this page, something hungry scratches by the creek, and something angry jabbers in the trees.