From Corazon

by Pamela Prince

San Francisco, California, 1890

Almost 60 years ago, yet I still sharply recall the deep, sweet sense of my first home, my beloved log cabin home. And how keenly I remember my last night in it, June 18, 1831, a night replete with the realization and premonition of irretrievable loss. I lay in my little bed in my small room, underneath the warmth of the cream-hued cashmere blanket sent to me by my grandmother from England, and considered by myself as my finest and most luxurious possession. I reached out and touched in the darkness the wooden walls of tree trunks that had given over their own lives that I might have such secure shelter. Their roots had been pulled from the earth and forfeited, I thought with gratitude, so that I might have, in these first ten years of my life, a profound and steady sense of place. And now this gift I was to forsake.

From the next room, I heard my parents’ voices, their low comforting murmurs, fragments of a word now and then concerning our imminent journey. Their talking ceased and my mother came in to sing to me. She sat on the edge of the bed and sang two of my favorites, “Life Let Us Cherish” and “Oft in the Stilly Night” and then bent and lightly kissed my forehead. My father, holding his candlestick as he stood in the doorway, intoned the soothing phrases that guided me off to sleep each night. “You are beautiful, my Cora. You are loved. You are safe. Sweet dreams I wish to you, my dear. May God hold you tight. Good Night.”

The house darkened more deeply, pulling me into its self-possessed peacefulness. From the tiny window near my bed, I saw stars shining through the web of tree branches outside my room. I breathed in gently. And then, with accelerated gulps I filled my lungs with the generous waves of soft scent the cedar planks and logs offered into the night air. I lay upon the pillow’s cheek and wept, closing my eyes and falling fitfully asleep with the palm of my hand against the side of the room, consoling our home because we were bidding farewell, and asking for consolation in return from its timeless strength and quiet.

We were to leave the following morning for destinations Westward, my Mama and Papa and myself. The emotional home I had always known felt intact, consisting in that sense of the reliable foundation, enveloping walls, and gently sloping roof built from the free-flowing love my parents daily gave me. But I fretted so for our vulnerability, embarking out into unknown worlds as if we were mollusks asked to shed our shells, leaving us in that precariously melted and tender state attractive to predators.

My talisman for the trip was a pearlized pink seashell, not much larger than an almond or a marble. When I held it and curled my fingers round, no one could see it. It was my secret. A secret to hide and protect from harm. The marine creature who had once inhabited those iridescent walls had long since disappeared, washed away and gone before I had discovered its abandoned shell-of-a-home upon the sands of the northern Maine seaside near our town, where we had visited on a Sunday, months before. That morning, I had overheard my father speak to my uncle, the first mention of our intended trip, and apprehension gripped my sensibilities. The sight of the little shell half-buried on the beach, the faintest blush of its color and curves exposed, gave rise to an intense rush of feelings. Indeed, the shell was eye-catchingly lovely, most beautiful, really, a miniature miracle of radiant luminosity, of graceful patterns and whorls and spirals. But when I picked it up and blew away the grains of sand from its surfaces I became equally fascinated by its interior...by what wasn’t there, no longer there, by the shell’s very emptiness. And into that hollow space I quickly found the place in which to put my own shadowy and nervous anxieties. They now had a shelter.

Returning home that afternoon I put the shell into a tiny silk pouch of the palest turquoise made by my mother from a cast-off dress. The little purse, color of sky and sea on a light-strewn morning, held my new treasure. Strung through with a forest-green velvet ribbon, I tied the precious package around my waist and carried it thenceforth on my person at all times. My mother, always discreet and sensitive, made no mention of it. Whether she even saw it or not I never knew, as I was always cunning and kept it hidden, taking it off only when I bathed, concealing it within my folded clothes which I kept within watch and close at hand.

And so I offer this rapid sketch of myself on this last evening of the first chapter of my life; a quick portrait depicting the most fragile aspects of my character, holding onto the very walls of my home for reassurance and hiding a delicate sanctuary tied around my body for protection. But whether out of pride or candor I must tell you even now that this represented but a portion of my person. I was most sensitive to safety, not merely because I feared external happenstance that could jeopardize. I was equally fearful of my own nature, surprisingly impulsive and fierce in ways that had already upset the equilibrium so strongly striven for, on my account, by my family. I needed to protect myself from myself. I was, and perhaps still am, equal portions caution and impetuousness.


San Antonio de Padua Mission, Jolon, California, November, 1841

Again, my eyes opened heavily in the shifting blackness and found the shadows of our bodies moving along the surface of the thick, white-washed adobe walls in my small cell-like room, shadows cast by the flickering candle’s last flame fast burning down on the rough plate by the wooden bedside. My sight traced upon the screen the silhouetted taut V of my own outspread legs, sharp and tapered, and his thrusting outline between. I watched as our fading and collapsing shapes gave a last tremble in the vanishing light, melting back inside the night. His eyes closing now. My hair streaming out across his chest like dark water.

I listened to our breathing, quieting, and found sounds faintly drifting in from outside.

The closest sound, right outside my heavy pine door with its hammered iron latch: the muffled echoes of a vaquero’s spurred boots pacing on the terra cotta tiles along the promenade, the graze of those spurs lightly scraping the door as he moved on past.

Beyond that, out through the narrow columned veranda, I sensed the torpid hums rising from the mission’s inner courtyard, floating sullenly over the meager fountain with its slow stingy drip of gray water; the strains pulled reluctantly across stray cacti, rusting wagon wheels and scattered bones of cats and dogs littered near the grinding stone. Listlessly, the late evening sounds moved towards me, carried feebly through shafts of moonlight.

And the intonations from the chapel, barely reaching my ears but, oh, so familiar, so predictable. I could palpably absorb every limp syllable with each intake of breath. The habitual drear of Padre Salvador’s self-satisfied voice droning his last evening mass to conclusion. The passive assents of his Indian congregation murmuring weakly with uncertain singing of hymns in a language not their own. The music ended on a high-pitched inexpert wail from the organ, trailing out into awkward wheezes and answered by raggedy chords of agitated coyote triads barking outside the walls. Finally, a jagged clash of the red-tiled tower’s silver bell. Then, the shuffling sandals of bare feet, sluggish against the cold tiled floors as the chapel cleared for the night.

Last week, I had hidden myself inside the chapel all night long, crouched down behind a pew as Padre Salvador ushered everyone out and closed and locked the planked double doors. Inside I stayed, voluntarily trapped along with the diminishing clouds of incense, with the fathers, sons, and holy ghosts lingering and clinging to the painted rafters and beams, with the confessional’s faded velvet curtains, standing silent watch with the bleeding crucifix over the partially plundered altar. As the doors shut with a dull echo, I felt, at first, as if inside a crushing and unrelenting density of black. But as my eyes became accustomed to this obscurity, I discerned the slightest silver line, a shimmering vertical slash, a sliver of pale night sky that glistened in the crack. An abstraction of the outside world, an illusion of possible escape.

Again, now, the nearer stride of boots passing my door....