|
As Juan Kitsepawit rode the bus to the hall, he worried whether his
story of Long Fingers and the Brown Robe would convince the Chumash children of the glory of their heritage, and if it would inspire the two Capuchins to continue to quest to realize their dream.
But once in the hall, knowing this was his last chance, he decided the truth
was his greatest ally. He began by recounting how Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo and
his Conquistadores landed on the shores of California in 1542, on a land that housed a nation that stretched as far south as Oxnard, as far north as San Luis Obispo, as far west as the Channel Islands, and as far east as Mount Pinos, which would hover over the first of the Inocentes villages, a land inhabited by between twenty and thirty thousand peaceful Chumash.
He told them that the Chumash greeted the foreigners with gifts and
hospitality, even accepting the strange theology as well as the forced servitude of the Franciscan missionaries who later arrived in 1782, led by Padre Junipero Serra. By 1839, he said, only two hundred and fifty Chumash remained.
He then began his story by saying that one of the thirty thousand original
Chumas was named Long Fingers, an exiled Chumash, who, together with Carlos, a Spanish deserter, and Paha, a strangely intuitive bear cub, escaped from the Conquistadores and the missionaries in a quest to find a legendary Franciscan who had allegedly led the people of a ravaged Chumash village into the mountains to the east.
Eventually, after many struggles, the trio finally encountered the
Franciscan and the village he calls Inocentes, and they also find a refuge. That is, all except Long Fingers who felt shame because of his desertion of his brother and
therefore concludes he must find him. What happened to him on his return has become the substance of legends.
Inspired as Kitsepawit had hoped, one eventful summer the two Capuchins --with the help of a strange, mystical old fabulist—set forth on their own quest to create a new Inocentes. In so doing, they change the lives of a despairing English teacher; a small, fat bartender; a grandmother who was once called “The Village Slut”; a grief-stricken and revengeful old man of the mountains; a philandering husband; his ambitious wife; a teenager over his head; and especially a young man of unlimited love but limited intellectual growth.
At the end, as one of the Capuchins sits on a bench over looking Nuevo
Inocentes, he can’t help wondering if what he sees below him has been the result of divine providence or the machinations of a remorseful sinner.
|
