COMES FOR THE a) ARCHBISHOP |
j “WILLA CATHER i
THE worKs OF Willa Cather
NOVELS Alexander's Bridge + 1912 O Pioneers! +1913 The Song of the Lark - 1915 My Antonia+ 1918 One of Ours + 1922 A Lost Lady - 1923 The Professors House + 1925 My Mortal Enemy - 1926 Death Comes for the Archbishop - 1927 Shadows on the Rock: 1931 Lucy Gayheart - 1935 Sapphira and the Slave Girl - 1940
SHORT STORIES Youth and the Bright Medusa- 1920 Obscure Destinies - 1932 The Old Beauty and Others - 1948
VERSE April Twilights * 1923
ESSAYS
Not Under Forty - 1936 Willa Cather on Writing «1949 Willa Cather in Europe - 1956
Two Books asout Willa Cather
BY E. K. BROWN, COMPLETED BY LEON EDEL Willa Cather: A Critical Biography - 1953
BY EDITH LEWIS Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record - 1953
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
“ Auspice Maria!”
FATHER VAILLANT’S SIGNET-RING
WILLA CATHER
Death Comes Jor the
el
ae THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK, PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Pr
A Copyright 1927 by Iye une
Renewal copyright 1955 by the Executors of the Estate of Willa Cather
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copy- right Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 1027 a
REPRINTED TWENTY-NINE TIMES
RESET AND PRINTED FROM NEW PLATES JANUARY 1945
REPRINTED TWELVE TIMES
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FORTY-FOURTH PRINTING, NOVEMBER 1968
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Protocur. AT ROME ; THE VICAR APOSTOLIC
MISSIONARY JOURNEYS ) Tue Mass at Acoma
SNAKE Root
ae MARTINEZ
DoÑa ISABELLA
THE GREAT DIOCESE
GOLD UNDER PIKE’Ss PEAK
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
117 139 175 199
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PROLOGUE: AT ROME
PROLOGUE: AT ROME
One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining to- gether in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, over- looking Rome. The villa was famous for the fine view from its terrace. The hidden garden in which the four men sat at table lay some twenty feet below the south end of this terrace, and was a mere shelf of rock, overhanging a steep declivity planted with vineyards. A flight of stone steps connected it with the promenade above. The table stood in a sanded square, among potted orange and ole- ander trees, shaded by spreading ilex oaks that grew out of the rocks overhead. Beyond the balustrade was the drop into the air, and far below the landscape stretched soft and undulating; there was nothing to arrest the eye until it reached Rome itself.
3
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
Tt was early when the Spanish Cardinal and his guests sat down to dinner. The sun was still good for an hour of supreme splendour, and across the shining folds of country the low profile of the city barely fretted the sky- line—indistinct except for the dome of St. Peter’s, bluish grey like the flattened top of a great balloon, just a flash of copper light on its soft metallic surface. The Cardinal had an eccentric preference for beginning his dinner at this time in the late afternoon, when the vehemence of the sun suggested motion. The light was full of action and had a peculiar quality of climax—of splendid finish. It was both intense and soft, with a ruddiness as of much-mul- tiplied candlelight, an aura of red in its flames. It bored into the ilex trees, illuminating their mahogany trunks and blurring their dark foliage; it warmed the bright green of the orange trees and the rose of the oleander blooms to gold; sent congested spiral patterns quivering over the damask and plate and crystal. The churchmen kept their rectangular clerical caps on their heads to protect them from the sun. The three Cardinals wore black cassocks with crimson pipings and crimson buttons, the Bishop a long black coat over his violet vest.
They were talking business; had met, indeed, to dis- cuss an anticipated appeal from the Provincial Council at eaten for the founding of an Apostolic Vicarate in mee ie part of North America recently annexed
ates. This new territory was vague to all
of them, even to the missionary Bishop. The Italian and 4
PROLOGUE
French Cardinals spoke of it as Ze Mexique, and the Spanish host referred to it as “New Spain.” Their interest in the projected Vicarate was tepid, and had to be con- tinually revived by the missionary, Father Ferrand; Irish by birth, French by ancestry—a man of wide wanderings and notable achievement in the New World, an Odysseus of the Church. The language spoken was French—the time had already gone by when Cardinals could con- veniently discuss contemporary matters in Latin.
The French and Italian Cardinals were men in vigorous middle life—the Norman full-belted and ruddy, the Vene- tian spare and sallow and hook-nosed. Their host, Garcfa ` Maria de Allande, was still a young man. He was dark in colouring, but the long Spanish face, that looked out from so many canvases in his ancestral portrait gallery, was inthe young Cardinal much modified through his English mother. With his caffé oscuro eyes, he had a fresh, pleasant English mouth, and an open manner.
During the latter years of the reign of Gregory XVI, de Allande had been the most influential man at the Vatican; but since the death of Gregory, two years ago, he had retired to his country estate. He believed the re- forms of the new Pontiff impractical and dangerous, and had withdrawn from politics, confining his activities to work for the Society for the Propagation of the Faith— that organization which had been so fostered by Gregory. In his leisure the Cardinal played tennis. As a boy, in England, he had been passionately fond of this sport.
5
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
Lawn tennis had not yet come into fashion; it was a formidable game of indoor tennis the Cardinal played. Amateurs of that violent sport came from Spain and France to try their skill against him.
The missionary, Bishop Ferrand, looked much older than any of them, old and rough—except for his clear, intensely blue eyes. His diocese lay within the icy arms of the Great Lakes, and on his long, lonely horseback rides among his missions the sharp winds had bitten him well. The missionary was here for a purpose, and he pressed his point. He ate more rapidly than the others and had plenty of time to plead his cause,—finished each course with such dispatch that the Frenchman remarked he hie have been an ideal dinner companion for Napo- eon.
The Bishop laughed and threw out his brown hands in apology. “Likely enough I have forgot my manners. Tam preoccupied. Here you can scarcely understand what it means that the United States has annexed that enormous territory which was the cradle of the Faith in the New World. The Vicarate of New Mexico will be in a few years raised to an Episcopal See, with jurisdiction over a coun- try larger than Central and Western Europe, barrin Russia. The Bishop of that See will direct ae ota: :
e beginning of momentous things.” p murmured the Venetian, “there have E e ever comes from over there ppeals for money, 6
PROLOGUE
The missionary turned to him patiently. “Your Emi- nence, I beg you to follow me. This country was evangel- ized in fifteen hundred, by the Franciscan Fathers. It has been allowed to drift for nearly three hundred years and is not yet dead. It still pitifully calls itself a Catholic country, and tries to keep the forms of religion without instruction. The old mission churches are in ruins. The few priests are without guidance or discipline. They are lax in religious observance, and some of them live in open concubinage. If this Augean stable is not cleansed, now that the territory has been taken over by a progressive government, it will prejudice the interests of the Church in the whole of North America.”
“But these missions are still under the jurisdiction of Mexico, are they not?” inquired the Frenchman.
“In the See of the Bishop of Durango?” added Marfa de Allande.
The missionary sighed. “Your Eminence, the Bishop of Durango is an old man; and from his seat to Santa Fé is a distance of fifteen hundred English miles. There are no wagon roads, no canals, no navigable rivers. Trade is carried on by means of pack-mules, over treacherous trails. The desert down there has a peculiar horror; I do not mean thirst, nor Indian massacres, which are fre- quent. The very floor of the world is cracked open into countless canyons and arroyos, fissures in the earth which are sometimes ten feet deep, sometimes a thousand. Up and down these stony chasms the traveller and his mules
7
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
clamber as best they can. It is impossible to go far in any direction without crossing them. If the Bishop of Du- rango should summon a disobedient priest by letter, who shall bring the Padre to him? Who can prove that he ever received the summons? The post is carried by hunt- ers, fur trappers, gold seekers, whoever happens to be moving on the trails.”
The Norman Cardinal emptied his glass and wiped his lips.
“And the inhabitants, Father Ferrand? If these are the travellers, who stays at home?”
“Some thirty Indian nations, Monsignor, each with its own customs and language, many of them fiercely hostile to each other. And the Mexicans, a naturally devout people. Untaught and unshepherded, they cling to the faith of their fathers.”
“T have a letter from the Bishop of Durango, recom- mending his Vicar for this new post,” remarked Maria de Allande.
“Your Eminence, it would be a great misfortune if a native priest were appointed; they have never done well in that field. Besides, this Vicar is old. The new Vicar must be a young man, of strong constitution, full of zeal, and above all, intelligent. He will have to deal with savag- ery and ignorance, with dissolute Priests and political in-
trigue. He must be a man to who
m order is necessary— as dear as life.”
The Spaniard’s coffee-coloured eyes showed a glint of 8
PROLOGUE
yellow as he glanced sidewise at his guest. “I suspect, from your exordium, that you have a candidate—and that he is a French priest, perhaps?”
“You guess rightly, Monsignor. I am glad to see that we have the same opinion of French missionaries.”
“Yes,” said the Cardinal lightly, “they are the best mis- sionaries. Our Spanish fathers made good martyrs, but the French Jesuits accomplish more. They are the great organizers.”
“Better than the Germans?” asked the Venetian, who had Austrian sympathies.
“Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange! The French missionaries have a sense of proportion and ra- tional adjustment. They are always trying to discover the logical relation of things. It is a passion with them.” Here the host turned to the old Bishop again. “But your Grace, why do you neglect this Burgundy? I had this wine brought up from my cellar especially to warm away the chill of your twenty Canadian winters. Surely, you do not gather vintages like this on the shores of the Great Lake Huron?”
The missionary smiled as he took up his untouched glass. “It is superb, your Eminence, but I fear I have lost my palate for vintages. Out there, a little whisky, or Hudson Bay Company rum, does better for us. I must confess I enjoyed the champagne in Paris. We had been forty days at sea, and I am a poor sailor.”
“Then we must have some for you.” He made a sign
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DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
to his major-domo. “You like it very cold? And your new Vicar Apostolic, what will he drink in the country of bison and serpents à sonnettes? And what will he eat?”
“He will eat dried buffalo meat and frijoles with chili, and he will þe glad to drink water when he can get it. He will have no easy life, your Eminence. That country will drink up his youth and strength as it does the rain. He will be called upon for every sacrifice, quite possibly for martyrdom. Only last year the Indian pueblo of San Fernandez de Taos murdered and scalped the American Governor and some dozen other whites. The reason they did not scalp their Padre, was that their Padre was one of the leaders of the rebellion and himself planned the massacre. That is how things stand in New Mexico!”
“Where is your candidate at present, Father?”
“He is a parish priest, on the shores of Lake Ontario, in my diocese, 1 have watched his work for nine years.
He is but thirty-five now. He came to us directly from the Seminary.”
“And his name is?” “Jean Marie Latour.”
Maria de Allande, leaning back in his chair, put the tips of his long fingers together and regarded them thought- fully.
“Of course, Father Ferrand, the Propaganda will al-
most certainly appoint to this Vicarate the man whom the Council at
Baltimore recommends,”
I0
PROLOGUE
“Ah yes, your Eminence; but a word from you to the Provincial Council, an inquiry, a suggestio >
“Would have some weight, I admit,” replied the Cardi- nal smiling. “And this Latour is intelligent, you say? What a fate you are drawing upon him! But I suppose it is no worse than a life among the Hurons. My knowledge of your country is chiefly drawn from the romances of Fenimore Cooper, which I read in English with great pleasure. But has your priest a versatile intelligence? Any intelligence in matters of art, for example?”
“And what need would he have for that, Monsignor? Besides, he is from Auvergne.”
The three Cardinals broke into laughter and refilled their glasses. They were all becoming restive under the monotonous persistence of the missionary.
“Listen,” said the host, “and I will relate a little story, while the Bishop does me the compliment to drink my champagne. I have a reason for asking this question which you have answered so finally. In my family house in Va- lencia I have a number of pictures by the great Spanish painters, collected chiefly by my great-grandfather, who was a man of perception in these things and, for his time, rich. His collection of El Greco is, I believe, quite the best in Spain. When my progenitor was an old man, along came one of these missionary priests from New Spain, begging. All missionaries from the Americas were in- veterate beggars, then as now, Bishop Ferrand. This Franciscan had considerable success, with his tales of
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DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
pious Indian converts and struggling missions. He came to visit at my great-grandfather’s house and conducted devotions in the absence of the Chaplain. He wheedled a good sum of money out of the old man, as well as vest- ments and linen and chalices—he would take anything— and he implored my grandfather to give him a painting from his great collection, for the ornamentation of his mission church among the Indians. My grandfather told him to choose from the gallery, believing the priest would covet most what he himself could best afford to spare. But not at all; the hairy Franciscan pounced upon one of the best in the collection; a young St. Francis in medita- tion, by El Greco, and the model for the saint was one of the very handsome Dukes of Albuquerque. My grand- father protested; tried to persuade the fellow that some picture of the Crucifixion, or a martyrdom, would appeal more strongly to his redskins. What would a St. Francis, of almost feminine beauty, mean to the scalp-takers?
“All in vain. The missionary turned upon his host with a reply which has become a saying in our family: “You refuse me this picture because it is a good picture. It is too good for God, but it is not too good for you’
“He carried off the painting. In my grandfather’s manu- script catalogue, under the number and title of the St.
Francis, is written: Given to fray Teodocio, for the glory of God, to enrich his mission chure
hat Pueblo de Cia, among the savages of New S pain.
“Tr is because of this lost treasure,
I2
Father Ferrand, that
PROLOGUE
I happened to have had some personal correspondence with the Bishop of Durango. I once wrote the facts to him fully. He replied to me that the mission at Cia was long ago destroyed and its furnishings scattered. Of course the painting may have been ruined ina pillage or massacre. On the other hand, it may still be hidden away in some crumbling sacristy or smoky wigwam. If your French priest had a discerning eye, now, and were sent to this Vicarate, he might keep my El Greco in mind.”
The Bishop shook his head. “No, I can’t promise you —I do not know. I have noticed that he is a man of severe and refined tastes, but he is very reserved. Down there the Indians do not dwell in wigwams, your Eminence,” he added gently.
“No matter, Father. I see your redskins through Feni- more Cooper, and I like them so. Now let us go to the terrace for our coffee and watch the evening come on.”
The Cardinal led his guests up the narrow stairway. The long gravelled terrace and its balustrade were blue as a lake in the dusky air. Both sun and shadows were gone. The folds of russet country were now violet. Waves of rose and gold throbbed up the sky from behind the dome of the Basilica.
As the churchmen walked up and down the promenade, watching the stars come out, their talk touched upon many matters, but they avoided politics, as men are apt to do in dangerous times. Not a word was spoken of the Lombard war, in which the Pope’s position was so anom-
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DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
alous. They talked instead of a new opera by young Verdi, which was being sung in Venice; of the case of a Spanish dancing-girl who had lately become a religious and was said to be working miracles in Andalusia. In this conversation the missionary took no part, nor could he even follow it with much interest. He asked himself whether he had been on the frontier so long that he had quite lost his taste for the talk of clever men. But before they separated for the night Maria de Allande spoke a word in his ear, in English.
“You are distrait, Father Ferrand. Are you wishing to unmake your new Bishop already? It is too late, Jean Marie Latour—am I right?”
BOOK T THE VICAR APOSTOLIC
BOOK ONE
THE VICAR APOSTOLIC
I THE CRUCIFORM TREE
One afternoon in the autumn of 1851 a solitary horse- man, followed by a pack-mule, was pushing through an arid stretch of country somewhere in central New Mexico. He had lost his way, and was trying to get back to the trail, with only his compass and his sense of direction for guides. The difficulty was that the country in which he found himself was so featureless—or rather, that it was crowded with features, all exactly alike. As far as he could see, on every side, the landscape was heaped up into mo- notonous red sand-hills, not much larger than haycocks, and very much the shape of haycocks. One could not have believed that in the number of square miles a man is able to sweep with the eye there could be so many uniform red hills. He had been riding among them since early morn- ing, and the look of the country had no more changed
17
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
than if he had stood still. He must have travelled through thirty miles of these conical red hills, winding his way in the narrow cracks between them, and he had begun to think that he would never see anything else. They were so exactly like one another that he seemed to be wander- ing in some geometrical nightmare; flattened cones, they were, more the shape of Mexican ovens than haycocks— yes, exactly the shape of Mexican ovens, red as brick- dust, and naked of vegetation except for small juniper trees. And the junipers, too, were the shape of Mexican ovens. Every conical hill was spotted with smaller cones of juniper, a uniform yellowish green, as the hills were a uniform red. The hills thrust out of the ground so thickly that they seemed to be pushing each other, elbowing each other aside, tipping each other over.
The blunted pyramid, repeated so many hundred times upon his retina and crowding down upon him in the heat, had confused the traveller, who was sensitive to the shape of things.
“Mais, c'est fantastique!” he muttered, closing his eyes to rest them from the intrusive omnipresence of the tri- angle.
When he opened his eyes again, his glance immediately fell upon one juniper which differed in shape from the others. It was not a thick-growing cone, but a naked, twisted trunk, perhaps ten feet high, and at the top it parted into two lateral, flat-lying branches,
with a little crest of green in the centre,
just above the cleavage. Living 18
THE VICAR APOSTOLIC
vegetation could not present more faithfully the form of the Cross.
The traveller dismounted, drew from his pocket a much worn book, and baring his head, knelt at the foot of the cruciform tree.
Under his buckskin riding-coat he wore a black vest and the cravat and collar of a churchman. A young priest, at his devotions; and a priest in a thousand, one knew at a glance. His bowed head was not that of an ordinary man,—it was built for the seat of a fine intelligence. His brow was open, generous, reflective, his features hand- some and somewhat severe. There was a singular elegance about the hands below the fringed cuffs of the buckskin jacket. Everything showed him to be a man of gentle birth—brave, sensitive, courteous. His manners, even when he was alone in the desert, were distinguished. He had a kind of courtesy toward himself, toward his beasts, toward the juniper tree before which he knelt, and the God whom he was addressing.
His devotions lasted perhaps half an hour, and when he rose he looked refreshed. He began talking to his mare in halting Spanish, asking whether she agreed with him that it would be better to push on, weary as she was, in hope of finding the trail. He had no water left in his canteen, and the horses had had none since yesterday morning. They had made a dry camp in these hills last night. The animals were almost at the end of their endurance, but they would not recuperate until they got water, and it
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DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
seemed best to spend their last strength in searching for it.
On a long caravan trip across Texas this man had had some experience of thirst, as the party with which he trav- elled was several times put on a meagre water ration for days together. But he had not suffered then as he did now. Since morning he had had a feeling of illness; the taste of fever in his mouth, and alarming seizures of vertigo. As these conical hills pressed closer and closer upon him, he began to wonder whether his long wayfaring from the mountains of Auvergne were possibly to end here. He reminded himself of that cry, wrung from his Saviour on the Cross, “Pai soif?” Of all our Lord’s physical suffer- ings, only one, “I thirst,” rose to His lips. Empowered by long training, the young priest blotted himself out of his own consciousness and meditated upon the anguish of his Lord. The Passion of Jesus became for him the only reality; the need of his own body was but a part of that conception.
His mare stumbled, breaking his mood of contempla- tion. He was sorrier for his beasts than for himself. He, supposed to be the intelligence of the party, had got the poor animals into this interminable desert of ovens. He was afraid he had been absent-minded, had been ponder- ing his problem instead of heeding the way. His problem was how to recover a Bishopric. He was a Vicar Apos- tolic, lacking a Vicarate. He was thrust ont; his flock would have none of him,
20
THE VICAR APOSTOLIC
_ The traveller was Jean Marie Latour, consecrated Vicar Apostolic of New Mexico and Bishop of Agathonica m partibus at Cincinnati a year ago—and ever since then he had been trying to reach his Vicarate. No one in Cincin- nati could tell him how to get to New Mexico—no one had ever been there. Since young Father Latour’s arrival in America, a railroad had been built through from New York to Cincinnati; but there it ended. New Mexico lay in the middle of a dark continent. The Ohio merchants knew of two routes only. One was the Santa Fé trail from St. Louis, but at that time it was very dangerous because of Comanche Indian raids. His friends advised Father Latour to go down the river to New Orleans, thence by boat to Galveston, across Texas to San Antonio, and to wind up into New Mexico along the Rio Grande valley. This he had done, but with what misadventures!
His steamer was wrecked and sunk in the Galveston harbour, and he had lost all his worldly possessions ex- cept his books, which he saved at the risk of his life. He crossed Texas with a traders’ caravan, and approaching San Antonio he was hurt in jumping from an overturning wagon, and had to lie for three months in the crowded house of a poor Irish family, waiting for his injured leg to get strong.
It was nearly a year after he had embarked upon the Mississippi that the young Bishop, at about the sunset hour of a summer afternoon, at last beheld the old settle- ment toward which he had been journeying so long: The
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DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
wagon train had been going all day through a greasewood plain, when late in the afternoon the teamsters began shouting that over yonder was the Villa. Across the level, Father Latour could distinguish low brown shapes, like earthworks, lying at the base of wrinkled green moun- tains with bare tops,—wave-like mountains, resembling billows beaten up from a flat sea by a heavy gale; and their green was of two colours—aspen and evergreen, not intermingled but lying in solid areas of light and dark. As the wagons went forward and the sun sank lower, a sweep of red carnelian-coloured hills lying at the foot of the mountains came into view; they curved like two arms about a depression in the plain; and in that depression was Santa Fé, at last! A thin, wavering adobe town...a green plaza . . . at one end a church with two earthen towers that rose high above the flatness. The long main street began at the church, the town seemed to flow from it like a stream from a spring. The church towers, and all the low adobe houses, were rose colour in that light,—a little darker in tone than the amphitheatre of red hills behind; and peri- odically the plumes of poplars flashed like gracious accent marks,— inclining and recovering themselves in the wind. The young Bishop was not alone in the exaltation of ase hour; beside him rode Father J oseph Vaillant, his n a. who had made this long pilgrimage with s ared his dangers. The two rode into Santa Fé together, claiming it for the glory of God. * kx x 22
THE VICAR APOSTOLIC
How, then, had Father Latour come to be here in the sand-hills, many miles from his seat, unattended, far out of his way and with no knowledge of how to get back to it?
On his arrival at Santa Fé, this was what had happened: The Mexican priests there had refused to recognize his authority. They disclaimed any knowledge of a Vicarate Apostolic, or a Bishop of Agathonica. They said they were under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Durango, and had received no instructions to the contrary. If Father Latour was to be their Bishop, where were his credentials? A parchment and letters, he knew, had been sent to the Bishop of Durango, but these had evidently got no farther. There was no postal service in this part of the world; the quickest and surest way to communicate with the Bishop of Durango was to go to him. So, having trav- elled for nearly a year to reach Santa Fé, Father Latour left it after a few weeks, and set off alone on horseback to ride down into Old Mexico and back, a journey of full three thousand miles.
He had been warned that there were many trails leading off the Rio Grande road, and that a stranger might easily mistake his way. For the first few days he had been cau- tious and watchful. Then he must have grown careless and turned into some purely local trail. When he realized that he was astray, his canteen was already empty and his horses seemed too exhausted to retrace their steps. He had persevered in this sandy track, which grew ever fainter, reasoning that it must lead somewhere.
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DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
All at once Father Latour thought he felt a change in the body of his mare. She lifted her head for the first time ina long while, and seemed to redistribute her weight upon her legs. The pack-mule behaved in a similar man- ner, and both quickened their pace. Was it possible they scented water?
Nearly an hour went by, and then, winding between two hills that were like all the hundreds they had passed, the two beasts whinnied simultaneously. Below them, in the midst of that wavy ocean of sand, was a green thread of verdure and a running stream. This ribbon in the des- ert seemed no wider than a man could throw a stone,— and it was greener than anything Latour had ever seen, even in his own greenest corner of the Old World. But for the quivering of the hide on his mare’s neck and shoulders, he might have thought this a vision, a delusion of thirst.
Running water, clover fields, cottonwoods, acacias, little adobe houses with brilliant gardens, a boy driving a flock of white goats toward the stream,—that was what the young Bishop saw.
A few moments later, when he was struggling with his horses, trying to keep them from overdrinking, a young girl with a black shawl over her head came running toward him. He thought he had never seen a kindlier face. Her greeting was that of a Christian.
“Ave Maria Purisima, Señor. Whence do you come?”
“Blessed child,” he replied in Spanish, “I am a priest who has lost his way. I am famished for water.”
24
THE VICAR APOSTOLIC
“A priest?” she cried, “that is not possible! Yet I look at you, and it is true. Such a thing has never happened to us before; it must be in answer to my father’s prayers. Run, Pedro, and tell father and Salvatore.”
2 HIDDEN WATER
An hour later, as darkness came over the sand-hills, the young Bishop was seated at supper in the mother- house of this Mexican settlement—which, he learned, was appropriately called Agua Secreta, Hidden Water. At the table with him were his host, an old man called Benito, the oldest son, and two grandsons. The old man was a widower, and his daughter, Josepha, the girl who had run to meet the Bishop at the stream, was his house- keeper. Their supper was a pot of frijoles cooked with meat, bread and goat’s milk, fresh cheese and ripe apples.
From the moment he entered this room with its thick whitewashed adobe walls, Father Latour had felt a kind of peace about it. In its bareness and simplicity there was something comely, as there was about the serious girl who had placed their food before them and who now stood in the shadows against the wall, her eager eyes fixed upon his face. He found himself very much at home with the four dark-headed men who sat beside him in the candle-
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DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
light. Their manners were gentle, their voices low and agreeable. When he said grace before meat, the men had knelt on the floor beside the table. The grandfather de- clared that the Blessed Virgin must have led the Bishop from his path and brought him here to baptize the children and to sanctify the marriages. Their settlement was little known, he said. They had no papers for their land and were afraid the Americans might take it away from them. There was no one in their settlement who could read or write. Salvatore, his oldest son, had gone all the way to Albuquerque to find a wife, and had married there. But the priest had charged him twenty pesos, and that was half of all he had saved to buy furniture and glass win- dows for his house. His brothers and cousins, discour- aged by his experience, had taken wives without the marriage sacrament.
In answer to the Bishop’s questions, they told him the simple story of their lives. They had here all they needed to make them happy. They spun and wove from the fleece of their flocks, raised their own corn and wheat and to- bacco, dried their plums and apricots for winter. Once a year the boys took the grain up to Albuquerque to have A e and bought such luxuries as sugar and coffee. a ie and when sugar was high they sweetened aes ae a did not know in what year his grand- eee = ere, coming from Chihuahua with all
“carts. “But it was soon after the time
when the French killed their king. My grandfather had 26
THE VICAR APOSTOLIC
heard talk of that before he left home, and used to tell us boys about it when he was an old man.”
“Perhaps you have guessed that I am a Frenchman,” said Father Latour.
No, they had not, but they felt sure he was not an American. José, the elder grandson, had been watching the visitor uncertainly. He was a handsome boy, with a triangle of black hair hanging over his rather sullen eyes. He now spoke for the first time.
“They say at Albuquerque that now we are all Ameri- cans, but that is not true, Padre. I will never be an Ameri- can. They are infidels.”
“Not all, my son. I have lived among Americans in the north for ten years, and I found many devout Catho- lics.”
The young man shook his head. “They destroyed our churches when they were fighting us, and stabled their horses in them. And now they will take our religion away from us. We want our own ways and our own religion.”
Father Latour began to tell them about his friendly re- lations with Protestants in Ohio, but they had not room in their minds for two ideas; there was one Church, and the rest of the world was infidel. One thing they could understand; that he had here in his saddle-bags his vest- ments, the altar stone, and all the equipment for cele- brating the Mass; and that to-morrow morning, after Mass, he would hear confessions, baptize, and sanctify marriages.
27
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
After supper Father Latour took up a candle and began to examine the holy images on the shelf over the fire- place. The wooden figures of the saints, found in even the poorest Mexican houses, always interested him. He had never yet seen two alike. These over Benito’s fire- place had come in the ox-carts from Chihuahua nearly sixty years ago. They had been carved by some devout soul, and brightly painted, though the colours had soft- ened with time, and they were dressed in cloth, like dolls. They were much more to his taste than the factory-made plaster images in his mission churches in Ohio—more like the homely stone carvings on the front of old parish churchesin Auvergne. The wooden Virgin wasa sorrowing mother indeed,—long and stiff and severe, very long from the neck to the waist, even longer from waist to feet, like some of the rigid mosaics of the Eastern Church, She was dressed in black, with a white apron, and a black reboso over her head, like a Mexican woman of the poor. At her tight was St. Joseph, and at her left a fierce little eques- trian figure, a saint wearing the costume of a Mexican ranchero, velvet trousers richly embroidered and wide at the ankle, velvet jacket and silk shirt, and a high-crowned, broad-brimmed Mexican sombrero. He was attached to his fat horse by a wooden pivot driven through the saddle,
The younger grandson saw the priest’s interest in this E That, he said, “is my name saint, Santiago.”
» Yes; Santiago. He was a missionary, like me. In 28
THE VICAR APOSTOLIC
our country we call him St. Jacques, and he carries a staff and a wallet—but here he would need a horse, surely.” - The boy looked at him in surprise. “But he is the saint of horses. Isn’t he that in your country?”
The Bishop shook his head. “No. I know nothing about that. How is he the saint of horses?”
“He blesses the mares and makes them fruitful. Even the Indians believe that. They know that if they neglect to pray to Santiago for a few years, the foals do not come right.”
A little later, after his devotions, the young Bishop lay down in Benito’s deep feather-bed, thinking how different was this night from his anticipation of it. He had expected to make a dry camp in the wilderness, and to sleep under a juniper tree, like the Prophet, tormented by thirst. But here he lay in comfort and safety, with love for his fellow creatures flowing like peace about his heart. If Father Vaillant were here, he would say, “A miracle”; that the Holy Mother, to whom he had addressed himself before the cruciform tree, had led him hither. And it was a miracle, Father Latour knew that. But his dear Joseph must always have the miracle very direct and spectacular, not with Nature, but against it. He would almost be able to tell the colour of the mantle Our Lady wore when She took the mare by the bridle back yonder among the junipers and led her out of the pathless sand-hills, as the angel led the ass on the Flight into Egypt.
* * * 29
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
In the late afternoon of the following day the Bishop was walking alone along the banks of the life-giving stream, reviewing in his mind the events of the morning. Benito and his daughter had made an altar before the sorrowful wooden Virgin, and placed upon it candles and flowers. Every soul in the village, except Salvatore’s sick wife, had come to the Mass. He had performed marriages and baptisms and heard confessions and confirmed until noon. Then came the christening feast. José had killed a kid the night before, and immediately after her confirma- tion Josepha slipped away to help her sisters-in-law roast © it. When Father Latour asked her to give him his portion without chili, the girl inquired whether it was more pious to eat it like that. He hastened to explain that Frenchmen, as a rule, do not like high seasoning, lest she should here- after deprive herself of her favourite condiment.
After the feast the sleepy children were taken home, the men gathered in the plaza to smoke under the great cot- tonwood trees. The Bishop, feeling a need of solitude, had gone forth to walk, firmly refusing an escort. On his way he passed the earthen thrashing-floor, where these people beat out their grain and winnowed it in the wind, like the Children of Israel. He heard a frantic bleating behind him, and was overtaken by Pedro with the great flock of goats, indignant at their day’s confinement, and wild to be in the fringe of pasture along the hills. They leaped the stream like arrows speeding from the bow, and regarded the Bishop as they passed him with their mock-
30
THE VICAR APOSTOLIC
ing, humanly intelligent smile. The young bucks were light and elegant in figure, with their pointed chins and polished tilted horns. There was great variety in their faces, but in nearly all something supercilious and sar- donic. The angoras had long silky hair of a dazzling whiteness. As they leaped through the sunlight they brought to mind the chapter in the Apocalypse, about the whiteness of them that were washed in the blood of the Lamb. The young Bishop smiled at his mixed theol- ogy. But though the goat had always been the symbol of pagan lewdness, he told himself that their fleece had warmed many a good Christian, and their rich milk nour- ished sickly children.
About a mile above the village he came upon the water- head, a spring overhung by the sharp-leafed variety of cottonwood called water willow. All about it crowded the oven-shaped hills,—nothing to hint of water until it rose miraculously out of the parched and thirsty sea of sand. Some subterranean stream found an outlet here, was re- leased from darkness. The result was grass and trees and flowers and human life; household order and hearths from which the smoke of burning pifion logs rose like incense to Heaven.
The Bishop sat a long time by the spring, while the declining sun poured its beautifying light over those low, rose-tinted houses and bright gardens. The old grand- father had shown him arrow-heads and corroded medals, and a sword hilt, evidently Spanish, that he had found in
3I
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP the earth near the water-head. This spot had been a refuge
for humanity long before these Mexicans had come upon it. It was older than history, like those well-heads in his own country where the Roman settlers had set up the image of a river goddess, and later the Christian priests had planted a cross. This settlement was his Bishopric in miniature; hundreds of square miles of thirsty desert, then a spring, a village, old men trying to remember their catechism to teach their grandchildren. The Faith planted by the Spanish friars and watered with their blood was not dead; it awaited only the toil of the husbandman. He was not troubled about the revolt in Santa Fé, or the powerful old native priest who led it—Father Martinez, of Taos, who had ridden over from his parish expressly to receive the new Vicar and to drive him away. He was rather terrifying, that old priest, with his big head, vio- lent Spanish face, and shoulders like a buffalo; but the day of his tyranny was almost over.
3 THE BISHOP CHEZ LUI
Tt was the late afternoon of Christmas Day, and the Bishop sat at his desk writing letters. Since his return to Santa Fé his official correspondence had b the closely-written sheets over which h thoughtful smile were not to go to Mo
32
een heavy; but e bent with a nsignori, or to
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Archbishops, or to the heads of religious houses,—but to France, to Auvergne, to his own little town; to a certain grey, winding street, paved with cobbles and shaded by tall chestnuts on which, even to-day, some few brown leaves would be clinging, or dropping one by one, to be caught in the cold green ivy on the walls.
The Bishop had returned from his long horseback trip into Mexico only nine days ago. At Durango the old Mexican prelate there had, after some delay, delivered to him the documents that defined his Vicarate, and Father Latour rode back the fifteen hundred miles to Santa Fé through the sunny days of early winter. On his arrival he found amity instead of enmity awaiting him. Father Vail- lant had already endeared himself to the people. The Mex- ican priest who was in charge of the pro-cathedral had gracefully retired—gone to visit his family in Old Mexico, and carried his effects along with him. Father Vaillant had taken possession of the priest’s house, and with the help of carpenters and the Mexican women of the parish had put it in order. The Yankee traders and the military Com- mandant at Fort Marcy had sent generous contributions of bedding and blankets and odd pieces of furniture.
The Episcopal residence was an old adobe house, much out of repair, but with possibilities of comfort. Father Latour had chosen for his study a room at one end of the wing. There he sat, as this afternoon of Christmas Day faded into evening. It was a long room of an agreeable shape. The thick clay walls had been finished on the in-
33
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
side by the deft palms of Indian women, and had that ir- regular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand. There was a reassuring solidity and depth about those walls, rounded at door-sills and win- dow-sills, rounded in wide wings about the corner fire- place. The interior had been newly whitewashed in the Bishop’s absence, and the flicker of the fire threw a rosy glow over the wavy surfaces, never quite evenly flat, never a dead white, for the ruddy colour of the clay underneath gave a warm tone to the lime wash. The ceil- ing was made of heavy cedar beams, overlaid by aspen saplings, all of one size, lying close together like the ribs in corduroy and clad in their ruddy inner skins. The earth floor was covered with thick Indian blankets; two blan- kets, very old, and beautiful in design and colour, were hung on the walls like tapestries.
On either side of the fire-place plastered recesses were let into the wall. In one, narrow and arched, stood the Bishop’s crucifix. The other was square, with a carved wooden door, like a grill, and within it lay a few rare and beautiful books. The rest of the Bishop’s library was on open shelves at one end of the room.
The furniture of the house Father Vaillant had bought from the departed Mexican priest. It was heavy and some- what clumsy, but not unsightly. All the wood used in making tables and bedsteads was hewn from tree boles with the ax or hatchet. Even the thick planks on which the Bishop’s theological books rested were ax-dressed. There
34
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was not at that time a turning-lathe or a saw-mill in all northern New Mexico. The native carpenters whittled out chair rungs and table legs, and fitted them together with wooden pins instead of iron nails. Wooden chests were used in place of dressers with drawers, and sometimes these were beautifully carved, or covered with decorated leather. The desk at which the Bishop sat writing was an importation, a walnut “secretary” of American make (sent down by one of the officers of the Fort at Father Vaillant’s suggestion). His silver candlesticks he had brought from France long ago. They were given to him by a beloved aunt when he was ordained.
The young Bishop’s pen flew over the paper, leaving a trail of fine, finished French script behind, in violet ink.
“My new study, dear brother, as I write, is full of the delicious fragrance of the pifion logs burning in my fire- place. (We use this kind of cedar-wood altogether for fuel, and it is highly aromatic, yet delicate. At our mean- est tasks we have a perpetual odour of incense about us.) I wish that you, and my dear sister, could look in upon this scene of comfort and peace. We missionaries wear a frock-coat and wide-brimmed hat all day, you know, and look like American traders. What a pleasure to come home at night and put on my old cassock! I feel more like a priest then—for so much of the day I must be a ‘busi- ness man’!—and, for some reason, more like a French- man. All day I am an American in speech and thought— yes, in heart, too. The kindness of the American traders,
35
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
and especially of the military officers at the Fort, com- mands more than a superficial loyalty. I mean to help the officers at their task here. I can assist them more than they realize. The Church can do more than the Fort to make these poor Mexicans ‘good Americans.’ And it is for the people’s good; there is no other way in which they can better their condition.
“But this is not the day to write you of my duties or my purposes. To-night we are exiles, happy ones, thinking of home. Father Joseph has sent away our Mexican woman, —he will make a good cook of her in time, but to-night he is preparing our Christmas dinner himself. I had thought he would be worn out to-day, for he has been conducting a Novena of High Masses, as is the custom here before Christmas. After the Novena, and the midnight Mass last night, I supposed he would be willing to rest to-day; but not a bit of it. You know his motto, ‘Rest in action.’ I brought him a bottle of olive-oil on my horse all the way from Durango (I say ‘olive-oil,’ because here ‘oil’ means something to grease the wheels of wagons!), and he is making some sort of cooked salad. We have no green vegetables here in winter, and no one seems ever to have heard of that blessed plant, the lettuce. J oseph finds it hard to do without salad-oil, he always had it in Ohio, though it was a great extravagance. He has been in the
kitchen all afternoon. There is only
an open fire-place for cooking,
and an earthen roasting-oven out in the court-yard. But he has never failed me in anything yet; 36
THE VICAR APOSTOLIC
and I think I can promise you that to-night two French- men will sit down to a good dinner and drink your health.”
The Bishop laid down his pen and lit his two candles with a splinter from the fire, then stood dusting his fingers by the deep-set window, looking out at the pale blue dark- ening sky. The evening-star hung above the amber after- glow, so soft, so brilliant that she seemed to bathe in her own silver light. Ave Maris Stella, the song which one of his friends at the Seminary used to intone so beautifully; humming it softly he returned to his desk and was just dipping his pen in the ink when the door opened, and a voice said,
“Monseigneur est servi! Alors, Jean, veux-tu apporter les bougies?” £
The Bishop carried the candles into the dining-room, where the table was laid and Father Vaillant was changing his cook’s apron for his cassock. Crimson from standing over an open fire, his rugged face was even homelier than usual—though one of the first things a stranger decided upon meeting Father Joseph was that the Lord had made few uglier men. He was short, skinny, bow-legged from a life on horseback, and his countenance had little to recom- mend it but kindliness and vivacity. He looked old, though he was then about forty. His skin was hardened and seamed by exposure to weather in a bitter climate, his neck scrawny and wrinkled like an old man’s. A bold, blunt-tipped nose, positive chin, a very large mouth,—
37
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
the lips thick and succulent but never loose, never re- laxed, always stiffened by effort or working with excite- ment. His hair, sunburned to the shade of dry hay, had originally been tow-coloured; “Blanchet” (“Whitey”) he was always called at the Seminary. Even his eyes were near-sighted, and of such a pale, watery blue as to be un- impressive. There was certainly nothing in his outer case to suggest the fierceness and fortitude and fire of the man, and yet even the thick-blooded Mexican half-breeds knew his quality at once. If the Bishop returned to find Santa Fé friendly to him, it was because everybody be- lieved in Father Vaillant—homely, real, persistent, with the driving power of a dozen men in his poorly-built body.
On coming into the dining-room, Bishop Latour placed his candlesticks over the fire-place, since there were al- ready six upon the table, illuminating the brown soup- pot. After they had stood for a moment in prayer, Father Joseph lifted the cover and ladled the soup into the plates, a dark onion soup with croutons. The Bishop tasted it critically and smiled at his companion. After the spoon had travelled to his lips a few times, he put it down and leaning back in his chair remarked,
“Think of it, Blanchet; in all this vast country between the Mississippi and the Pacific Ocean not another human bein this.”
“Not unless he is a Frenchman,” said Father J oseph.
38
» there is probably g who could make a soup like
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He had tucked a napkin over the front of his cassock and was losing no time in reflection.
“J am not deprecating your individual talent, Joseph,” the Bishop continued, “but, when one thinks of it, a soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.”
Father Joseph frowned intently at the earthen pot in the middle of the table. His pale, near-sighted eyes had al- ways the look of peering into distance. “C’est ça, c'est vrai,” he murmured. “But how,” he exclaimed as he filled the Bishop’s plate again, “how can a man make a proper soup without leeks, that king of vegetables? We cannot go on eating onions for ever.”
After carrying away the soupiére, he brought in the roast chicken and pommes sautées. “And salad, Jean,” he continued as he began to carve. “Are we to eat dried beans and roots for the rest of our lives? Surely we must find time to make a garden. Ah, my garden at Sandusky! And you could snatch me away from it! You will admit that you never ate better lettuces in France. And my vineyard; a natural habitat for the vine, that. I tell you, the shores of Lake Erie will be covered with vineyards one day. I envy the man who is drinking my wine. Ah well, that is a missionary’s life; to plant where another shall reap.”
As this was Christmas Day, the two friends were speak- ing in their native tongue. For years they had made it a
39
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
practice to speak English together, except upon very special occasions, and of late they conversed in Spanish, in which they both needed to gain fluency.
“And yet sometimes you used to chafe a little at your dear Sandusky and its comforts,” the Bishop reminded him—“to say that you would end a home-staying parish priest, after all.”
“Of course, one wants to eat one’s cake and have it, as they say in Ohio. But no farther, Jean. This is far enough. Do not drag me any farther.” Father Joseph began gently to coax the cork from a bottle of red wine with his fingers. “This I begged for your dinner at the hacienda where I went to baptize the baby on St. Thomas’s Day. It is not easy to separate these rich Mexicans from their French wine. They know its worth.” He poured a few drops and tried it. “A slight taste of the cork; they do not know how to keep it properly. However, it is quite good enough for missionaries.”
“You ask me not to drag you any farther, Joseph. I wish,” Bishop Latour leaned back in his chair and locked his hands together beneath his chin, “I wish I knew how far this is! Does anyone know the extent of this diocese, or of this territory? The Commandant at the Fort seems as much in the dark as I. He says I can get some informa- u from the scout, Kit Carson, who lives at Taos.”
“Don’t begin worrying about the diocese, Jean. For the present, Santa Fé is the diocese. Establish order at home. To-morrow I will have a reckoning with the
40
THE VICAR APOSTOLIC
church-wardens, who allowed that band of drunken cow- boys to come in to the midnight Mass and defile the font. There is enough to do here. Festina lente. I have made a resolve not to go more than three days’ journey from Santa Fé for one year.”
The Bishop smiled and shook his head. “And when you were at the Seminary, you made a resolve to lead a life of contemplation.”
A light leaped into Father Joseph’s homely face. “I have not yet renounced that hope. One day you will re- lease me, and I will return to some religious house in France and end my days in devotion to the Holy Mother. For the time being, it is my destiny to serve Her in action. But this is far enough, Jean.”
The Bishop again shook his head and murmured, “Who knows how far?”
The wiry little priest whose life was to be a succession of mountain ranges, pathless deserts, yawning canyons and swollen rivers, who was to carry the Cross into ter- ritories yet unknown and unnamed, who would wear down mules and horses and scouts and stage-drivers, to- night looked apprehensively at his superior and repeated, “No more, Jean. This is far enough.” Then making haste to change the subject, he said briskly, “A bean salad was the best I could do for you; but with onion, and just a suspicion of salt pork, it is not so bad.”
Over the compote of dried plums they fell to talking of the great yellow ones that grew in the old Latour garden
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DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
at home. Their thoughts met in that tilted cobble street, winding down a hill, with the uneven garden walls and tall horse-chestnuts on either side; a lonely street after nightfall, with soft street lamps shaped like lanterns at the darkest turnings. At the end of it was the church where the Bishop made his first Communion, with a grove of flat-cut plane trees in front, under which the market was held on Tuesdays and Fridays.
While they lingered over these memories—an indul- gence they seldom permitted themselves—the two mis- sionaries were startled by a volley of rifle-shots and blood- curdling yells without, and the galloping of horses. The Bishop half rose, but Father Joseph reassured him with a shrug.
“Do not discompose yourself. The same thing hap- pened here on the eve of All Souls’ Day. A band of drunken cowboys, like those who came into the church last night, go out to the pueblo and get the Tesuque In- dian boys drunk, and then they ride in to serenade the soldiers at the Fort in this manner.”
4 A BELL AND A MIRACLE On the morning after the Bishop’s return from Du- rango, after his first night in his Episcopal residence, he had a pleasant awakening from sleep. He had ridden into 42
THE VICAR APOSTOLIC
the court-yard after nightfall, having changed horses at a rancho and pushed on nearly sixty miles in order to reach home. Consequently he slept late the next morning —did not awaken until six o’clock, when he heard the Angelus ringing. He recovered consciousness slowly, unwilling to let go of a pleasing delusion that he was in Rome. Still half believing that he was lodged near St. John Lateran, he yet heard every stroke of the Ave Maria bell, marvel- ling to hear it rung correctly (nine quick strokes in all, divided into threes, with an interval between); and from a bell with beautiful tone. Full, clear, with something bland and suave, each note floated through the air like a globe of silver. Before the nine strokes were done Rome faded, and behind it he sensed something Eastern, with palm trees,—Jerusalem, perhaps, though he had never been there. Keeping his eyes closed, he cherished for a moment this sudden, pervasive sense of the East. Once before he had been carried out of the body thus to a place far away. It had happened in a street in New Orleans. He had turned a corner and come upon an old woman with a basket of yellow flowers; sprays of yellow sending out a honey-sweet perfume. Mimosa—but before he could think of the name he was overcome by a feeling of place, was dropped, cassock and all, into a garden in the south of France where he had been sent one winter in his child- hood to recover from an illness. And now this silvery bell note had carried him farther and faster than sound could travel. 43
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
When he joined Father Vaillant at coffee, that impetu- ous man who could never keep a secret asked him anx- iously whether he had heard anything.
“I thought I heard the Angelus, Father Joseph, but my reason tells me that only a long sea voyage could bring me within sound of such a bell.”
“Not at all,” said Father Joseph briskly. “I found that remarkable bell here, in the basement of old San Miguel. They tell me it has been here a hundred years or mote. There is no church tower in the place strong enough to hold it—it is very thick and must weigh close upon eight hundred pounds. But I had a scaffolding built in the churchyard, and with the help of oxen we raised it and got it swung on cross-beams. I taught a Mexican boy to ting it properly against your return.”
“But how could it have come here? It is Spanish, I suppose?”
“Yes, the inscription is in Spanish, to St. J oseph, and the date is 1356. It must have been brought up from Mex- ico City in an ox-cart. A heroic undertaking, certainly. Nobody knows where it was cast. But they do tell a story about it: that it was pledged to St. Joseph in the wars with the Moors, and that the people of some besieged city brought all their plate and silver and gold ornaments and threw them in with the baser metals. There is cer- tainly a good deal of silver in the beil, nothing else would account for its tone.”
Father Latour reflected. “And the silver of the Span-
44
THE VICAR APOSTOLIC
iards was really Moorish, was it not? If not actually of Moorish make, copied from their design. The Spaniards knew nothing about working silver except as they learned it from the Moors.”
“What are you doing, Jean? Trying to make my bell out an infidel?” Father Joseph asked impatiently.
The Bishop smiled. “I am trying to account for the fact that when I heard it this morning it struck me at once as something oriental. A learned Scotch Jesuit in Montreal told me that our first bells, and the introduction of the bell in the service all over Europe, originally came from the East. He said the Templars brought the Angelus back from the Crusades, and it is really an adaptation of a Moslem custom.”
Father Vaillant sniffed. “I noticed that scholars always manage to dig out something belittling,” he complained.
“Belittling? I should say the reverse. I am glad to think there is Moorish silver in your bell. When we first came here, the one good workman we found in Santa Fé was a silversmith. The Spaniards handed on their skill to the Mexicans, and the Mexicans have taught the Navajos to work silver; but it all came from the Moors.”
“I am no scholar, as you know,” said Father Vaillant rising. “And this morning we have many practical affairs to occupy us. I have promised that you will give an audi- ence to a good old man, a native priest from the Indian mission at Santa Clara, who is returning from Mexico. He has just been on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of
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DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
Guadalupe and has been much edified. He would like to tell you the story of his experience. It seems that ever since he was ordained he has desired to visit the shrine. During your absence I have found how particularly precious is that shrine to all Catholics in New Mexico. They regard it as the one absolutely authenticated appearance of the Blessed Virgin in the New World, and a witness of Her affection for Her Church on this continent.”
The Bishop went into his study, and Father Vaillant brought in Padre Escolastico Herrera, a man of nearly seventy, who had been forty years in the ministry, and had just accomplished the pious desire of a lifetime. His mind was still full of the sweetness of his late experience. He was so rapt that nothing else interested him. He asked anxiously whether perhaps the Bishop would have more leisure to attend to him later in the day. But Father Latour placed a chair for him and told him to proceed,
The old man thanked him for the privilege of being seated. Leaning forward, with his hands locked between his knees, he told the whole story of the miraculous ap- pearance, both because it was so dear to his heart, and because he was sure that no “American” have heard of the occurrence as it was, th
all the details were well known and two gifts to the shrine,
Bishop would ough at Rome Popes had sent
On Saturday, December
oth, in the year 1521. a oor neophyte of the monaster A P
y of St. James was hurrying 46
THE VICAR APOSTOLIC
down Tapeyac hill to attend Mass in the City of Mexico. His name was Juan Diego and he was fifty-five years old. When he was half way down the hill a light shone in his path, and the Mother of God appeared to him as a young woman of great beauty, clad in blue and gold. She greeted him by name and said:
“Juan, seek out thy Bishop and bid him build a church in my honour on the spot where I now stand. Go then, and I will bide here and await thy return.”
Brother Juan ran into the City and straight to the Bishop’s palace, where he reported the matter. The Bishop was Zumarraga, a Spaniard. He questioned the monk severely and told him he should have required a sign of the Lady to assure him that she was indeed the Mother of God and not some evil spirit. He dismissed the poor brother harshly and set an attendant to watch his actions.
Juan went forth very downcast and repaired to the house of his uncle, Bernardino, who was sick of a fever. The two succeeding days he spent in caring for this aged man who seemed at the point of death. Because of the Bishop’s reproof he had fallen into doubt, and did not return to the spot where the Lady said She would await him. On Tuesday he left the City to go back to his mon- astery to fetch medicines for Bernardino, but he avoided the place where he had seen the vision and went by an- other way.
Again he saw a light in his path and the Virgin appeared
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DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
to him as before, saying, “Juan, why goest thou by this way?”
Weeping, he told Her that the Bishop had distrusted his report, and that he had been employed in caring for his uncle, who was sick unto death. The Lady spoke to him with all comfort, telling him that his uncle would be healed within the hour, and that he should return to Bishop Zumarraga and bid him build a church where She had first appeared to him. It must be called the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, after Her dear shrine of that name in Spain. When Brother Juan replied to Her that the Bishop required a sign, She said: “Go up on the rocks yonder, and gather roses.”
Though it was December and not the season for roses, he ran up among the rocks and found such roses as he had never seen before. He gathered them until he had filled his zi/ma. The tilma was a mantle worn only by the very poor,—a wretched garment loosely woven of coarse vege- table fibre and sewn down the middle. When he returned to the apparition, She bent over the flowers and took pains to arrange them, then closed the ends of the tima together and said to him:
“Go now, and do not open your mantle until you Open it before your Bishop.”
Juan sped into the City and gained admission to the Bishop, who was in council with his Vicar.
“Your Grace,” he said, “the Blessed Lady who ap- peared to me has sent you these roses for a sign.”
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At this he held up one end of his zi/ma and let the roses fall in profusion to the floor. To his astonishment, Bishop Zumarraga and his Vicar instantly fell upon their knees among the flowers. On the inside of his poor mantle was a painting of the Blessed Virgin, in robes of blue and rose and gold, exactly as She had appeared to him upon the hill- side.
A shrine was built to contain this miraculous portrait, which since that day has been the goal of countless pil- grimages and has performed many miracles.
Of this picture Padre Escolastico had much to say: he affirmed that it was of marvellous beauty, rich with gold, and the colours as pure and delicate as the tints of early morning. Many painters had visited the shrine and mar- velled that paint could be laid at all upon such poor and coarse material. In the ordinary way of nature, the flimsy mantle would have fallen to pieces long ago. The Padre modestly presented Bishop Latour and Father Joseph with little medals he had brought from the shrine; on one side a relief of the miraculous portrait, on the other an in- scription: Non fecit taliter omni nationi. (She hath not dealt so with any nation.)
Father Vaillant was deeply stirred by the priest’s re- cital, and after the old man had gone he declared to the Bishop that he meant himself to make a pilgrimage to this shrine at the earliest opportunity.
“What a priceless thing for the poor converts of a
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savage country!” he exclaimed, wiping his glasses, which were clouded by his strong feeling. “All these poor Cath- olics who have been so long without instruction have at least the reassurance of that visitation. It is a household word with them that their Blessed Mother revealed Her- self in their own country, to a poor convert. Doctrine is well enough for the wise, Jean; but the miracle is some- thing we can hold in our hands and love.”
Father Vaillant began pacing restlessly up and down as he spoke, and the Bishop watched him, musing. It was just this in his friend that was dear to him. “Where there is great love there are always miracles,” he said at length. “One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”
BOOK II MISSIONARY JOURNEYS
BOOK TWO
MISSIONARY JOURNEYS
I THE WHITE MULES
In mid-March, Father Vaillant was on the road, return- ing from a missionary journey to Albuquerque. He was to stop at the rancho of a rich Mexican, Manuel Lujon, to marry his men and maid servants who were living in cons cubinage, and to baptize the children. There he would spend the night. To-morrow or the day after he would go on to Santa Fé, halting by the way at the Indian pueblo of Santo Domingo to hold service. There was a fine old mis- sion church at Santo Domingo, but the Indians were of a haughty and suspicious disposition. He had said Mass there on his way to Albuquerque, nearly a week ago. By dint of canvassing from house to house, and offering medals and religious colour prints to all who came to church, he had got together a considerable congregation. It was a large and prosperous pueblo, set among clean
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sand-hills, with its rich irrigated farm lands lying just below, in the valley of the Rio Grande. His congregation was quiet, dignified, attentive. They sat on the earth floor, wrapped in their best blankets, repose in every line of their strong, stubborn backs. He harangued them in such Spanish as he could command, and they listened with re- spect. But bring their children to be baptized, they would not. The Spaniards had treated them very badly long ago, and they had been meditating upon their grievance for many generations. Father Vaillant had not baptized one infant there, but he meant to stop to-morrow and try again. Then back to his Bishop, provided he could get his horse up La Bajada Hill.
He had bought his horse from a Yankee trader and had been woefully deceived. One week’s journey of from twenty to thirty miles a day had shown the beast up for a wind-broken wreck. Father Vaillant’s mind was full of material cares as he approached Manuel Lujon’s place be- yond Bernalillo. The rencho was like a little town, with all its stables, corrals, and stake fences. The casa grande was long and low, with glass windows and bright blue doors, a portale running its full length, supported by blue posts. Under this portale the adobe wall was hung with bridles, saddles, great boots and spurs, guns and saddle blankets, strings of red Peppers, fox skins, and the skins of two great rattlesnakes.
Pe a a Me rode in through the gateway, 8 trom every direction, some with 54
MISSIONARY JOURNEYS
no clothing but a little shirt, and women with no shawls over their black hair came running after the children. They all disappeared when Manuel Lujon walked out of the great house, hat in hand, smiling and hospitable. He was a man of thirty-five, settled in figure and somewhat full under the chin. He greeted the priest in the name of God and put out a hand to help him alight, but Father Vaillant sprang quickly to the ground.
“God be with you, Manuel, and with your house. But where are those who are to be married?”
“The men are all in the field, Padre. There is no hurry. A little wine, a little bread, coffee, repose—and then the ceremonies.”
“A little wine, very willingly, and bread, too. But not until afterward. I meant to catch you all at dinner, but I am two hours late because my horse is bad. Have some- one bring in my saddle-bags, and I will put on my vest- ments. Send out to the fields for your men, Sefior Lujon. A man can stop work to be married.”
The swarthy host was dazed by this dispatch. “But one moment, Padre. There are all the children to bap- tize; why not begin with them, if I cannot persuade you to wash the dust from your sainted brow and repose a little.”
“Take me to a place where I can wash and change my clothes, and I will be ready before you can get them here. No, I tell you, Lujon, the marriages first, the baptisms afterward; that order is but Christian. I will baptize the
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DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
children to-morrow morning, and their parents will at least have been married over night.”
Father Joseph was conducted to his chamber, and the older boys were sent running off across the fields to fetch the men. Lujon and his two daughters began constructing an altar at one end of the sala. Two old women came to scrub the floor, and another brought chairs and stools.
“My God, but he is ugly, the Padre!” whispered one of these to the others. “He must be very holy. And did you see the great wart he has on his chin? My grandmother could take that away for him if she were alive, poor soul! Somebody ought to tell him about the holy mud at Chi- mayo. That mud might dry it up. But there is nobody left now who can take warts away.”
“No, the times are not so good any more,” the other agreed. “And I doubt if all this marrying will make them any better. Of what use is it to marry people after they have lived together and had children? and the man is maybe thinking about another woman, like Pablo. I saw him coming out of the brush with that oldest girl of Trini- dad’s, only Sunday night.”
The reappearance of the priest upon the scene cut short further scandal. He knelt down before the improvised altar and began his private devotions. The women tip- toed away. Señor Lujon himself went out toward the Servants’ quarters to hurry the candidates for the mar- nage sacrament. The women were giggling and snatch- ing up their best shawls. Some of the men had even
56
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washed their hands. The household crowded into the sala, and Father Vaillant married couples with great dispatch.
“To-morrow morning, the baptisms,” he announced. “And the mothers see to it that the children are clean, and that there are sponsors for all.”
After he had resumed his travelling-clothes, Father Joseph asked his host at what hour he dined, remarking that he had been fasting since an early breakfast.
“We eat when it is ready—a little after sunset, usually. I have had a young lamb killed for your Reverence.”
Father Joseph kindled with interest. “Ah, and how will it be cooked?”
Sefior Lujon shrugged. “Cooked? Why, they put it in a pot with chili, and some onions, I suppose.”
“Ah, that is the point. I have had too much stewed mutton. Will you permit me to go into the kitchen and cook my portion in my own way?”
Lujon waved his hand. “My house is yours, Padre. Into the kitchen I never go—too many women. But there it is, and the woman in charge is named Rosa.”
When the Father entered the kitchen he found a crowd of women discussing the marriages. They quickly dis~ persed, leaving old Rosa by her fire-place, where hung a kettle from which issued the savour of cooking mutton fat, all too familiar to Father Joseph. He found a half sheep hanging outside the door, covered with a bloody sack, and asked Rosa to heat the oven for him, announc- ing that he meant to roast the hind leg.
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DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
“But Padre, I baked before the marriages. The oven is almost cold. It will take an hour to heat it, and it is only two hours till supper.”
“Very well. I can cook my roast in an hour.”
“Cook a roast in an hour!” cried the old woman. “Mother of God, Padre, the blood will not be dried in it!”
“Not if I can help it!” said Father Joseph fiercely. “Now hurry with the fire, my good woman.”
When the Padre carved his roast at the supper-table, the serving-girls stood behind his chair and looked with horror at the delicate stream of pink juice that followed the knife. Manuel Lujon took a slice for politeness, but he did not eat it. Father Vaillant had his gigot to himself.
All the men and boys sat down at the long table with the host, the women and children would eat later. Father Joseph and Lujon, at one end, had a bottle of white Bor- deaux between them. It had been brought from Mexico City on mule-back, Lujon said. They were discussing the toad back to Santa Fé, and when the missionary remarked that he would stop at Santo Domingo, the host asked him why he did not get a horse there. “I am afraid you will hardly get back to Santa Fé on your own. The pueblo is famous for breeding good horses. You might make a trade.”
“No,” said Father Vaillant. “Those Indians are of a sullen disposition. If I were to have dealings with them, they would suspect my motives. If we are to save their
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souls, we must make it clear that we want no profit for ourselves, as I told Father Gallegos in Albuquerque.”
Manuel Lujon laughed and glanced down the table at his men, who were all showing their white teeth. “You said that to the Padre at Albuquerque? You have courage. He is a rich man, Padre Gallegos, All the same, I respect him. I have played poker with him. He is a great gambler and takes his losses like a man. He stops at nothing, plays like an American.”
“And I,” retorted Father Joseph, “I have not much re- spect for a priest who either plays cards or manages to get rich.”
“Then you do not play?” asked Lujon. “I am disap- pointed. I had hoped we could have a game after supper. The evenings are dull enough here, You do not even play dominoes?”
“Ah, that is another matter!” Father Joseph declared. “A game of dominoes, there by the fire, with coffee, or some of that excellent grape brandy you allowed me to taste, that I would find refreshing. And tell me, Manuelito, where do you get that brandy? It is like a French liqueur.”
“Tt is well seasoned. It was made at Bernalillo in my grandfather’s time. They make it there still, but it is not so good now.”
The next morning, after coffee, while the children were being got ready for baptism, the host took Father Vaillant through his corrals and stables to show him his stock. He exhibited with peculiar pride two cream-coloured mules,
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stalled side by side. With his own hand he led them out of the stable, in order to display to advantage their hand- some coats,—not bluish white, as with white horses, but a rich, deep ivory, that in shadow changed to fawn-colour. Their tails were clipped at the end into the shape of bells.
“Their names,” said Lujon, “are Contento and An- gelica, and they are as good as their names. It seems that God has given them intelligence. When I talk to them, they look up at me like Christians; they are very com- panionable. They are always ridden together and have a great affection for each other.”
Father Joseph took one by the halter and led it about. “Ah, but they are rare creatures! I have never seen a mule or horse coloured like a young fawn before.” To his host’s astonishment, the wiry little priest sprang upon Contento’s back with the agility of a grasshopper. The mule, too, was astonished. He shook himself violently, bolted toward the gate of the barnyard, and at the gate stopped suddenly. Since this did not throw his rider, he seemed satisfied, trotted back, and stood placidly beside Angelica.
“But you are a caballero, Father Vaillant!” Lujon ex- claimed. “I doubt if Father Gallegos would have kept his seat—though he is something of a hunter.”
“The saddle is to be my home in your country, Lujon. What an easy gait this mule has, and what a narrow back! I notice that especially. For a man with short legs, like me, it is a punishment to ride eight hours a day on a
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wide horse. And this I must do day after day. From here I go to Santa Fé, and, after a day in conference with the Bishop, I start for Mora.”
“For Mora?” exclaimed Lujon. “Yes, that is far, and the roads are very bad. On your mare you will never do it. She will drop dead under you.” While he talked, the Father remained upon the mule’s back, stroking him with his hand.
“Well, I have no other. God grant that she does not drop somewhere far from food and water. I can carry very little with me except my vestments and the sacred vessels.” l
The Mexican had been growing more and more thought- ful, as if he were considering something profound and not altogether cheerful. Suddenly his brow cleared, and he turned to the priest with a radiant smile, quite boyish in its simplicity. “Father Vaillant,” he burst out in a slightly oratorical manner, “you have made my house right with Heaven, and you charge me very little. I will do some- thing very nice for you; I will give you Contento for a present, and I hope to be particularly remembered in your prayers.”
Springing to the ground, Father Vaillant threw his arms about his host. “Manuelito!” he cried, “for this darling mule I think I could almost pray you into Heaven!”
The Mexican laughed, too, and warmly returned the embrace. Arm-in-arm they went in to begin the baptisms.
* * * ĜI
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
The next morning, when Lujon went to call Father Vaillant for breakfast, he found him in the barnyard, lead- ing the two mules about and smoothing their fawn- coloured flanks, but his face was not the cheerful coun- tenance of yesterday.
“Manuel,” he said at once, “I cannot accept your pres- ent. I have thought upon it over night, and I see that I cannot. The Bishop works as hard as I do, and his horse is little better than mine. You know he lost everything on his way out here, in a shipwreck at Galveston—among the rest a fine wagon he had had built for travel on these plains. I could not go about on a mule like this when my Bishop rides a common hack. It would be inappropriate. I must ride away on my old mare.”
“Yes, Padre?” Manuel looked troubled and somewhat aggrieved. Why should the Padre spoil everything? It had all been very pleasant yesterday, and he had felt like a prince of generosity. “I doubt if she will make La Bajada Hill,” he said slowly, shaking his head. “Look my horses over and take the one that suits you. They are all better than yours.”
“No, no,” said Father Vaillant decidedly. “Having seen these mules, I want nothing else. They are the colour of pearls, really! I will raise the price of marriages until I can buy this pair from you. A missionary must depend upon his mount for companionship in his lonely life. I want a mule that can look at me like a Christian, as you said of these.”
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Sefior Lujon sighed and looked about his barnyard as if he were trying to find some escape from this situation.
Father Joseph turned to him with vehemence. “If I were a rich ranchero, like you, Manuel, I would do a splendid thing; I would furnish the two mounts that are to carry the word of God about this heathen country, and then I would say to myself: There go my Bishop and my Vicario, on my beautiful cream-coloured mules.”
“So be it, Padre,” said Lujon with a mournful smile. “But I ought to get a good many prayers. On my whole estate there is nothing I prize like those two. True, they might pine if they were parted for long. They have never been separated, and they have a great affection for each other. Mules, as you know, have strong affections. It is hard for me to give them up.”
“You will be all the happier for that, Manuelito,” Father Joseph cried heartily. “Every time you think of these mules, you will feel pride in your good deed.”
Soon after breakfast Father Vaillant departed, riding Contento, with Angelica trotting submissively behind, and from his gate Sefior Lujon watched them disconso- lately until they disappeared. He felt he had been worried out of his mules, and yet he bore no resentment. He did not doubt Father Joseph’s devotedness, nor his singleness of purpose. After all, a Bishop was a Bishop, and a Vicar was a Vicar, and it was not to their discredit that they worked like a pair of common parish priests. He believed he would be proud of the fact that they rode Contento
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and Angelica. Father Vaillant had forced his hand, but he was rather glad of it.
2 THE LONELY ROAD TO MORA
The Bishop and his Vicar were riding through the rain in the Truchas mountains. The heavy, lead-coloured drops were driven slantingly through the air by an icy wind from the peak. These raindrops, Father Latour kept thinking, were the shape of tadpoles, and they broke against his nose and cheeks, exploding with a splash, as if they were hollow and full of air. The priests were riding across high mountain meadows, which in a few weeks would be green, though just now they were slate-col~ oured. On every side lay ridges covered with blue-green fir trees; above them rose the horny backbones of moun- tains. The sky was very low; purplish lead-coloured clouds let down curtains of mist into the valleys between the pine ridges. There was not a glimmer of white light in the dark vapours working overhead—rather, they took on the cold green of the evergreens. Even the white mules, their coats wet and matted into tufts, had turned a slaty hue, and the faces of the two priests were purple and spotted in that singular light.
Father Latour rode first, sitting straight upon his mule, with his chin lowered just enough to keep the drive of
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rain out of his eyes. Father Vaillant followed, unable to see much,—in weather like this his glasses were of no use, and he had taken them off. He crouched down in the saddle, his shoulders well over Contento’s neck. Father Joseph’s sister, Philoméne, who was Mother Superior of a convent in her native town in the Puy-de-Dôme, often tried to picture her brother and Bishop Latour on these long missionary journeys of which he wrote her; she imagined the scene and saw the two priests moving through it in their cassocks, bareheaded, like the pic- tures of St. Francis Xavier with which she was familiar. The reality was less picturesque,—but for all that, no one could have mistaken these two men for hunters or trad- ers. They wore clerical collars about their necks instead of neckerchiefs, and on the breast of his buckskin jacket the Bishop’s silver cross hung by a silver chain.
They were on their way to Mora, the third day out, and they did not know just how far they had still to go. Since morning they had not met a traveller or seen a human habitation. They believed they were on the right trail, for they had seen no other. The first night of their journey they had spent at Santa Cruz, lying in the warm, wide valley of the Rio Grande, where the fields and gardens were already softly coloured with early spring. But since they had left the Espafiola country behind them, they had contended first with wind and sand-storms, and now with cold. The Bishop was going to Mora to assist the Padre there in disposing of a crowd of refugees who
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filled his house. A new settlement in the Conejos valley had lately been raided by Indians; many of the inhabitants were killed, and the survivors, who were originally from Mora, had managed to get back there, utterly destitute.
Before the travellers had crossed the mountain mead- ows, the rain turned to sleet. Their wet buckskins quickly froze, and the rattle of icy flakes struck them and bounded off. The prospect of a night in the open was not cheering. It was too wet to kindle a fire, their blankets would be- come soaked on the ground. As they were descending the mountain on the Mora side, the grey daylight seemed al- ready beginning to fail, though it was only four o’clock. Father Latour turned in his saddle and spoke over his shoulder.
“The mules are certainly very tired, Joseph. They ought to be fed.”
“Push on,” said Father Vaillant. “We will come to shelter of some kind before night sets in.” The Vicar had been praying steadfastly while they crossed the mead- ows, and he felt confident that St. Joseph would not turn a deaf ear. Before the hour was done they did indeed come upon a wretched adobe house, so poor and mean that they might not have seen it had it not lain close beside the trail, on the edge of a steep ravine. The stable looked more habitable than the house, and the priests thought perhaps they could spend the night in it.
As they rode up to the door, a man came out, bare- headed, and they saw to their surprise that he was not a
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Mexican, but an American, of a very unprepossessing type. He spoke to them in some drawling dialect they could scarcely understand and asked if they wanted to stay the night. During the few words they exchanged with him Father Latour felt a growing reluctance to re- main even for a few hours under the roof of this ugly, evil-looking fellow. He was tall, gaunt and ill-formed, with a snake-like neck, terminating in a small, bony head, Under his close-clipped hair this repellent head showed a number of thick ridges, as if the skull joinings were over- grown by layers of superfluous bone. With its small, rudi- mentary ears, this head had a positively malignant look. The man seemed not more than half human, but he was the only householder on the lonely road to Mora.
The priests dismounted and asked him whether he could put their mules under shelter and give them grain feed.
“As soon as I git my coat on I will. You kin come in.”
They followed him into a room where a pifion fire blazed in the corner, and went toward it to warm their stiffened hands. Their host made an angry, snarling sound in the direction of the partition, and a woman came out of the next room. She was a Mexican.
Father Latour and Father Vaillant addressed her courte- ously in Spanish, greeting her in the name of the Holy Mother, as was customary. She did not open her lips, but stared at them blankly for a moment, then dropped her eyes and cowered as if she were terribly frightened. ‘The
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priests looked at each other; it struck them both that this man had been abusing her in some way. Suddenly he turned on her.
“Clear off them cheers fur the strangers. They won't eat ye, if they air priests.”
She began distractedly snatching rags and wet socks and dirty clothes from the chairs. Her hands were shaking so that she dropped things. She was not old, she might have been very young, but she was probably half-witted. There was nothing in her face but blankness and fear.
Her husband put on his coat and boots, went to the door, and stopped with his hand on the latch, throwing over his shoulder a crafty, hateful glance at the bewildered woman.
“Here, you! Come right along, FI need ye!”
She took her black shawl from a peg and followed him. Just at the door she turned and caught the eyes of the visitors, who were looking after her in compassion and perplexity. Instantly that stupid face became intense, pro- phetic, full of awful meaning. With her finger she pointed them away, away!—two quick thrusts into the air. Then, with a look of horror beyond anything language could convey, she threw back her head and drew the edge of her palm quickly across her distended throat—and van- ished. The doorway was empty; the two priests stood staring at it, speechless. That flash of electric passion had been so swift, the warning it communicated so vivid and definite, that they were struck dumb.
68
MISSIONARY JOURNEYS Father Joseph was the first to find his tongue. “There
is no doubt of her meaning. Your pistol is loaded, Jean?”
“Yes, but I neglected to keep it dry. No matter.”
They hurried out of the house. It was still light enough xo see the stable through the grey drive of rain, and they went toward it.
“Señor American,” the Bishop called, “will you be good enough to bring out our mules?”
The man came out of the stable. “What do you want?”
“Our mules. We have changed our mind. We will push on to Mora. And here is a dollar for your trouble.”
The man took a threatening attitude. As he looked from one to the other his head played from side to side exactly like a snake’s. “What’s the matter? My house ain’t good enough for ye?”
“No explanation is necessary. Go into the barn and get the mules, Father Joseph.”
“You dare go into my stable, you priest
The Bishop drew his pistol. “No profanity, Señor. We want nothing from you but to get away from your uncivil tongue. Stand where you are.”
The man was unarmed. Father Joseph came out with the mules, which had not been unsaddled. The poor things were each munching a mouthful, but they needed no urging to be gone; they did not like this place. The moment they felt their riders on their backs they trotted quickly along the road, which dropped immediately into the arroyo. While they were descending, Father Joseph
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33 !
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
remarked that the man would certainly have a gun in the house, and that he had no wish to be shot in the back.
“Nor I. But it is growing too dark for that, unless he should follow us on horseback,” said the Bishop. “Were there horses in the stable?”
“Only a burro.” Father Vaillant was relying upon the protection of St. Joseph, whose office he had fervently said that morning. The warning given them by that poor woman, with such scant opportunity, seemed evidence that some protecting power was mindful of them.
By the time they had ascended the far side of the arroyo, night had closed down and the rain was pouring harder than ever.
“I am by no means sure that we can keep in the road,” said the Bishop. “But at least I am sure we are not being followed. We must trust to these intelligent beasts. Poor woman! He will suspect her and abuse her, I am afraid.” He kept seeing her in the darkness as he rode on, her face in the fire-light, and her terrible pantomime.
They reached the town of Mora a little after midnight. The Padre’s house was full of refugees, and two of them were put out of a bed in order that the Bishop and his Vicar could get into it.
In the morning a boy came from the stable and re- ported that he had found a crazy woman lying in the straw, and that she begged to see the two Padres who owned the white mules. She was brought in, her clothing cut to rags, her legs and face and even her hair so plastered
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with mud that the priests could scarcely recognize the woman who had saved their lives the night before.
She said she had never gone back to the house at all. When the two priests rode away her husband had run to the house to get his gun, and she had plunged down a washout behind the stable into the arroyo, and had been on the way to Mora all night. She had supposed he would overtake her and kill her, but he had not. She reached the settlement before day-break, and crept into the stable to warm herself among the animals and wait until the house- hold was awake. Kneeling before the Bishop she began to relate such horrible things that he stopped her and turned to the native priest.
“This is a case for the civil authorities. Is there a mag- istrate here?”
There was no magistrate, but there was a retired fur trapper who acted as notary and could take evidence. He was sent for, and in the interval Father Latour instructed the refugee women from Conejos to bathe this poor crea- ture and put decent clothes on her, and to care for the cuts and scratches on her legs.
An hour later the woman, whose name was Magdalena, calmed by food and kindness, was ready to tell her story. The notary had brought along his friend, St. Vrain, a Canadian trapper who understood Spanish better than he. The woman was known to St. Vrain, moreover, who con- firmed her statement that she was born Magdalena Valdez, at Los Ranchos de Taos, and that she was twenty-four
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years old. Her husband, Buck Scales, had drifted into Taos with a party of hunters from somewhere in Wyo- ming. All white men knew him for a dog and a degenerate —but to Mexican girls, marriage with an American meant coming up in the world. She had married him six years ago, and had been living with him ever since in that wretched house on the Mora trail. During that time he had robbed and murdered four travellers who had stopped there for the night. They were all strangers, not known in the country. She had forgot their names, but one was a German boy who spoke very little Spanish and little English; a nice boy with blue eyes, and she had grieved for him more than for the others. They were all buried in the sandy soil behind the stable. She was always afraid their bodies might wash out in a storm. Their horses Buck had ridden off by night and sold to Indians some- where in the north. Magdalena had borne three children since her marriage, and her husband had killed each of them a few days after birth, by ways so horrible that she could not relate it. After he killed the first baby, she ran away from him, back to her parents at Ranchos. He came after her and made her go home with him by threatening harm to the old people. She was afraid to go anywhere for help, but twice before she had managed to warn travellers away, when her husband happened to be out of the house. This time she had found courage because, when she looked into the faces of these two Padres, she knew they were good men, and she thought if she ran 72
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after them they could save her. She could not bear any more killing. She asked nothing better than to die herself, if only she could hide near a church and a priest for a while, to make her soul right with God.
St. Vrain and his friend got together a search-party at once. They rode out to Scales’s place and found the re- mains of four men buried under the corral behind the stable, as the woman had said. Scales himself they cap- tured on the road from Taos, where he had gone to look for his wife. They brought him back to Mora, but St. Vrain rode on to Taos to fetch a magistrate.
There was no calabozo in Mora, so Scales was put into an empty stable, under guard. This stable was soon sur- rounded by a crowd of people, who loitered to hear the blood-curdling threats the prisoner shouted against his wife. Magdalena was kept in the Padre’s house, where she lay on a mat in the corner, begging Father Latour to take her back to Santa Fé, so that her husband could not get at her. Though Scales was bound, the Bishop felt alarmed for her safety. He and the American notary, who had a pistol of the new revolver model, sat in the sala and kept watch over her all night.
In the morning the magistrate and his party arrived from Taos. The notary told him the facts of the case in the plaza, where everyone could hear. The Bishop in- quired whether there was any place for Magdalena in Taos, as she could not stay on here in such a state of terror.
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A man dressed in buckskin hunting-clothes stepped out of the crowd and asked to see Magdalena. Father Latour conducted him into the room where she lay on her mat. The stranger went up to her, removing his hat. He bent down and put his hand on her shoulder. Though he was clearly an American, he spoke Spanish in the native man- ner.
“Magdalena, don’t you remember me?”
She looked up at him as out of a dark well; something became alive in her deep, haunted eyes. She caught with both hands at his fringed buckskin knees.
“Christóbal!” she wailed. “Oh, Christóbal!”
“Pil take you home with me, Magdalena, and you can stay with my wife. You wouldn’t be afraid in my house, would your”
“No, no, Christóbal, I would not be afraid with you. I am not a wicked woman.”
He smoothed her hair. “You're a good girl, Magdalena —always were. It will be all right. Just leave things to me.”
Then he turned to the Bishop. “Señor Vicario, she can come to me. Í live near Taos. My wife is a native woman, and she’ll be good to her. That varmint won’t come about my place, even if he breaks jail, He knows me. My name is Carson.”
Father Latour had looked forward to meeting the scout. He had supposed him to bea very large man, of powerful
’ body and commanding presence. This Carson was not so 74
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tall as the Bishop himself, was very slight in frame, modest in manner, and he spoke English with a soft Southern drawl. His face was both thoughtful and alert; anxiety had drawn a permanent ridge between his blue eyes. Under his blond moustache his mouth had a singular refinement. The lips were full and delicately modelled. There was something curiously unconscious about his mouth, re- flective, a little melancholy,—and something that sug- gested a capacity for tenderness. The Bishop felt a quick glow of pleasure in looking at the man. As he stood there in his buckskin clothes one felt in him standards, loyal- ties, a code which is not easily put into words but which is instantly felt when two men who live by it come to- gether by chance. He took the scout’s hand. “I have long wanted to meet Kit Carson,” he said, “even before I came to New Mexico. I have been hoping you would pay me a visit at Santa Fé.”
The other smiled. “I’m right shy, sir, and I’m always afraid of being disappointed. But I guess it will be all right from now on.”
This was the beginning of a long friendship.
On their ride back to Carson’s ranch, Magdalena was put in Father Vaillant’s care, and the Bishop and the scout rode together. Carson said he had become a Catholic merely as a matter of form, as Americans usually did when they married a Mexican girl. His wife was a good woman and very devout; but religion had seemed to him pretty much a woman’s affair until his last trip to California. He
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had been sick out there, and the Fathers at one of the mis- sions took care of him. “I began to see things different, and thought I might some day be a Catholic in earnest. I was brought up to think priests were rascals, and that the nuns were bad women,—all the stuff they talk back in Missouri. A good many of the native priests here bear out that story. Our Padre Martinez at Taos is an old scapegrace, if ever there was one; he’s got children and grandchildren in almost every settlement around here. And Padre Lucero at Arroyo Hondo is a miser, takes everything a poor man’s got to give him a Christian burial.”
The Bishop discussed the needs of his people at length with Carson. He felt great confidence in his judgment. The two men were about the same age, both a little over forty, and both had been sobered and sharpened by wide experience. Carson had been guide in world-renowned explorations, but he was still almost as poor as in the days when he was a beaver trapper. He lived in a little adobe house with his Mexican wife. The great country of desert and mountain ranges between Santa Fé and the Pacific coast was not yet mapped or chartered; the most reliable map of it was in Kit Carson’s brain. This Missourian, whose eye was so quick to read a landscape or a human face, could not read a printed page. He could at that time barely write his own name. Yet one felt in him a quick and discriminating intelligence. That he was illiterate was an accident; he had got ahead of books, gone where the
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printing-press could not follow him. Out of the hard- ships of his boyhood—from fourteen to twenty picking up a bare living as cook or mule-driver for wagon trains, often in the service of brutal and desperate characters— he had preserved a clean sense of honour and a compas- sionate heart. In talking to the Bishop of poor Magdalena he said sadly: “I used to see her in Taos when she was such a pretty girl. Ain’t it a pity?”
The degenerate murderer, Buck Scales, was hanged after a short trial. Early in April the Bishop left Santa Fé on horseback and rode to St. Louis, on his way to attend the Provincial Council at Baltimore. When he returned in September, he brought back with him five courageous nuns, Sisters of Loretto, to found a school for girls in letterless Santa Fé. He sent at once for Magdalena and took her into the service of the Sisters. She became house- keeper and manager of the Sisters’ kitchen. She was de- voted to the nuns, and so happy in the service of the Church that when the Bishop visited the school he used to enter by the kitchen-garden in order to see her serene and handsome face. For she became beautiful, as Carson said she had been as a girl. After the blight of her horrible youth was over, she seemed to bloom again in the house-
hold of God.
BOOK IHN THE MASS AT ACOMA
BOOK THREE
THE MASS AT ACOMA
I THE WOODEN PARROT
During the first year after his arrival in Santa Fé, the Bishop was actually in his diocese only about four months. Six months of that first year were consumed in attending the Plenary Council at Baltimore, to which he had been summoned. He went on horseback over the Santa Fé trail to St. Louis, nearly a thousand miles, then by steamboat to Pittsburgh, across the mountains to Cumberland, and on to Washington by the new railroad. The return jour- ney was even slower, as he had with him the five nuns who came to found the school of Our Lady of Light. He reached Santa Fé late in September.
So far, Bishop Latour had been mainly employed on business that took him far away from his Vicarate. His great diocese was still an unimaginable mystery to him. He was eager to be abroad in it, to know his people; to
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escape for a little from the cares of building and founding, and to go westward among the old isolated Indian mis- sions; Santo Domingo, breeder of horses; Isleta, whitened with gypsum; Laguna, of wide pastures; and finally, cloud-set Acoma.
In the golden October weather the Bishop, with his blankets and coffee-pot, attended by Jacinto, a young In- dian from the Pecos pueblo, whom he employed as guide, set off to visit the Indian missions in the west. He spent a night and a day at Albuquerque, with the genial and pop- ular Padre Gallegos. After Santa Fé, Albuquerque was the most important parish in the diocese; the priest be- longed to an influential Mexican family, and he and the rancheros had run their church to suit themselves, making a very gay affair of it. Though Padre Gallegos was ten years older than the Bishop, he would still dance the fan- dango five nights running, as if he could never have enough of it. He had many friends in the American colony, with whom he played poker and went hunting, when he was not dancing with the Mexicans. His cellar was well stocked with wines from El Paso del Norte, whisky from Taos, and grape brandy from Bernalillo. He was genuinely hospitable, and the gambler down on his luck, the soldier sobering up, were always welcome at his table. The Padre was adored by a rich Mexican widow, who was hostess at his supper parties, engaged his servants for him, made lace for the altar and napery for his table. Every Sunday her carriage, the only closed
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one in Albuquerque, waited in the plaza after Mass, and when the priest had put off his vestments, he came out and was driven away to the lady’s hacienda for dinner.
The Bishop and Father Vaillant had thoroughly ex- amined the case of Father Gallegos, and meant to end this scandalous state of things well before Christmas. But on this visit Father Latour exhibited neither astonish- ment nor displeasure at anything, and Padre Gallegos was cordial and most ceremoniously polite. When the Bishop permitted himself to express some surprise that there was not a confirmation class awaiting him, the Padre explained smoothly that it was his custom to confirm infants at their baptism.
“Tt is all the same in a Christian community like ours. We know they will receive religious instruction as they grow up, so we make good Catholics of them in the be- ginning. Why not?”
The Padre was uneasy lest the Bishop should require his attendance on this trip out among the missions. He had no liking for scanty food and a bed on the rocks. So, though he had been dancing only a few nights before, he received his Superior with one foot bandaged up in an Indian moccasin, and complained of a severe attack of gout. Asked when he had last celebrated Mass at Acoma, he made no direct reply. It used to be his custom, he said, to go there in Passion Week, but the Acoma Indians were unreclaimed heathen at heart, and had no wish to be
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bothered with the Mass. The last time he went out there, he was unable to get into the church at all. The Indians pretended they had not the key; that the Governor had it, and that he had gone on “Indian business” up into the Cebolleta mountains.
The Bishop did not wish Padre Gallegos’s company up- on his journey, was very glad not to have the embarrass- ment of refusing it, and he rode away from Albuquerque after polite farewells. Yet, he reflected, there was some- thing very engaging about Gallegos as a man. Asa priest, he was impossible; he was too self-satisfied and popular ever to change his ways, and he certainly could not change his face. He did not look quite like a professional gambler, but something smooth and twinkling in his countenance suggested an underhanded mode of life. There was but one course: to suspend the man from the exercise of all priestly functions, and bid the smaller native priests take warning.
Father Vaillant had told the Bishop that he must by all means stop a night at Isleta, as he would like the priest there—Padre Jesus de Baca, an old white-haired man, almost blind, who had been at Isleta many years and had won the confidence and affection of his Indians.
When he approached this pueblo of Isleta, gleaming white across a low plain of grey sand, Father Latour’s spirits rose. It was beautiful, that warm, rich whiteness of the church and the clustered town, shaded by a few bright acacia trees, with their intense blue-green like the colour
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of old paper window-blinds. That tree always awakened pleasant memories, recalling a garden in the south of France where he used to visit young cousins. As he rode up to the church, the old priest came out to meet him, and after his salutation stood looking at Father Latour, shading his failing eyes with his hand.
“And can this be my Bishop? So young a man?” he exclaimed.
They went into the priest’s house by way of a garden, walled in behind the church. This enclosure was full of domesticated cactus plants, of many varieties and great size (it seemed the Padre loved them), and among these hung wicker cages made of willow twigs, full of parrots. There were even parrots hopping about the sanded paths —with one wing clipped to keep them at home. Father Jesus explained that parrot feathers were much prized by his Indians as ornaments for their ceremonial robes, and he had long ago found he could please his parishioners by raising the birds.
The priest’s house was white within and without, like all the Isleta houses, and was almost as bare as an Indian dwelling. The old man was poor, and too soft-hearted to press the pueblo people for pesos. An Indian girl cooked his beans and cornmeal mush for him, he required little else. The girl was not very skilful, he said, but she was clean about her cooking. When the Bishop remarked that everything in this pueblo, even the streets, seemed clean, the Padre told him that near Isleta there was a hill of some
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white mineral, which the Indians ground up and used as whitewash. They had done this from time immemorial, and the village had always been noted for its whiteness. A little talk with Father Jesus revealed that he was simple almost to childishness, and very superstitious. But there was a quality of golden goodness about him. His right eye was overgrown by a cataract, and he kept his head tilted as if he were trying to see around it. All his move- ments were to the left, as if he were reaching or walking about some obstacle in his path.
After coming to the house by way of a garden full of parrots, Father Latour was amused to find that the sole ornament in the Padre’s poor, bare little sala was a wooden parrot, perched in a hoop and hung from one of the roof-logs. While Father Jesus was instructing his In- dian girl in the kitchen, the Bishop took this carving down from its perch to examine it. It was cut from a single stick of wood, exactly the size of a living bird, body and tail rigid and straight, the head a little turned. The wings and tail and neck feathers were just indicated by the tool, and thinly painted. He was surprised to feel how light it was; the surface had the whiteness and vel- vety smoothness of very old wood. Though scarcely carved at all, merely smoothed into shape, it was strangely lifelike; a wooden pattern of parrots, as it were.
The Padre smiled when he found the Bishop with the bird in his hand.
“I see you have found my treasure! That, your Grace,
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is probably the oldest thing in the pueblo—older than the pueblo itself.”
The parrot, Father Jesus said, had always been the bird of wonder and desire to the pueblo Indians. In ancient times its feathers were more valued than wampum and turquoises. Even before the Spaniards came, the pueblos of northern New Mexico used to send explorers along the dangerous and difficult trade routes down into tropical Mexico to bring back upon their bodies a cargo of parrot feathers. To purchase these the trader carried pouches full of turquoises from the Cerrillos hills near Santa Fé. When, very tarely, a trader succeeded in bringing back a live bird to his people, it was paid divine honours, and its death threw the whole village into the deepest gloom. Even the bones were piously preserved. There was in Isleta a parrot skull of great antiquity. His wooden bird he had bought from an old man who was much indebted to him, and who was about to die without descendants. Father Jesus had had his eye upon the bird for years. The Indian told him that his ancestors, generations ago, had brought it with them from the mother pueblo. The priest fondly believed that it was a portrait, done from life, of one of those rare birds that in ancient times were carried up alive, all the long trail from the tropics.
Father Jesus gave a good report of the Indians at La- guna and Acoma. He used to go to those pueblos to hold services when he was younger, and had always found them friendly.
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“At Acoma,” he said, “you can see something very holy. They have there a portrait of St. Joseph, sent to them by one of the Kings of Spain, long ago, and it has worked many miracles. If the season is dry, the Acoma people take the picture down to their farms at Acomita, and it never fails to produce rain. They have rain when none falls in all the country, and they have crops when the Laguna Indians have none.”
2 JACINTO
Taking leave of Isleta and its priest early in the morn- ing, Father Latour and his guide rode all day through the dry desert plain west of Albuquerque. It was like a coun- try of dry ashes; no juniper, no rabbit brush, nothing but thickets of withered, dead-looking cactus, and patches of wild pumpkin—the only vegetation that had any vitality. It is a vine, remarkable for its tendency, not to spread and ramble, but to mass and mount. Its fong, sharp, arrow- shaped leaves, frosted over with prickly silver, are thrust upward and crowded together; the whole rigid, up-thrust matted clump looks less like a plant than like a great colony of grey-green lizards, moving and suddenly ar- rested by fear.
As the morning wore on they had to make their way through a sand-storm which quite obscured the sun. Ja-
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cinto knew the country well, having crossed it often to go to the religious dances at Laguna, but he rode with his head low and a purple handkerchief tied over his mouth. Coming from a pueblo among woods and water, he had a poor opinion of this plain. At noon he alighted and collected enough greasewood to boil the Bishop’s coffee. They knelt on either side of the fire, the sand curling about them so that the bread became gritty as they ate it.
The sun set red in an atmosphere murky with sand. The travellers made a dry camp and rolled themselves in their blankets. All night a cold wind blew over them. Father Latour was so stiff that he arose long before day- break. The dawn came at last, fair and clear, and they made an early start.
About the middle of that afternoon Jacinto pointed out Laguna in the distance, lying, apparently, in the midst of bright yellow waves of high sand dunes—yellow as ochre. As they approached, Father Latour found these were pet- rified sand dunes; long waves of soft, gritty yellow rock, shining and bare except for a few lines of dark juniper that grew out of the weather cracks,—little trees, and very, very old. At the foot of this sweep of rock waves was the blue lake, a stone basin full of water, from which the pueblo took its name.
The kindly Padre at Isleta had sent his cook’s brother off on foot to warn the Laguna people that the new High Priest was coming, and that he was a good man and did
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not want money. They were prepared, accordingly; the church was clean and the doors were open; a small white church, painted above and about the altar with gods of wind and rain and thunder, sun and moon, linked to- gether in a geometrical design of crimson and blue and dark green, so that the end of the church seemed to be hung with tapestry. It recalled to Father Latour the in- terior of a Persian chieftain’s tent he had seen in a textile exhibit at Lyons. Whether this decoration had been done by Spanish missionaries or by Indian converts, he was unable to find out.
The Governor told him that his people would come to Mass in the morning, and that there were a number of children to be baptized. He offered the Bishop the sacristy for the night, but there was a damp, earthy smell about that chamber, and Father Latour had already made up his mind that he would like to sleep on the rock dunes, under the junipers.
Jacinto got firewood and good water from the Lagunas, and they made their camp in a pleasant spot on the rocks north of the village. As the sun dropped low, the light brought the white church and the yellow adobe houses up into relief from the flat ledges. Behind their camp, not far away, lay a group of great mesas. The Bishop asked Jacinto if he knew the name of the one nearest them.
“No, I not know any name,” he shook his head. “I know Indian name,” he added, as if, for once, he were
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“And what is the Indian name?”
“The Laguna Indians call Snow-Bird mountain.” He spoke somewhat unwillingly.
“That is very nice,” said the Bishop musingly. “Yes, that is a pretty name.”
“Oh, Indians have nice names too!” Jacinto replied quickly, with a curl of the lip. Then, as if he felt he had taken out on the Bishop a reproach not deserved, he said in a moment: “The Laguna people think it very funny for a big priest to be a young man. The Governor say, how can I call him Padre when he is younger than my sons?”
There was a note of pride in Jacinto’s voice very flatter- ing to the Bishop. He had noticed how kind the Indian voice could be when it was kind at all; a slight inflection made one feel that one had received a great compliment.
“I am not very young in heart, Jacinto. How old are you, my boy?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Have you a son?”
“One. Baby. Not very long born.”
Jacinto usually dropped the article in speaking Span- ish, just as he did in speaking English, though the Bishop had noticed that when he did give a noun its article, he used the right one. The customary omission, therefore, seemed to be a matter of taste, not ignorance. In the In- dian conception of language, such attachments were su- perfiuous and unpleasing, perhaps.
They relapsed into the silence which was their usual
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form of intercourse. The Bishop sat drinking his coffee slowly out of the tin cup, keeping the pot near the em- bers. The sun had set now, the yellow rocks were turning grey, down in the pueblo the light of the cook fires made red patches of the glassless windows, and the smell of pifion smoke came softly through the still air. The whole western sky was the colour of golden ashes, with here and there a flush of red on the lip of a little cloud. High above the horizon the evening-star flickered like a lamp just lit, and close beside it was another star of constant light, much smaller.
Jacinto threw away the end of his cornhusk cigarette and again spoke without being addressed.
“The ev-en-ing-star,” he said in English, slowly and somewhat sententiously, then relapsed into Spanish. “You see the little star beside, Padre? Indians call him the guide.”
The two companions sat, each thinking his own thoughts as night closed in about them; a blue night set with stars, the bulk of the solitary mesas cutting into the firmament. The Bishop seldom questioned Jacinto about his thoughts or beliefs. He didn’t think it polite, and he believed it to be useless. There was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of European civiliza- tion into the Indian mind, and he was quite willing to believe that behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience, which no language could translate to him. A chill came with the darkness. Father Latour
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put on his old fur-lined cloak, and Jacinto, loosening the blanket tied about his loins, drew it up over his head and shoulders.
“Many stars,” he said presently. “What you think about the stars, Padre?”
- “The wise men tell us they are worlds, like ours, Ja- cinto.”
The end of the Indian’s cigarette grew bright and then dull again before he spoke. “I think not,” he said in the tone of one who has considered a proposition fairly and rejected it. “I think they are leaders—great spirits.”
“Perhaps they are,” said the Bishop with a sigh. “ What- ever they are, they are great. Let us say Our Father, and go to sleep, my boy.”
Kneeling on either side of the embers they repeated the prayer together and then rolled up in their blankets. The Bishop went to sleep thinking with satisfaction that he was beginning to have some sort of human compan- ionship with his Indian boy. One called the young In- dians “boys,” perhaps because there was something youthful and elastic in their bodies. Certainly about their behaviour there was nothing boyish in the American sense, nor even in the European sense. Jacinto was never, by any chance, naif; he was never taken by surprise. One felt that his training, whatever it had been, had prepared him to meet any situation which might confront him. He was as much at home in the Bishop’s study as in his own pueblo—and he was never too much at home anywhere.
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Father Latour felt he had gone a good way toward gain- ing his guide’s friendship, though he did not know how.
The truth was, Jacinto liked the Bishop’s way of meet- ing people; thought he had the right tone with Padre Gallegos, the right tone with Padre Jesus, and that he had good manners with the Indians. In his experience, white people, when they addressed Indians, always put on a false face. There were many kinds of false faces; Father Vaillant’s, for example, was kindly but too vehe- ment. The Bishop put on none at all. He stood straight and turned to the Governor of Laguna, and his face underwent no change. Jacinto thought this remarkable.
3 THE ROCK
After early Mass the next morning Father Latour and his guide rode off across the low plain that lies between Laguna and Acoma. In all his travels the Bishop had seen no country like this. From the flat red sea of sand rose great rock mesas, generally Gothic in outline, resembling vast cathedrals. They were not crowded together in dis- order, but placed in wide spaces, long vistas between. This plain might once have been an enormous city, all the smaller quarters destroyed by time, only the public buildings left,—piles of architecture that were like moun- tains. The sandy soil of the plain had a light sprinkling of
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junipers, and was splotched with masses of blooming rab- bit brush,—that olive-coloured plant that grows in high waves like a tossing sea, at this season covered with a thatch of bloom, yellow as gorse, or orange like mari- golds.
This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape.
Ever afterward the Bishop remembered his first ride to Acoma as his introduction to the mesa country. One thing which struck him at once was that every mesa was duplicated by a cloud mesa, like a reflection, which lay motionless above it or moved slowly up from behind it. These cloud formations seemed to be always there, how- ever hot and blue the sky. Sometimes they were flat terraces, ledges of vapour; sometimes they were dome- shaped, or fantastic, like the tops of silvery pagodas, ris- ing one above another, as if an oriental city lay directly behind the rock. The great tables of granite set down in an empty plain were inconceivable without their attend- ant clouds, which were a part of them, as the smoke is part of the censer, or the foam of the wave.
Coming along the Santa Fé trail, in the vast plains of Kansas, Father Latour had found the sky more a desert
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than the land; a hard, empty blue, very monotonous to the eyes of a Frenchman. But west of the Pecos all that _ changed; here there was always activity overhead, clouds forming and moving all day long. Whether they were dark and full of violence, or soft and white with luxurious idleness, they powerfully affected the world beneath them. The desert, the mountains and mesas, were continually re- formed and re-coloured by the cloud shadows. The whole country seemed fluid to the eye under this constant change of accent, this ever-varying distribution of light.
Jacinto interrupted these reflections by an exclamation.
“Acoma!” He stopped his mule.
The Bishop, following with his eye the straight, point- ing Indian hand, saw, far away, two great mesas. They were almost square in shape, and at this distance seemed close together, though they were really some miles apart.
“The far one” —his guide still pointed.
The Bishop’s eyes were not so sharp as Jacinto’s, but now, looking down upon the top of the farther mesa from the high land on which they halted, he saw a flat white outline on the grey surface—a white square made up of squares. That, his guide said, was the pueblo of Acoma.
Riding on, they presently drew rein under the En- chanted Mesa, and Jacinto told him that on this, too, there had once been a village, but the stairway which had been the only access to it was broken off by a great storm many centuries ago, and its people had perished up there from hunger.
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But how, the Bishop asked him, did men first think of living on the top of naked rocks like these, hundreds of feet in the air, without soil or water?
Jacinto shrugged. “A man can do whole lot when they hunt him day and night like an animal. Navajos on the north, Apaches on the south; the Acoma run up a rock to be safe.”
All this plain, the Bishop gathered, had once been the scene of a periodic man-hunt; these Indians, born in fear and dying by violence for generations, had at last taken this leap away from the earth, and on that rock had found the hope of all suffering and tormented creatures—safety. They came down to the plain to hunt and to grow their crops, but there was always a place to go back to. If a band of Navajos were on the Acoma’s trail, there was still one hope; if he could reach his rock—Sanctuary! On the winding stone stairway up the cliff, a handful of men could keep off a multitude. The rock of Acoma had never been taken by a foe but once,—by Spaniards in armour. It was very different from a mountain fastness; more lonely, more stark and grim, more appealing to the imagination. The rock, when one came to think of it, was the utmost expression of human need; even mere feeling yearned for it; it was the highest comparison of loyalty in love and friendship. Christ Himself had used that comparison for the disciple to whom He gave the keys of His Church. And the Hebrews of the Old Testa- ment, always being carried captive into foreign lands,—
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their rock was an idea of God, the only thing their con- querors could not take from them.
Already the Bishop had observed in Indian life a strange literalness, often shocking and disconcerting. The Acomas, who must share the universal human yearning for some- thing permanent, enduring, without shadow of change,— they had their idea in substance. They actually lived upon their Rock; were born upon it and died upon it. There was an element of exaggeration in anything so simple!
As they drew near the Acoma mesa, dark clouds began boiling up from behind it, like ink spots spreading in a brilliant sky.
“Rain come,” remarked Jacinto. “That is good. They will be well disposed.” He left the mules in a stake corral at the foot of the mesa, took up the blankets, and hurried Father Latour into the narrow crack in the rock where the craggy edges formed a kind of natural stairway up the cliff. Wherever the footing was treacherous, it was helped out by little hand-holds, ground into the stone like smooth mittens. The mesa was absolutely naked of vegetation, but at its foot a rank plant grew conspicuously out of the sand; a plant with big white blossoms like Easter lilies. By its dark blue-green leaves, large and coarse-toothed, Father Latour recognized a species of the noxious datura. The size and luxuriance of these nightshades astonished him. They looked like great artificial plants, made of shin- ing silk.
While they were ascending the rock, deafening thunder
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broke over their heads, and the rain began to fall as if it were spilled from a cloud-burst. Drawing into a deep twist of the stairway, under an overhanging ledge, they watched the water shaken in heavy curtains in the aiz before them. In a moment the seam in which they stood was like the channel of a brook. Looking out over the great plain spotted with mesas and glittering with rain sheets, the Bishop saw the distant mountains bright with sunlight. Again he thought that the first Creation morn- ing might have looked like this, when the dry land was first drawn up out of the deep, and all was confusion.
The storm was over in half an hour. By the time the Bishop and his guide reached the last turn in the trail, and rose through the crack, stepping out on the flat top of the rock, the noontide sun was blazing down upon Acoma with almost insupportable brightness. The bare stone floor of the town and its deep-worn paths were washed white and clean, and those depressions in the surface which the Acomas call their cisterns, were full of fresh rain water. Already the women were bringing out their clothes, to begin washing. The drinking water was carried up the stairway in earthen jars on the heads of the women, from a secret spring below; but for all other purposes the people depended on the rainfall held in these cisterns.
The top of the mesa was about ten acres in extent, the Bishop judged, and there was not a tree or a blade of green upon it; not a handful of soil, except the churchyard, held
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in by an adobe wall, where the earth for burial had been carried up in baskets from the plain below. The white dwellings, two and three storeyed, were not scattered, but huddled together in a close cluster, with no protecting slope of ground or shoulder of rock, lying flat against the flat, bright against the bright,—both the rock and the plastered houses threw off the sun glare blindingly.
At the very edge of the mesa, overhanging the abyss so that its retaining wall was like a part of the cliff itself, was the old warlike church of Acoma, with its two stone towers. Gaunt, grim, grey, its nave rising some seventy feet to a sagging, half-ruined roof, it was more like a fortress than a place of worship. That spacious interior depressed the Bishop as no other mission church had done. He held a service there before midday, and he had never found it so hard to go through the ceremony of the Mass. Before him, on the grey floor, in the grey light, a group of bright shawls and blankets, some fifty or sixty silent faces; above and behind them the grey walls. He felt as if he were celebrating Mass at the bottom of the sea, for antediluvian creatures; for types of life so old, so hardened, so shut within their shells, that the sacrifice on Calvary could hardly reach back so far. Those shell- like backs behind him might be saved by baptism and divine grace, as undeveloped infants are, but hardly through any experience of their own, he thought. When he blessed them and sent them away, it was with a sense of inadequacy and spiritual defeat.
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After he had laid aside his vestments, Father Latour went over the church with Jacinto. As he examined it his wonder grew. What need had there ever been for this great church at Acoma? It was built early in sixteen hun. dred, by Fray Juan Ramirez, a great missionary, who laboured on the Rock of Acoma for twenty years or more. It was Father Ramirez, too, who made the mule trail down the other side,—the only path by which a burro can ascend the mesa, and which is still called “El Camino del Padre.”
The more Father Latour examined this church, the more he was inclined to think that Fray Ramirez, or some Spanish priest who followed him, was not altogether in- nocent of worldly ambition, and that they built for their own satisfaction, perhaps, rather than according to the needs of the Indians. The magnificent site, the natural grandeur of this stronghold, might well have turned their heads a little. Powerful men they must have been, those Spanish Fathers, to draft Indian labour for this great work without military support. Every stone in that structure, every handful of earth in those many thousand pounds of adobe, was carried up the trail on the backs of men and boys and women. And the great carved beams of the roof—Father Latour looked at them with amazement. In all the plain through which he had come he had seen no trees but a few stunted pifions. He asked Jacinto where these huge timbers could have been found.
“San Mateo mountain, I guess.”
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“But the San Mateo mountains must be forty or fifty miles away. How could they bring such timbers?”
Jacinto shrugged. “Acomas carry.” Certainly there was no other explanation.
Besides the church proper there was the cloister, large, thick-walled, which must have required an enormous labour of portage from the plain. The deep cloister cor- ridors were cool when the rock outside was blistering; the low arches opened on an enclosed garden which, judging from its depth of earth, must once have been very verdant. Pacing those shady passages, with four feet of solid, win- dowless adobe shutting out everything but the green garden and the turquoise sky above, the early mission- aries might well have forgotten the poor Acomas, that tribe of ancient rock-turtles, and believed themselves in some cloister hung on a spur of the Pyrenees.
In the grey dust of the enclosed garden two thin, half- dead peach trees still struggled with the drouth, the kind of unlikely tree that grows up from an old root and never bears. By the wall yellow suckers put out from an oid vine stump, very thick and hard, which must once have borne its ripe clusters.
Built upon the north-east corner of the cloister the Bishop found a loggia—troofed, but with open sides, looking down on the white pueblo and the tawny rock, and over the wide plain below. There he decided he would spend the night. From this loggia he watched the sun go down; watched the desert become dark, the shadows creep
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upward. Abroad in the plain the scattered mesa tops, red with the afterglow, one by one lost their light, like candles going out. He was on a naked rock in the desert, in the stone age, a prey to homesickness for his own kind, his own epoch, for European man and his glorious history of desire and dreams. Through all the centuries that his own part of the world had been changing like the sky at daybreak, this people had been fixed, increasing neither in numbers nor desires, rock-turtles on their rock. Some- thing reptilian he felt here, something that had endured by immobility, a kind of life out of reach, like the crus- taceans in their armour.
On his homeward way the Bishop spent another night with Father Jesus, the good priest at Isleta, who talked with him much of the Moqui country and of those very old rock-set pueblos still farther to the west. One story related to a long-forgotten friar at Acoma, and was some- what as follows:
_4 THE LEGEND OF FRAY BALTAZAR
Some time in the very early years of seventeen hundred, nearly fifty years after the great Indian uprising in which all the missionaries and all the Spaniards in northern New Mexico were either driven out or murdered, after the country had been reconquered and new missionaries had come to take the place of the martyrs, a certain Friar
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Baltazar Montoya was priest at Acoma. He was of a tyrannical and overbearing disposition and bore a hard hand on the natives. All the missions now in ruins were active then, each had its resident priest, who lived for the people or upon the people, according to his nature. Friar Baltazar was one of the most ambitious and exact- ing. It was his belief that the pueblo of Acoma existed chiefly to support its fine church, and that this should be the pride of the Indians as it was his. He took the best of their corn and beans and squashes for his table, and selected the choicest portions when they slaughtered a sheep, chose their best hides to carpet his dwelling. More- over, he exacted a heavy tribute in labour. He was never done with having earth carried up from the plain in baskets. He enlarged the churchyard and made the deep garden in the cloister, enriching it with dung from the corrals. Here he was able to grow a wonderful garden, since it was watered every evening by women,—and this despite the fact that it was not proper that a woman should ever enter the cloister at all. Each woman owed the Padre so many ollas of water a week from the cisterns, and they murmured not only because of the labour, but because of the drain on their water-supply.
Baltazar was not a lazy man, and in his first years there, before he became stout, he made long journeys in behalf of his mission and his garden. He went as far as Oraibi, many days’ journey, to select their best peach seeds. (The peach orchards of Oraibi were very old, having been cul-
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tivated since the days of the earliest Spanish expeditions, when Coronado’s captains gave the Moquis peach seeds brought from Spain.) His grape cuttings were brought from Sonora in baskets on muleback, and he would go all the way to the Villa (Santa Fé) for choice garden seeds, at the season when pack trains came up the Rio Grande valley. The early churchmen did a great business in carry- ing seeds about, though the Indians and Mexicans were satisfied with beans and squashes and chili, asking nothing more.
Friar Baltazar was from a religious house in Spain which was noted for good living, and he himself had worked in the refectory. He was an excellent cook and something of a carpenter, and he took a great deal of trouble to make himself comfortable upon that rock at the end of the world. He drafted two Indian boys into his service, one to care for his ass and work in the garden, the other to cook and wait upon him at table. In time, as he grew more unwieldy in figure, he adopted a third boy and employed him as a runner to the distant missions. This boy would go on foot all the way to the Villa for red cloth or an iron spade or a new knife, stopping at Bernalillo to bring home a wineskin full of grape brandy. He would go five days’ journey to the Sandia mountains to catch fish and dry or salt them for the Padre’s fast-days, or run to Zuñi, where the Fathers raised rabbits, and bring back a pair for the spit. His errands were seldom of an ecclesiastical nature.
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It was clear that the Friar at Acoma lived more after the flesh than after the spirit. The difficulty of obtaining an interesting and varied diet on a naked rock seemed only to whet his appetite and tempt his resourcefulness. But his sensuality went no further than his garden and table. Carnal commerce with the Indian women would have been very easy indeed, and the Friar was at the hardy age of ripe manhood when such temptations are peculiarly sharp. But the missionaries had early discov- ered that the slightest departure from chastity greatly weakened their influence and authority with their Indian converts. The Indians themselves sometimes practised continence as a penance, or as a strong medicine with the spirits, and they were very willing that their Padre should practise it for them. The consequences of carnal indul- gence were perhaps more serious here than in Spain, and Friar Baltazar seems never to have given his flock an op- portunity to exult over his frailty.
He held his seat at Acoma for nearly fifteen prosperous years, constantly improving his church and his living- quarters, growing new vegetables and medicinal herbs, making soap from the yucca root. Even after he became stout, his arms were strong and muscular, his fingers clever. He cultivated his peach trees, and watched over his garden like a little kingdom, never allowing the native women to grow slack in the water-supply. His first serv- ing-boys were released to marry, and others succeeded them, who were even more minutely trained.
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Baltazar’s tyranny grew little by little, and the Acoma people were sometimes at the point of revolt. But they could not estimate just how powerful the Padre’s magic might be and were afraid to put it to the test. There was no doubt that the holy picture of St. Joseph had come to them from the King of Spain by the request of this Padre, and that picture had been more effective in avert- ing drouth than all the native rain-makers had been. Properly entreated and honoured, the painting had never failed to produce rain. Acoma had not lost its crops since Friar Baltazar first brought the picture to them, though at Laguna and Zuñi there had been drouths that compelled the people to live upon their famine store,—an alarming extremity.
The Laguna Indians were constantly sending legations to Acoma to negotiate terms at which they could rent the holy picture, but Friar Baltazar had warned them never to let it go. If such powerful protection were withdrawn, or if the Padre should turn the magic against them, the consequences might be disastrous to the pueblo. Better give him his choice of grain and lambs and pottery, and allow him his three serving-boys. So the missionary and his converts rubbed along in seeming friendliness.
One summer the Friar, who did not make long jour- neys now that he had grown large in girth, decided that he would like company,—someone to admire his fine garden, his ingenious kitchen, his airy loggia with its rugs and water jars, where he meditated and took his
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after-dinner siesta. So he planned to give a dinner party in the week after St. John’s Day.
He sent his runner to Zuñi, Laguna, Isleta, and bade the Padres to a feast. They came upon the day, four of them, for there were two priests at Zuñi. The stable-boy was stationed at the foot of the rock to take their beasts and conduct the visitors up the stairway. At the head of the trail Baltazar received them. They were shown over the place, and spent the morning gossiping in the cloister walks, cool and silent, though the naked rock outside was almost too hot for the hand to touch. The vine leaves rustled agreeably in the breeze, and the earth about the carrot and onion tops, as it dried from last night’s water- ing, gave off a pleasant smell. The guests thought their host lived very well, and they wished they had his secret. If he was a trifle boastful of his air-bound seat, no one could blame him.
With the dinner, Baltazar had taken extravagant pains. The monastery in which he had learned to cook was off the main highway to Seville; the Spanish nobles and the King himself sometimes stopped there for entertainment. In that great kitchen, with its multiplicity of spits, small enough to roast a lark and large enough to roast a boar, the Friar had learned a thing or two about sauces, and in his lonely years at Acoma he had bettered his instruction by a natural aptitude for the art. The poverty of materials had proved an incentive rather than a discouragement.
Certainly the visiting missionaries had never sat down
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to food like that which rejoiced them to-day in the cool refectory, the blinds open just enough to admit a streak of throbbing desert far below them. Their host was telling them pompously that he would have a fountain in the cloister close when they came again. He had to check his hungry guests in their zeal for the relishes and the soup, warning them to save their mettle for what was to come. The roast was to be a wild turkey, superbly done—but that, alas, was never tasted. The course which preceded it was the host’s especial care, and here he had trusted nothing to his cook; hare jardiniére (his carrots and onions were tender and well flavoured), with a sauce which he had been perfecting for many years. This entrée was brought from the kitchen in a large earthen dish—but not large enough, for with its luxury of sauce and floating carrots it filled the platter to the brim. The stable-boy was serving to-day, as the cook could not leave his spits, and he had been neat, brisk, and efficient. The Friar was pleased with him, and was wondering whether he could not find some little medal of bronze or silver-gilt to reward him for _ his pains.
When the hare in its sauce came on, the priest from Isleta chanced to be telling a funny story at which the company were laughing uproariously. The serving-boy, who knew a little Spanish, was apparently trying to get the point of the recital which made the Padres so merry. At any rate, he became distracted, and as he passed behind the senior priest of Zuñi, he tipped his full platter and
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spilled a stream of rich brown gravy over the good man’s head and shoulders. Baltazar was quick-tempered, and he had been drinking freely of the fiery grape brandy. He caught up the empty pewter mug at his right and threw it at the clumsy lad with a malediction. It struck the boy on the side of the head. He dropped the platter, staggered a few steps, and fell down. He did not get up, nor did he move. The Padre from Zufii was skilled in medicine. Wiping the sauce from his eyes, he bent over the boy and examined him.
‘Muerto,’ he whispered. With that he plucked his junior priest by the sleeve, and the two bolted across the garden without another word and made for the head of the stairway. In a moment the Padres of Laguna and Isleta unceremoniously followed their example. With re- markable speed the four guests got them down from the rock, saddled their mules, and urged them across the plain.
Baltazar was left alone with the consequences of his haste. Unfortunately the cook, astonished at the pro- longed silence, had looked in at the door just as the last pair of brown gowns were vanishing across the cloister. He saw his comrade lying upon the floor, and silently disappeared from the premises by an exit known only to himself.
When Friar Baltazar went into the kitchen he found it solitary, the turkey still dripping on the spit. Certainly he had no appetite for the roast. He felt, indeed, very re-
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morseful and uncomfortable, also indignant with his de- parted guests. For a moment he entertained the idea of following them; but a temporary flight would only weaken his position, and a permanent evacuation was not to be thought of. His garden was at its prime, his peaches were just coming ripe, and his vines hung heavy with green clusters. Mechanically he took the turkey from the spit, not because he felt any inclination for food, but from an instinct of compassion, quite as if the bird could suffer from being burned to a crisp. This done, he repaired to his loggia and sat down to read his breviary, which he had neglected for several days, having been so occupied in the refectory. He had begrudged no pains to that sauce which had been his undoing.
The airy loggia, where he customarily took his after- noon repose, was like a birdcage hung in the breeze. Through its open archways he looked down on the huddled pueblo, and out over the great mesa-strewn plain far below. He was unable to fix his mind upon his office. The pueblo down there was much too quiet. At this hour there should be a few women washing pots or rags, a few children playing by the cisterns and chasing the turkeys. But to-day the rock top baked in the fire of the sun in utter silence, not one human being was visible—yes, one, though he had not been there a moment ago. At the head of the stone stairway, there was a patch of lustrous black, just above the rocks; an Indian’s hair. They had set a guard at the trail head.
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Now the Padre began to feel alarmed, to wish he had gone down that stairway with the others, while there was yet time. He wished he were anywhere in the world but on this rock. There was old Father Ramirez’s donkey path; but if the Indians were watching one road, they would watch the other. The spot of black hair never stirred; and there were but those two ways down to the plain, only those. ... Whichever way one turned, three hundred and fifty feet of naked cliff, without one tree or shrub a man could cling to.
As the sun sank lower and lower, there began a deep, singing murmur of male voices from the pueblo below him, not a chant, but the rhythmical intonation of Indian oratory when a serious matter is under discussion. Fright- ful stories of the torture of the missionaries in the great rebellion of 1680 flashed into Friar Baltazar’s mind; how one Franciscan had his eyes torn out, another had been burned, and the old Padre at Jamez had been stripped naked and driven on all fours about the plaza all night, with drunken Indians straddling his back, until he rolled over dead from exhaustion.
Moonrise from the loggia was an impressive sight, even to this Brother who was not over-impressionable. But to- night he wished he could keep the moon from coming up through the floor of the desert,—the moon was the clock which began things in the pueblo. He watched with horror for that golden rim against the deep blue velvet: of the night.
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The moon came, and at its coming the Acoma people issued from their doors. A company of men walked si- lently across the rock to the cloister. They came up the ladder and appeared in the loggia. The Friar asked them gruffly what they wanted, but they made no reply. Not ‘once speaking to him or to each other, they bound his feet together and tied his arms to his sides.
The Acoma people told afterwards that he did not sup- plicate or struggle; had he done so, they might have dealt more cruelly with him. But he knew his Indians, and that when once they had collectively made up their pueblo mind ... Moreover, he was a proud old Spaniard, and had a certain fortitude lodged in his well-nourished body. He was accustomed to command, not to entreat, and he retained the respect of his Indian vassals to the end.
They carried him down the ladder and through the cloister and across the rock to the most precipitous clifi— the one over which the Acoma women flung broken pots and such refuse as the turkeys would not eat. There the people were assembled. They cut his bonds, and taking him by the hands and feet, swung him out over the rock- edge and back a few times. He was heavy, and perhaps they thought this dangerous sport. No sound but hissing breath came through his teeth. The four executioners took him up again from the brink where they had laid him, and, after a few feints, dropped him in mid-air.
So did they rid their rock of their tyrant, whom on the whole they had liked very well. But everything has its
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day. The execution was not followed by any sacrilege to the church or defiling of holy vessels, but merely by a division of the Padre’s stores and household goods. The women, indeed, took pleasure in watching the garden pine and waste away from thirst, and ventured into the cloisters to laugh and chatter at the whitening foliage of the peach trees, and the green grapes shrivelling on the vines.
When the next priest came, years afterward, he found no ill will awaiting him. He was a native Mexican, of un- pretentious tastes, who was well satisfied with beans and jerked meat, and let the pueblo turkey flock scratch in the hot dust that had once been Baltazar’s garden. The old peach stumps kept sending up pale sprouts for many years.
BOOK IV SNAKE ROOT
BOOK FOUR
SNAKE ROOT
I THE NIGHT AT PECOS
A month after the Bishop’s visit to Albuquerque and Acoma, the genial Father Gallegos was formally sus- pended, and Father Vaillant himself took charge of the parish. At first there was bitter feeling; the rich rancheros and the merry ladies of Albuquerque were very hostile to the French priest. He began his reforms at once. Every- thing was changed. The holy-days, which had been oc- casions of revelry under Padre Gallegos, were now days of austere devotion. The fickle Mexican population soon found as much diversion in being devout as they had once found in being scandalous. Father Vaillant wrote to his sister Philoméne, in France, that the temper of his parish was like that of a boys’ school; under one master the lads try to excel one another in mischief and disobedi- ence, under another they vie with each other in acts
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of loyalty. The Novena preceding Christmas, which had long been celebrated by dances and hilarious merry- making, was this year a great revival of religious zeal.
Though Father Vaillant had all the duties of a parish priest at Albuquerque, he was still Vicar General, and in February the Bishop dispatched him on urgent business to Las Vegas. He did not return on the day that he was expected, and when several days passed with no word from him, Father Latour began to feel some anxiety.
One morning at day-break a very sick Indian boy rode into the Bishop’s courtyard on Father Joseph’s white mule, Contento, bringing bad news. The Padre, he said, had stopped at his village in the Pecos mountains where black measles had broken out, to give the sacrament to the dying, and had fallen ill of the sickness. The boy him- self had been well when he started for Santa Fé, but had become sick on the way.
The Bishop had the messenger put into the wood- house, an isolated building at the end of the garden, where the Sisters of Loretto could tend him. He instructed the Mother Superior to pack a bag with such medicines and comforts for the sick as he could carry, and told Fructosa, his cook, to put up for him the provisions he usually took on horseback journeys. When his man brought a pack- mule and his own mule, Angelica, to the door, Father Latour, already in his rough riding-breeches and buck-
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skin jacket, looked at the handsome beast and shook his head.
“No, leave her with Contento. The new army mule is heavier, and will do for this journey.”
The Bishop rode out of Santa Fé two hours after the Indian messenger rode in. He was going direct to the pueblo of Pecos, where he would pick up Jacinto. It was late in the afternoon when he reached the pueblo, lying low on its red rock ledges, half-surrounded by a crown of fir-clad mountains, and facing a sea of junipers and cedars. The Bishop had meant to get fresh horses at Pecos and push on through the mountains, but Jacinto and the older Indians who gathered about the horseman strongly advised him to spend the night there and start in the early morning. The sun was shining brilliantly in a blue sky, but in the west, behind the mountain, lay a great sta- tionary black cloud, opaque and motionless as a ledge of rock. The old men looked at it and shook their heads.
“Very big wind,” said the governor gravely.
Unwillingly the Bishop dismounted and gave his mules to Jacinto; it seemed to him that he was wasting time. There was still an hour before nightfall, and he spent that hour pacing up and down the crust of bare rock between the village and the ruin of the old mission church. The sun was sinking, a red ball which threw a copper glow over the pine-covered ridge of mountains, and edged that inky, ominous cloud with molten silver. The great red earth walls of the mission, red as brick-dust,
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yawned gloomily before him,—part of the roof had fallen in, and the rest would soon go.
At this moment Father Joseph was lying dangerously ill in the dirt and discomfort of an Indian village in winter. Why, the Bishop was asking himself, had he ever brought his friend to this life of hardship and danger? Father Vail- lant had been frail from childhood, though he had the endurance resulting from exhaustless enthusiasm. The Brothers at Montferrand were not given to coddling boys, but every year they used to send this one away for a rest in the high Volvic mountains, because his vitality ran down under the confinement of college life. Twice, while he and Father Latour were missionaries in Ohio, Joseph had been at death’s door; once so ill with cholera that the newspapers had printed his name in the death list. On that occasion their Ohio Bishop had christened him Trompe- la-Mort. Yes, Father Latour told himself, Blanchet had outwitted death so often, there was always the chance he would do it again.
Walking about the walls of the ruin, the Bishop dis- covered that the sacristy was dry and clean, and he de- cided to spend the night there, wrapped in his blankets, on one of the earthen benches that ran about the inner walls. While he was examining this room, the wind began to howl about the old church, and darkness fell quickly. From the low doorways of the pueblo ruddy fire-light was gleaming-—singularly grateful to the eye. Waiting for him on the rocks, he recognized the slight figure of Ja-
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cinto, his blanket drawn close about his head, his shoul- ders bowed to the wind.
The young Indian said that supper was ready, and the Bishop followed him to his particular lair in those rows of little houses all alike and all built together. There was a ladder before Jacinto’s door which led up to a second storey, but that was the dwelling of another family; the roof of Jacinto’s house made a veranda for the family above him. The Bishop bent his head under the low door- way and stepped down; the floor of the room was a long step below the door-sill—the Indian way of preventing drafts. The room into which he descended was long and narrow, smoothly whitewashed, and clean, to the eye, at least, because of its very bareness. There was nothing on the walls but a few fox pelts and strings of gourds and red peppers. The richly coloured blankets of which Ja- cinto was very proud were folded in piles on the earth settle, —it was there he and his wife slept, near the fire- place. The earth of that settle became warm during the day and held its heat until morning, like the Russian peasants’ stove-bed. Over the fire a pot of beans and dried meat was simmering. The burning pifion logs filled the room with sweet-smelling smoke. Clara, Jacinto’s wife, smiled at the priest as he entered. She ladled out the stew, and the Bishop and Jacinto sat down on the floor beside the fire, each with his bowl. Between them Clara put a basin full of hot corn-bread baked with squash seeds,—an Indian delicacy comparable to raisin bread
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among the whites. The Bishop said a blessing and broke the bread with his hands. While the two men ate, the young, woman watched them and stirred a tiny cradle of deerskin which hung by thongs from the roof poles. Ja- cinto, when questioned, said sadly that the baby was ail- ing. Father Latour did not ask to see it; it would be swathed in layers of wrappings, he knew; even its face and head would be covered against drafts. Indian babies were never bathed in winter, and it was useless to suggest treatment for the sick ones. On that subject the Indian ear was closed to advice.
It was a pity, too, that he could do nothing for Jacinto’s baby. Cradles were not many in the pueblo of Pecos. The tribe was dying out; infant mortality was heavy, and the young couples did not reproduce freely,—the life-force seemed low. Smallpox and measles had taken heavy toll here time and again.
Of course there were other explanations, credited by many good people in Santa Fé. Pecos had more than its share of dark legends,—perhaps that was because it had been too tempting to white men, and had had more than its share of history. It was said that this people had from time immemorial kept a ceremonial fire burning in some cave in the mountain, a fire that had never been allowed to go out, and had never been revealed to white men. The story was that the service of this fire sapped the strength of the young men appointed to serve it, —always the best of the tribe. Father Latour thought this hardly probable.
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Why should it be very arduous, in a mountain full of timber, to feed a fire so small that its whereabouts had been concealed for centuries?
There was also the snake story, reported by the early explorers, both Spanish and American, and believed ever since: that this tribe was peculiarly addicted to snake wor- ship, that they kept rattlesnakes concealed in their houses, and somewhere in the mountain guarded an enormous serpent which they brought to the pueblo for certain feasts. It was said that they sacrificed young babies to the great snake, and thus diminished their numbers.
It seemed much more likely that the contagious diseases brought by white men were the real cause of the shrinkage of the tribe. Among the Indians, measles, scarlatina and whooping-cough were as deadly as typhus or cholera, Certainly, the tribe was decreasing every year. Jacinto’s house was at one end of the living pueblo; behind it were long rock ridges of dead pueblo,—empty houses ruined by weather and now scarcely more than piles of earth and stone. The population of the living streets was less than one hundred adults.* This was all that was left of the rich and populous Cicuyé of Coronado’s expedition. Then, by his report, there were six thousand souls in the Indian town. They had rich fields irrigated from the Pecos River. The streams were full of fish, the mountain was full of game. The pueblo, indeed, seemed to lie upon the knees
* In actual fact, the dying pueblo of Pecos was abandoned some years before the American occupation of New Mexico.
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of these verdant mountains, like a favoured child. Out yonder, on the juniper-spotted plateau in front of the vil- lage, the Spaniards had camped, exacting a heavy tribute of corn and furs and cotton garments from their hapless hosts. It was from here, the story went, that they set forth in the spring on their ill-fated search for the seven golden cities of Quivera, taking with them slaves and concubines ravished from the Pecos people.
As Father Latour sat by the fire and listened to the wind sweeping down from the mountains and howling over the plateau, he thought of these things; and he could not help wondering whether Jacinto, sitting silent by the same fire, was thinking of them, too. The wind, he knew, was blow- ing out of the inky cloud bank that lay behind the moun- tain at sunset; but it might well be blowing out of a re- mote, black past. The only human voice raised against it was the feeble wailing of the sick child in the cradle. Clara ate noiselessly in a corner, Jacinto looked into the fire.
The Bishop read his breviary by the fire-light for an hour. Then, warmed to the bone and assured that his roll of blankets was warmed through, he rose to go. Jacinto followed with the blankets and one of his own buffalo robes. They went along a line of red doorways and across the bare rock to the gaunt ruin, whose lateral walls, with
their buttresses, still braved the storm and let in the star- light.
SNAKE ROOT
2 STONE LIPS
It was not difficult for the Bishop to waken early. After midnight his body became more and more chilled and cramped. He said his prayers before he rolled out of his blankets, remembering Father Vaillant’s maxim that if you said your prayers first, you would find plenty of time for other things afterward.
Going through the silent pueblo to Jacinto’s door, the Bishop woke him and asked him to make a fire. While the Indian went to get the mules ready, Father Latour got his coffee-pot and tin cup out of his saddle-bags, and a round loaf of Mexican bread. With bread and black coffee, he could travel day after day. Jacinto was for starting without breakfast, but Father Latour made him sit down and share his loaf. Bread is never too plenty in Indian households. Clara was still lying on the settle with her baby.
At four o’clock they were on the road, Jacinto riding the mule that carried the blankets. He knew the trails through his own mountains well enough to follow them in the dark. Toward noon the Bishop suggested a halt to rest the mules, but his guide looked at the sky and shook his head. The sun was nowhere to be seen, the air was thick and grey and smelled of snow. Very soon the snow began to fall—lightly at first, but all the while be- coming heavier. The vista of pine trees ahead of them
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grew shorter and shorter through the vast powdering of descending flakes. A little after mid-day a burst of wind sent the snow whirling in coils about the two travellers, and a great storm broke. The wind was like a hurricane at sea, and the air became blind with snow. The Bishop could scarcely see his guide—saw only parts of him, now a head, now a shoulder, now only the black rump of his mule. Pinetrees by the way stood out for a moment, then disappeared absolutely in the whirlpool of snow. Trail and landmarks, the mountain itself, were obliterated.
Jacinto sprang from his mule and unstrapped the roll of blankets. Throwing the saddle-bags to the Bishop, he shouted, “Come, I know a place. Be quick, Padre.”
The Bishop protested they could not leave the mules. Jacinto said the mules must take their chance.
For Father Latour the next hour was a test of endur- ance. He was blind and breathless, panting through his open mouth. He clambered over half-visible rocks, fell over prostrate trees, sank into deep holes and struggled out, always following the red blankets on the shoulders of the Indian boy, which stuck out when the boy himself was lost to sight.
Suddenly the snow seemed thinner. The guide stopped short. They were standing, the Bishop made out, under an overhanging wall of rock which made a barrier against the storm. Jacinto dropped the blankets from his shoulder and seemed to be preparing to climb the cliff. Looking up, the Bishop saw a peculiar formation in the rocks; two
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rounded ledges, one directly over the other, with a mouth- like opening between. They suggested two great stone lips, slightly parted and thrust outward. Up to this mouth Jacinto climbed quickly by footholds well known to him. Having mounted, he lay down on the lower lip, and helped the Bishop to clamber up. He told Father Latour to wait for him on this projection while he brought up the baggage.
A few moments later the Bishop slid after Jacinto and the blankets, through the orifice, into the throat of the cave. Within stood a wooden ladder, like that used in kivas, and down this he easily made his way to the floor.
He found himself in a lofty cavern, shaped somewhat like a Gothic chapel, of vague outline,—the only light within was that which came through the narrow aperture between the stone lips. Great as was his need of shelter, the Bishop, on his way down the ladder, was struck by a reluctance, an extreme distaste for the place. The air in the cave was glacial, penetrated to the very bones, and he detected at once a fetid odour, not very strong but highly disagreeable. Some twenty feet or so above his head the open mouth let in grey daylight like a high transom.
While he stood gazing about, trying to reckon the size of the cave, his guide was intensely preoccupied in mak- ing a careful examination of the floor and walls. At the foot of the ladder lay a heap of half-burned logs. There had been a fire there, and it had been extinguished with
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fresh earth,—a pile of dust covered what had been the heart of the fire. Against the cavern wall was a heap of pifion faggots, neatly piled. After he had made a minute examination of the floor, the guide began cautiously to move this pile of wood, taking the sticks up one by one, and putting them in another spot. The Bishop supposed he would make a fire at once, but he seemed in no haste to do so. Indeed, when he had moved the wood he sat down upon the floor and fell into reflection. Father La- tour urged him to build a fire without further delay.
“Padre,” said the Indian boy, “I do not know if it was right to bring you here. This place is used by my people for ceremonies and is known only to us. When you go out from here, you must forget.”
“T will forget, certainly. But unless we can have a fire, we had better go back into the storm. I feel ill here al- ready.”
Jacinto unrolled the blankets and threw the dryest one about the shivering priest. Then he bent over the pile of ashes and charred wood, but what he did was to select a number of small stones that had been used to fence in the burning embers. These he gathered in his sarape and car- ried to the rear wall of the cavern, where, a little above his head, there seemed to be a hole. It was about as large as a very big watermelon, of an irregular oval shape.
Holes of that shape are common in the black volcanic cliffs of the Pajarito Plateau, where they occur in great numbers. This one was solitary, dark, and seemed to lead
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into another cavern. Though it lay higher than Jacinto’s head, it was not beyond easy reach of his arms, and to the Bishop’s astonishment he began deftly and noiselessly to place the stones he had collected within the mouth of this orifice, fitting them together until he had entirely closed it. He then cut wedges from the pifion faggots and in- serted them into the cracks between the stones. Finally, he took a handful of the earth that had been used to smother the dead fire, and mixed it with the wet snow that had blown in between the stone lips. With this thick mud he plastered over his masonry, and smoothed it with his palm. The whole operation did not take a quarter of an hour.
Without comment or explanation he then proceeded to build a fire. The odour so disagreeable to the Bishop soon vanished before the fragrance of the burning logs. The heat seemed to purify the rank air at the same time that it took away the deathly chill, but the dizzy noise in Father Latour’s head persisted. At first he thought it was a vertigo, a roaring in his ears brought on by cold and changes in his circulation. But as he grew warm and re- laxed, he perceived an extraordinary vibration in this cavern; it hummed like a hive of bees, like a heavy roll of distant drums. After a time he asked Jacinto whether he, too, noticed this. The slim Indian boy smiled for the first time since they had entered the cave. He took up a faggot for a torch, and beckoned the Padre to follow him along a tunnel which ran back into the mountain, where the roof
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grew much lower, almost within reach of the hand. ‘There Jacinto knelt down over a fissure in the stone floor, like a crack in china, which was plastered up with clay. Dig- ging some of this out with his hunting knife, he put his ear on the opening, listened a few seconds, and motioned the Bishop to do likewise.
Father Latour lay with his ear to this crack for a long while, despite the cold that arose from it. He told himself he was listening to one of the oldest voices of the earth. What he heard was the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock. It was not a rushing noise, but the sound of a great flood moving with majesty and power.
“It is terrible,” he said at last, as he rose.
“Si, Padre.” Jacinto began spitting on the clay he had gouged out of the seam, and plastered it up again.
When they returned to the fire, the patch of daylight up between the two lips had grown much paler. The Bishop saw it die with regret. He took from his saddle- bags his coffee-pot and a loaf of bread and a goat cheese. Jacinto climbed up to the lower ledge of the entrance, shook a pine tree, and filled the coffee-pot and one of the blankets with fresh snow. While his guide was thus en- gaged, the Bishop took a swallow of old Taos whisky from his pocket flask. He never liked to drink spirits in the presence of an Indian.
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Jacinto declared that he thought himself lucky to get bread and black coffee. As he handed the Bishop back his tin cup after drinking its contents, he rubbed his hand over his wide sash with a smile of pleasure that showed all his white teeth.
“We had good luck to be near here,” he said. “When we leave the mules, I think I can find my way here, but J am not sure. I have not been here very many times. You was scare, Padre?”
The Bishop reflected. “You hardly gave me time to be scared, boy. Were you?”
The Indian shrugged his shoulders. “I think not to re- turn to pueblo,” he admitted.
Father Latour read his breviary long by the light of the fire. Since early morning his mind had been on other than spiritual things. At last he felt that he could sleep. He made Jacinto repeat a Pater Noster with him, as he always did on their night camps, rolled himself in his blankets, and stretched out, feet to the fire. He had it in his mind, however, to waken in the night and study a little the curious hole his guide had so carefully closed. After he put on the mud, Jacinto had never looked in the direction of that hole again, and Father Latour, ob- serving Indian good manners, had tried not to glance toward it.
He did waken, and the fire was still giving off a rich glow of light in that lofty Gothic chamber. But there against the wall was his guide, standing on some invisible
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foothold, his arms outstretched against the rock, his body flattened against it, his ear over that patch of fresh mud, listening; listening with supersensual ear, it seemed, and he looked to be supported against the rock by the in- tensity of his solicitude. The Bishop closed his eyes with- out making a sound and wondered why he had supposed he could catch his guide asleep.
The next morning they crawled out through the stone lips, and dropped into a gleaming white world. The snow- clad mountains were red in the rising sun. The Bishop stood looking down over ridge after ridge of wintry fir trees with the tender morning breaking over them, all their branches laden with soft, rose-coloured clouds of virgin snow.
Jacinto said it would not be worth while to look for the mules. When the snow melted, he would recover the saddles and bridles. They floundered on foot some eight miles to a squatter’s cabin, rented horses, and completed their journey by starlight. When they reached Father Vaillant, he was sitting up in a bed of buffalo skins, his fever broken, already on the way to recovery. Another good friend had reached him before the Bishop. Kit Car- son, on a deer hunt in the mountains with two Taos In- dians, had heard that this village was stricken and that the Vicario was there. He hurried to the rescue, and got into the pueblo with a pack of venison meat just before the storm broke. As soon as Father Vaillant could sit in the saddle, Carson and the Bishop took him back to
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Santa Fé, breaking the journey into four days because of his enfeebled state.
The Bishop kept his word, and never spoke of Ja- cinto’s cave to anyone, but he did not cease from won- dering about it. It flashed into his mind from time to time, and always with a shudder of repugnance quite un- justified by anything he had experienced there. It had been a hospitable shelter to him in his extremity. Yet afterward he remembered the storm itself, even his ex- haustion, with a tingling sense of pleasure. But the cave, which had probably saved his life, he remembered with horror. No tales of wonder, he told himself, would ever tempt him into a cavern hereafter.
At home again, in his own house, he still felt a certain curiosity about this ceremonial cave, and Jacinto’s puz- zling behaviour. It seemed almost to lend a colour of probability to some of those unpleasant stories about the Pecos religion. He was already convinced that neither the white men nor the Mexicans in Santa Fé understood any- thing about Indian beliefs or the workings of the Indian mind.
Kit Carson had told him that the proprietor of the trad- ing post between Glorieta Pass and the Pecos pueblo had grown up a neighbour to these Indians, and knew as much about them as anybody. His parents had kept the trading post before him, and his mother was the first white woman in that neighborhood. The trader’s name was Zeb Or-
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chard; he lived alone in the mountains, selling salt and sugar and whisky and tobacco to red men and white. Carson said that he was honest and truthful, a good friend to the Indians, and had at one time wanted to marry a Pecos girl, but his old mother, who was very proud of being ‘“‘white,” would not hear to it, and so he had re- mained a single man and a recluse.
Father Latour made a point of stopping for the night with this trader on one of his missionary journeys, in order to question him about the Pecos customs and cere- monies.
Orchard said that the legend about the undying fire was unquestionably true; but it was kept burning, not in the mountain, but in their own pueblo. It was a smothered fire in a clay oven, and had been burning in one of the kivas ever since the pueblo was founded, centuries ago. About the snake stories, he was not certain. He had seen rattle- snakes around the pueblo, to be sure, but there were rat- tlers everywhere. A Pecos boy had been bitten on the ankle some years ago, and had come to him for whisky; he swelled up and was very sick, like any other boy.
The Bishop asked Orchard if he thought it probable that the Indians kept a great serpent in concealment some- where, as was commonly reported.
“They do keep some sort of varmint out in the moun- tain, that they bring in for their religious ceremonies,” the trader said. “But I don’t know if it’s a snake or not. No white man knows anything about Indian religion, Padre.”
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was a boy he had been very curious about these snake stories himself, and once, at their festival time, he had spied on the Pecos men, though that was not a very safe thing to do. He had lain in ambush for two nights on the mountain, and he saw a party of Indians bringing in a chest by torch-light. It was about the size of a woman’s trunk, and it was heavy enough to bend the young aspen poles on which it was hung. “If Pd seen white men bring- ing in a chest after dark,” he observed, “I could have made a guess at what was in it; money, or whisky, or fire-arms. But seeing it was Indians, I can’t say. It might have been only queer-shaped rocks their ancestors had taken a no- tion to. The things they value most are worth nothing to us. They’ve got their own superstitions, and their minds will go round and round in the same old ruts till Judg- ment Day.”
Father Latour remarked that their veneration for old customs was a quality he liked in the Indians, and that it played a great part in his own religion.
The trader told him he might make good Catholics among the Indians, but he would never separate them from their own beliefs. “Their priests have their own kind of mysteries. I don’t know how much of it is real and how much is made up. I remember something that happened when I was a little fellow. One night a Pecos girl, with her baby in her arms, ran into the kitchen here and begged my mother to hide her until after the festival, for she’d seen
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signs between the cacigues, and was sure they were going to feed her baby to the snake. Whether it was true or not, she certainly believed it, poor thing, and Mother let her stay. It made a great impression on me at the time.”
BOOK V PADRE MARTINEZ
BOOK FIVE
PADRE MARTINEZ
I THE OLD ORDER
Bishop Latour, with Jacinto, was riding through the mountains on his first official visit to Taos—after Albu- querque, the largest and richest parish in his diocese. Both the priest and people there were hostile to Americans and jealous of interference. Any European, except a Spaniard, was regarded as a gringo. The Bishop had let the parish alone, giving their animosity plenty of time to cool. With Carson’s help he had informed himself fully about condi- tions there, and about the powerful old priest, Antonio José Martinez, who was ruler in temporal as well as in spiritual affairs. Indeed, before Father Latour’s entrance upon the scene, Martínez had been dictator to all the parishes in northern New Mexico, and the native priests at Santa Fé were all of them under his thumb.
It was common talk that Padre Martinez had instigated
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the revolt of the Taos Indians five years ago, when Bent, the American Governor, and a dozen other white men were murdered and scalped. Seven of the Taos Indians had been tried before a military court and hanged for the murder, but no attempt had been made to call the plotting priest to account. Indeed, Padre Martinez had managed to profit considerably by the affair. The Indians who were sentenced to death had sent for their Padre and begged him to get them out of the trouble ‘he had got them into. Martinez promised to save their lives if they would deed him their lands, near the pueblo. This they did, and after the conveyance was properly exe- cuted the Padre troubled himself no more about the mat- ter, but went to pay a visit at his native town of Abiquiu. In his absence the seven Indians were hanged on the ap- pointed day. Martinez now cultivated their fertile farms, which made him quite the richest man in the parish. Father Latour had had polite correspondence with Martinez, but had met him only once, on that memorable occasion when the Padre had ridden up from Taos to strengthen the Santa Fé clergy in their refusal to recog- nize the new Bishop. But he could see him as if that were only yesterday,—the priest of Taos was not a man one would easily forget. One could not have passed him on the street without feeling his great physical force and his imperious will. Not much taller than the Bishop in reality, he gave the impression ot being an enormous man. His broad high shoulders were like a bull buffalo’s, his big
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head was set defiantly on a thick neck, and the full-cheeked, richly coloured, egg-shaped Spanish face—how vividly the Bishop remembered that face! It was so unusual that he would be glad to see it again; a high, narrow forehead, brilliant yellow eyes set deep in strong arches, and full, florid cheeks,—not blank areas of smooth flesh, as in Anglo-Saxon faces, but full of muscular activity, as quick to change with feeling as any of his features. His mouth was the very assertion of violent, uncurbed passions and tyrannical self-will; the full lips thrust out and taut, like the flesh of animals distended by fear or desire.
Father Latour judged that the day of lawless personal power was almost over, even on the frontier, and this figure was to him already like something picturesque and impressive, but really impotent, left over from the past.
The Bishop and Jacinto left the mountains behind them, the trail dropped to a plain covered by clumps of very old sage-brush, with trunks as thick as a man’s leg. Ja- cinto pointed out a cloud of dust moving rapidly toward them,—a cavalcade of a hundred men or more, Indians and Mexicans, come out to welcome their Bishop with shouting and musketry.
As the horsemen approached, Padre Martinez himself was easily distinguishable—in buckskin breeches, high boots and silver spurs, a wide Mexican hat on his head, and a great black cape wound about his shoulders like a shepherd’s plaid. He rode up to the Bishop and reining
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in his black gelding, uncovered his head in a broad salu- tation, while his escort surrounded the churchmen and fired their muskets into the air.
The two priests rode side by side into Los Ranchos de Taos, a little town of yellow walls and winding streets and green orchards. The inhabitants were all gathered in the square before the church. When the Bishop dismounted to enter the church, the women threw their shawls on the dusty pathway for him to walk upon, and as he passed through the kneeling congregation, men and women snatched for his hand to kiss the Episcopal ring. In his own country all this would have been highly distasteful to Jean Marie Latour. Here, these demonstrations seemed a part of the high colour that was in landscape and gar- dens, in the flaming cactus and the gaudily decorated altars,—in the agonized Christs and dolorous Virgins and the very human figures of the saints. He had already learned that with this people religion was necessarily theatrical.
From Los Ranchos the party rode quickly across the grey plain into Taos itself, to the priest’s house, opposite the church, where a great throng had collected. As the people sank on their knees, one boy, a gawky lad of ten or twelve, remained standing, his mouth open and his hat on his head. Padre Martinez reached over the heads of several kneeling women, snatched off the boy’s cap, and cuffed him soundly about the ears. When Father Latour murmured in protest, the native priest said boldly:
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“He is my own son, Bishop, and it is time I taught him manners.”
So this was to be the tune, the Bishop reflected. His well-schooled countenance did not change a shadow as he received this challenge, and he passed on into the Padre’s house. They went at once into Martinez’s study, where they found a young man lying on the floor, fast asleep. He was a very large young man, very stout, lying on his back with his head pillowed on a book, and as he breathed his bulk rose and fell amazingly. He wore a Franciscan’s brown gown, and his hair was clipped short. At sight of the sleeper, Padre Martinez broke into a laugh and gave him a no very gentle kick in the ribs. The fellow got to his feet in great confusion, escaping through a door into the patio.
“You there,” the Padre called after him, “only young men who work hard at night want to sleep in the day! You must have been studying by candle-light. PI give you an examination in theology!” This was greeted by a titter of feminine laughter from the windows across the court, where the fugitive took refuge behind a washing hung out to dry. He bent his tall, full figure and disap- peared between a pair of wet sheets.
“That was my student, Trinidad,” said Martinez, “a nephew of my old friend Father Lucero, at Arroyo Hondo. He’s a monk, but we want him to take orders. We sent him to the Seminary in Durango, but he was either too homesick or too stupid to learn anything, so I’m teach-
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ing him here. We shall make a priest of him one day.”
Father Latour was told to consider the house his own, but he had no wish to. The disorder was almost more than his fastidious taste could bear. The Padre’s study table was sprinkled with snuff, and piled so high with books that they almost hid the crucifix hanging behind it. Books were heaped on chairs and tables all over the house,—and the books and the floors were deep in the dust of spring sand-storms. Father Martinez’s boots and hats lay about in corners, his coats and cassocks were hung on pegs and draped over pieces of furniture. Yet the place seemed over-run by serving-women, young and old,—and by large yellow cats with full soft fur, of a special breed, apparently. They slept in the window-sills, lay on the well-curb in the patio; the boldest came, di- rectly, to the supper-table, where their master fed them carelessly from his plate.
When they sat down to supper, the host introduced to the Bishop the tall, stout young man with the protruding front, who had been asleep on the floor. He said again ‘that Trinidad Lucero was studying with him, and was supposed to be his secretary,—adding that he spent most of his time hanging about the kitchen and hindering the girls at their work.
These remarks were made in the young man’s pres- ence, but did not embarrass him at all. His whole atten- tion was fixed upon the mutton stew, which he began to
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devour with undue haste as soon as his plate was put before him. The Bishop observed later that Trinidad was treated very much like a poor relation or a servant. He was sent on errands, was told without ceremony to fetch the Padre’s boots, to bring wood for the fire, to saddle his horse. Father Latour disliked his personality so much that he could scarcely look at him. His fat face was ir- ritatingly stupid, and had the grey, oily look of soft cheeses. The corners of his mouth were deep folds in plumpness, like the creases in a baby’s legs, and the steel rim of his spectacles, where it crossed his nose, was em- bedded in soft flesh. He said not one word during supper, but ate as if he were afraid of never seeing food again. When his attention left his plate for a moment, it was fixed in the same greedy way upon the girl who served the table—and who seemed to regard him with careless contempt. The student gave the impression of being al- ways stupefied by one form of sensual disturbance or another.
Padre Martinez, with a napkin tied round his neck to protect his cassock, ate and drank generously. The Bishop found the food poor enough, despite the many cooks, though the wine, which came from El Paso del Norte, was very fair.
During supper, his host asked the Bishop flatly if he considered celibacy an essential condition of the priest’s vocation.
Father Latour replied merely that this question had
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been thrashed out many centuries ago and decided once for all.
“Nothing is decided once for all,” Martinez declared fiercely. “Celibacy may be all very well for the French clergy, but not for ours. St. Augustine himself says it is better not to go against nature. I find every evidence that in his old age he regretted having practised con- tinence.”
The Bishop said he would be interested to see the pas- sages from which he drew such conclusions, observing that he knew the writings of St. Augustine fairly well.
“I have the telling passages all written down some- where. I will find them before you go. You have probably read them with a sealed mind. Celibate priests lose their perceptions. No priest can experience repentance and for- giveness of sin unless he himself falls into sin. Since con- cupiscence is the most common form of temptation, it is better for him to know something about it. The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.”
“This is a subject upon which we must confer later, and at some length,” said the Bishop quietly. “I shall reform these practices throughout my diocese as rapidly as pos- sible. I hope it will be but a short time until there is not a priest left who does not keep all the vows he took when he bound himself to the service of the altar.”
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The swarthy Padre laughed, and threw off the big cat which had mounted to his shoulder. “It will keep you busy, Bishop. Nature has got the start of you here. But for all that, our native priests are more devout than your French Jesuits. We have a living Church here, not a dead arm of the European Church. Our religion grew out of the soil, and has its own roots. We pay a filial respect to the person of the Holy Father, but Rome has no authority here. We do not require aid from the Propa- ganda, and we resent its interference. The Church the Franciscan Fathers planted here was cut off; this is the second growth, and is indigenous. Our people are the most devout left in the world. If you blast their faith by European formalities, they will become infidels and prof- ligates.”
To this eloquence the Bishop returned blandly that he had not come to deprive the people of their religion, but that he would be compelled to deprive some of the priests of their parishes if they did not change their way of life.
Father Martinez filled his glass and replied with perfect good humour. “You cannot deprive me of mine, Bishop. Try it! I will organize my own church. You can have your French priest of Taos, and I will have the people!”
With this the Padre left the table and stood warming his back at the fire, his cassock pulled up about his waist to expose his trousers to the blaze. “You are a young man, my Bishop,” he went on, rolling his big head back and looking up at the well-smoked roof poles. “And you
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introduce European civilization here and change our old ways, to interfere with the secret dances of the Indians, let us say, or abolish the bloody rites of the Penitentes, I foretell an early death for you. I advise you to study our native traditions before you begin your reforms. You are among barbarous people, my Frenchman, between two savage races. The dark things forbidden by your Church are a part of Indian religion. You cannot introduce French fashions here.”
At this moment the student, Trinidad, got up quietly, and after an obsequious bow to the Bishop, went with soft, escaping tread toward the kitchen. When his brown skirt had disappeared through the door, Father Latour turned sharply to his host.
“Martinez, I consider it very unseemly to talk in this loose fashion before young men, especially a young man who is studying for the priesthood. Furthermore, Í can- not see why a young man of this calibre should be en- couraged to take orders. He will never hold a parish in my diocese.”
Padre Martinez laughed and showed his long, yellow teeth. Laughing did not become him; his teeth were too large—distinctly vulgar. “Oh, Trinidad will go to Ar- royo Hondo as curate to his uncle, who is growing old. He’s a very devout fellow, Trinidad. You ought to see him in Passion Week. He goes up to Abiquiu and be- comes another man; carries the heaviest crosses to the
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highest mountains, and takes more scourging than any- one. He comes back here with his back so full of cactus spines that the girls have to pick him like a chicken.” Father Latour was tired, and went to his room soon after supper. The bed, upon examination, seemed clean and comfortable, but he felt uncertain of its surroundings. He did not like the air of this house. After he retired, the clatter of dish-washing and the giggling of women across the patio kept him awake a long while; and when that ceased, Father Martinez began snoring in some chamber near by. He must have left his door open into the patio, for the adobe partitions were thick enough to smother sound otherwise. The Padre snored like an enraged bull, until the Bishop decided to go forth and find his door and close it. He arose, lit his candle, and opened his own door in half-hearted resolution. As the night wind blew into the room, a little dark shadow fluttered from the wall across the floor; a mouse, perhaps. But no, it was a bunch of woman’s hair that had been indolently tossed into a sorner when some slovenly female toilet was made in this room. This discovery annoyed the Bishop exceedingly. High Mass was at eleven the next morning, the parish priest officiating and the Bishop in the Episcopal chair. He was well pleased with the church of Taos. ‘The build- ing was clean and in good repair, the congregation large and devout. The delicate lace, snowy linen, and bur- nished brass on the altar told of a devoted Altar Guild. The boys who served at the altar wore rich smocks of
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hand-made lace over their scarlet cassocks. The Bishop had never heard the Mass more impressively sung than by Father Martinez. The man had a beautiful baritone voice, and he drew from some deep well of emotional power. Nothing in the service was slighted, every phrase and gesture had its full value. At the moment of the Ele- vation the dark priest seemed to give his whole force, his swarthy body and all its blood, to that lifting-up. Rightly guided, the Bishop reflected, this Mexican might have been a great man. He had an altogether compelling personality, a disturbing, mysterious, magnetic power. After the confirmation service, Father Martinez had horses brought round and took the Bishop out to see his farms and live-stock. He took him all over his ranches down in the rich bottom lands between Taos and the Indian pueblo which, as Father Latour knew, had come into his possession from the seven Indians who were hanged. Martinez referred carelessly to the Bent massacre as they rode along. He boasted that there had never been trouble afoot in New Mexico that wasn’t started in Taos. They stopped just west of the pueblo a little before sunset,—-a pueblo very different from all the