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 had been sick out there,
and the Fathers at one of the missions 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 charted; 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 printing-press
could not follow him. Out of the hardships 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 compassionate 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 housekeeper and manager of the Sisters' kitchen. She
was devoted 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
household of God.
BOOK THREE
_THE MASS AT ÁCOMA_
1
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 journey 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
escape for a little from the cares of building and founding, and to go
westward among the old isolated Indian missions; Santo Domingo, breeder
of horses; Isleta, whitened with gypsum; Laguna, of wide pastures; and
finally, cloud-set Ácoma.
In the golden October weather the Bishop, with his blankets and
coffee-pot, attended by Jacinto, a young Indian 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
popular Padre Gallegos. After Santa Fé, Albuquerque was the most
important parish in the diocese; the priest belonged 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 fandango 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 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 examined 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
astonishment 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.
"It 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 beginning. 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 Ácoma, he made no direct reply. It used to be
his custom, he said, to go there in Passion Week, but the Ácoma Indians
were unreclaimed heathen at heart, and had no wish to be 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 upon his journey, was
very glad not to have the embarrassment of refusing it, and he rode away
from Albuquerque after polite farewells. Yet, he reflected, there was
something very engaging about Gallegos as a man. As a 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
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 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 movements 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 Indian 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 velvety 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, 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 rarely, 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 Laguna and Ácoma. He
used to go to those pueblos to hold services when he was younger, and
had always found them friendly.
"At Ácoma," 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
Ácoma 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 morning, Father
Latour and his guide rode all day through the dry desert plain west of
Albuquerque. It was like a country 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 long, 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 arrested by fear.
As the morning wore on they had to make their way through a sand-storm
which quite obscured the sun. Jacinto 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 petrified 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 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 together 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 interior 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 thinking aloud.
"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 flattering 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 Spanish, 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 Indian
conception of language, such attachments were superfluous and
unpleasing, perhaps.
They relapsed into the silence which was their usual form of
intercourse. The Bishop sat drinking his coffee slowly out of the tin
cup, keeping the pot near the embers. 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 piñon 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 civilization 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 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, Jacinto."
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. "Whatever 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
companionship with his Indian boy. One called the young Indians "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, naïf; 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. Father
Latour felt he had gone a good way toward gaining his guide's friendship,
though he did not know how.
The truth was, Jacinto liked the Bishop's way of meeting 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 vehement. 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 Ácoma. 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 disorder, 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 mountains.
The sandy soil of the plain had a light sprinkling of junipers, and was
splotched with masses of blooming rabbit 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
marigolds.
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 Ácoma 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, however 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, rising 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 attendant 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 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.
"Ácoma!" He stopped his mule.
The Bishop, following with his eye the straight, pointing 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 Ácoma.
Riding on, they presently drew rein under the Enchanted 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.