Lamy of Santa Fe

by Paul Horgan

He liked to share what he had—perhaps most of all the freeing outlook and closeness to nature of his little ranch in the Tesuque Cañon. Now and then he would go to St Michael’s College in the piercing early morning air of Santa Fe and collect a straggle of boys and walk them out to the Villa Pintoresca, where they could hear his Mass, and a couple could serve it for him. He had made a fish pond there too, and they could fish for German carp which he had had shipped to him; and when he brought the nuns and other friends to the country for a picnic, they were told to pick at will among the peach trees—but to exhaust one place before they raided another. He once called one of the nuns to come to look at a certain flower with him. She thought he might be about to pick it; but instead, he knelt, inhaled its fragrance, and brought her to her knees to do the same. The scattered families who lived in the cañon saw Lamy as he went on foot from the villa to the chancery in the mornings. When he was alone in his lodge, he spent much time reading, and he used his old caravan telescope to sweep the sky, and the unchanging fantasies of the earth forms, near and far, and the constantly changing marvels of light and color at sunrise, in daytime storm and cloud passage and in the fiery fall of evening before the starry dark.