Death Comes for the Archbishop

by Willa Cather

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.

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 very floor of the world is cracked open

The new vicar must be a young man, of strong constitution, full of zeal, and, above all, intelligent. He will have to deal with savagery and ignorance, with dissolute priests and political intrigue. He must be a man to whom order is necessary—as dear as life.”

Our Spanish fathers made good martyrs, but the French Jesuits accomplish more. They are the great organizers.”

“Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange!

“He will eat dried buffalo meat and frijoles with chili, and he will be 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.

My knowledge of your country is chiefly drawn from the romances of Fenimore Cooper, which I read in English with great pleasure.

Empowered by long training, the young priest blotted himself out of his own consciousness and meditated upon the anguish of his Lord.

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 rather terrifying, that old priest, with his big head, violent Spanish face, and shoulders like a buffalo; but the day of his tyranny was almost over.

one of the first things a stranger decided upon meeting Father Joseph was that the Lord had made few uglier men.

Ah well, that is a missionary’s life; to plant where another shall reap.”

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.

Soon after breakfast Father Vaillant departed riding Contento, with Angelica trotting submissively behind, and from his gate Señor Lujon watched them disconsolately 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 and Angelica. Father Vaillant had forced his hand, but he was rather glad of it.

He kept seeing her in the darkness as he rode on, her face in the fire-light, and her terrible pantomime.

Our Padre Martinez, at Taos is an old scapegrace,

He did not look quite like a professional gambler, but something smooth and twinkling in his countenance suggested an underhanded mode of life.

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 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 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.

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.

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 Ácoma run up a rock to be safe.”

All this plain, the Bishop gathered, once had 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.

So did they rid their rock of their tyrant, whom on the whole they had liked very well.

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.

The Bishop kept his word, and never spoke of Jacinto’s cave to anyone, but he did not cease from wondering about it. It flashed into his mind from time to time, and always with a shudder of repugnance quite unjustified 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 exhaustion, 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.

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

He had already learned that with this people religion was necessarily theatrical.

The student gave the impression of being always stupefied by one form of sensual disturbance or another.

The swarthy padre laughed, and threw off the big cat which had mounted to his shoulder.

When I went there everybody was my enemy, now everybody is my friend; therefore it is time to go.”

Avarice, he assured them, was the one passion that grew stronger and sweeter in old age.

He wasted away so rapidly that his people had the horse doctor come from Taos to look at him.

When the floor of the priest’s house was taken up, according to his last instructions, people came from as far as Taos and Santa Cruz and Mora to see the buckskin bags of gold and silver coin that were buried beneath it. Spanish coins, French, American, English, some of them very old. When it was at length conveyed to a Government mint and examined, it was valued at nearly twenty thousand dollars in American money. A great sum for one old priest to have scraped together in a country parish down at the bottom of a ditch.

He was proud of his skill with Indian weapons; he had acquired it in a hard school.

THE Bishop’s work was sometimes assisted, often impeded, by external events.

As Father Vaillant remarked, at Rome they did not seem to realize that it was no easy matter for two missionaries on horseback to keep up with the march of history.

Father Joseph had come to love the tamarisk above all trees. It had been the companion of his wanderings. All along his way through the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, wherever he had come upon a Mexican homestead, out of the sun-baked earth, against the sun-baked adobe walls, the tamarisk waved its feathery plumes of bluish green.

His devotions had been constantly interrupted by practical considerations.

But this year, because of his illness, the month of Mary he had been able to give to Mary; to Her he had consecrated his waking hours.

I have almost become a Mexican! I have learned to like chili colorado and mutton fat. Their foolish ways no longer offend me, their very faults are dear to me. I am their man!”

Though the Bishop had worked with Father Joseph for twenty-five years now, he could not reconcile the contradictions of his nature. He simply accepted them, and, when Joseph had been away for a long while, realized that he loved them all. His vicar was one of the most truly spiritual men he had ever known, though he was so passionately attached to many of the things of this world. Fond as he was of good eating and drinking, he not only rigidly observed all the fasts of the Church, but he never complained about the hardness and scantiness of the fare on his long missionary journeys.

It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it.

In the working of silver or drilling of turquoise the Indians had exhaustless patience; upon their blankets and belts and ceremonial robes they lavished their skill and pains. But their conception of decoration did not extend to the landscape. They seemed to have none of the European’s desire to “master” nature, to arrange and re-create. They spent their ingenuity in the other direction—in accommodating themselves to the scene in which they found themselves. This was not so much from indolence, the Bishop thought, as from an inherited caution and respect. It was as if the great country were asleep, and they wished to carry on their lives without awakening it; or as if the spirits of earth and air and water were things not to antagonize and arouse. When they hunted, it was with the same discretion; an Indian hunt was never a slaughter. They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.

Father Latour laughed. “Is a cathedral a thing to be taken lightly, after all?” “Oh no, certainly not!”

That congested heaping up of the Rocky Mountain chain about Pike’s Peak was a blank space on the continent at this time. Even the fur trappers, coming down from Wyoming to Taos with their pelts, avoided that humped granite backbone. Only a few years before, Frémont had tried to penetrate the Colorado Rockies, and his party had come half-starved into Taos at last, having eaten most of their horses. But within twelve months everything had changed. Wandering prospectors had found large deposits of gold near Cripple Creek, and the mountains that were solitary a year ago were now full of people. Wagon trains were streaming westward across the prairies from the Missouri River.

The two priests talked until a late hour. There was Arizona to be considered; somebody must be found to continue Father Vaillant’s work there. Of all the countries he knew, that desert and its yellow people were the dearest to him. But it was the discipline of his life to break ties; to say farewell and move on into the unknown.

At the Mexican village of Chimayo, over toward the Truchas mountains, the good people were especially devoted to a little equestrian image of Santiago in their church, and they made him a new pair of boots every few months, insisting that he went abroad at night and wore out his shoes, even on horseback. When Father Joseph stayed there he used to tell them he wished that, in addition to the consecration of the hands, God had provided some special blessing for the missionary’s feet.

Yes, he reflected, as he went quietly to his own room, there was a great difference in their natures. Wherever he went, he soon made friends that took the place of country and family. But Jean, who was at ease in any society and always the flower of courtesy, could not form new ties. It had always been so. He was like that even as a boy; gracious to everyone, but known to a very few.