Death Comes for the Archbishop

by Willa Cather

And perhaps, after all, something would remain through the years to come: some ideal, or memory, or legend.

Raphael and Titian had made costumes for Her in their time, and the great masters had made music for Her, and the great architects had built cathedrals for Her. Long before Her years on earth, in the long twilight between the Fall and the Redemption, the pagan sculptors were always trying to achieve the image of a goddess who should yet be a woman.

Broken tongues and singletrees, smashed wheels and splintered axles he considered trifling matters.

It was a part of the Wild West attitude to despise the decencies of life.

To fulfil the dreams of one’s youth—that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.”

Wherever there was a French priest, there should be a garden of fruit trees and vegetables and flowers. He often quoted to his students that passage from their fellow Auvergnat, Pascal: that Man was lost and saved in a garden.

The old man smiled. “I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.”

No one but Molny and the Bishop had ever seemed to enjoy the beautiful site of that building—perhaps no one ever would.

“Setting,” Molny used to tell Father Latour, “is accident. Either a building is a part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.”

Clermont was beautiful—but he found himself sad there; his heart lay like a stone in his breast. There was too much past, perhaps.

Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up to him for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again.

That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day. He did not know just when it had become so necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning—into the morning!

Everything was dry, prickly, sharp; Spanish bayonet, juniper, greasewood, cactus; the lizard, the rattle-snake—and man made cruel by a cruel life. Those early missionaries threw themselves naked upon the hard heart of a country that was calculated to try the endurance of giants. They thirsted in its deserts, starved among its rocks, climbed up and down its terrible canyons on stone-bruised feet, broke long fasts by unclean and repugnant food.

Lying so still that the bed-clothes over his body scarcely moved, with his hands resting delicately on the sheet beside him or upon his breast, the Bishop was living over his life.

Every year, even after he was crippled, he travelled thousands of miles by stage and in his carriage, among the mountain towns that were now rich, now poor and deserted; Boulder, Gold Hill, Caribou, Cache-à-la-Poudre, Spanish Bar, South Park, up the Arkansas to Cache Creek and California Gulch.

DURING those last weeks of the Bishop’s life he thought very little about death; it was the past he was leaving.

He was soon to have done with calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him.

You remember when we come together once to Santa Fé from my country? How long it take us? Two weeks, pretty near. Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.”

He continued to murmur, to move his hands a little, and Magdalena thought he was trying to ask for something, or to tell them something. But in reality the Bishop was not there at all: he was standing in a tip-tilted green field among his native mountains, and he was trying to give consolation to a young man who was being torn in two before his eyes by the desire to go and the necessity to stay. He was trying to forge a new Will in that devout and exhausted priest; and the time was short, for the diligence for Paris was already rumbling down the mountain gorge.