Texas

by James A. Michener

  Even before he and the other fifty-three Islanders boarded the ship that would carry them to Mexico, Goras was shouting suggestions as to how their accommodations might be improved, and when the captain snarled ‘Go to hell!’ Goras threatened a lawsuit. But on 20 March 1730 the rickety craft set sail, and next morning, after a rough passage, his people landed at Santa Cruz on the main island of Teneriffe, where they picked up a few additional emigrants. With inadequate food supplies, they then sailed for Cuba, a difficult crossing of forty-five days of heat and seasickness. At one point the captain, driven almost crazy by the torrent of suggestions from Goras, cried: ‘Put that man in chains!’ And the would-be admiral crossed the Atlantic bound to two huge grinding stones intended for the first grain mill in Tejas.

  The settlers wasted two months in Cuba, then spent ten steamy days sailing to Vera Cruz, where on 19 July a horrendous epidemic of el vómito prostrated most of them and killed several.

  They left Vera Cruz joyously on 1 August, headed for the great volcanoes that marked the backbone of Mexico, and they were grateful to reach higher land where el vómito did not flourish, but now they had an equally grave problem.

  The two huge millstones were gifts to the Islanders from the king himself: ‘The Crown will support you with your every need, clothes, food, utensils, money, until your first crop comes in.’ So the stones had sentimental as well as practical value, but they were so large that the oxen drawing them began to die. By the time the Islanders reached the foothills of the volcano at Orizaba, it was obvious that hauling the stupendous things was no longer practical; nevertheless Goras bellowed: ‘If the king gave us the stones, we keep them with us.’ But when more oxen died, even Goras had to agree that the stones should be abandoned until officials in Vera Cruz could recover them.

  After twenty-seven painful days the Islanders entered that majestic valley of Mexico, one of the wonders of the world, guarded by the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Ixtaccíhuatl, garlanded in flowers and protected by one of heaven’s bluest skies. There at the center stood the splendid capital itself, with its university, its printing houses, its grand eating places and stately mansions. To see Mexico City after the bucolic simplicity of the Canaries was an adventure in empire, and Goras told his people: ‘We’ll make Tejas like this, an example to the world,’ but a muleteer who had once led his animals to Saltillo warned: ‘I doubt it will be the same.’

  For almost three months Goras and his Islanders languished in the environs of the great city. A few of them, including his own wife, died; young people contracted marriages; worn-out horses were exchanged at the king’s expense, as promised; and some of the Islanders, including Goras, began to think that they should remain in these pleasant surroundings rather than head for Tejas.

  But the king’s orders were that they must move on to Béxar, and so, on 15 November 1730, they resumed their pilgrimage, reaching Saltillo in mid-December and resting in that lovely town with its salubrious breezes and good food until the end of January 1731.

  More people died; children were born; more horses collapsed from exhaustion; and on 7 March the surviving Islanders reached the Medina, some distance east of where Fray Domingo had his profitable ranch. Looking across its narrow waters into Tejas, they were appalled by what they saw: a continuation of the sea of grass, more mesquite, never a hill, not a single habitation, only an occasional wild horse or a strayed cow with enormous horns.

  ‘Oh God!’ Goras cried when he saw their new home through his one good eye. ‘Is this Tejas?’

  He was encouraged, however, by a soldier accompanying the group, who assured him: ‘At Béxar, where the missions are, everything is better. They have gardens there and food enough to share.’

  On 9 March 1731, Goras led his Islanders to the gates of the Misión Santa Teresa, where they were rapturously greeted by a tall, thin friar: ‘Settlers at last. My name is Fray Damián, and everything within this mission is at your service, for God has delivered you safely to this destination.’

  The friar embraced Juan Leal and the other men, pressed the women’s hands, and fought back tears when he saw the emaciated children. ‘Fray Domingo!’ he called. ‘Do bring these children some sugar squares!’ Then he turned to the group and said in a strong, quiet voice: ‘Let us kneel and give thanks that your long journey is completed.’ As the little congregation knelt inside the mission gates, he prayed, but Goras, counting the days by the system he kept in his mind, did not, for he was thinking: 20 March last year to 9 March this. That’s three hundred and fifty-five days, and for this?

  If Fray Damián had previously thought he’d known trouble with his Indians and soldiers, he was forced to come up with a new definition of that word where the Islanders were concerned, because within a few weeks Goras was threatening to bring lawsuits against Damián for failing to provide a suitable place for the Lanzarote people, against Fray Domingo for not carrying out the king’s promise that they would be taken care of in these early days, and against Captain Saldaña for malfeasances too numerous to specify. Since none of the Islanders could write, and since he knew the complaints had to be made on the proper stamped paper, he badgered Damián de Saldaña to document the charges against his brother Alvaro de Saldaña, and vice versa. In fact, so many garbled reports reached Zacatecas that the commandant there roared one morning: ‘What in hell is going on up there in Béxar?’ and he organized an inspection tour which he himself led.

  He learned that the major grievance was one that had surfaced in all parts of northern Mexico: Who controlled the water? The six missions, including Fray Damián’s, argued with some reason that since they had established irrigation rights on the San Antonio, a limited stream at best, it would be illegal and against the interests of the crown for the Canary Islanders to build their own dam and siphon off an undue share of the river. But Goras argued brilliantly: ‘Surely the king did not intend that his loyal servants be brought here and set down in a wilderness with no water.’ And he pointed out that the six missions, even with the presidio thrown in, housed fewer Spaniards, real Spaniards, that is, than his new village of San Fernando.

  At this, one of the soldiers asked: ‘And when have Canary Islanders been considered real Spaniards?’ Goras challenged him on the spot: ‘A duel. Any weapons you like. Our honor has been abused.’

  He was now engaged in five distinct lawsuits, but the Islanders still had no stone houses, no garden plots, no horses and, worst of all, no water. This was an intolerable situation and Fray Damián knew it. One night after the most acrimonious confrontation, in which the Islanders charged the Saldaña brothers with treason to begin with and thievery and lechery as tempers grew, Damián consulted with Fray Domingo: ‘Surely, in the interests of God, we must do something to resolve this bitterness.’

  Domingo started to laugh. ‘Do you remember, Damián, how we sat here one night, just like this, and you told me in your solemn way: “Domingo, Tejas will never function properly until we import real Spaniards here to establish standards?” Well, now you have your Spaniards. Are you happy about it?’

  ‘I had not expected such Spaniards,’ Damián replied, but the two friars decided on their own to take those Christian steps which any man of good conscience would feel forced to take, regardless of what course the presidio or the other missions might follow. ‘We must share our water,’ Damián said. ‘And the richness of our land.’

  Before dawn Domingo and three Indians drove out to the ranch with wagons to be filled with produce and spare tools. Cows, goats and sheep were rounded up, and then the men slept for a few hours, but at sunset they started back to where the Canary Islanders needed help.

  In the meantime Damián and Garza, working by starlight, traced out a route whereby an irrigation ditch could be led along the crest of hills in such a way that water could be brought from the San Antonio directly onto the fields of the Islanders, avoiding the necessity for a costly aqueduct like the one another of the missions would be required to build. But when Goras saw
the run of the proposed ditch, he objected strenuously: ‘My fields are over there. The ditch should run here, and if it doesn’t, I shall bring a lawsuit to alter it.’

  Just as the Saltillo men were sure all problems relating to the Islanders’ community had been resolved, Goras, supported by two cronies, marched to the presidio with yet another startling demand: ‘We were promised that if we left our secure homes and ventured into this wilderness, we would henceforth be called, because of our bravery, hidalgos, with right to the title Don. I am to be called Don Juan, he is Don Manuel de Niz, and that one is Don Antonio Rodríguez.’

  In Spanish society, the word hidalgo carried significant connotations. It was composed of three small words: hijo-de-algo, which meant literally son-of-something or, by extension, son-of-someone-important, and it was impossible for even a minor member of the nobility like Don Alvaro de Saldaña to dream of calling men like Goras and his illiterate peasants Don.

  The soldiers and most of the friars flatly refused to do so, but Goras and his Islanders threatened new lawsuits if they were denied their honorific. Since they had already flooded Guadalajara and Zacatecas with petitions, they fired this one at Mexico City itself, demanding that the commandant draft their protest on his own stamped paper.

  This was too much: ‘Goras, if you give me any more trouble …’

  Before he could complete his threat the one-eyed Islander demanded in a loud, offensive voice: ‘And where are those grinding stones the king gave us? I suspect you stole them, and I’m starting a lawsuit to recover them.’ The commandant had never heard of the promised grinders, but some months later they were delivered to Saltillo with a specific message from the king that they were to be sent on to his loyal subjects at Béxar, with this added instruction:

  In accordance with promises made on my behalf, all male heads of families who left Lanzarote for this dangerous undertaking are to be known henceforth as hidalgos and are to be addressed as Don.

  In this manner the civil settlement of Tejas was launched, with the Canary Islanders becoming aristocratic hidalgos at a stroke of the king’s pen.

  Fray Damián was a saintly man, but he was no saint. No sooner had he championed the Canary Islanders in their demand for an irrigation ditch and helped them start it than he summoned his carpenter Simón Garza and their two best Indians to an emergency meeting: ‘Before the Islanders dig their ditch and draw off their water, let us deepen ours, all along the way.’

  As the work progressed, he found to his surprise that Simón Garza was frequently absent from the ditch, and Damián began to believe that the carpenter, always so faithful, was scamping his duties. Such unlikely behavior was so agitating that Damián began watching Garza more closely. One morning when the carpenter had sneaked away, Damián followed him to the larger of the two mission barns, where he expected to find him sleeping while the others worked. Entering quietly by the main door, he adjusted his eyes to the darkness and moved to where a shaft of sunlight illuminated a cleared corner, and there Damián saw what amounted to a miracle, a true miracle brought down to earth and given form.

  Working in secret, Garza had hewn and bonded together three oaken planks, scraping and smoothing one side of the resulting board until it was quite even. From the long board thus created, he had sawed off seven large squares of wood and had begun to bond three other oak boards together to form a second long board from which he could saw off seven more squares.

  Suspended from a nail above his work, space hung a painting, done in Spain, of one of the fourteen Stations of the Cross, those panels displayed in all churches showing scenes of Christ struggling through the streets of Jerusalem on the way to His crucifixion. Garza had taken this sample from the mission church; below it on a kind of horizontal easel rested one of his first seven squares. With such tools as he had been able to improvise, Simón had nearly completed his carving of the Third Station, in which the solitary figure of Christ falls to the cobbled pavement of the Via Dolorosa, weighed down by the heavy cross he must bear. Below the figure rose from the wood the words JESÚS CAE POR PRIMERA VEZ (Jesus falls for the first time).

  With an innate appreciation of what oak could represent and of the mystery of Christ’s Passion, this unlettered carpenter was creating a masterpiece, for the figure of Christ seemed not only to rise living from the oaken surface but also to proclaim its religious significance.

  And there was the mystery! The Christ that Garza had carved was indeed living, but not in any realistic way. If, for artistic purpose, the arm holding the cross required lengthening, he carved it so, and if the head needed to be cocked at an impossible angle, he cocked it. Indeed, as he studied that painting in the darkness of the barn he had intuitively corrected each wrong thing; he had held to the good basics and discarded all that was meretricious. Simón’s Third Station was not Indian art or primitive art or any other kind of art capable of being designated by an adjective; it was art itself, simple and pure, and Fray Damián could only gape in awed respect.

  Bowing his head in reverence, he could visualize the fourteen completed carvings on the walls of his church, and he knew that they must become the chief treasure of Béxar.

  Humbly he faced his carpenter and said: ‘Surely God is working through you, Simón, to give us this miracle. Henceforth I shall dig your ditches and you shall complete your carvings in this barn.’

  In many ways the year 1733 represented the apex at Misión Santa Teresa, for the peaceful Indians near Béxar had learned to live within the compound and to listen to sermons even though they showed no inclination toward becoming Christians. At the ranch Fray Domingo had achieved great success with his cattle and a limited one with his Apache; indeed, he had two of them singing in his informal choir on those occasions when they wandered by the corrals to inspect the Spanish horses they hoped to steal on their next night raid.

  Relations between the mission and the presidio, always a measure of how things were progressing, had never been better; the Saldaña brothers had seen to that. Surprisingly, the religious contacts with Zacatecas and the governmental with Mexico City were also unruffled. It was a time of peace, especially with the French to the north, and Fray Damián could have been forgiven had he taken pride in his custodianship of the most important mission in Tejas.

  He did not. His innate self-depreciation prevented him from accepting praise for what he deemed his ordinary duty, and on some days he almost castigated himself for not achieving more of God’s work. However, his relationships with his brother and sister-in-law had never been better, for these three sensible adults—Damián, aged forty-seven; Alvaro, thirty-eight, and Benita, twenty-nine—had evolved a routine which produced great satisfactions.

  On two or three days each week Damián took his evening meal with his brother’s family, bringing with him such produce from the mission farm adjacent to the church as he felt he could spare, plus cuts of meat from the animals that Domingo had brought in from the ranch for slaughter. Benita, on her part, would have her Indian servants bake bread and occasionally a fruit tart, if the mission orchards had provided plums.

  The three would bow their heads as Damián asked blessing, and then engage in chatter about the doings in Béxar and Saltillo as the platters of food circulated and the bottle of wine was opened. Whenever a problem of management arose, regarding either the mission or the presidio, the brothers would consult, but often it was Benita who offered the practical and equitable solution.

  She had developed into one of those extraordinary women who find in the rearing of a family and the organization of her husband’s day-to-day life a key to her own happiness; she had never been overly religious and saw no reason to depend upon the rewards of an afterlife to compensate for disappointments in this. She had been reared by her Spanish parents to believe that the greatest thing that could happen to a woman in Mexico was to marry some incoming Spaniard, make him a good wife, and in later years go first to Spain and then to heaven. In the wilds of Tejas she had begun to doubt whether
she would ever return to Spain, and she had long ago decided to leave heaven to God’s dispensation.

  Sensible as she was, she had always known why Damián wanted to stay close to his brother and why he now brought gifts rather more lavish than conditions warranted. She knew that Damián, thinking of her as his spiritual wife, was joined to her with bonds so powerful that neither imagination nor death could dissolve them, and she felt obligated to him. He was her responsibility, and by her acquiescence she knew she had accepted the pleasant burden of his emotional life. When he was ill, she tended him. When his robe required mending, she sewed it. When he told little jokes about the mission Indians, she laughed. And whenever he appeared at her house or departed, she showed her pleasure at his arrival or her sadness at his going. In Benita he had a wife without the responsibility of one.

  Was Alvaro aware of this unusual triangle of which he was a silent part? He never alluded to it. He welcomed his brother with more than brotherly affection and saw no unpleasant consequences from what might have been a dangerous arrangement.

  Partly this was because Damián was so helpful, not only with his food contributions but also with his attention to the three Saldaña boys; he played games with them and taught them their letters, and often took them to the mission when Fray Domingo was in attendance so they could learn to sing. Invariably, when he visited their home at the presidio he brought them little presents, sometimes so trivial they could scarcely be called presents, but so thoughtful that they proved his continuing love.