by Willa Cather
“Fifty-three!” she cried in a voice of horrified amazement. “Why, I never heard of anything so outrageous! I was forty-two my last birthday. It was in December, the fourth of December. If Antonio were here, he would tell you! And he wouldn’t let you scold me and talk about business to me, either, Father Joseph. He never let anybody talk about business to me!” She hid her face in her little handkerchief and began to cry.
Father Latour checked his impetuous Vicar, and sat down on the sofa beside Madame Olivares, feeling very sorry for her and speaking very gently. “Forty-two to your friends, dear Madame Olivares, and to the world. In heart and face you are younger than that But to the Law and the Church there must be a literal reckoning. A formal statement in court will not make you any older to your friends; it will not add one line to your face. A woman, you know, is as old as she looks.”
“That’s very sweet of you to say, Bishop Latour,” the lady quavered, looking up at him with tear-bright eyes. “But I never could hold up my head again. Let the Olivares have that old money. I don’t want it.”
Father Vaillant sprang up and glared down at her as if he could put common sense into her drooping head by the mere intensity of his gaze. “Four hundred thousand pesos, Señora Isabella!” he cried. “Ease and comfort for you and your daughter all the rest of your lives. Would you make your daughter a beggar? The Olivares will take everything.”
“I can’t help it about Inez,” she pleaded. “Inez means to go into the convent anyway. And I don’t care about the money. Ah, mon père, je voudrais mieux être jeune et mendiante, que n’être que vieille et riche, certes, oui!”
Father Joseph caught her icy cold hand. “And have you a right to defraud the Church of what is left to it in your trust? Have you thought of the consequences to yourself of such a betrayal?”
Father Latour glanced sternly at his Vicar. “Assez,” he said quietly. He took the little hand Father Joseph had released and bent over it, kissing it respectfully. “We must not press this any further. We must leave this to Madame Olivares and her own conscience. I believe, my daughter, you will come to realize that this sacrifice of your vanity would be for your soul’s peace. Looking merely at the temporal aspect of the case, you would find poverty hard to bear. You would have to live upon the Olivares’s charity, would you not? I do not wish to see this come about. I have a selfish interest; I wish you to be always your charming self and to make a little poésie in life for us here. We have not much of that.”
Madame Olivares stopped crying. She raised her head and sat drying her eyes. Suddenly she took hold of one of the buttons on the Bishop’s cassock and began twisting it with nervous fingers.
“Father,” she said timidly, “what is the youngest I could possibly be, to be Inez’s mother?”
The Bishop could not pronounce the verdict; he hesitated, flushed, then passed it on to O’Reilly with an open gesture of his fine white hand.
“Fifty-two, Señora Olivares,” said the young man respectfully. “If I can get you to admit that, and stick to it, I feel sure we will win our case.”
“Very well, Mr. O’Reilly.” She bowed her head. As her visitors rose, she sat looking down at the dust-covered rugs. “Before everybody!” she murmured, as if to herself.
When they were tramping home, Father Joseph said that, as for him, he would rather combat the superstitions of a whole Indian pueblo than the vanity of one white woman.
“And I would rather do almost anything than go through such a scene again,” said the Bishop with a frown. “I don’t think I ever assisted at anything so cruel.”
Boyd O’Reilly defeated the Olivares brothers and won his case. The Bishop would not go to the court hearing, but Father Vaillant was there, standing in the malodorous crowd (there were no chairs in the court room), and his knees shook under him when the young lawyer, with the fierceness born of fright, poked his finger at his client and said:
“Señora Olivares, you are fifty-two years of age, are you not?”
Madame Olivares was swathed in mourning, her face a streak of shadowed white between folds of black veil.
“Yes, sir.” The crape barely let it through.
The night after the verdict was pronounced, Manuel Chavez, with several of Antonio’s old friends, called upon the widow to congratulate her. Word of their intention had gone about the town and put others in the mood to call at a house that had been closed to visitors for so long A considerable company gathered there that evening, including some of the military people, and several hereditary enemies of the Olivares brothers.
The cook, stimulated by the sight of the long sala full of people once more, hastily improvised a supper. Pablo put on a white shirt and a velvet jacket, and began to carry up from the cellar his late master’s best whisky and sherry, and quarts of champagne. (The Mexicans are very fond of sparkling wines. Only a few years before this, an American trader who had got into serious political trouble with the Mexican military authorities in Santa Fé, regained their confidence and friendship by presenting them with a large wagon shipment of champagne—three thousand, three hundred and ninety-two bottles, indeed!)
This hospitable mood came upon the house suddenly, nothing had been prepared beforehand. The wine glasses were full of dust, but Pablo wiped them out with the shirt he had just taken off, and without instructions from anyone he began gliding about with a tray full of glasses, which he afterward refilled many times, taking his station at the sideboard. Even Doña Isabella drank a little champagne; when she had sipped one glass with the young Georgia captain, she could not refuse to take another with their nearest neighbour, Ferdinand Sanchez, always a true friend to her husband. Everyone was gay, the servants and the guests, everything sparkled like a garden after a shower.
Father Latour and Father Vaillant, having heard nothing of this spontaneous gathering of friends, set off at eight o’clock to make a call upon the brave widow. When they entered the court-yard, they were astonished to hear music within, and to see light streaming from the long row of windows behind the portale. Without stopping to knock, they opened the door into the sala. Many candles were burning. Señors were standing about in long frock-coats buttoned over full figures. O’Reilly and a group of officers from the Fort surrounded the sideboard, where Pablo, with a white napkin wrapped showily about his wrist, was pouring champagne. From the other end of the room sounded the high tinkle of the harp, and Doña Isabella’s voice:
“Listen to the mocking-bird,
Listen to the mocking-bird!”
The priests waited in the doorway until the song was finished, then went forward to pay their respects to the hostess. She was wearing the unrelieved white that grief permitted, and the yellow curls were bobbing as of old—three behind her right ear, one over either temple, and a little row across the back of her neck. As she saw the two black figures approaching, she dropped her arms from the harp, took her satin toe from the pedal, and rose, holding out a hand to each. Her eyes were bright, and her face beamed with affection for her spiritual fathers. But her greeting was a playful reproach, uttered loud enough to be heard above the murmur of conversing groups:
“I never shall forgive you, Father Joseph, nor you either, Bishop Latour, for that awful lie you made me tell in court about my age!”
The two churchmen bowed amid laughter and applause.
BOOK SEVEN
The Great Diocese
1
The Month of Mary
The Bishop’s work was sometimes assisted, often impeded, by external events.
By the Gadsden Purchase, executed three years after Father Latour came to Santa Fé, the United States took over from Mexico a great territory which now forms southern New Mexico and Arizona. The authorities at Rome notified Father Latour that this new territory was to be annexed to his diocese, but that as the national boundary lines often cut parishes in two, the boundaries of Church jurisdiction must be settled by conference with the Mexican Bishops of Chihuahua and Sonora. Such conferences would
necessitate a journey of nearly four thousand miles. 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.
The question hung fire for some years, the subject of voluminous correspondence. At last, in 1858, Father Vaillant was sent to arrange the debated boundaries with the Mexican Bishops. He started in the autumn and spent the whole winter on the road, going from El Paso del Norte west to Tucson, on to Santa Magdalena and Guaymas, a seaport town on the gulf of California, and did some seafaring on the Pacific before he turned homeward.
On his return trip he was stricken with malarial fever, resulting from exposure and bad water, and lay seriously ill in a cactus desert in Arizona. Word of his illness came to Santa Fé by an Indian runner, and Father Latour and Jacinto rode across New Mexico and half of Arizona, found Father Vaillant, and brought him back by easy stages.
He was ill in the Bishop’s house for two months. This was the first spring that he and Father Latour had both been there at the same time, to enjoy the garden they had laid out soon after they first came to Santa Fé.
It was the month of Mary and the month of May. Father Vaillant was lying on an army cot, covered with blankets, under the grape arbour in the garden, watching the Bishop and his gardener at work in the vegetable plots. The apple trees were in blossom, the cherry blooms had gone by. The air and the earth interpenetrated in the warm gusts of spring; the soil was full of sunlight, and the sunlight full of red dust. The air one breathed was saturated with earthy smells, and the grass under foot had a reflection of blue sky in it.
This garden had been laid out six years ago, when the Bishop brought his fruit trees (then dry switches) up from St. Louis in wagons, along with the blessed Sisters of Loretto, who came to found the Academy of Our Lady of Light. The school was now well established, reckoned a benefit to the community by Protestants as well as Catholics, and the trees were bearing. Cuttings from them were already yielding fruit in many Mexican gardens. While the Bishop was away on that first trip to Baltimore, Father Joseph had, in addition to his many official duties, found time to instruct their Mexican housekeeper, Fructosa, in cookery. Later Bishop Latour took in hand Fructosa’s husband, Tranquilino, and trained him as a gardener. They had boldly planned for the future; the ground behind the church, between the Bishop’s house and the Academy, they laid out as a spacious orchard and kitchen-garden. Ever since then the Bishop had worked on it, planting and pruning. It was his only recreation.
A line of young poplars linked the Episcopal court-yard with the school. On the south, against the earth wall, was the one row of trees they had found growing there when they first came,—old, old tamarisks, with twisted trunks. They had been so neglected, left to fight for life in such hard, sun-baked, burro-trodden ground, that their trunks had the hardness of cypress. They looked, indeed, like very old posts, well seasoned and polished by time, miraculously endowed with the power to burst into delicate foliage and flowers, to cover themselves with long brooms of lavender-pink blossom.
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. The family burro was tied to its trunk, the chickens scratched under it, the dogs slept in its shade, the washing was hung on its branches. Father Latour had often remarked that this tree seemed especially designed in shape and colour for the adobe village. The sprays of bloom which adorn it are merely another shade of the red earth walls, and its fibrous trunk is full of gold and lavender tints. Father Joseph respected the Bishop’s eye for such things, but himself he loved it merely because it was the tree of the people, and was like one of the family in every Mexican household.
This was a very happy season for Father Vaillant. For years he had not been able properly to observe this month which in his boyhood he had selected to be the holy month of the year for him, dedicated to the contemplation of his Gracious Patroness. In his former missionary life, on the Great Lakes, he used always to go into retreat at this season. But here there was no time for such things. Last year, in May, he had been on his way to the Hopi Indians, riding thirty miles a day; marrying, baptizing, confessing as he went, making camp in the sand-hills at night. 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. At night he sank to sleep with the sense of Her protection. In the morning when he awoke, before he had opened his eyes, he was conscious of a special sweetness in the air,—Mary, and the month of May. Alma Mater redemptoris! Once more he had been able to worship with the ardour of a young religious, for whom religion is pure personal devotion, unalloyed by expediency and the benumbing cares of a missionary’s work. Once again this had been his month; his Patroness had given it to him, the season that had always meant so much in his religious life.
He smiled to remember a time long ago, when he was a young curate in Cendre, in the Puy-de-Dôme; how he had planned a season of special devotion to the Blessed Virgin for May, and how the old priest to whom he was assistant had blasted his hopes by cold disapproval. The old man had come through the Terror, had been trained in the austerity of those days of the persecution of the clergy, and he was not untouched by Jansenism. Young Father Joseph bore his rebuke with meekness, and went sadly to his own chamber. There he took his rosary and spent the entire day in prayer. “Not according to my desires, but if it is for thy glory, grant me this boon, O Mary, my hope.” In the evening of that same day the old pastor sent for him, and unsolicited granted him the request he had so sternly denied in the morning. How joyfully Father Joseph had written all this to his sister Philomène, then a pupil with the nuns of the Visitation in their native Riom, begging her to make him a quantity of artificial flowers for his May altar. How richly she had responded!—and she rejoiced no less than he that his May devotions were so largely attended, especially by the young people of the parish, in whom a notable increase of piety was manifest. Father Vaillant’s had been a close-knit family—losing their mother while they were yet children had brought the brothers and sisters the closer together—and with this sister, Philomène, he had shared all his hopes and desires and his deepest religious life.
Ever since then, all the most important events in his own history had occurred in the blessed month when this sinful and sullied world puts on white as if to commemorate the Annunciation, and becomes, for a little, lovely enough to be in truth the Bride of Christ. It was in May that he had been given grace to perform the hardest act of his life; to leave his country, to part from his dear sister and his father (under what sad circumstances!), and to start for the New World to take up a missionary’s labours. That parting was not a parting, but an escape—a running away, a betrayal of family trust for the sake of a higher trust. He could smile at it now, but at the time it had been terrible enough. The Bishop, thinning carrots yonder, would remember. It was because of what Father Latour had been to him in that hour, indeed, that Father Joseph was here in a garden in Santa Fé. He would never have left his dear Sandusky when the newly appointed Bishop asked him to share his hardships, had he not said to himself: “Ah, now it is he who is torn by perplexity! I will be to him now what he was to me that day when we stood by the road-side, waiting for the diligence to Paris, and my purpose broke, and,—he saved me.”
That time came back upon Father Vaillant now so keenly that he wiped a little moisture from his eyes,—(he was quickly moved, after the way of sick people) and he cleared his glasses and called:
“Father Latour, it is time for you to rest your back. You have been stooping over a great while.”
The Bishop came and sat down in a wheelbarrow that stood at the edge of the arbour.
“I have been thinking that I shall no longer pray for your speedy recovery, Joseph. The only way I can keep my Vicar within call is to have him sick.”
Father Joseph smiled.
“You are not in Santa Fé a great deal yourself, my Bishop.”
“Well, I shall be here this summer, and I hope to keep you with me. This year I want you to see my lotus flowers Tranquilino will let the water into my lake this afternoon.” The lake was a little pond in the middle of the garden, into which Tranquilino, clever with water, like all Mexicans, had piped a stream from the Santa Fé creek flowing near at hand. “Last summer, while you were away,” the Bishop continued, “we had more than a hundred lotus blossoms floating on that little lake. And all from five bulbs that I put into my valise in Rome.”
“When do they blossom?”
“They begin in June, but they are at their best in July.”
“Then you must hurry them up a little. For with my Bishop’s permission, I shall be gone in July.”
“So soon? And why?”
Father Vaillant moved uneasily under his blankets. “To hunt for lost Catholics, Jean! Utterly lost Catholics, down in your new territory, towards Tucson. There are hundreds of poor families down there who have never seen a priest. I want to go from house to house this time, to every little settlement. They are full of devotion and faith, and it has nothing to feed upon but the most mistaken superstitions. They remember their prayers all wrong. They cannot read, and since there is no one to instruct them, how can they get right? They are like seeds, full of germination but with no moisture. A mere contact is enough to make them a living part of the Church. The more I work with the Mexicans, the more I believe it was people like them our Saviour bore in mind when He said, Unless ye become as little children. He was thinking of people who are not clever in the things of this world, whose minds are not upon gain and worldly advancement. These poor Christians are not thrifty like our country people at home; they have no veneration for property, no sense of material values. I stop a few hours in a village, I administer the sacraments and hear confessions, I leave in every house some little token, a rosary or a religious picture, and I go away feeling that I have conferred immeasurable happiness, and have released faithful souls that were shut away from God by neglect.
