Texas

by James A. Michener

  With each numeral sounding in the crisp morning air, the two men, so pathetically ill-matched—a Spanish gentleman at the end of his days protecting his conception of honor, an American invader with his own rough ideas of justice—moved apart.

  ‘Fourteen!’ Moncado cried. ‘Fifteen!’

  Don Ramón whirled, fired with trembling arms, and sent his bullet far to the right, kicking up dust at the foot of a wayward tree.

  ‘Don Mordecai!’ Moncado shouted. ‘Show mercy!’

  But Marr, who had anticipated this wild shot and who had postponed firing until it took place, drew steady aim, kept his pistol motionless, and fired a bullet straight into the old man’s heart.

  When the burial of Don Ramón had been solemnized, by a friar from Santa Teresa and not by Father Ybarra, the heavy consequences of the duel began to emerge, for it was now that the priest saw fit to announce the results of his investigations into ancient malfeasances at Misión Santa Teresa. Had Marr proceeded with his proposed marriage to Trinidad, Ybarra would have buried his accusations out of deference to his prize convert, but with Marr marrying the Veramendi girl, the priest felt free to indulge his vengeance upon a young woman he disdained:

  Even the most cursory inquiries at San Antonio de Béjar would satisfy a judge that the so-called saint Fray Damián de Saldaña, founder of Misión Santa Teresa, committed acts of the gravest impropriety in tricking the then viceroy into approving a devious plan whereby Damián’s brother, Captain Alvaro de Saldaña of the presidio, obtained possession of lands pertaining to the mission. Some, commenting on the trickery whereby this exchange took place, call it ordinary family protection; others call it more accurately plain theft.

  I recommend that even though Misión Santa Teresa may soon be secularized and its possessions redistributed as the court in Madrid decides, it is imperative that lands stolen from it be returned immediately, so that a just disposition of them can be made. I recommend that the ranch known as El Codo in the bend of the Medina west of Béjar be taken from the Saldaña family and restored to its rightful owner, Misión Santa Teresa.

  When the order approving this reached Béjar, Captain Moncado sorrowfully and Father Ybarra joyfully served notice on Trinidad that she must surrender the twenty-five thousand choice acres, along with any buildings situated on them and all cattle grazing there. She would be left the house in town and the few plots of land scattered about Béjar, but nothing more.

  With her customary nobility, she acquiesced, without showing any rancor toward Father Ybarra, who had persecuted her in so many ways; on the Sunday following her dispossession she even went to church for solace, enduring one of his last sermons prior to his return to the capital. He used as his text the parable of the faithful servant, pointing out how Fray Damián had proved faithless to his trust, whereas he, Ybarra, had come north as a faithful servant to rectify that wrong.

  When he was gone, Trinidad discovered that although the court trials and paper work relating to the formal transfer of El Codo would take years, the friars at Misión Santa Teresa retained possession only four days before turning it over to the Veramendis, who gave it to their daughter Amalia as a wedding present. This, when added to Rancho San Marcos, which adjoined it and which was also given to the newlyweds, meant that Don Mordecai, in town barely two years, now controlled forty-three thousand acres: ten miles along the river, seven miles wide.

  The happy couple saw Trinidad occasionally, and when they did a miracle of human behavior occurred: they forgave her. As often happens when a crime of grave dimension has been perpetrated, the guilty made a great show of forgiving the innocent, so that when the Mordecai Marrs met Trinidad in the narrow streets or in the plaza, they smiled generously. One afternoon Amalia actually came to visit, a young, gracious, condescending matron, and she explained that since Mordecai had obtained land near Béjar, he now saw no necessity to move on to Saltillo, which had been his original intention when he learned that the Veramendis had huge estates there: ‘We shall be very happy here in Béjar, I’m sure. Mordecai’s trade with Chihuahua increases monthly.’

  These social scandals of Béjar were forgotten when the Comanche went on another rampage. After slaying scores of isolated countrymen to the west they tried to overrun El Codo, but its fortifications held. So they raged on to Béjar itself, mounting such a furious assault that all men and women, and even children, had to be mustered by Captain Moncado to hold them off.

  They struck the town with fury, breaking down barricades, killing many but failing to reach the houses about the central plaza. Repulsed by the bravery of Moncado and his stout right arm Mordecai Marr, who fired four different guns as fast as women could reload them, the Comanche turned abruptly, struck at unprotected Misión Santa Teresa, and overwhelmed it. Two young friars there were pierced with a score of arrows. The older domesticated Indians were slain by fierce stabs and slashes; the younger were kept alive for prolonged torture, the children to serve as slaves. Infuriated by the resistance, the Comanche set all buildings ablaze, battered down the wooden doors of the stone church, and took savage, howling delight in throwing upon the fire Simón Garza’s great carvings of the Fourteen Stations.

  In flames the patient work of Fray Damián disappeared. The Indian houses so carefully built by Fray Domingo in 1723 vanished; the barns where the cows had given birth and the cribs in which their feed had been stored, the school where children had learned to sing, and the cell in which Damián had prayed for guidance—none survived the rage of the Comanche.

  Loss of the northernmost mission caused Father Ybarra to speed his report on the remaining five, and in his careful recommendations to Zacatecas, Mexico City and Madrid, he summarized the criticisms of Spain’s mission effort:

  In advising you to halt the operations of the Franciscans in Béjar and throughout the rest of Tejas, with the two exceptions already noted, I act in pain and sorrow, but the facts can support no other conclusion.

  The first important mission of which I have knowledge was San Francisco de los Tejas in the Nacogdoches region, established in 1690. Others so numerous that I cannot name them followed, including the six at Béjar starting in 1718. At the end of a hundred years of concentrated and costly attempts to Christianize the Indians, I find after a most careful count that Tejas contains exactly four hundred and seventeen Christian Indians, and not one of them is an Apache or a Comanche. Captain Moncado at the presidio in Béjar estimates that it requires three and one half soldiers to protect each Indian convert, yet the converts perform no tasks beneficial to the general society.

  I am most suspicious of the conversions that do occur. Most of the converts are old women who have lived lives of great licentiousness and deem it prudent to have their sins remitted before they die. The young, the hardy and those who could do strong work for Jesus are little touched by the missions; as a matter of fact, if we secularized them all immediately, the young Indians might well be inclined to join our established churches at one-tenth the cost and ten times the results.

  I do not speak disparagingly of the friars who attempted to do God’s work in these remote and depressing areas. Those serving now are exemplary Christians, and some have striven mightily, but they have accomplished little. I am told that in the earliest days, when the missions first opened, results were better, but the numbers of Indians converted to the True Religion were always minimal, and to continue this fruitless effort would be financially and religiously unjustified.

  Close the missions. Send the friars back to Zacatecas, where they can do some good. Use the emptied buildings as fortresses in time of siege. Sell the mission ranches with their cattle to local men who can make better use of them. And do it now.

  What Father Ybarra overlooked in his harsh and overall accurate summary of the mission experience in Tejas—so much bleaker than that in California and New Mexico—was the civilizing effect of men like Fray Damián and especially Fray Domingo in the 1720s and 1730s, when they lit brave candles in the wilderness, demonstr
ated Spain’s sincere interest in the souls of its Indians, and helped establish little centers of safety and learning capable of maturing into fine towns and cities.

  Also, the Franciscans did succeed in civilizing the smaller Indian tribes that clustered about the missions, but their failure to domesticate first the fierce Apache and then the terrible Comanche, now the dominant tribe, created the impression that they had failed in all. This was unfortunate, a historic misinterpretation which implanted in Tejas lore the fiction that ‘nothing can be done with the Indian.’ Father Ybarra’s 1792 report summarized what many Spaniards had concluded, and this legend grew and festered until Tejas, once an area teeming with Indians of many tribes, some most civilized, became Texas, a state with almost no Indians, for it preferred to operate under the slogan attributed to a Northern general serving in Texas: ‘The only good Indian is a dead Indian.’ In due course, the Indians of Texas would be either expelled or dead.

  But the greatest injustice in Father Ybarra’s judgment on the missions was that he did not take into account the nature of God or the workings of His will. God had not come to Tejas in white robes attended by choirs of angels; He came as a toilworn Franciscan friar, a confused captain trying to do his best in some remote presidio. He came as a mestizo woman lugging two bawling babies who would grow into stalwart men; He came sweating Himself over the vast amount of work to be done before the place could be called civilized; and God knew, if Father Ybarra did not, that fat Fray Domingo dancing at sunset in what his detractors called ‘a near state of tipsiness and shouting at the top of his voice’ was closer to heaven than Ybarra would ever be.

  After the destruction of Santa Teresa, Trinidad spent two agonizing weeks surveying her deplorable situation, but could reach no sensible conclusions. She felt such confusion that during the third week she kept entirely to herself in the beautiful house with the low-ceilinged rooms, tended only by Natán. She applied these hours to an unemotional evaluation of all that had happened to her since she first began to confide in her dear friend Amalia Veramendi. Through the shadows of her darkened room passed ghosts of the two dead men she had loved so dearly, René-Claude and Don Ramón, and images of the two living ones she despised, Don Mordecai and Father Ybarra, and she had to conclude that not only had those two men abused her, but that Amalia had betrayed her. Despite constant review, she could not find herself at fault. She had responded as any spirited young woman would to the courtship of René-Claude, and even though the Galíndez and Saldaña families had rebuked her for unladylike enthusiasm in the Saltillo paseo, she could not think of a single action she would reverse. She had loved him; she still loved him; and she would love him until she died.

  Her relations with Don Mordecai were more difficult to evaluate, for she had actively speculated about her need for a husband, and although she had not sought Marr out or overtly encouraged him, she had wanted to know what kind of man he was, and even what kind of husband he might prove to be. What else could I have done? she asked herself in the darkness of her room. That Marr turned out to be unprincipled was her bad luck, not her fault.

  Gradually, as sensitive young women had done throughout history, she tried to construct a realistic portrait of herself: I’ve done nothing wrong. I regret nothing. And I will not allow them to submerge me in some swamp.

  But her moral courage did not solve her personal problems. As she moved about her little town she could feel disapproval directed toward her, but she bit her lip and grappled with specifics: The loss of El Codo? Of course our saintly Fray Damián was less than honest when he maneuvered its transfer to his brother. Away it goes.

  Once she had conceded this, she no longer grieved about this loss, but she did realize that she must leave Béjar, though to go where, she did not know. That decision she would postpone until she resolved a matter that was perplexing many thoughtful Mexicans these days. Summoning Natán, she told him: ‘It would be painful for me to hold another human being in bondage,’ and with exquisite attention to legal detail she gave him his freedom. She also took care of an old Indian nurse, then left funds to the church for perpetual novenas for the soul of Don Ramón. As she delivered the silver she looked up at a crucifix, and without kneeling she stared into the eyes of Christ and whispered: ‘You died to save me, and Don Ramón died to protect my honor. I will strive to be worthy of your love.’

  Consoled but still uncertain as to what she must do, she returned to her garden and sat alone, allowing tears to flow: I’m lost. Oh God, I am so alone. Then slowly, from some deep reservoir, an idea began to germinate, and with her eyes still wet, she moved inside to find pen and paper, and drafted a letter:

  Esteemed Domingo Garza,

  I write from the dark valley of the human soul. A beautiful Frenchman who was to marry me was slain by Comanche. My mother has died. A strong americano I was to marry has married another, then killed my grandfather in a duel. The ranch at which you worked has been taken from us. Misión Santa Teresa, where your great-grandfather carved those wonderful Stations, has been burned and his work lost.

  In these tragic days I remember when my grandfather made me learn my letters and I taught you, and I remember how your grandfather taught you to ride, and you taught me. I remember how you were always kind and thoughtful, and how you obeyed the harsh rules my grandfather sometimes laid down. I remember you as a young man of goodness, and now I pray with tears welling from my eyes that in your goodness, and if you are free to do so, you will come and rescue me from the terror in which I live.

  San Antonio de Béjar

  Provincia de Tejas

  1792

  Trinidad de Saldaña

  She posted the letter to the growing town of Laredo, from where it would go downriver to the settlements established by the great Escandón in the 1740s, and in time to the lands once held by the Saldañas. There it would be delivered to Domingo Garza, son of the couple that now owned these lands on the north bank of the river.

  It would require, Trinidad judged, about three months for the letter to reach Domingo and three months more before she could receive a reply. In the meantime she moved about the paths of Béjar as if she intended remaining there the rest of her life, heiress no more, sought after no more. She attended church; she asked about new laws at the presidio; she watched as Amalia and her husband reinforced their foothold in the community. She never spoke against them to the acquaintances she met, and she counseled with no one.

  At the end of two months and two weeks she was startled by an importunate banging on her door, and when she opened it she found standing before her, his clothes covered with dust from his long ride, Domingo Garza. When he faced her and saw once more that twisted smile and those luminous eyes, he was transfixed, unable to move, for he was a mestizo and she was a daughter of Spain, but as he hesitated she looked directly into his eyes and whispered: ‘You have saved me,’ and thus set free, he swept her into his arms and buried his head against her neck to hide the tears he could not control.

  He stayed in Béjar one week, visiting the burned mission and riding out to see the ranch which he had once supposed he would some day manage for the Saldañas, as his ancestors had done for so long. Later, when Don Mordecai heard that he was in town, he sought him out to make a generous offer: ‘You know the ranch. I need a manager I can trust. I’ll give you a good job and a good wage.’ Then he added with a sly wink: ‘And if in due course you should care to marry the Saldaña girl …’

  Domingo said promptly: ‘Now that’s a good idea. I need a job.’

  So the two men, protected by troops from the presidio, rode out to the ranch, and when they arrived they dismissed the soldiers, telling them to wait within the walled area. Without dismounting, they moved about the ranch, with Marr explaining what Domingo’s duties would be, and when they were far from the others, with Marr pointing to a fence that Domingo would have to mend, Domingo drew back, leaned forward from his left stirrup, and landed a mighty blow on Marr’s chin that toppled him clean out
of his saddle.

  With never a sound, Domingo leaped onto the prostrate Marr and began hammering him as hard as he could with both fists.

  Bigger and stronger, Marr was not defenseless, but overwhelmed by Garza’s sudden move, he could not easily apply his superior force. When he struggled to his feet, lashing out with his powerful arms, Garza danced and dodged, landing such severe blows that before long Marr was winded and sorely hurt.

  But still he defended himself, and when Garza saw that his opponent was tiring, he smashed in with a series of wild punches, kicks, jabs and belts, until Marr fell to the ground. As he lay there, clearly defeated, Garza did not grant him the honors of war. Not at all. With his first outcry in the battle he leaped upon the fallen man and smashed him so furiously about the face that blood spurted; the remaining big front tooth popped out, and Don Mordecai fainted.

  Wiping his hands on the grass, Domingo tied Marr’s horse to his own, then rode slowly back to where the soldiers waited. ‘You’d better go out and find him,’ he said. Surrendering Marr’s horse to them, he started the long ride back to Béjar, asking for no protection.

  He arrived at sunset, well speckled with blood, and before the moon was up he and Trinidad de Saldaña, protected by four riders he had hired, were on their way to Laredo, but they had barely left town when she cried: ‘Oh! I must go back!’ He feared she was reconsidering her decision, but when they reached the beautiful old house on the plaza, all she wanted was that sketch she had made of the church at Saltillo, which Don Ramón had framed. It was one of the memories of her past life which she would never surrender.