by Anya Seton
South of the Canon Road, near the foot of Atalaya Peak, there stood an isolated four-room adobe house, its rose-tinged mud walls indistinguishable at a little distance from the reddish piñon-tufted earth of the hills behind it. The Anglos across the river in the town knew nothing of this house’s inhabitants, neither did the rico Spanish families. To the others—the Mexican people and the Indians—the house was known and beloved as far north as Santa Cruz and Truchas, as far south as Galisteo, and sometimes the piercing shriek of ungreased axles heralded the arrival of an ox-drawn carreta from distant Jemez or Mora.
At first they called this house La Casa de la Bruja, but when calling the woman who lived there a witch, they stripped the term of all opprobrium or fear. It was simply an affectionate nickname. They did not know her real name, and they were not curious. They knew only that she understood their speech and their ways, and that sometimes, when one of them became involved with some inexplicable ruling or restriction imposed by the Anglos, she could understand that, too, and make it clear to them. They came to her for things like that because she had wisdom and patience, but usually they came to her to be healed. She had a healing power that came from God. They knew it came from God because, quite a while after she first arrived and turned the back room of her house into a resting-place for the sick, a woman from the Analco, María Gonzalez, had become frightened at seeing her sick baby stripped naked, scrubbed all over with warm water and Anglo soap, and then at seeing a little knife plunged into the angry red boil on the baby’s buttocks. Maria had seized her child and run all the way to Padre Antonio at the Cathedral.
The padre had listened very carefully to Maria’s story and then had himself gone to visit the house by Atalaya, Quite a crowd had followed him anxiously. He had stayed inside a long time talking to La Bruja. Several people had looked through the window and seen the padre examining, one after the other, the medicine chest, some large books, and the three clean-sheeted mattresses which lay in the room for the sick.
It was during that visit of the padre that many of the people first realized that there was another inhabitant in the house, a small old man who coughed a great deal and lay on an Anglo bed high up from the floor in full sunlight from a southern window. They were too polite to stare at him as they circled the house to watch what the padre was doing, but when he saw them he turned his face to the wall with an expression of anger.
At last the padre came out of the house and smiled at the little crowd which waited for his verdict. ‘She is a good woman,’ he said solemnly. ‘ She wants only to help you and start a clinic for you such as the Americans have back in the States. You may trust her. And she is one of us,’ he added. ‘This is her home.’
They did not understand that very well, but they were relieved to know that her healing power came from God. The padre, too, was relieved. His people would not go to the few available American doctors, nor, unless they were dying and too weak to resist, would they go to the hospital where the Sisters of Charity were already overworked.
He had not, then, asked many questions of this strange señora. He knew only that she had been born here and had now come back with an invalid husband whom she tended with unvarying gentleness and skill. She had much medical knowledge and she had an almost miraculous intuition as to what ailed the sick bodies or souls which came to her. As time went on, this power grew and they began to regard her with semi-superstitious reverence. They no longer called her La Bruja, but now they spoke of her as La Santa instead. There was nothing remarkable about her. She was small and thin, her hair streaked with white, but people remembered her eyes.
They were calm and gray and infinitely wise. They made you feel that, though you could hide nothing from them, neither would they ever be shocked or repelled by any secret they might read. Many thought she got her strength from the lovely image of the Virgin of Guadalupe which she kept in a niche by the hearth.
Once in a while Indians came to her from the near-by pueblos, and they thought differently, though they never discussed it. They thought that her power came from Atalaya, the ancient sacred mountain near whose foot she dwelt.
She healed and comforted many people throughout the years, and it could be seen that it was a source of great sorrow to her that she never completely healed her husband. His body gradually grew better, but his mind was clouded. Perhaps this was for the best, though, for in the beginning he had not treated her with the love she gave him. He had been surly, and had looked on everyone with a disagreeable, sneering contempt. But after his memory grew dim and his thoughts confused, his nature had softened. Then he began to follow her about like a small child, and he helped her with household tasks and he responded gently to her.
One day a strange thing happened. It became known because Frasquita Romero was convalescing from fever on one of the clinic beds and both heard and saw some of it. She understood English, having once been cook at the Palace for Governor Lew Wallace.
As Frasquita later told the story, it was on a brilliant June day that the beautiful young lady arrived at the house of La Santa. It was very surprising because one could see that she was most fashionably dressed, an Anglo-American from outside, and she came in a carriage from the station. The driver was very angry at having to go so far into the country over a miserable cart road, but he turned and drove off again without a word when he saw the meeting between the young lady and the couple at the Casa. The three of them stood and stared at each other for a long time, and then La Santa gave a cry and opened her arms and suddenly the tears were running down her face.
This had startled Frasquita very much, for La Santa had always seemed too calm and strong for tears. Then she heard the young lady say ‘ Mother! ’ in a tone of great feeling and the matter bad been plainer. Still puzzling, however, was the behavior of the old man, even granted that his mind was not clear. He had turned a very bad color like a tallow candle, and he had walked out of the house alone, making a queer and dreadful noise like a child that is frightened.
The two women had fetched him back before he had stumbled very far, and the young one had kissed him on the forehead. ‘It’s all over and done with long ago,’ she said, ‘and I’ve learned at last to forgive and not to judge. I came to tell you that and to bring you both back.’
Frasquita felt sad to hear this, for suddenly she realized how badly they would all miss La Santa. But La Santa had not gone. The young lady had stayed a few days, she and her mother had talked in English for hours and hours on end. Far into each night Frasquita had heard their voices rising and falling from the next room. Voices very much alike, rich and soft, but with an undertone of certainty and power. Like the new organ in the Cathedral.
Finally the young lady went away again. Little Jaime Ruiz drove her to the station in his ox-cart, lovely silk dress, big diamond ring, parasol, and all. La Santa and El viejo stayed behind in the little house by Atalaya. Frasquita thought maybe the mother would cry again, but she did not, and much of the sadness which had always lain in back of her eyes vanished.
There were never any more visitors from the outside. The clinic went on and in time the cart track up to the house became beaten into quite a wide road.
Then one day the old man died, and La Santa did a strange thing. She had Jaime and his ox-cart carry the body across the river into the town, and she went with it to the Presbyterian Church on Grant Avenue for a Protestant burial. Jaime was very much shocked, and so were many others when they heard, but she never explained, and, though she went often to the Protestant cemetery with flowers, and they saw her walking lightly across the footbridge into town, dressed in the black dress and shawl that they all wore, they soon accepted this and forgot the reason.
She continued to work for them and heal them for a long time after that, and it was Padre Antonio who first realized that she was growing very weak. He mentioned this to one or two and at once there was a rush of sympathy and contrition from the many she had helped. Frasquita and Maria Gonzalez overrode her protests and
stayed with her to care for her. The finest wine and delicacies flowed to the little house. Over and over again in the Barrio Analco they pooled their pennies and went to the plaza stores to buy special food for her. And the Indians heard. They came from Tesuque and Nambe and Santo Domingo to bring her gifts.
One evening Maria Gonzalez sent for Padre Antonio. He administered the last rites, and after that La Santa lay very still on her colchón, raised up a bit as she wished it so that she might see Atalaya through the window. Her eyes were continually seeking the mountain, and always the sight of it seemed to give her peace, even when she was in great pain.
At dawn of the next day she ceased to breathe, and while the two women sobbed, the priest, who had stayed with her, bowed his head with a sharp feeling of sorrow and personal loss.
She was buried as she had wished to be in San Miguel Cemetery at the nearest point to Atalaya. Buried in a simple black dress and around her neck a magnificent roughly cut turquoise pendant on a gold chain. Maria Gonzalez and Frasquita had been shocked to find that the chain did not end in a crucifix as they had always supposed. And they had rather timidly mentioned this to the padre.
‘Is it not strange that this devout woman, whom we have considered as almost a saint, should wish to be buried like the heathen Indians with a lump of turquoise on her breast? ’
And the padre answered: ‘Is it not strange that you, Maria Gonzalez, whose baby she twice cured, and you, Frasquita, whom she nursed for five months through the bloody flux, should dare to question her now? The soul, my daughters, may have many symbols with which it reaches toward God.’
And the women were silenced.
Though he alone of all those who knew her had had many talks with her and learned something of her history, it was not until he opened the letter of instruction which she had prepared that he learned her real name.
Santa Fe Cameron, he thought in amazement; she was named for this town of her birth, for whose people she had done so much, and they have all these years unknowingly and against my wishes been calling her by part of her baptismal name. And this realization gave him a sense of mystical contentment, for it seemed in that moment of illumination that there was here a glimpse of the underlying pattern and meaning for which we all seek, and he pondered often on the woman’s story.
She had once repudiated this place of her birth and spirit, fled from it with passion and a clamoring of the senses, as she had misused the vision with which she had been born. And because she was strong and had latent in her the possibilities for true greatness, even perhaps for the beatification she had here transiently and but semi-seriously achieved—because of this strength she had involved others in her tragedy.
But there had been atonement, patient day-by-day self-sacrifice back here in the place which she had once despised. Ah, yes, thought the priest, it makes a pattern. And the pattern is God’s.
When a new generation grew up in the Barrio Analco, she would be forgotten, her untended adobe house was already crumbling, the wooden Mexican cross on her grave would last no longer than all the others throughout the land, but something would endure. Something in the pure and exalted air on the summit of the mountains, in the fragrance of the junipers and piñons, in the warm shadows of the portales, and in the still sunlight and the gold-flecked dust of the far-reaching roads.
THE END