Lamy of Santa Fe

by Paul Horgan

  The very knowledge that his burden was already officially lightened, and would soon practically be so, seemed to revive Lamy’s energies. In May, quite in his old habit, he set out on a two-week pastoral visit, beginning with the dedication of the new Jesuit church of the Immaculate Conception at Albuquerque. How he loved the open country; was most at home in the saddle; most content when he was able to assist at the process of growth, in whatever degree.

  ii.

  The Gardener

  TIME WAS ON HIM NOW, TO SEE. More spare than before; taller than average, he was still muscular. Callers—according to the season he saw many in his garden—saw his dark eyes somewhat sunken, though still quick to sparkle when he was amused or interested. His jaws and cheekbones and chin now jutted out like the granite outcroppings of his old country of Auvergne. His mouth was folded inward—he had lost teeth. If he had always moved deliberately, now perhaps he went more slowly than before. He had few personal indulgences; and the one he loved best, gave most to, received most from, was the garden behind the cathedral. There his adobe house, with its small chapel, stood at one edge of the five-acre tract; and there through the years he had made a haven away from the parched distances of his far-flung work. It was a silent and living model of what could be done with the desert; and lying all about it, the city of Santa Fe also bore out his belief in planting and cultivating what would take root and grow. Mid-century daguerreotypes of the city showed almost no trees; but in photographs of the 1880s, the plaza and other streets had bountiful shade. From many a plains voyage Lamy had brought cuttings of fruit and shade trees and grape vines all the way in buckets of water, scarce as it was, to be planted on his arrival home.

  The garden was walled with adobes by his first French architects, who had crafted its main entrance out of native granite. There was a sparkling fountain, and a sundial stood on a pedestal of polished Santa Fe marble. Aisles of trees, plants, and arbors led to it from all quarters of the enclosure. Formal walks reached from one end of the garden to the other, with little bypaths turning aside among the flower beds and leading to benches cunningly placed in the shade from which Lamy and his visitors could see, on the high ground to the north and east, the old earthen battlements of Fort Marcy, and “the only brick and modern residence in the city, and a windmill, probably the only one in the territory.” To the west through the branches of his trees he could make out the long blue sweep of the Jemez Mountains. At the south end of the garden on its highest ground was a spring which fed a pond covering half an acre. From the pond flowed little graded waterways to all parts of the garden. In the pond were two small islands on one of which stood a miniature chalet with a thatched roof. Little bridges led to the islands. Flowers edged the shores, and water lilies floated on the still surface, and trout lived in the pond and came to take crumbs which the archbishop threw to them. Now and then he would send a mess of trout over to St Michael’s College to be cooked for the scholars.

  There was always color in the garden through the warm season, for he chose varieties of plants which would in turn keep new blooms coming. He loved to bring wildflowers in from the country—someone said he “tamed” them in his cultivated beds. There was a plot for vegetables. Many of the trees bore fruit, and he worked season by season to improve their size and flavor. From cuttings of California vines he grew Malaga grapes whose bunches finally measured fifteen inches long. His cabbages and beets were huge, and he once showed three turnips which together weighed twenty-five pounds. His strawberries were so spectacular that he was able to sell them for a dollar a box, giving the proceeds to charity. When he came to live in New Mexico there were almost no fruit trees, for the fruit culture of the Spanish and Mexican colonists had vanished. Bringing in new orchard stocks, he encouraged others to do the same. For each tree he spent ten or fifteen dollars; and for freight—when the trees came by stage—ten dollars a pound. One of his pear trees yielded one hundred and fifteen pears in a season, and his prize cherry tree, which he called the Belle of Santa Fe, bore two crops a year of black oxheart cherries. For a visitor he could pick a peach of five and a half ounces, a pear of eleven, or an apple of sixteen. When he gave a caller one of his prize peaches, it was always with the earnest request that the pit be kept—and planted.

  Among his shade trees he cultivated elm, maple, cottonwood, locust, and both weeping and osier willows. There were red and white currants, plums as large as hen’s eggs, and flawless Catawba grapes. Every vine leaf, every shrub, was sound, and so were the trees—apple, peach, pear (he espaliered the pears with the help of Louis, his gardener, who was remembered as a “wonderful gardener, a little man”). They said that much of Lamy’s original garden stock came from Auvergne. When the yield was bountiful, he would thin out his growths for transplanting.

  Within his garden walls, he delighted to receive visitors. The garden was a famous sight in Santa Fe—the other, which he could see at the eastern end of his retreat, was the unfinished cathedral, one of whose towers was rising toward its belfry. He would walk the raked aisles with his callers, or sitting by the pond throw crumbs to the trout. A correspondent who signed himself D.T.W. in an eastern paper had a fine day with the archbishop, who opened for him “a bottle of the best wine I have yet tasted in Santa Fe … it would have passed for a very fine Burgundy.’

  They sit by the trout pond, in which Lamy most “delights his soul.’ In one corner of the lake, partitioned off from the rest, “is the nursery, where the baby trout are—little fellows, but as spry as can be.” Lamy has his favorite seat by the main pond. As they talk, the archbishop commences “throwing bread into the water.’ The lake, which is as smooth as glass, now looks as though a thunder shower has suddenly dropped upon it. Its whole surface is agitated at once. For every crumb of bread that fell, “I should judge that forty fish rose at once.’

  So they sat by the lakeside, “the archbishop talking all the time and abstractedly throwing in his bread, while the beautiful creatures swarmed from all quarters, even up to our very feet.… He kindly offered a day’s fishing, but it would have been murder—as bad as shooting quails on the ground …” The visitor spends two hours with this “excellent man, and a more pleasant, cultivated gentleman I have rarely met.’

  Everyone saw that Lamy loved the work of gardens; but it was plain that he did not follow it for his pleasure alone. Sweeping the long shady vista and its bright colors of fruit and flower with a gesture, he would say that the purpose of it all was to demonstrate what could be done to bring the graces and comforts of the earth to a land largely barren, rocky, and dry. To help his fellow citizens follow his example, he made them many gifts. On one of his westward journeys over the plains he brought horse-chestnut seeds in a pail of water all the way from Ohio, and a hundred sapling elms besides. He gave these to be planted in Santa Fe, and one day his old friend Mrs Flora Spiegelberg glanced out of her front window in Palace avenue and saw the archbishop planting with his own hands a pair of willow saplings at her front gate. When he was done with his spading, he blessed the young trees. In another year he saw English walnut trees planted in the city from his seeds. In another, a thousand fruit trees were set out in Santa Fe where there were so few.

  If the garden was his principal joy, he did not see it as his exclusively. The pleasure it gave to visitors rewarded him, and what it had to offer in other ways was at the disposal of those who needed it. One day Sister Blandina, from the hospital nearby, looked over the wall. She saw beds of cabbages, turnips, carrots. In the hospital there were seventy-two patients, thirty-five orphans, and sixteen nuns who had not “a handful of vegetables” in their kitchen. The garden was quiet —nobody there. Blandina “made one athletic spring,” with heavy skirts and rosary flying, vaulted over the wall and landed near the cabbage patch. There in haste she threw over the wall at least two dozen cabbages, and many more of the smaller vegetables. A little later, she went to Lamy’s house in the garden and knocked.

  “Come in.”

  She we
nt in and said,

  “I have come to make a confession out of the confessional.’

  He gazed at her with “that benevolent expression which once seen” could never be forgotten. He saw that she was covered with dust.

  “My little sister,” he said, “what have you been doing?”

  “Stealing, Your Grace. With never a thought of restitution, I dug up enough vegetables from your garden to last us three days.”

  “And then?”

  “Whatever you say,” she replied.

  “Tell Louis to give you all there are.”

  She could only say, “Thank you very much.” All she ever heard further about the raid was that in a little while he sent sacks of coffee and sugar to the hospital.

  Among an occasional visitor was the Swiss-born anthropologist Adolph Bandelier, who brought Lamy news, now and then, of his discoveries. Antiquity was evident everywhere in New Mexico, either exposed and waiting to be recognized, or waiting to be dug up and opened to knowledge. It was not, as in European cultures, continuously assimilated, adopted, modified, and brought along into daily use. Now the newly arrived industrial age seemed swiftly to bypass whole epochs. Bandelier appealed to Lamy’s sense of tradition. It was believed that Bandelier became a Catholic. People saw him wearing a clerical collar. When there was a progressive movement launched to raze the old Governor’s Palace and replace it with an up-to-date new capitol, Lamy powerfully opposed the idea. Bandelier spent nine months living in a pueblo, slowly becoming a friend and accepted there. His purpose was to discover whether it was true that the Indians had a cult for worshipping snakes. He came away having seen the cult in action, and had his drawings to show in proof. If the snake was a deity, he was also a natural inhabitant, and a priest one day at his altar in San Juan was not prepared for what he saw there near his feet—a huge diamondback rattlesnake coiled in wariness.

  So much to talk about with a congenial caller (though sometimes Lamy did not admit all comers, but courteously and briefly stayed them at his door). Somehow an absurd rumor went about in 1881 that he was the owner of a newly discovered and immensely rich gold mine; and he was at some pains to assure Paris and Lyon that there was no truth to it; for such a story could seriously disturb the modest flow of revenue which provided the chief support of his labors. He was prompt and careful in accounting for financial matters—unlike Machebeuf, whose methods were diffuse and impetuous. Month by month, year by year, Lamy made his reports, and gave his hearty thanks for the help which sustained him. When in residence, he worked steadily at his desk. After he drafted his pastoral letters, Mother Francesca copied them for the printer.

  One of the Loretto sisters served as the chapel sacristan. It was her duty to summon the archbishop for early Mass. When she rang the rising bell, she would see his light instantly come on, but he was often late appearing in the sacristy, where she waited to serve his Mass. At the altar, he was never hurried, every motion was exact, careful, devout.

  The nuns saw how he kept as much time as possible for prayer and spiritual reading. His library gave evidence of much use. Many of the volumes were water-stained from the shipwreck—how long ago? thirty years—was it possible? They were theological works in French, Latin, Spanish, many of them published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, retaining their original bindings of leather and gold, or vellum with quill lettering. The collection included a seven-volume edition of the Mystica Ciudad de Dies (Madrid, 1758), that “Divine History of the Virgin Mother of Christ” by the extraordinary nun Maria de Agreda. She was famous among the faithful for her gift of bilocation by which, in the 1620s, she was able to appear to countless Indians of the Southwest to whom she introduced the cross, though at the same time she visibly remained in Spain at her post as Mother Superior Maria de Jesús of the Discalced Sisters of St Francis at Agreda, on the border of Aragon and Castile, where she also had time to write. Among his other books, Lamy had his own Thomas Aquinas in several editions of the Summa—Latin volumes published variously in 1570, 1790, and 1798. There was a copy in vellum of Commentaria in Duodecim Prophetas (Venice, 1704); a Virgini Deiparae (Rome, 1633); a Theologia Moralis (La Croix) (Venice, 1753); a Commentarius in Esdram, Nehemiam (Antwerp, 1645), the wooden cover of which had been cracked in drying after immersion; and a Commentaria in Proverbia (Brussels, 1739). All these bore marks of the sea, some permanently warped by the waters of Matagorda Bay. To think—so they marvelled in the convents—of all the bishop’s voyages and travels since then! One journey overland added up to three thousand five hundred miles, and if all his days of camping out “under the stars” were reckoned together, they came to more than a thousand.

  Near or far, others had claims upon him which he met as he could. A Taos Indian lay incurably ill in St Vincent’s, and knowing he was to die, begged to be sent home to his pueblo. The doctors believed this ill-advised. Lamy heard of the case, directed that the Taoseno be given his wish, put on a cot, the cot into a waggon driven up the riverside road to Taos. The man died soon, but at home. On a heavy snowy day Major Sena’s mother lay in bed with a fever. Lamy went to see her wearing the shawl which he put around himself in cold weather. From his garden harvest he carried four fine apples in the breast of his cassock. They were rich in pectin and quinine, good for fever. He put them on the hearth to roast them, chatted with the invalid, and when the apples were ready, peeled them with his penknife and, slice by slice, fed them to the old lady. The family said it was “a simple thing,” but they always remembered it. Another woman who as a small child received a visit from him when she was sick in bed told how he came to see her. He seemed so tall, all in black, that he terrified her and she burrowed down under the blanket, pulling it over her head. Then she felt him gently pulling it off her face. Sitting by the bed, he said she was not to be afraid, and told her a story. Listening in wonder, she began to feel better.

  In the Rosario Chapel stood the Shrine of La Conquistadora—Our Lady of the Conquest. It contained a tiny statue of the Madonna, in painted gesso and wood. She was the patroness of Santa Fe, for she had been brought to New Mexico by Oñate in 1598, taken south to safety during the Pueblo Rebellion of 1680, and brought back by De Vargas during the reconquest of 1692. She was the most venerable sacred object in Santa Fe, and her wardrobe of ceremonial costumes, changed for important feast days, was voluminous, her votive gifts innumerable. She was carried every year in the May procession, when the faithful marched through the streets, pausing at each improvised shrine—there were many of them—set up before house or shop by people who wanted the procession to halt for prayers, when the benign influence of La Conquistadora could be visited upon them.

  In the Corpus Christi procession one year the marchers paused in Palace avenue before the house of Willi Spiegelberg to rest for a moment in the heat of the day. They set the decorated and canopied litter of La Conquistadora on the street while they mopped their brows and chatted briefly. The smallest Spiegelberg child—a little girl of four or five—saw the tiny Madonna and, unobserved, ran out to take it up in her arms as she would a doll, and happily returned to the house. The bearers went on their way, and not until they reached the cathedral did they notice that their Madonna had left them. Their astonishment was mixed with fear. They had no explanation for the terrible event. The procession must proceed, another holy figure was found, and the mystery grew with the day. It was not solved until in the evening Flora Spiegelberg went to kiss her daughter good night and found the Madonna tucked neatly in her daughter’s bed. “Horrified,” Mrs Spiegelberg flew to the archbishop’s house to restore the figure with explanations and apologies. Lamy received all with “roars of laughter,” and he and his appalled guest had a glass of wine together. (They were old friends—when the Jews of Santa Fe held their holy-day observances, Lamy was usually present.) Comforted, she was able to go home in peace, though her child felt robbed of her new doll. Nothing more was heard of the affair until many months later “a beautifully dressed wax doll” came from Paris
, with a note from the archbishop to the little girl to explain that it was “to replace the little Madonna.”

  Generally companionable, Lamy was easy with his colleagues; though there was a shade of formality in his dealings with Salpointe, such as never obtruded itself in his friendship with Machebeuf. But after all, the younger man had come as a recruit to Santa Fe, while Machebeuf had been to school with him, had arrived with the bishop at the beginning, and with him had faced and overcome the first obstacles of the desert diocese. When these two friends were together, the talk seemed to go racing along. The essence of friendship was never to have enough time to exchange all the ideas and references and memories that wanted sharing. Lamy’s quiet bearing was well countered by Machebeuf’s vivacity. Where the one had humor under his calm, the other had an extravagance of word and gesture which his priests used to mimic when he was absent. But in essential affairs he was as serious as his superior, and he never asked anyone to undertake a duty which he himself had not already served. Like Lamy, Machebeuf loved the native Mexican people, who repaid them both with dependent respect. In repose Lamy was like a medieval sculpture of a bishop whose eyes saw beyond time; Machebeuf, even in repose, with his small hilarious old face, looked like a carved imp unexpectedly glimpsed as a detail in a pulpit or a capital.

  After the railroads came, the two old friends were able to meet more frequently than in harder days.

  In the spring of 1884, the Jesuit pastor of San Felipe de Neri in Old Albuquerque sought out one of his nuns—it was Sister Blandina in her genius for being “present at the creation” in any situation.

  “I am in trouble,” said the pastor. “Can you help me out?”