by Paul Horgan
“What is the trouble, Father?”
It seemed that Lamy and Machebeuf were to arrive on the four o’clock train, were coming to the parish, and there was no cook to prepare their dinner—an archbishop and a bishop! Blandina—so suitably named—assumed the problem. All the local clergy were to entertain the visiting bishops while the music room of the parish house was being turned into a banquet hall—quite possibly it was the great sala of the old house of Father Gallegos behind the church—and while the nuns put together a menu to be served at six o’clock. A mood of reminiscence was prescribed by Blandina. It carried through until after dinner when at half past seven the supper room again became a music room, and the eight nuns of the community entered to join the clergy in a conversazione.
The archbishop, the bishop, in the principal armchairs, faced a semicircle of Sisters of Charity leaning decorously forward in their little straight chairs. Machebeuf pointed to Blandina and told Lamy how he had first seen her in Trinidad, Colorado, carrying two hods full of plaster to be applied to the new schoolhouse she was having built. The plasterers had gone for the day. The local priest was walking with Machebeuf. She put him to work while Machebeuf watched.
“Do you remember, Sister.” asked Machebeuf now, “how annoyed Father Pinto was?”
Amidst the marvelling murmur at this, Blandina, like an experienced hostess, said to Machebeuf,
“Now, Bishop, that you have brought on the conversation about me—give us the pleasure of knowing how you became lame.”
To this somewhat odd question, he replied,
“My horse got frightened and threw me with my foot in the stirrup and in this posture the animal dragged me. When the horse stopped, my leg was broken.”
If anyone remembered that it was a buggy accident, no one offered a correction. Lamy, taking pleasure in his friend’s gifts as a story-teller, said,
“What about the time you dined at one of Harvey’s restaurants”—the eating houses maintained at railroad meal stops on the Santa Fe—“and the waiter told you you occupied two seats, and for that reason you would have to pay for two persons?”
The nuns rustled and said,
“Yes, tell us, Bishop.”
“Well,” said Machebeuf, “it happened at a period when … you could take advantage of thirty minutes for dinner. All who wanted to [leave the train and] dine filed into Harvey’s dining hall. Some good man took compassion on my lameness and carried my valise. He looked to see where there were vacant places, spying a table where two chairs were not occupied, he placed my valise on one and helped me to seat myself on the other.… When the waiter came to collect, he said to me: ‘You occupied two seats—your charge is double.’ The gentlemen at the table looked quizzically at me and I good-humoredly said: ‘Justice is one of the prime factors of our Constitution, hence I will follow its dictates,’ ”
With that, Machebeuf, opening his valise, said to the waiter,
“Bring dinner for one more—this guest does not want anything damp. Bring equivalents in dry edibles.”
And then, Machebeuf said, the men at his table let go a yell “as though a mountain cat were making ready for a spring—the others in the hall joined in the fun.…”
Blandina noted that Machebeuf’s “lower lip has the expression of a good grandmother who fears she never does enough for all who belong to her. His whole make-up says, ‘You may take advantage of me, but I remain poor, lame Bishop Machebeuf, one of the first modern missionaries of the Southwest.”
Breaking the respectful stillness which followed the anecdote, one of the Jesuit priests said to Lamy,
“Now, Most Reverend Archbishop, it is your turn to tell us something of your earlier days in New Mexico.”
How meagre the social life of the listeners; how hungry for converse in such an august visitation. Lámy did his share. He knew the absorbing delight of his listeners in the small events and details of daily life which if they met them well would bring the great things to take care of themselves in harmony. He said,
“Well, you all know that the Vicar Forane Ortiz would not acknowledge me as the rightful person for the see of Santa Fe unless I could show my credentials from the bishop of Durango. So to Durango I went on horseback. The experience of later years made me understand I was safer in going unobtrusively through New Mexico down to Durango, Old Mexico, than if I had a large retinue for protection. At that time the Navajos and Apaches were constantly on paths of destruction warring among themselves and against our native population. Our Mexican people greatly feared the Navajos, and though quite a number of our best families have raised [Indian] children found on the battlefield after Indian attacks, they still are on their guard against whom they raised. You would greatly insult a native by calling him a Chato Navajo—flat-nosed Navajo—as they do in anger.”
Another Jesuit asked him if he gave confirmation on that trip to Durango.
“Oh, no. That took place some years afterward, when I formulated plans to build a stone cathedral. The bishop of Durango kindly invited me to give confirmation in a number of isolated villages, some of which had not been visited for seven years.”
The purpose, of course, was to raise funds to build the cathedral. In the poor villages, the parents of the sponsors of those confirmed gave him dos reales—twenty-five cents. The journey took several months. The sponsors had to be instructed, which took many days, and so did the children. A few of the richer people gave cariños, or love tokens—”among them one solid gold brick.” He was kindly received everywhere, but the native food was not good for him, especially tortillas. Chili con carne gave one strength. Jerked meat was common. He always carried some bread, crackers, a few hard-boiled eggs. The travel was exhausting, but not any more, since the railroads had come. “But look back from the eighties to the fifties, and it meant purgatorial work.…”
Lamy’s time in the West spanned all the great changes in the forms of life which followed the American invasion, and he took full advantage of them all. But, too, he represented the still unchanging great world, through Rome. Everyone remarked his affability, “the kindest man you ever saw,” said a priest he had sent to the seminary and who lived to be a hundred and remembered him well, and saying it, the little old man had a strike of energy through his whole bird-like body which was like a convulsion of truth. He remembered Lamy’s “strong voice,” and he thought he remembered that Lamy’s speech in both English and Spanish retained a tinge of French accent.
In his lifetime’s succession of the opening out of his world, through the perceptions of faith, and the conquest of the physical environment, he showed everyone his gift for reality, which did not preclude appropriate gaiety, and an almost abstract, selfless piety, a “given” which was to remain constant. If his thoughts came to him slowly, they came firmly. Nobody said he was brilliant, but all seemed to reach beyond that to his disposition, which an Army colonel called “lovable,” with the added observation that the archbishop, when he believed himself to be right, “could be as firm as a rock.” In all his life, his energy was like a force of nature, except for those sometimes inexplicable and sudden spells of exhaustion to the point of serious illness; but there was no hint of accidie in his days—his prodigious, handwritten correspondence, his purgatorial travels, disposed of that tendency of the celibate life.
A sense of his own energy came through his descriptions of the new energies of others, as he saw civilization unfolding under his hand. He—and Machebeuf—were spared the bleak luxuries of skepticism, and he seemed to open the windows of his desert adobe towns upon the world. To live and work without doubts and yet without arrogance—this was to possess a serene balance, like the result of some hidden but all-availing law, with its power to commit, to spend, and to renew its forces. If nobody found him clever or volatile, most people felt that he was strong essentially, and that his main strength was given to his love of God, expressed through the long labors he calmly and justly pursued; and many must have asked themselves why this sp
iritual dedication was so moving in a physical sort of man? Few knew it, but it may have been that the devotion to Notre-Dame de Bonne Nouvelle which he had from childhood was a sort of abiding innocence which animated him all his life. An orator once said on an occasion of compliments that Lamy was “the greatest pacifier he had ever known.”
He liked to share what he had—perhaps most of all the freeing outlook and closeness to nature of his little ranch in the Tesuque Cañon. Now and then he would go to St Michael’s College in the piercing early morning air of Santa Fe and collect a straggle of boys and walk them out to the Villa Pintoresca, where they could hear his Mass, and a couple could serve it for him. He had made a fish pond there too, and they could fish for German carp which he had had shipped to him; and when he brought the nuns and other friends to the country for a picnic, they were told to pick at will among the peach trees—but to exhaust one place before they raided another. He once called one of the nuns to come to look at a certain flower with him. She thought he might be about to pick it; but instead, he knelt, inhaled its fragrance, and brought her to her knees to do the same. The scattered families who lived in the cañon saw Lamy as he went on foot from the villa to the chancery in the mornings. When he was alone in his lodge, he spent much time reading, and he used his old caravan telescope to sweep the sky, and the unchanging fantasies of the earth forms, near and far, and the constantly changing marvels of light and color at sunrise, in daytime storm and cloud passage and in the fiery fall of evening before the starry dark.
In November 1881, General Charles Ewing—the same who had been unable to further Lamy’s plan for the Pueblo agency schools—had put up at the Exchange Hotel in Santa Fe and had gone at once to call at the archbishop’s “palacio.” It was a reunion which bound the early days in Ohio to the decades which followed in the West, for Ewing and his parents had belonged to Lamy’s parish in Lancaster, and Purcell had married Charles Ewing and his wife, all of which Lamy recalled. They toured the garden where snow had fallen, and the general picked a flower out of a snowbank to send his wife.
Lamy invited him to see the Villa Pintoresca, and took him there in a buggy. “The Archbishop drove me himself, and he drove like a Jehu [and the driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi; for he driveth furiously—2 Kings 9:20]. We had lunch at the ranch—a wild beautiful place from which you can see Mountain Peakes covered with snow that are 120 miles away.” Lamy took him to the chapel and showed him a chalice set with jewels, “very old probably over 300 years that he found there thirty years ago when he came here first as Bishop of Santa Fe. The old gentleman was very kind and fatherly—talked of my old home when he was a young Priest where he was often kindly cared for, when I was a child only six years old … and his visits there as bright places in his missionary life that never grew dim, but to which he turns with pleasure and loves to talk …” In his life’s fabric there seemed to be no broken thread.
iii.
The Apostle
WITH SALPOINTE, HIS COADJUTOR, to share his duties, and to be ready to succeed him if sudden need arose, Lamy was lighter in spirit and more energetic than he had been for some time. His main local concern now was to see the cathedral completed. It stood covered, services were regularly held there, but the towers rose slowly, the sanctuary was still the old tapering, coffin-headed, adobe enclosure which he had found in 1851; and funds were slow to come.
He worked every possibility to bring in more; but it was still an astonishment, given his recent serious illnesses, when he left Santa Fe in 21 July 1884, for another trip of many months in Mexico, to raise money by donation, loan, and the little fees which would come to him in giving confirmations. The prospect of a long journey and hard work in the great land of which his diocese was a physical extension seemed to bring him zest and a return of strength.
Going south by the Santa Fe Railroad, he met with a washout above Socorro—sudden heads of storm water tore away the old silt left ages before by the Rio Grande—and going single file with the other passengers along a sloping path on the bank of an arroyo, he had to walk from the broken track to the other side of the washout where the track resumed and another train was waiting. He was glad that his two valises were not heavy, for he was carrying them, and even at that, had to stop twice to rest in the heat.
A few days later he reached Chihuahua city, travelling by President Diaz’s Mexican National Railway, where thirty-three years ago he had advanced a few miles a day by horse. He was acclaimed on his arrival now, and was taken on a whirl through the city in a carriage, and visited the “beautiful chapel of Guadalupe” where he had said Mass in 1851. He spoke to his host—a rich man—about a loan of a few thousand dollars, but seemed unlikely to receive it. The governor and his staff, and splendid Mexican music from the bands of the infantry and cavalry regiments, paid him respects, and he felt “very well.’ though the heat was frightful, and there had been no rain for months. A day later he was to go on to Zacatecas, and then to Mexico City. At every stop he was received with “ovations.” Word of his arrival was always telegraphed ahead. The archbishop of Mexico, whom he had met at the Vatican Council of 1869, received him warmly, and invited him to give confirmations anywhere in the huge diocese of the primacy.
He went, then, to Puebla, and at every train station, there were delegations of clergy and faithful, and he was taken to the “grand palaces” of the leading citizens. At Puebla, he was dazzled by the magnificence of the churches—the great cathedral with its huge dome, its towering choir and dazzling gold everywhere, and its bells (more beautiful in tone than any he had ever heard in Europe). With the image of his half-stone, half-adobe unfinished cathedral surely in mind, he remarked the decorations, marbles, gilded sculptures, of the Blessed Sacrament Chapel in the cathedral, which alone, he was told, had cost “one million and a half dollars.” The golden altar screens of Mexican churches were like nothing anywhere else, and the profusion of churches in city after city was astonishing.
He wrote to Mother Francesca frequently during the tour, sometimes in English, often in Spanish.
In the midst of the alien splendors and the ardent people he encountered, he was mindful of more homely affairs—there were running accounts to meet at Santa Fe, Mother Francesca was to see that a draft on Paris was duly presented to Mr Spiegelberg at the Second National Bank. If Juan, the caretaker at the Villa Pintoresca, needed food for repair work there, it was to be taken to him, and he should bring a horse to Louis the gardener, take him to the villa, and show him how he keeps the place. It was time to lay in firewood for the next winter—let them bring three hundred loads at least—the little bundles which a burro could carry. If there was any money left after paying for the wood, Mother Francesca could keep and use it.
Wherever he went to hold services, Lamy preached. Asked what sort of preacher he was, a priest who knew him well said, “Very good preacher.” He wrote his sermons and his retreat reflections in pencil. They were brief, and wherever he gave them, they brought in simplicity of word an often freshly stated idea of the equation possible between God and man. He was a man of his time and place, and he met its hard conditions without much comment; but he would not have been so effective if he had not also been a man of a timeless faith which was his source of strength and the medium of his humanity as he extended it to each being in whom he always saw the universal—Indian, Protestant, Jew, or Catholic. He would say:
The divine word is a mirror that discloses to the ambitious all the infidelity of the world which he serves. It lets him see his ingratitude toward God, whom he has rejected, abandoned. This divine word is a mirror without taint that shows the impenitent sinner the danger to which he exposes himself in falling into the hands of the terrible justice of God.
On 13 August, he came by train in the state of Puebla to a station where he was met by priests who conducted him on horseback to a town eighteen miles away at the base of the mountains, “rather cool and damp.” After confirming many hundreds there, he left to go
thirty-six miles deep into the mountains to a town where sixteen or twenty strong men took away the four horses of his waggon and pulled it themselves to the church, where “a splendid choir with a grand organ sang the Te Deum.” There he was informed that deeper in the mountains were two more curacies they hoped he would visit.
In the words of the Epistle we are sons of the Light, for the same reason that we are Christians. Let us go out of the fog of sin.…
Among the throngs who responded to him in Mexico—the greatest crowds of his apostolate—he seemed to demonstrate that a great priest was one not less like, but more like, all humanity.
In Zacatlán toward the end of August at least six thousand people came out to meet him on the road, where on every side he saw green fields reaching as far as the highest hills. He passed between gardens and orchards—every kind of fruit but grapes; he supposed the excessive rainfall rotted the vines. There were two grand churches, one of which “would make a good cathedral.…” He confirmed four or five thousand people there, and invitations kept arriving from other places asking him to come. He would be at least two more months in the diocese of Puebla. The local general and the mayor came to dinner at the pastor’s house. In most places, he found, the civil and military authorities did not enforce “those tyrannical laws of this government against the Church.” If Mother Francesca should write to him—he was troubled at not having heard from her—let her “put sixteen cents’ worth of stamps.”
In another day, he had come to Chiuawapa, where he saw in the local curate a man after his own heart. This was an Indian of fine education and a most neat appearance, who for his eight thousand souls had established schools, educated young men, helped to build and improve the town which was now almost new, including a new church being built to replace an older one—itself very fine, but its roof leaked. The padre led his people to “open good roads, plant trees,” and he had embellished the place with “a large and beautiful park and a fountain where the water is brought from over ten miles.” Lamy had had too many ovations, he said, which made him feel miserable, the fatigue made his work all the harder afterward. “I will be glad when I get through and be able to be in a quiet place.”