Michener, James A.

by Texas

  'With such stones we could replace the adobe. Make this a real church.'

  'Better yet, we could replace everything.'

  At this Damian gasped, for he could not imagine sacrificing Simon's glorious Stations. The young friars now discovered him, and realizing that he must have heard their plans, were eager to apologize: 'We didn't know you were here. We're so sorry.'

  'No, no! I assure you, it's time to build a new church.'

  'Do you really approve?'

  'Yes!' he cried vehemently. 'Each man builds only for his generation. Everything he does ought to be restudied . . . improved by those who follow.' He waved his hand deprecatingly. 'I built so poorly. They told me in Zacatecas: "You need build only in wood, for temporary use." ' His voice dropped to a whisper: 'But the heart yearns to build in stone ... for eternity.'

  As he moved his right arm across the spread of the little church his eyes were directed to the Stations of the Cross, and almost as if he were a parent defending his children, he stepped before the carvings and lifted his arms to cover one of them. 'I would not want you to replace these . . . not destroy them, that is.' And his plea was so profound that one of the young friars stooped and kissed his hand.

  'We would never have damaged them, Brother Damian. We planned to have them as the heart of our new church.'

  'Did you?' he asked in great excitement, and as the two moved about the church, explaining to each other how the roof could be taken off and the walls replaced with minimum confusion, he stayed with them, encouraging them and talking far more than was necessary.

  On 21 September 1737, when day and night stood even across the world, Damian left his mission riding a mule, with a donkey in tow. He rode westward toward Rancho El Codo, which Alvaro, Benita and their sons now owned, and here he stopped to utter a long prayer for the soul of Domingo Pacheco as it made its way through purgatory to heaven. He spent his first night at the

  ranch, and rose refreshed and eager for the serious part of his journey.

  Not till three days later did he make contact with any Apache; then he came upon a good-sized band which did not include either the squaw or any of the chiefs who had known him earlier, although there were members who had heard of the decent manner in which he had treated other Apache. They made him as welcome as Apache ever did, but he was aware that some of the younger braves resented him and were advising their fellows against any contact with a Spaniard.

  In the two days he spent in the Apacheria he found some leaders who were willing to listen when he explained about the advantages of Christianity and an orderly life within the Spanish empire. 'Like me,' he told them, 'you will enjoy the full protection of the king.' He was convinced that the conversion of the Apache was at hand and that God had sent him to be the agent.

  But on the third day, in the midst of the most serious explanation of how God and His son Jesus Christ shared responsibilities in heaven, three impatient young braves kicked aside a buffalo skin before which Damian sat, seized him and dragged him to an oak tree, from which they hung him by his thumbs. Then, before the older chiefs could protest, which they showed little inclination to do, the young men stripped the dangling body and began making little cuts across it with their flint scrapers.

  They were not deep, just a slash on the arm, or on the leg, but the young men kept darting back and forth, now away from Damian, now toward him, always making another small cut, until his body was red-stained in all its parts.

  The young men now called upon the women of the tribe, and with obvious delight the squaws joined them, dancing around and making deeper cuts in parts of the body hitherto untouched. One woman, hair falling across her dark face, evil-smelling, was lifted up to cut at the base of his left thumb, not severing it but nearly so; she and her sisters wanted to see how long it took for the weight . of the body to pull the damaged thumb apart, and when this I happened, and the body swung sideways, suspended only by the ■ right thumb and twirling in a tight circle, the women shrieked with pleasure, and ran back to stab at the body that now gushed blood from various deep wounds.

  Damian, still conscious, for no cuts had yet been made in a vital place, held to his belief that this hideous affair was merely a ritual torture, but now two of the women rushed up and made such deep slashes in the lower part of his stomach that a great shudder ran through all his body, visible to his tormentors.

  'He dies! He dies!' they screamed, and this encouraged other women to dance in and stab at him. One was even lifted high enough so that she could cut at his throat, but this terrible pain Damian ignored, for when he stared at her hawklike face he saw not an Apache woman but Benita Lirian. She smiled at him as she had on that first evening in the paseo, and as his blood spurted she leaned forward to cradle him in her arms.

  . . . TASK FORCE

  San Antonio! Loveliest city in Texas, Venice of the Drylands, its river runs right through the heart of town, providing a colorful waterway for festive barges and an exotic riverside walk along which one could promenade forever. How glad I was to be coming back to a city I had cherished as a boy, for this had been my family's preferred vacation spot.

  I remembered well the Buckhorn Saloon, that relic of the Old West, with its fantastic guns and cattle horns. I sneaked my first beer there, my mother watching from a distance, then teasing when I spat it out. Later, when I returned from Europe to find the Buckhorn moved, 1 felt as if my youth had officially ended.

  San Antonio! Conservative, always lagging behind more daring towns like Houston and Dallas, it had long been the largest city in Texas but had now given way to those two giants. Recently it had stunned the state by electing as mayor a man of Spanish heritage, and in decades to come it might once more become a leading city because of the spectacular development of its Spanish-speaking population.

  For our April meeting there our staff had enlisted a Franciscan friar who served in one of the city's famous missions, Friar Clarence Cummings, born in Albany, New York. He was respected as an expert on the five surviving missions that line the river like a string of jewels on a necklace, but even before he appeared he caused animosity in our Task Force.

  Rusk complained: 'I didn't join this committee to get a course in Catholic theology,' and Quimper chimed in: 'If this keeps up, next meeting will be a public baptism.'

  This was too much for Professor Garza, a wise and prudent

  Catholic. 'What makes you think the friar will try to proselytize you?' and Rusk growled: 'He better not try!'

  In two minutes Friar Clarence won the skeptics over, or at least neutralized them. He was a tall, good-looking, robust fellow in his late thirties, clad in a brown robe, bare feet in rugged leather sandals. After the briefest introduction he said in no-nonsense style: 'I hope you'll join me in a cell we use as a projection room, because it's important that you see the slides I've prepared,' and when we were seated with our staff in the cell in the Mision San Jose, he surprised us with the title of his talk: 'Form and Legacy.'

  'Now, what does that mean?' Quimper asked, and he replied: 'That's what I've come to explain.'

  With carefully organized notes accompanying a set of excellent colored slides he had prepared from his own drawings and photographs, he began his talk with a promise: 'I propose to concentrate on two subjects only, the physical form of the Spanish mission in its heyday and its legacy for us today. No theology, no moralizing. We begin with this simple question, which must have preoccupied those in charge at the time: "If your mission is to fulfill its purpose, what form should it take?" '

  At that he darkened the cell, and with the heavy stone walls enclosing us, we had little difficulty in imagining ourselves back in 1720: 'This drawing—I studied architecture at Cornell before joining the Franciscans at a rather advanced age—shows the landscape you will have to work with. The wandering river. The loop where the horses pasture. The flat land where your mission will ultimately stand.'

  With seven choice slides he showed us the terrain of San Antonio as it must have
been in 1717, with no mission visible: 'Since you are Spaniards imbued with the traditions of your homeland, you will insist upon centralization, with civilian settlers and their activities clustered closely together. A main difference between Catholic Spain and Protestant America, I've always thought, is that Spain likes to collect its citizens in villages dominated by the church. There they find mutual protection during the night. During the day, when conditions are safer, they can march out to their distant fields. Americans, fed up with clerical control both in Europe and New England, want their homes and farms as far apart as possible. I grew up in rural New York, with the nearest farm half a mile away, and you cannot imagine my amazement when I first saw the crowded little villages of Spain and Italy, one house abutting the other. How do they breathe? I thought. And how do they get to their distant fields each morning?'

  He warned us not to attribute this spatial difference to social factors: 'The attacks of Apache and Comanche in Texas were just as severe as the attacks of marauding armies in Europe, but the Americans refused to cluster for protection, while the Spaniards did. In San Antonio your civilians will cluster.'

  Under his guidance we did imagine ourselves about to build a mission in 1719, and while we were in this frame of mind he flashed onto the screen a majestic slide of the Alamo, that sacred mission, heavily rebuilt, around which the soul of Texas rallies. This time it had been photographed at dusk, with an ominous cloud to the east, and after it had been on the screen for a few moments, Miss Cobb wiped her eyes with a handkerchief, and I noticed that the staff, then even Quimper, and finally Rusk, followed with similar reactions. Here was a photograph that would affect the heart of any Texan who saw it unexpectedly. Within those walls brave men had died defending a principle in which they believed; on those parapets my ancestor, illiterate Moses Barlow, had given his life for a cause with which he had been associated for less than two weeks.

  Rapidly, in a series of beautiful slides, the friar now gave us a swift review of the four other surviving missions, those heavy structures with such delicate names: San Jose y San Miguel, Nues-tra Senora de la Purisima Coneepcion, San Francisco de la Espada and, the one I preferred, San Juan Capistrano.

  He showed them in storm, in sunlight, at evening with birds nesting, and at the break of day with a golden sun exploding over their walls. He showed us architectural fragments, and stretches of reconstructed walls, and windows glowing with majesty, and fonts where the friars washed their feet, and after a while we became so much a part of those missions that we were prepared to listen to what he had to say about us.

  'Our five San Antonio missions cannot compare in raw beauty with the handsomely preserved and reconstructed missions of California. We have no one superb example of architecture like Santa Barbara, no outstanding summary of mission life like Fray Junipero Serra's San Carlos Borromeo, and the reason is simple. Since the Spanish missionaries in California were not required to face extremely hostile Indians, they did not have to fortify their buildings. They could enjoy the luxury of graceful architecture and widely spaced structures. But our poor friars in Tejas had to build both a church and a fortress to protect it. Most experts agree that if you want to understand mission life, you must come to San Antonio, because our rude buildings, constructed without guile represent

  what the mission experience was all about, and now, at the halfway point in my talk, we're going to leave this cell and move out to see the structures themselves.'

  To visit the five missions of San Antonio was like walking slowly and with deep passion into the beginnings of Texas history. Each was different. The Alamo had been massively added to; it was really a museum as well as a sacred gathering place, always cluttered with visitors. San Jose had also been rebuilt, most faithfully, and best represented what mission life had been like within its spacious walls and its little cubicles for Indians. But the mission that clutched at my heart from the time I first saw it as a boy, giving me insight into those early days, was Capistrano, with its simpler lines, its lovely three-part bell tower and especially that long severe wall with the five cemented archways. It spoke to me with such force that even now I fell silent when I saw it.

  The Alamo had awed me; San Jose had delighted me; but Capistrano, when I stood before its simplicity, invited me to become a member of its congregation, concerned about its canal and the gathering of its crops.

  As we gazed at this noble relic, Friar Clarence altered the tenor of his talk: 'So much for the past. You've seen what form these missions took, and a very good one it was. But what concerns us now is the legacy of these missions in the life of modern Texas. So as we stand here I want you to focus on the acequia, the little canal that brought water to the mission. It ran over there, we think, and today when Texas needs water so badly that it dreams up all kinds of tricks to find and save it, it's interesting to remember that our first irrigation ditches were dug by the friars of these San Antonio missions. An unusual Franciscan worked here in the 1720s, Fray Damian de Saldaria, born in Spain, who had great skill in laying out irrigation systems. He could be called the Father of Texan Water Conservation, and the work he did back then is as functional as anything we attempt today. I've often thought that the farmers and ranchers and citrus growers who lead water onto their lands should contribute a mite of their profit for a statue to that far-seeing friar.'

  'Was he that important?' Rusk asked, and Quimper jumped in: 'Any man who can show Texas how to use its water is a certified Lone Star hero.'

  When we returned to the projection room we were eager tc hear how Friar Clarence would link the missions to modern Texas: 'If Spain had given us nothing but these five missions, the legacy would have been monumental. Because they had a fine solid form, they stand today as treasures of the first order. So even though they

  do reach us in damaged or altered state, we can still thank the prudence of our predecessors that they exist at all, because in such buildings the spiritual history of Texas is preserved.'

  But whenever he approached such religious matters, he remembered his promise: 'But we're talking about form and function, not theology, and I would like to close with a reminder of how creatively the mission discharged its obligations in the early. 1700s and how, its job done, it made itself obsolete by the end of the century. San Juan Capistrano, which seems to have affected our chairman so deeply, is a case in point. Founded near Nacogdoches in 1716, it died there and its functions were moved to a spot near Austin. Dying again, it was brought to San Antonio, where it enjoyed some success. As many as two hundred and fifty Indian residents. Five thousand head of cattle. Its own cotton fields and woolen manufacturing. But by 1793, when it had to be secularized, only a dozen Christianized Indians, less than twenty cattle, and the looms in disrepair.'

  'What does secularize mean?' Rusk asked, and I was impressed by the manner in which this extremely capable man was always willing to reveal his ignorance when an unusual word was introduced whose exact meaning he wished to learn.

  Instead of replying in words, Friar Clarence flashed onto the wall a series of photographs showing the five missions as they had existed at various times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, before restoration began. We were shocked at their pitiful condition: walls down, garbage piled high, roofs fallen in, and ruin in each little church. 'Strictly speaking,' Friar Clarence explained, 'to secularize means to convert from religious ownership and use to civil. Like today when an urban congregation finds that its members have moved to the suburbs and it sells the church building to some little-theater group. In Texas the word carries a special meaning, for when the missions finished trying to tame the frontier and Christianize the Indians, in both of which they had limited success, the system had no further utility. So the church turned the missions back to the civil government. Hungry fingers grabbed for the valuable land, but nobody could see any use for the buildings, so they were allowed to fall into ruin or removed for other construction.' On that mournful note the slides concluded.

  When t
he lights came up I saw that he kept his head bowed, and for some moments he remained that way. Then he smiled and said softly: 'How beautiful a concept! And how suddenly it was outmoded.'

  'Why?' Miss Cobb asked, and he turned to her: 'I believe that many meritorious ideas are allowed a life span of about thirty years.

  Liberalism in France flourished briefly before World War II, made its contribution and vanished. Dr. Spock's theories of child rearing set a generation free, then collapsed in excess. The Erie Canal in my home state. And the mission concept as applied to Texas. All made great contributions, then perished.'

  'Railroads outmoded your Erie Canal after its allotted life,' Miss ; Cobb said. 'And airplanes killed many railroads and almost all the ocean liners. What killed your missions?'

  He reflected on this, then chuckled: 'Texas.'

  'Now, what does that mean?' Miss Cobb pursued.

  'From its start, any Texas mission was destined for a short life. Distances were so great. The Indians were so intractable. So often, when its work failed in one place, it moved on to some other challenge.'

  if that's true, why do I see five stone buildings?'

  'Ah!' he cried, a light burning in his eyes. 'You can never convince a man like the Fray Damian of whom I spoke that what he's doing is temporary. Once he positions that first adobe, he begins to build for eternity.'

  'But you say his mission has disappeared?'

  'Others killed it, not he. Damian succeeded beyond imagination. His form vanished. Completely destroyed. But the legacy survives.'

  As he said this his face assumed a radiance which warmed us: i promised you at the beginning: no theology, no moralizing; just form and legacy. But you must have deduced from what I've said that the Texas missions would provide us with only a limited legacy if they were mere architecture. Their grandeur is twofold: art plus the spiritual force which evoked that art. The friars could not have survived in this wilderness without some guiding principle, and it was Christianity. There were drunkards among the friars, and some who chased after Indian girls, and others who had never known vocation, but there were also men of supreme devotion, and upon their efforts the future city of San Antonio and the state of Texas were founded. That is their legacy.'