Lamy of Santa Fe (71 page)

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?”

“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 spiritual 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.