Michener, James A. (18 page)

Damian drafted a letter intended for the very highest authorities, whether in Mexico or Spain.

But submitting such a request was not a simple procedure. First, the petition had to be written on stamped paper, printed and distributed by the government; no request or report of any kind could be official unless at its head appeared the stamp of the Spanish government, a system comparable to the one which England would introduce into its colonies facing the Atlantic. Since such paper was jealously guarded and distributed in a niggardly fashion, careless requests rarely surfaced. Fray Damian could get his stamped paper only at the presidio, where the commanding officer had a low opinion of missionaries. For two months the latter refused to issue the paper, but Fray Domingo handled this by quietly suggesting to the commander that if the paper was not immediately forthcoming, there would be no more chickens from the mission farm.

Fray Damian wrote his petition on 21 January 1727:

Since my faithful assistant Fray Domingo Pacheco of excellent reputation represents the maiesty of the Spanish Crown in Tejas, it would be proper for him to have a vestment of blue linen-and-wool, highest quality, and I beseech the authorities to allow him to have it. And since I labor constantly to finish the canal upon which the welfare of this mission depends, I ask for three shovels of first-class iron with handles of oak from Spain to match If the oak cannot be spared, I can fashion handles here, but do prefer Spanish oak, for it is best.

The petition, properly folded, was sent down to San Juan Bautista on 29 January, and there it languished until a courier was sent to Monclova on 25 February. From there it went at a leisurely pace to Saltillo, arriving in' mid-March in time to catch a messenger headed for Zacatecas, which it reached on the tenth of April.

The authorities at the Franciscan offices realized that they had no jurisdiction over such a special request, and they had learned through harsh experience not to take such matters into their own hands, not in the Spanish system, so they forwarded the petition to Mexico City, but they were bold enough to add an endorsement: 'These are two good men, so perhaps they might have two vestments, one tall, one short.'

Franciscan headquarters in the capital received the document on 19 May and refused even to study it, referring it to the viceroy's office. This authority kept it on file till the fifteenth of July, when it was forwarded to Vera Cruz for shipment to Spain with a second

endorsement: 'Fray Damian de Saldana is the son of Don Miguel de Saldana of Saldana, a man to be trusted.'

A Spanish trading ship sailed from Vera Cruz at the end of July, but it stopped in both Cuba and Espanola, laying over in the latter port for two months and not sailing for Spain until the third of October. No officials in these two ports were allowed to touch the pouch from Mexico, so Damian's letter was delivered at the port of Sanlucar at the end of a four-week crossing. From there it was sent to a section of the Council of the Indies holding session in Sevilla, where clerks studied the unusual request for three weeks. It was finally decided what should have been clear at the start, that this was a unique problem which could be solved only by the king, so belatedly a mounted messenger took the letter to Madrid. He arrived on the twenty-ninth of November, and at dawn on the next day the King of Spain eagerly reached for official messages from his dominions in the New World, reading each one meticulously and making upon it such advisory notes as he deemed fit.

In the afternoon he came upon Fray Damian's stamped and endorsed paper: 'A blue habit for Sundays and three iron shovels.'

The king leaned back, rubbed his tired eyes, and tried to visualize Mexico, a part of the empire for the last two centuries. It was difficult, for he was a newcomer to the throne of Spain. When the powerful Austrian Habsburg line—Charles V, Philip II and their successors—died out in 1700, the French Bourbons supplied the next king, Phillip V, a boy of seventeen.

Although no member of his royal family had ever visited Mexico, he had seen enough drawings and read enough reports to know fairly accurately what it was like; Mexico City, Oaxaca, Guadalajara and even Zacatecas were familiar locations, but when he tried to picture Tejas, his imagination failed, for it was the loneliest and least important of his frontiers.

'How many Spaniards in Tejas?' he asked the courtiers who brought him his belated lunch.

'Born in Spain, sixteen, maybe twenty. Born in Mexico itself, perhaps two hundred, counting mestizos. Indians, of course.'

'Sixteen Spaniards in the entire territory, and he wants a blue vestment. Notice that he is bold enough to ask for the best linen-and-wool. Who is this man?'

One of the aides looked at the petition and particularly at the endorsement from the viceroy: 'Son of Don Miguel de Saldana, of the village of Saldana. He supported you vigorously when Europe wanted to put someone else on our throne.'

'Good man,' the king said, and as he ate, another aide pointed

to a peculiarity in the petition: 'Did you notice, Sire, that he asks for the habit not for himself but for his assistant? What he seeks are the shovels.'

The king pushed back his meal, lifted the petition once more, and asked: 'Am I thinking of the same Saldana? The one who served us so well in Portugal?'

The same.' Once more the king hesitated: 'Have any of you ever been to Tejas?' No one had, in either the meeting room or the entire court, so the king asked: isn't that where they have the buffalo?' and while the courtiers argued whether these great animals—several of which had been imported to Spain for the amazement of the citizenry—inhabited Tejas or Santa Fe, the king impulsively took the petition and not only signed it but even added a notation of his own. The paper was then returned to the Council of the Indies, which endorsed it and started it upon its slow journey back to Sanlucar, to Cuba, to Mexico City, to Saltillo, to San Juan Bautista and finally to Mision Santa Teresa de Casafuerte. It' arrived on 19 July 1728, eighteen months after posting, and with it came a package.

It was so heavy when Fray Damian lifted it in his tired, calloused hands that he cried out thoughtlessly: 'Be praised, Garza. We have our shovels,' forgetting that Fray Domingo, who was eying the package jealously, hoped for something much different. And indeed, when he and Garza ripped open the sea-stained crate they found their three shovels, with handles of Spanish oak, best in the world.

'Look!, cried Domingo, and from a corner of a small package inside the larger peeked a swatch of blue cloth, and when he opened his prize with trembling fingers he held up for all to see a most beautiful blue habit with hood and belt and flowing folds. He could not restrain himself from throwing the precious garment about his shoulders, but as he started to parade in the sunlight so that his Indians could applaud, he chanced to look back at the package, and there beneath the first robe lay a second. Stooping to take it in his hands, he allowed its full length to fall free, and he saw that it was a larger robe of much finer cloth than the first, and it was apparent to him that this had been sent by the king as a personal gift to his superior.

'This must be for you,' he said, but Fray Damian pushed it back, and then took the first robe from the shoulders of his assistant: 'This one will do for me.'

'Do you think so?' Domingo asked, and Damian said: 'I'm certain.'

Now that Fray Domingo had appropriated the habit in-tendcd for Damian, he took doubled interest in his work, riding 3ut to the ranch southwest of the mission each Monday and working there throughout the week. The Santa Teresa ranch was i reach of unlimited definition, with no roads or fences, nor any houses in which anyone of even the slightest importance would wish to stay. It did contain a rude corral but had no barns or sheds Dr tool cribs, nothing but an endless expanse of grassland suitable for the untended grazing of cattle. Its effective area was about five leagues, but this meant nothing because if no other owner in the region gained title to adjacent lands, it could just as well have been five hundred.

Its chief asset was that it lay withki a sharp turn of the Medina, whence its name, Rancho El Codo (Elbow Ranch). Indeed, the Medina surrounded it on three sides, guaranteeing the cattle all the water they needed.

Within a compound it had four miserable adobe-and-wattle jacales in which the Indian families who tended the cattle lived; two of the hovels were occupied by married men who had brought their wives and children with them, the other two housed unmarried men, and sometimes when Fray Domingo studied the six adults who worked for him he speculated as to why they so willingly submitted themselves to this arduous labor, for neither he nor Fray Darnian had the authority to force them to work.

He was pondering this question one August afternoon as the Indians were sweating over the branding of young stock while he rested in the shade. The branding was necessary because the rule from Madrid was stern: 'In settled areas, any cattle unbranded promptly after birth remain the property of the king.' The ranch at El Codo could have twenty thousand cattle if it wanted them, but it had to round them up and brand them, and that work was dusty and dirty and arduous, since each animal had to be wrestled to the ground before the red-hot brand could be applied.

Why do they consent to such toil? Domingo asked himself as he watched the Indians. And for that matter, why does Fray Damian work so hard? And how about me? I could be in Mexico City enjoying myself.

And it occurred to him that he and Damian were much like the Indians: We work because it's the will of God. We build the mission because Jesus Christ wants it. This is honorable work, because my father and mother and the priest in Saltillo told me it was. The Bible says so, too. The Indians obey us because deep inside they know it's right. They're living better lives than their fathers, and they know it.

Wherever he worked with Indians, Fray Domingo organized a choir, and the one at El Codo was among his finest, because three of the men had deep voices, Domingo a lilting tenor, and the fourth Indian man a strong voice which maintained a strict monotone in the middle, never moving up or down no matter how carefully the friar coached him. He was like a cello that could strike only one powerful note around which the other singers had to organize theirs, and when this choir sang on Sundays or in the evenings at prayer, the music glorified the countryside.

It was a tradition of the Franciscans that 'we never discipline the Indians except for their own good,' and Domingo believed that his own rules were just and lenient. If his Indians lagged in their field work, he reproved them. If anyone persisted, he lectured that person severely, and if the error continued, he beat him or her with a leather strap reserved for that use. But as soon as the punishment was administered, he invited the culprit back to the choir, and after a few resentful moments the reproof was forgotten, except by a few who left, never to return.

It was Domingo's love for music which projected Mision Santa J Teresa into a storm that nearly destroyed it. An enthusiastic friar newly arrived from the more traditional Franciscan center at Queretaro northwest of Mexico City, took vigorous exception to I the fiery dances enjoyed by the Indians of Bexar, for he categorized 1 these exhibitions as 'licentious debauchery of the worst sort, cal-1 dilated to induce venery and the most debased forms of sexual extravagance.' With written approval from the authorities at Sal- ! tillo, who had never seen these dances, he proceeded to stamp them out.

But when he eliminated them at Mision San Jose, they erupted I at Mision San Antonio de Valero, and so on. However, with I extraordinary vigor he succeeded for a while in halting them all I except for those at Santa Teresa, where Fray Domingo's lyric choir would start a celebration with hymns, move on to Spanish ballads he had taught them, and progress to some lively Indian chants, | until they reached the point where all the listeners were stomping their feet and clapping their hands, and even dancing. Sometimes | the noise grew so vigorous that the two friars deemed it best to retire.

Fray Damia'n saw nothing intrinsically evil in such dancing, but the new friar thought differently, and backed by an official paper from the religious authorities in Guadalajara, he marched in to the officer in charge of the presidio at Bexar and demanded that he stop the dancing at Santa Teresa: 'It's an affront to God, who wants it stopped at once.'

HO

The officer had been searching for some excuse to discipline the two friars at Santa Teresa, for he found the senior man, Fray Damian, too aloof, and the junior, Fray Domingo, much too niggardly with the food his Indians grew. So he issued an edict: 'No more dancing at Santa Teresa.'

He expected Fray Domingo, who started his music with proper gravity but allowed it to deterioriate quickly, to object, but to his surprise it was tall, thin Fray Damian who came quietly to the presidio, speaking softly and with obvious deference: 'Captain, the Indians have always danced, and while I admit it sometimes leads to excesses, as the new friar claims, I have found no great wrong in it and much good.'

'But I've issued an order.'

'I think you might want to reconsider your order,' Damian said gently.

'Where Indians are concerned, I never reconsider.'

Damian did not wish to argue, but he did voice an important judgment: 'Captain, when we move in upon the Indians with our missions and our presidios we ask them to surrender a great many things they love, traditions which have kept them strong ... in a most inhospitable land, I may point out. They've been gracious here in Tejas in making such surrender. Don't ask them to sacrifice everything.'

'But the dances are against the will of God. The new friar said so.'

'I think our laughing Domingo represents the will of God, too.' Before the captain could destroy that specious argument, Damian said: 'I sometimes fear his singing accomplishes more than my prayers.'

'There will be no more dancing.'

'Very well,' Damian said obediently. And when he returned to the mission he waited till his companion returned from the ranch, herding along several steers that were to be slaughtered there.