Michener, James A. (20 page)

deception he began to convince himself that he visited only to help her with her eldest boy, Ramon, now seven: That one, Benita, he'd make a fine priest.'

'How foolish! He's a rowdy little boy who hates to sit still while you say prayers. He has no sense of vocation and little likelihood of ever attaining one.' Damian ignored this sensible assessment and continued visiting the boy, but with no constructive results.

When Alvaro said one day: i do not like the idea of your Fray Domingo spending so much time at the ranch,' Damian assured his brother that much good work was being done there with cattle and goats and sheep. But Alvaro's apprehension focused on other matters: it's the Apache. They keep moving closer, and sooner or later I fear they'll try to attack the ranch.' Again Damian protested: 'Domingo has the touch of God. He saves souls, and given time, he'll bring peace even to the Apache.'

Alvaro grew quite serious: 'You don't seem to understand. With three walled missions here at Bexar, with this stout presidio, with the armed huts in the village, I'm still afraid the Apache will attack one night. Imagine what they might do at an unprotected ranch.'

'God ordered us to establish that ranch,' Damian said. 'He will protect it.'

i hope so, because I won't be able to.'

Some days later, when Domingo had returned to the mission, Damian accompanied him to the presidio, where the three leaders consulted, the fat little friar trying to convince Captain Alvaro that life at the ranch was safe: 'Each week the Apache understand a little better what Christianity means, and the salvation it will bring them.'

'Are they living at the ranch? Real converts, I mean?'

'No, but they do come in now and then, and I talk with them.'

Alvaro stood up and saluted: 'You're a brave man, Domingo. Much braver than I, and may God protect you.'

'I dance with them. I sing with them. I pray with them. And that's the pathway to salvation.'

Faithful to his promise, Father Espejo did forward his urgent appeal to the king, begging him to send civilian settlers to Bexar, but before any response was possible, the growing town was tripled in size by an extraordinary event. In early 1731 three faltering missions wasting away in the north were transferred to San Antonio de Bexar, where they joined the three already in operation. Of course, the buildings themselves were not transported; they were so forlorn and storm-shattered, they could not have been moved, but the six friars and the best of their Indian

helpers made long treks through Tejas, expressing robust satisfaction when they saw the vastly improved site they were to occupy.

How beautiful their names are, Fray Damian thought, as he helped the three new missions select their locations: Nuestra Senora de la Purisima Concepcion, San Juan Capistrano, San Francisco de la Espada. Like shining beads on a rosary.

When they were in place—the first two on the eastern bank of the river, like the earliest mission, San Antonio de Valero; the third on the western bank, like Santa Teresa and San Jose—Damian warned the new friars: 'Your success will depend on two things. Prayers to help you do better at converting Indians than we've done. And securing an assured water supply for the fields that will feed you and your Indians.'

The incoming friars encouraged Fray Damian to tell them more about bringing water onto their land, and they were so persistent in seeking his advice that he ended by laying out the three additional ditches which would in future years account for much of Bexar's growth. Having shown the newcomers how to survey so as to avoid costly aqueducts unless they were inescapable, he continued to counsel the friars until work actually started, then found himself once more with a shovel, demonstrating how the digging should be done.

Fray Damian was forty-five years old when the new missions started functioning, rather tired and increasingly emaciated in appearance, but he was so eager to help these servants of God get started correctly that he labored on their ditches as if he were a member of their missions, and when at last the precious water began to flow, he felt as if he had helped write a small addition to the Acts of the Apostles.

There was at San Juan Capistrano, the mission which honored a saintly man who had worked among the Bulgarians in much the way that Damian worked with the Indians, a young mestizo friar named Eusebio who, because of his extreme sanctity, had been allowed to take major orders, and he was so awed by this privilege that he honored with extra seriousness each precept of the Franciscans. Particularly, he wore about his waist the long heavily knotted cord that served a double purpose: it was a belt holding the blue habit close to the body, but also a flagellum, a scourge to be applied whenever one felt he was indulging in vainglory. Sometimes when Damian paused in his work, he would see Eusebio walking under the trees, beating himself with his knots and crying 'Mea culpa, mea culpa.'

One morning as Damian dug in the ditch at one of the new missions he noticed Eusebio sitting on a log, striking himself. 'Really, you're not required to punish yourself that way.'

Tni vain,' the young friar mumbled. 'Far too proud of the high position to which God has promoted me.' And he struck himself again.

'Stop it! If God did the promoting . . .'

'Are you never vainglorious?'

'I have little to be vain about. At this mission Fray Domingo saves the souls. I dig the ditches.'

'But is your mind never troubled?'

'On the night I was assigned to Bexar, I cried: "I have sin upon me. I'm unworthy to be a shepherd." '

'What changed your mind?'

'Work.'

'But the great battles of faith?'

This last word seemed to animate Damian, for he put down his shovel and climbed from the irrigation ditch to take his place beside the young friar, i take great solace from the Epistle of James,' he said, quoting haphazardly as his memory allowed from the startling second chapter which gave Protestant rigorists so much trouble:

'What does it profit if a man say he has faith, but has not works? Can faith save him?

'Faith, if it has not works, is dead, being alone.

'You see then that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.

'For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.'

The young man stared at him, but Damian merely kicked at the earth as he said: 'I know that I am lesser than Domingo, who does the work of God, but I find comfort in doing the work of man. Domingo builds castles in heaven, I build adobe huts here on earth. And I do believe that God sometimes wants both.'

'You never lash yourself?'

in the morning I'm too hopeful that on this day I shall be permitted to accomplish something good. At night I'm too conscious of another failure.'

is Domingo really a holy man?'

'He's a good man, and sometimes that's better.'

'His goodness, what does it consist of?'

'He brings happiness in his sack . . . wherever he goes.'

'Was he not rebuked for lewd dancing?'

Damian ignored this painful charge, shifting the emphasis:

'From our ranch he attempts to bring peace to the Apache '

'I'd be terrified to move anywhere near them.'

'Have you converted any Indians, Eusebio?'

'One. A very old man about to die. He sent his wife running for me, and when I reached him he said with a smile: "Now!" and five minutes later he was dead, still smiling.'

'With your prayers, Eusebio, you saved one man. With his songs and his courage Domingo may save an entire tribe, thousands of Apache living at last in peace ... a glory to the goodness of God.'

'I would be afraid to try,' Eusebio said, rising and whipping himself again, while Fray Damian climbed back into the ditch, determined to help bring water to Mision San Juan Capistrano.

Hernando Cortes had completed his conquest of the Val-ley of Mexico in 1521, which meant that by 1730 the Spaniards had controlled the country for two hundred and nine years, and while it is true that they had constructed on Indian foundations a chain of glowing cities like Puebla, Oaxaca, Guanajuato, Zacatecas and the charming settlement at Saltillo, they had not accomplished much in remote areas like Tejas. In 1730, Bexar, the leading town, contained a population of some two hundred, Spaniards and Mexicans, only fourteen of which were civilians not associated with either the military or the friars at the missions. But now the letter which Father Espejo had sent to Spain requesting that true-born Spanish settlers be dispatched to Tejas to build a civilian community reached the king, who had for some years been contemplating just such a solution to his problems in northern Mexico:

In my opinion we can never secure a frontier province like Tejas until we populate it with trusted men and women of pure Spanish blood, preferably those born in Spain or the Canaries. I advocate sending over a large number of farmers direct from Spain or such persons already in Cuba.

But even though he was an absolute monarch with exceptional powers, he had been unable to move his conservative bureaucracy from their cautious ways, so that the intervening years had seen nothing accomplished in the populating of Tejas. Now, with this new proposal before him, he confronted his ministers and said: 'The time has come. How about those recalcitrants in the Canaries?' And thus he initiated an intricate series of movements which would eventually bring to Tejas its earliest formal colony of civilian settlers.

The Canary Islands lay in the Atlantic Ocean, far removed from Spain and opposite the coastline of Morocco. The islands had been populated centuries earlier by a dark-skinned people from the mainland of Africa, but in time they were conquered by Spain and brought into the bosom of Spanish religion and culture. They were Spaniards, but of a different cast.

The Canaries consisted of seven major islands, none large, and of these, the poorest in material goods but the most stubborn in resisting authority was Lanzarote, the one nearest Africa. By a curious chance it rested on approximately the same parallel of latitude as Bexar (29°/30')> so that in making the move to Tejas, these Canary Islanders would be leaping, as it were, some five thousand eight hundred miles due west to a somewhat comparable climate. The king, in suggesting that the Tejas settlers be drawn from the Canaries, had Lanzarote specifically in mind, for he had recently received a confidential report regarding these unfortunate Islanders:

I know the people of Lanzarote occupy an island with miserably poor soil, but they have never shown the slightest interest in farming or even in properly tending their scrawny sheep and goats. While we all know that the people of the Canaries are generally illiterate, those of Lanzarote are by far the most ignorant. And although our government gives them royal aid, they consistently eat more than they produce. Never have they contributed in any way to the social or economic advancement of our Kingdom and I see no hope for improvement in the future. I recommend that the Crown transplant a number of Lanzarote families to Tejas, where under changed conditions they might under pressure learn to become useful citizens. At least we should give my recommendation a trial.

To this proposal the king gave hearty approval, and steps were taken to deposit a group of Lanzarote families at the doorstep of the Mision Santa Teresa in Bexar.

For the king's command to take effect, his officials had to convince the political leader of Lanzarote that the idea was prudent, and now they were thrown up against one of the wiliest, most contentious, arrogant, conniving and headstrong men of that time.

He was Juan Leal Goras, and according to traditional Spanish custom, he should have been called Leal, his father's name, but he stubbornly insisted that his name was Goras, and so he was known. Now in his fifties, he had five children and one eye, having lost the other in an argument with a mule. Obstinately, he refused to wear a patch over the missing eye, and with moisture trickling down his cheek, pointed the gaping hole offensively at anyone with whom

he spoke. He was illiterate, a deficiency which did not prevent him from becoming the most litigious man in the Canaries; he initiated lawsuits against everyone—priest, king's official, neighbor with a goat, the sea captain of a little ship plying between the islands— and even when he won, he enjoyed prolonging the hearings in hopes of gaining a mite more advantage.

Even before he and the other fifty-three Islanders boarded the ship that would carry them to Mexico, Goras was shouting suggestions as to how their accommodations might be improved, and when the captain snarled 'Go to hell!' Goras threatened a lawsuit. But on 20 March 1730 the rickety craft set sail, and next morning, after a rough passage, his people landed at Santa Cruz on the main island of TenerifTe, where they picked up a few additional emigrants. With inadequate food supplies, they then sailed for Cuba, a difficult crossing of forty-five days of heat and seasickness. At one point the captain, driven almost crazy by the torrent of suggestions from Goras, cried: 'Put that man in chains!' And the would-be admiral crossed the Atlantic bound to two huge grinding stones intended for the first grain mill in Tejas.

The settlers wasted two months in Cuba, then spent ten steamy-days sailing to Vera Cruz, where on 19 July a horrendous epidemic of el vomito prostrated most of them and killed several.

They left Vera Cruz joyously on 1 August, headed for the great volcanoes that marked the backbone of Mexico, and they were grateful to reach higher land where el vomito did not flourish, but now they had an equally grave problem.

The two huge millstones were gifts to the Islanders from the king himself: 'The Crown will support you with your every need, clothes, food, utensils, money, until your first crop comes in.' So the stones had sentimental as well as practical value, but they were so large that the oxen drawing them began to die. By the time the Islanders reached the foothills of the volcano at Orizaba, it was obvious that hauling the stupendous things was no longer practical; nevertheless Goras bellowed: 'If the king gave us the stones, we keep them with us.' But when more oxen died, even Goras had to agree that the stones should be abandoned until officials in Vera Cruz could recover them.

After twenty-seven painful days the Islanders entered that majestic Valley of Mexico, one of the wonders of the world, guarded by the volcanoes Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, garlanded in flowers and protected by one of heaven's bluest skies. There at the center stood the splendid capital itself, with its university, its printing houses, its grand eating places and stately mansions. To see Mexico City after the bucolic simplicity of the Canaries was

an adventure in empire, and Goras told his people: 'We'll make Tejas like this, an example to the world,' but a muleteer who hadt once led his animals to Saltillo warned: i doubt it will be the I same.'

For almost three months Goras and his Islanders languished in the environs of the great city. A few of them, including his own wife, died; young people contracted marriages; worn-out horses were exchanged at the king's expense, as promised; and some of the Islanders, including Goras, began to think that they should remain in these pleasant surroundings rather than head for Tejas.

But the king's orders were that they must move on to Bexar, and so, on 15 November 1730, they resumed their pilgrimage, reaching Saltillo in mid-December and resting in that lovely town with its salubrious breezes and good food until the end of January 1731.

More people died, children were born; more horses collapsed from exhaustion; and on 7 March the surviving Islanders reached the Medina, some distance east of where Fray Domingo had his profitable ranch. Looking across its narrow waters into Tejas, they were appalled by what they saw: a continuation of the sea of grass, more mesquite, never a hill, not a single habitation, only an occasional wild horse or a strayed cow with enormous horns.

'Oh God!' Goras cried when he saw their new home through his one good eye. is this Tejas?'

He was encouraged, however, by a soldier accompanying the group, who assured him: 'At Bexar, where the missions are, everything is better. They have gardens there and food enough to share.'

On 9 March 1731, Goras led his Islanders to the gates of the Mision Santa Teresa, where they were rapturously greeted by a tall, thin friar: 'Settlers at last. My name is Fray Damian, and everything within this mission is at your service, for God has delivered you safely to this destination.'

The friar embraced Juan Leal and the other men, pressed the women's hands, and fought back tears when he saw the emaciated children. 'Fray Domingo!' he called. 'Do bring these children some sugar squares!' Then he turned to the group and said in a strong, quiet voice: 'Let us kneel and give thanks that your long journey is completed.' As the little congregation knelt inside the mission gates, he prayed, but Goras, counting the days by the system he kept in his mind, did not, for he was thinking: 20 March last year to 9 March this. That's three hundred and fifty-five days, and for this?

If Fray Damian had previously thought he'd known trouble with his Indians and soldiers, he was forced to come up

with a new definition of that word where the Islanders were concerned, because within a few weeks Goras was threatening to bring lawsuits against Damian for failing to provide a suitable place for the Lanzarote people, against Fray Domingo for not carrying out the king's promise that they would be taken care of in these early days, and against Captain Saldana for malfeasances too numerous to specify. Since none of the Islanders could write, and since he knew the complaints had to be made on the proper stamped paper, he badgered Damian de Saldana to document the charges against his brother Alvaro de Saldana, and vice versa. In fact, so many garbled reports reached Zacatecas that the commandant there roared one morning: 'What in hell is going on up there in Bexar?' and he organized an inspection tour which he himself led.

He learned that the major grievance was one that had surfaced in all parts of northern Mexico: Who controlled the water? The six missions, including Fray Damian's, argued with some reason that since they had established irrigation rights on the San Antonio, a limited stream at best, it would be illegal and against the interests of the crown for the Canary Islanders to build their own dam and siphon off an undue share of the river. But Goras argued brilliantly: 'Surely the king did not intend that his loyal servants be brought here and set down in a wilderness with no water.' And he pointed out that the six missions, even with the presidio thrown in, housed fewer Spaniards, real Spaniards, that is, than his new village of San Fernando.

At this, one of the soldiers asked: 'And when have Canary Islanders been considered real Spaniards?' Goras challenged him on the spot: 'A duel. Any weapons you like. Our honor has been abused.'

He was now engaged in five distinct lawsuits, but the Islanders still had no stone houses, no garden plots, no horses and, worst of all, no water. This was an intolerable situation and Fray Damian knew it. One night after the most acrimonious confrontation, in which the Islanders charged the Saldana brothers with treason to begin with and thievery and lechery as tempers grew, Damian consulted with Fray Domingo: 'Surely, in the interests of God, we must do something to resolve this bitterness.'

Domingo started to laugh. 'Do you remember, Damian, how we sat here one night, just like this, and you told me in your solemn way: "Domingo, Tejas will never function properly until we import real Spaniards here to establish standards?" Well, now you have your Spaniards. Are you happy about it?'

'I had not expected such Spaniards,' Damian replied, but the two friars decided on their own to take those Christian steps which

any man of good conscience would feel forced to take, regardless of what course the presidio or the other missions might follow. 'We must share our water,' Damian said. 'And the richness of our land.'

Before dawn Domingo and three Indians drove out to the ranch with wagons to be filled with produce and spare tools. Cows, goats and sheep were rounded up, and then the men slept for a few hours, but at sunset they started back to where the Canary Islanders needed help.

In the meantime Damian and Garza, working by starlight, traced out a route whereby an irrigation ditch could be led along the crest of hills in such a way that water could be brought from the San Antonio directly onto the fields of the Islanders, avoiding the necessity for a costly aqueduct like the one another of the missions would be required to build. But when Goras saw the run of the proposed ditch, he objected strenuously: 'My fields are over there. The ditch should run here, and if it doesn't, I shall bring a lawsuit to alter it.'

Just as the Saltillo men were sure all problems relating to the Islanders' community had been resolved, Goras, supported by two cronies, marched to the presidio with yet another startling demand: 'We were promised that if we left our secure homes and ventured into this wilderness, we would henceforth be called, because of our bravery, hidalgos, with right to the title Don. I am to be called Don Juan, he is Don Manuel de Niz, and that one is Don Antonio Rodriguez.'

In Spanish society, the word hidalgo carried significant connotations. It was composed of three small words: hijo-de-algo, which meant literally son-of-something or, by extension, son-of-someorre-important, and it was impossible for even a minor member of the nobility like Don Alvaro de Saldana to dream of calling men like Goras and his illiterate peasants Don.

The soldiers and most of the friars flatly refused to do so, but Goras and his Islanders threatened new lawsuits if they were denied their honorific. Since they had already flooded Guadalajara and Zacatecas with petitions, they fired this one at Mexico City itself, demanding that the commandant draft their protest on his own stamped paper.

This was too much: 'Goras, if you give me any more trouble . . .'

Before he could complete his threat the one-eyed Islander demanded in a loud, offensive voice: 'And where are those grinding stones the king gave us? I suspect you stole them, and I'm starting a lawsuit to recover them.' The commandant had never heard of

the promised grinders, but some months later they were delivered to Saltillo with a specific message from the king that they were to be sent on to his loyal subjects at Bexar, with this added instruction:

In accordance with promises made on my behalf, all male heads of families who left Lanzarote for this dangerous undertaking are to be known henceforth as hidalgos and are to be addressed as Don.

In this manner the civil settlement of Tejas was launched, with the Canary Islanders becoming aristocratic hidalgos at a stroke of the king's pen.

Fray Damian was a saintly man, but he was no saint. No sooner had he championed the Canary Islanders in their demand for an irrigation ditch and helped them start it than he summoned his carpenter Simon Garza and their two best Indians to an emergency meeting: 'Before the Islanders dig their ditch and draw off their water, let us deepen ours, all along the way.'

As the work progressed, he found to his surprise that Simon Garza was frequently absent from the ditch, and Damian began to believe that the carpenter, always so faithful, was scamping his duties. Such unlikely behavior was so agitating that Damian began watching Garza more closely. One morning when the carpenter had sneaked away, Damian followed him to the larger of the two mission barns, where he expected to find him sleeping while the others worked. Entering quietly by the main door, he adjusted his eyes to the darkness and moved to where a shaft of sunlight illuminated a cleared corner, and there Damian saw what amounted to a miracle, a true miracle brought down to earth and given form.

Working in secret, Garza had hewn and bonded together three oaken planks, scraping and smoothing one side of the resulting board until it was quite even. From the long board thus created, he had sawed off seven large squares of wood and had begun to bond three other oak boards together to form a second long board from which he could saw off seven more squares.

Suspended from a nail above his work space hung a painting, done in Spain, of one of the fourteen Stations of the Cross, those panels displayed in all churches showing scenes of Christ struggling through the streets of Jerusalem on the way to His crucifixion. Garza had taken this sample from the mission church; below it on a kind of horizontal easel rested one of his first seven squares. With such tools as he had been able to improvise, Simon had

nearly completed his carving of the Third Station, in which the solitary figure of Christ falls to the cobbled pavement of the Via Dolorosa, weighed down by the heavy cross he must bear. Below the figure rose from the wood the words jesus cae por primera vez (Jesus falls for the first time).

With an innate appreciation of what oak could represent and of the mystery of Christ's Passion, this unlettered carpenter was creating a masterpiece, for the figure of Christ seemed not only to rise living from the oaken surface but also to proclaim its religious significance.

And there was the mystery! The Christ that Garza had carved was indeed living, but not in any realistic way. If, for artistic purpose, the arm holding the cross required lengthening, he carved it so, and if the head needed to be cocked at an impossible angle, he cocked it. Indeed, as he studied that painting in the darkness of the barn he had intuitively corrected each wrong thing; he had held to the good basics and discarded all that was meretricious. Simon's Third Station was not Indian art or primitive art or any other kind of art capable of being designated by an adjective; it was art itself, simple and pure, and Fray Damian could only gape in awed respect.

Bowing his head in reverence, he could visualize the fourteen completed carvings on the walls of his church, and he knew that they must become the chief treasure of Bexar.

Humbly he faced his carpenter and said: 'Surely God is working through you, Simon, to give us this miracle. Henceforth I shall dig your ditches and you shall complete your carvings in this barn.'

In many ways the year 1733 represented the apex at Mision Santa Teresa, for the peaceful Indians near Bexar had learned to live within the compound and to listen to sermons even though they showed no inclination toward becoming Christians. At the ranch Fray Domingo had achieved great success with his cattle and a limited one with his Apache; indeed, he had two of them singing in his informal choir on those occasions when they wandered by the corrals to inspect the Spanish horses they hoped to steal on their next night raid.

Relations between the mission and the presidio, always a measure of how things were progressing, had never been better; the Saldaria brothers had seen to that. Surprisingly, the religious contacts with Zacatecas and the governmental with Mexico City were also unruffled. It was a time of peace, especially with the French to the north, and Fray Damian could have been forgiven had he

taken pride in his custodianship of the most important mission in Tejas.

He did not. His innate self-depreciation prevented him from accepting praise for what he deemed his ordinary duty, and on some days he almost castigated himself for not achieving more of God's work. However, his relationships with his brother and sister-in-law had never been better, for these three sensible adults— Damian, aged forty-seven; Alvaro, thirty-eight, and Benita, twenty-nine—had evolved a routine which produced great satisfactions.