Having recently traveled throughout the Santa Fe Diocese, the setting of Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, I was grateful for Cather's vivid powers of description and her delicate treatment of this complicated culture and location. After a trip to Albuquerque, we ventured into the pueblo of Isleta just north of the city. Cather's Bishop Latour (i.e., the historical Bishop Lamy) made this same trip albeit on horseback: "When he approached this pueblo of Isleta, gleaming white across a low plain of grey sand, Father Latour's spirits rose. It was beautiful, that warm, rich whiteness of the church and the clustered town, shaded by a few bright acacia trees, with their intense blue-green… As he rode up to the church, the old priest came out to meet him… The priest's house was white within and without, like all the Isleta houses, and was almost as bare as an Indian dwelling… When the Bishop remarked that everything in this pueblo, even the streets, seemed clean, the Padre told him that near Isleta there was a hill of some white mineral, which the Indians ground up and used as whitewash. They had done this from time immemorial."
With small children in tow, we were unable to trek to the heights of the Acoma Pueblo that Cather describes with such assiduity in her section, "The Mass at Acoma." On my next trip to New Mexico, I hope to travel up the rock cliff on which Acoma is situated not unlike Bishop Latour/Lamy. We did, however, visit the pueblo of Taos of Cather's roguishly charismatic priest, Father Martinez. Cather writes of Taos, "Both the priest and people there were hostile to Americans and jealous of interference." This description captures the same resistance and secretive religiosity of the Taos people even still today.
After visiting the pueblo of Taos, we also stopped at the Santuario de Chimayo, which similarly makes an appearance in Cather's novel. "At the Mexican village of Chimayo, over toward the Truchas mountains, the good people were especially devoted to a little equestrian image of Santiago in their church, and they made him a new pair of boots every few months, insisting that he went abroad at night and wore out his shoes, even on horseback. When Father Joseph stayed there, he used to tell them he wished that, in addition to the consecration of the hands, God had provided some special blessing for the missionary's feet."
And of course, there is the great cathedral of the bishop's imagination and aspirations that still stands today as a testament to his visionary outlook for his humble diocese. "Bishop Latour [Lamy] had one very keen worldly ambition; to build in Santa Fe a cathedral which would be worthy of a setting naturally beautiful. As he cherished this wish and meditated upon it, he came to feel that such a building might be a continuation of himself and his purpose, a physical body full of his aspirations after he had passed from the scene." Cather envisions the discovery of the rock materials that Lamy designated for the construction of the cathedral's facade: "At about four o'clock they came out upon a ridge high over the Rio Grande valley. The trail dropped down a long decline at this point and wound about the foot of the Sandias into Albuquerque, some sixty miles away. This ridge was covered with cone-chaped, rocky hills, thinly clad with pinons, and the rock was a curious shade of green, something between sea-green and olive….After a moment of silence he looked up at the rugged wall, gleaming gold above them. 'That hill, Blanchet, is my Cathedral.'"
Having just completed Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop in the advent of my grandpa's death, I couldn't help but return to her narration of the bishop's death while reflecting on the passing of my grandfather. Cather's description of the dissolution of "calendared time" in the wake of the passing unto death brought me poignant consolation.
During those last weeks of the Bishop's life he thought very little about death; it was the Past he was leaving. The future would take care of itself….He observed also that there was no longer any perspective in his memories…. He was soon to have done with the calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible. Sometimes, when Magdalena or Bernard came in and asked him a question, it took him several seconds to bring himself back to the present. He could see they thought his mind was failing; but it was only extraordinarily active in some other part of the great picture of his life---some part of which they knew nothing. When the occasion warranted he could return to the present. But there was not much present left…only the minor characters of his life remained in present time.
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