"Death Comes For the Archbishop"

[fiefoe]

This is a very misleading title. Willa Cather gave her Archbishop a full life before death came for him. Such a sincere book seems quite old-fashioned (along with its episodic plot), and suits the spirituality of the protagonist like the Romanesque church he built.

• The sun was still good for an hour of supreme splendour, and across the shining folds of country the low profile of the city barely fretted the skyline... The light was full of action and had a peculiar quality of climax--of splendid finish.  It was both intense and soft, with a ruddiness as of much-multiplied candlelight, an aura of red in its flames.
• The desert down there has a peculiar horror; I do not mean thirst, nor Indian massacres, which are frequent.  The very floor of the world is cracked open into countless canyons and arroyos, fissures in the earth which are sometimes ten feet deep, sometimes a thousand.
• He will have to deal with savagery and ignorance, with dissolute priests and political intrigue. He must be a man to whom order is necessary--as dear as life."
• "Yes," said the Cardinal lightly, "they are the best missionaries. Our Spanish fathers made good martyrs, but the French Jesuits accomplish more.  They are the great organizers."
• He reminded himself of that cry, wrung from his Saviour on the Cross, "J'ai soif!"  Of all our Lord's physical sufferings, only one, "I thirst," rose to His lips.
• But the priest had charged him twenty pesos, and that was half of all he had saved to buy furniture and glass windows for his house.  His brothers and cousins, discouraged by his experience, had taken wives without the marriage sacrament.
• The Faith planted by the Spanish friars and watered with their blood was not dead; it awaited only the toil of the husbandman.
• Even the thick planks on which the Bishop's theological books rested were ax-dressed. There was not at that time a turning-lathe or a saw-mill in all northern New Mexico.
• And my vineyard; a natural habitat for the vine, that.  I tell you, the shores of Lake Erie will be covered with vineyards one day.  I envy the man who is drinking my wine.  Ah well, that is a missionary's life; to plant where another shall reap."
• A learned Scotch Jesuit in Montreal told me that our first bells, and the introduction of the bell in the service  all over Europe, originally came from the East.  He said the Templars brought the Angelus back from the Crusades, and it is really an adaptation of a Moslem custom."
• The Spaniards handed on their skill to the Mexicans, and the Mexicans have taught the Navajos to work silver; but it all came from the Moors."
• She said:  "Go up on the rocks yonder, and gather roses." Though it was December and not the season for roses, he ran up among the rocks and found such roses as he had never seen before.
• "One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love.  I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you.
• Springing to the ground, Father Vaillant threw his arms about his host.  "Manuelito!" he cried, "for this darling mule I think I could almost pray you into Heaven!"
• Father Jesus explained that parrot feathers were much prized by his Indians as ornaments for their ceremonial robes, and he had long ago found he could please his parishioners by raising the birds.
• a small white church, painted above and about the altar with gods of wind and rain and thunder, sun and moon, linked together in a geometrical design of crimson and blue and dark green, so that the end of the church seemed to be hung with tapestry.
• (Jacinto) was as much at home in the Bishop's study as in his own pueblo--and he was never too much at home anywhere.
• One thing which struck him at once was that every mesa was duplicated by a cloud mesa, like a reflection, which lay motionless above it or moved slowly up from behind it... The desert, the mountains and mesas, were continually reformed and recoloured by the cloud shadows.  The whole country seemed fluid to the eye under this constant change of accent, this ever-varying distribution of light.
• He was on a naked rock in the desert, in the stone age, a prey to homesickness for his own kind, his own epoch, for European man and his glorious history of desire and dreams.  Through all the centuries that his own part of the world had been changing like the sky at daybreak, this people had been fixed, increasing neither in numbers nor desires, rock-turtles on their rock.
• the floor of the room was a long step below the door-sill--the Indian way of preventing drafts.
• He had already learned that with this people religion was necessarily theatrical.
• The general growth on its sides was evergreen, but the canyons and ravines were wooded with aspens, so that the shape of every depression was painted on the mountain-side, light green against the dark, like symbols; serpentine, crescent, half-circles.
• Thrift is such a rare quality among Mexicans that they find it very amusing;
• the dying murmurs of every common man and woman were listened for and treasured by their neighbours and kinsfolk.  These sayings, no matter how unimportant, were given oracular significance and pondered by those who must one day go the same road.
• never forgetting her husband's favourites, "La Paloma" and "La Golondrina," and "My Nelly Was A Lady."  The Negro melodies of Stephen Foster had already travelled to the frontier, going along the river highways, not in print, but passed on from one humble singer to another.
• Suddenly she took hold of one of the buttons on the Bishop's cassock and began twisting it with nervous fingers. "Father," she said timidly, "what is the youngest I could possibly be, to be Inez's mother?"