# Myths and Legends Beyond Our Borders/Father José's Love

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FATHER JOSÉ'S LOVE
FIERCE troubles came upon New Spain as the seventeenth century was drawing to its end, and the stout old soldier, Diego de Vargas, was hurried north to crush the Pueblos in their strongholds. As lieutenant he took his son, José, despite the setting of the march for the very day whereon the young man was to have married Doña Ana de Orñate. The sadness of the parting was softened, so much as might be, by assurances that the troops would soon return, and who knew but they might bring some of the wealth of Cibola with them? In that event the Doña Ana should be jewelled like a queen, should live in the fairest hacienda in Mexico, should have slaves and servants, and a gilded carriage; yes, if she chose, she should live in old Spain and ruffle it with the proudest of the old families. And so, watched through tear-dimmed eyes, the troop set off.
The Indians were not so easily put down. They were fighting for their homes, their religion, their lives, and they fought well. Nearly two years passed before the army went back to Mexico City, worn, broken, sadly less in numbers. They had beaten the red men, but it had cost many lives and two human hearts to do it, for on a report that José had been killed in battle Ana had withdrawn to a convent; and finding that he was thus deserted, José cursed the church and its priests who ​had robbed him of his treasure. In a cooler hour he repented this frenzy. He begged and received comfort from the blessed Saint Francis, who appeared to him in a dream, promising forgiveness if he, too, would live the religious life. The world held nothing for him longer: he became a monk, asking only that the bishop would send him away from a city where the sight of familiar objects kept memory alive to torture him. So he was ordered to the Franciscan monastery in Monterey, there to enlighten and gospel the heathen, to care for the sick, to teach useful arts, and all this he did, softened by a sincerity of repentance for his blasphemy and thankfulness that it had been forgiven. Though he had been a soldier and had tasted wild, free life, his bent was toward books and gentle things, and—he could not deny it—toward the memory of that fairest of beings, the Doña Ana. He could pray her image out of his mind in chapel, but in his dreams he was not his own master, and neither prayers, fasts, nor penances could prevent the rising of that vision, pale, appealing, yes, seductive, at his bedside.
Returning on a hot day toward the monastery from the chapel of Our Lady of Guadalupe, where he had just said mass for a company of stolid Indians, Father José—he kept his worldly name—drooped to the ground in the shade of the palms that grow below the chapel, and thought and suffered. Before him lay a tiny palm that some wayfarer had carelessly plucked up and tossed upon ​the ground, and as carelessly he took it up and switched the dusty earth with it; yet, somehow, his compassion was moved for its thwarted life: it recalled his own; he would befriend it. Plunging it into an irrigating canal that flowed lazily and turbidly past him, he washed it free of dust and felt something of life stir in the wilted leaves and stem. Then, packing it in moss, he walked to the town more hurriedly than usual, and planted the little thing in the garden, where he could see it from his cell. He tended it as palms are seldom tended in that country, loosening the earth at its roots when it became hard, freeing it from scale and insects, picking off dead leaves, watering it in the dry season, and shortly it dawned upon him that the love he could not give to a woman he was bestowing on a tree. Perhaps in its grace, its beauty, its uncertainty, it reminded him of a woman, and he felt that as it owed its life and strength to his care, it had a love for him. It grew prodigiously and was most fair to look on,—as you may see, when you visit Monterey,—and sitting in its shadow, his arm about the trunk, he was nearer to content.
As the tree gained in beauty he increased in age. His face was sad and pale, and lines were cutting themselves upon it. Then came the fever, the dreaded typhus, and townsmen, monks, soldiers, Indians, were struck down as in a battle. He attended them constantly, ministering to the sick, ​praying for the dying. Every house was a hospital, and for the first time the Capuchina nuns were released, and went into the town to give comfort to the tortured and the perishing,—a breach of vow for which they readily gained absolution from Rome. Worn with his work, José caught the fever too, and at its height he had dragged himself to his cell to die. Knowing that his end was near, he begged the brothers to carry him to his palm-tree and so leave him. He leaned against it and watched the great peaks in the west, toward which the sun was sinking as fast as his own life ebbed; but it was sweet to end the world like that; to fade like the day; to see beauty to the last. He started. His pulse leaped wildly. A woman was coming up the path, a Capuchina. Their eyes met. With a little sob and cry the woman sank to her knees and wet his hand with her tears. It was Doña Ana. For an hour they were together, calm, after the first agitation had passed, their hands clasped, his voice growing fainter, her face more saintly resigned. Now the sun was down. A wan smile struggled over the man's lips; a breeze shook the palm-leaves overhead, and he raised his eyes to the golden glory in the sky. Palm-leaves? They used to betoken victory. The Angelus rang out, musical and silvery, and a star trembled like a tear on the brow of Mitra. It was an hour of peace. Father José's long unhappiness was over.