The Shelter of this Red Rock

A note on the location. Willa Cather is a novelist who immediately evokes a location; she seems like a novelist of a place. That place is the Great Plains. My Antonia, O Pioneers! and many other novels and stories conjure up images of life in the cornfields of Nebraska. So, what is this novel set in New Mexico doing in her oeuvre?

Thinking about the idea of a frontier, it is not really that much of a change. Father Latour, a Roman Catholic Bishop, takes up office in New Mexico shortly after it stopped being a part of Old Mexico. The scene is indeed every bit as much a frontier as the Great Plains had been before. America is marching west, and both My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop chronicle the early movers.

There is, however something striking about the change in location. This is a novel that could only have been written about the location in which the novel is set. I never noticed this before visiting the area, but having been there, suddenly passages like this take on a clarity I would have never imagined:

In all his travels the Bishop had seen no country like this. From the flat red sea of sand rose great rock mesas, generally Gothic in outline, resembling vast cathedrals. They were not crowded together in disorder, but placed in wide spaces, long vistas between. This plain might once have been an enormous city, all the smaller quarters destroyed by time, only the public buildings left,—piles of architecture that were like mountains. The sandy soil of the plain had a light sprinkling of junipers, and was splotched with masses of blooming rabbit brush,—that olive-coloured plant that grows in high waves like a tossing sea, at this season covered with a thatch of bloom, yellow as gorse, or orange like marigolds.

That is indeed exactly not only what it looks like, but what it feels like. Then in the next paragraph, Cather adds this, ostensibly just a continuation of the description of the landscape in the previous paragraph, but really a description of the novel itself:

This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape.

Death Comes for the Archbishop is an episodic story; chapter by chapter, we drop in on events in the bishop’s career and his relationship with a priest who works with him. At one level, it is just an achingly beautiful tale of two priests in a sparsely populated land. But, these set pieces do indeed sit just on the verge of being brought together, and as you look at each piece in turn, you notice the similarity—they all have the appearance of great antiquity.

First we have the fact that this is a story about Catholic priests in New Mexico. These are not Protestant missionaries, cattle ranchers, homesteaders, or any other product of the past 500 years. Catholic priests, tracing their lineage back 1800 years. The novel begins in what seems like an odd way; this novel about New Mexico begins in Rome; the origin of this story is the old world. Both of the priests in the story were born in France, again reminding us of the old. The land may seem new, but the religion is old.

Second, as Father Latour moves into the area, he is not founding a church; the church is there before him, brought in by the Spaniards long before. Many of the problems Latour faces in the early part of the novel are shaking off the legacy of the Spanish past, finding ways to correct the bad habits from the past while preserving what was good.

As the novel stretches on, the delving into the past gets deeper as we slowly realize that the legacies of those who were there before the Spanish arrived linger on in tribal cultures. Latour literally finds himself in the deep prehistorical past, where people build fires in mysterious hidden caves to keep the Great Serpent at bay. Priests of a religion older than Catholicism have their own mysteries, and those mysteries have been passed down generation to generation since before recorded time began.

There is still one more level down. The land itself. That country which is still waiting to be made into a landscape. Those ageless piles of rocks who barely note our passing there.

Slowly the realization dawns. This seemed like a novel about the frontier, a novel in which the questions are about the future. But the real frontier here is not between the present and the unknowable future; the frontier is between the present and the past. The future will take care of itself. It is the Past we are leaving when we die; the Past is what remains.

He was soon to have done with 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.

We are obsessed with the future. We think about the past as a litany of errors, things that need to be changed to make the future even better. Or the past is the place for which one is nostalgic, things that have vanished and we wish had been preserved. In either case, the past is there to be used.

The Past, however cannot be used. It does not care how you want to use it. It does not change because we want it to change. It neither gets better nor worse as we dream about it. The past can neither be altered nor preserved. The Past is there, complete and inviolable. That is the message of Death Comes for the Archbishop. An enterprising young Catholic priest comes to the Past, hoping to build a future upon it and slowly discovers the Past laughs at us. Its legacies run deep. We are all products of that past, and we cannot escape it. You may hate the fact that some things in the past persist; you may hate that fact that some things in the Past went away; but the one thing you cannot do is change the facts about the Past.

The trader told him he might make good Catholics among the Indians, but he would never separate them from their own beliefs. “Their priests have their own kind of mysteries. I don’t know how much of it is real and how much is made up. I remember something that happened when I was a little fellow. One night a Pecos girl, with her baby in her arms, ran into the kitchen here and begged my mother to hide her until after the festival, for she’d seen signs between the caciques, and was sure they were going to feed her baby to the snake. Whether it was true or not, she certainly believed it, poor thing, and Mother let her stay. It made a great impression on me at the time.”

Thinking of the Past like that is humbling. We can’t change the Past. It is immune to our judgments, good or bad. Death comes for the Archbishop. Death comes for you, for me. The Past Abides, and it cares not if we admire or condemn it for doing so.