Of course one knows Casas Grandes.
It is the equal, nearly, of Fronteras or Bavispe or of Janos, even, as a legend-place of the Apache country. It has been on the maps of the monte since the Spanish came. Only look up there where the borders of Chihuahua and Sonora conjoin with the Arizona Territory. There it is. South, as the Apaches put it, “a two-day pony ride” from the United States. East, “but the look of an eye” from the center-bone of the great Sierra Madre, which the people of Juh call the Blue Mountains.
There it dwells beside the sparkling small river of its own name, the Rio Casas Grandes, itself a marker site in the history of Apacheria. Flowing out from the very foothills of Juh’s forbidden stronghold, the river falls northward to end in the Laguna Guzman, midway to Ciudad Juárez. Its desert course watered the main Apache war trail east of the Sierra, into the United States. It watered, as well, the bean fields, melon patches, and corn plots of Casas Grandes. Or it did on those blessed summers when God left enough flow within its shallow bed to reach our acequias. It was thus the artery of our lives; it was but an iron whim of heaven—some say hell—that it also served the lives of the wild Apache.
Casas Grandes?
Ah! It might be the image of the blind poet’s paradise, or the mirror of Gehenna’s fiery pit; it depends upon the eye.
If one sees no beauty in glow of cactus orchid or bright halo of paloverde tree, for him Casas Grandes would be an ugliness. Did another, gazing westward over the grand rampart of the Sierra, behold only the blank stone of the earth’s spine breaking free of the desert’s crust, he too would cry an abomination upon the place.
For those of us who lived there in that singular time, Casas Grandes was an oasis of Christian hope in a solitude of barbarian death. A bastion, however frail, of God’s house in a wilderness of heathen red horsemen and marauding outlaws of every wickedness. We clung to Casas Grandes as men who knew it was their last retreat, which they must defend from the Devil be he Apache or Anglo.
Casas Grandes was a true outpost. We were all soldiers who lived in it, all servants of the cross.
The mission was built in the seventeenth century by the Franciscans. A German friar supervised construction, demonstrating the plodding genius of his race. Even by that fateful spring when the Apaches came for the last time, the adobes had scarcely broken past their plaster coat, the ancient joists and sills of mountain oak were as sound as the day of their cutting in the nearby Sierra. When I came to it in my turn, I was the nineteenth of its pastors in the Order of our Blessed Saint Francis of Assisi to serve it in unbroken line—a prideful thing for Church and priest alike.
Alas, we were not all children of the same forgiving God who came to Casas Grandes.
The final morning was of a kind to make the tasseled quail burst with song. The sun was everywhere within and without the mean hovels of the waking town. The people were in a glad spirit such as the Lord had fashioned the springtime to assure. Cactus wren, twit sparrow, ocotillo bird, and chaparral finch answered back the quail. All were likewise challenged by the reedy roosters of the village, each from his separate small mountain of cow chip or burro dung beside his master’s dusty palace.
Quito! That sand pink dawn would make a pullet crow!
All cassocked and belted as I was, fresh from the early mass, I felt inspired to leap atop the mission wall and flap my arms to let God know his chanticleer could also cock-a-doodle-doo.
It demonstrates the original ignorance of man.
That was no pristine morning for Casas Grandes; it was a sunrise spoken of from that day in fearful whispering.
Its shadow fell first across my garden.