I SHALL BELIEVE

By Lisa
lisa_weston@csufresno.edu

Many thanks to Brig for "assigning" such evocative lyrics: Sheryl Crow's "I Shall Believe." She cannot, however, be held responsible for where my playing the song over and over while free-associating--Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" with it's plaintive "ah, love, let us be true to one another" and W. H. Auden's "Lay your sleeping head, my love,/faithless on my human arm" and similar poems of love in dangerous times, not to mention bits and pieces of California history--finally led me. That's my fault.

Spoilers for "Betrayed" (which was, after all, the theme of the challenge)

Rating: PG-13. A bit slashy. There's no sex, but this does deal with the intensities of friendship. There's also other "adult subjects" such as violence, cultural genocide and colonial exploitation.

~~~~~

As dusk settled on Santa Helena the heat subsided. The harsh sunlight softened, allowing the bleached-out colors of midday to recover their lost vibrancy, if only for the precious few moments before the shadows darkened into evening. A light breeze-faintly moist from the sea tonight, not dry with the desert's heat-sighed through the muslin curtains of the bedroom windows. Luis Montoya savored its touch upon his brow: if he closed his eyes he could almost believe it a lover's caress.

He stood at the window, looking out upon the pueblo, his pueblo. He was just tired, he told himself, too bone-weary after the exertions of the last few days to feel proper satisfaction. Had he not saved his pueblo from rebellion and apostasy? For the first time in months his plans had succeeded. He summoned up a brief, self-mocking smile. For the first time in week he could enjoy the perquisites of power, the luxuries of civilization: a decent meal, fresh linen, a body cleansed of the salt-sweat and dust of the trail.

Only hours earlier he and his soldiers had returned, battle-stained but triumphant, and it seemed that the entire population of the district had assembled in the plaza to welcome them back. He had dismounted at the foot of the Comandancia's staircase, steeling his expression against the pain of the arrow wound in his shoulder, determined to appear as invulnerable, as invincible as he needed them to believe him.

"You see, senores," he had remarked to the increasingly troublesome Gaspar Hidalgo and the other dons clustered there, "how Montoya deals with betrayal."

He had stood there, self-consciously and theatrically regal, one hand resting on the lion statue of the baluster, watching as his men were gathered into the arms of their relieved families. He had allowed himself one moment of regret that he had no lover, not even a true friend, had come forward to embrace him. But he was the Military Governor here. He was Colonel Luis Ramirez Montoya: victory and the subsequent gratitude of his people should be enough. And yet as he had stood there he could not help searching for a sight of the one person whose welcome-whose approval, whose forgiveness, however impossible that might be now-he most coveted.

"Doctor Helm," he had called out, unconsciously raising his hand to hide the dark discoloration of his uniform tunic that betrayed the presence of his wound. He hadn't wanted pity or duty. Helm had looked back at him as he edged his way through the crowd. Their eyes had met for an instant, but the doctor had not answered his summons. He had merely walked on toward the slumped, shackled prisoners. "Doctor Helm," Montoya had repeated more coldly. "Those traitors can wait. I have wounded men-loyal men-who require your attention. Now, if you please."

It was growing darker. Montoya struck a match and lit the lamp on his dressing table. The flame guttered in the slight breeze and cast a flickering pattern of light and shadow across the face reflected in the mirror.

Especially after the recent fiasco of Senora Hildalgo's "accident" he had needed a spectacular success. The news out of Mexico was increasingly dire: the Crown was losing control of New Spain. Piece by piece, the empire was crumbling. When the time and opportunity came to make his own rebellious move he would need the dons' compliance, their obedience if not their complete loyalty. But the failures and annoyances of the last few months had rendered that compliance more and more difficult to acquire. The landowners begrudged him every reale of the tax money he needed, and the Queen taught them to disregard and mock his authority. Oh yes, he had needed a victory. And had not God given him one?

The news had shocked the community: a handful of ostensibly Christian indios had risen up against the padres at the mission. They had looted the parlors and the kitchens, burnt storerooms, stolen horses, killed an overseer. And while the priests and a handful of their more faithful converts had barricaded themselves in the Church and prayed for deliverance, the renegades had taken the trail over the mountains to the tulares, away from civilization. The dons had come to their Colonel then, demanding the protection they had scorned and abused so often of late, and he had known he had to lead the expedition himself if he was to regain their respect.

The vague, incomplete maps left by Garces' exploration years before described a great valley east of the coastal range, a network of marshes, sloughs and shallow lakes fed by rivers flowing out of the Sierra Nevada further beyond, but the region was largely unsurveyed. Pursuit into such unknown territory offered only danger, no certain success. Taking the better part of his paltry garrison-so far from the army he desired, needed, deserved--into the wilderness had constituted an act of faith in his own destiny.

He had found the rebels, and a small band of savages who had given them refuge, at the foot of the pass on the eastern side of the mountains. The inevitable battle-hardly more than a skirmish, really, a mechanical anticlimax to days spent tracking and flushing the game-had been brief and bloody. And when it was over he had marched the wounded rebels back to Santa Helena for execution. He had brought back the pagan women and children, as well, a harvest of neofitos for the Church. Their souls would be saved. Their men-folk, however, he had ordered executed, as a lesson in power, a warning against complicity in insurrection. He himself had passed among the bodies, dispatching the merely wounded with a clean, dispassionate slice of the throat. He had left the carcasses there unburied, carrion for vultures and coyotes in this world and Hell in the next, where the small stream his soldiers followed back up into the mountains rippled out, whispered its witness and sank into silence amid a nameless field of tall grass.

Montoya wandered about the room, lighting a few more lamps, picking up a book or two but always laying them down again after a minute's perusal. He was restless, so restless even the Bard's words could not distract him.

Tonight, he knew, Padre Quintera and the mission priests would be praying with the apostates, attempting to bring them back to the True Faith. Tomorrow... well, tomorrow would complete this provincial auto-de-fe. The rebels would be hanged, and for that they should be grateful. These were enlightened times: not long ago the Holy Office would have demanded the stake for such treason against God and king. Then after the execution, even as the bodies jerked and kicked their last, the Te Deum would ring out, signaling the procession to the church and a solemn Mass of Thanksgiving.

Montoya ran his hands through hair still damp from his bath, and felt a twinge of pain in his left shoulder. He grimaced. It was so unlike him not to summon his physician, to demand his attention. Why else did he keep the man around if not to safeguard his health and well-being? Was he too proud, this time, to admit his need? For they were both of them proud men. Never properly subordinate, Helm had always provoked Montoya, challenged his authority, never surrendered his equality and independence, his power. He might compromise-rarely-but he would never give in. But then neither would Montoya. Yet Montoya liked to think they had been friends, even if also adversaries on occasion. A difficult relationship at the best of times, their friendship had foundered in betrayal and violence, and now there was a silence between them as bleak and bitter as the grave.

He heard a perfunctory knock before the door opened. "I gave orders that I was not to be disturbed," he began as he turned. Helm paused in the doorway, then came forward into the room without waiting for permission or invitation. "You." Montoya drew himself up a little taller. "Let me guess. You have come to dispute military tactics? Or perhaps you wish to complain yet again about my treatment of criminals and traitors?"

Helm laid his medical bag on a small table. "I heard you were wounded." His voice was soft, the tone blandly professional, and his face impossible to read.

"It's barely more than a scratch." Montoya waved away his attentions. "The rumor that these savages poison their arrows with rattlesnake venom is, I am glad to say, quite false. But perhaps that disappoints you?"

"Don't be ridiculous. I'm your physician." The phrase, the pronoun, was a slip of the tongue, an unconscious echo of earlier days. Montoya allowed himself a nostalgic smile, but Helm frowned as he began to unpack bandages and medicines. "Take off your shirt and sit down." Montoya removed his waistcoat, unbuttoned his shirt and slipped it off his shoulder as he sat in his armchair. Helm's cool fingers stripped off the old dressing and probed the wound gently but thoroughly. "Somewhat more than a scratch," he remarked. "There's no numbness?" Montoya shook his head. "Good. No nerve damage, then. And you let it bleed for a while at first, to clean itself out?"

"This was hardly my first battle, Doctor, or my first wound. And my men have had plenty of opportunities to learn the proper protocols. Thanks to your beloved Queen."

"The Queen-" Helm finally looked him in the eye as he began to respond to the taunt. Then he looked away, turning back to the table a picking up a small bottle. "I didn't come here to argue with you, Colonel." Of course not: argument had always been too much like courtship between them. He poured some of the medicine on a cloth and dabbed at the wound. "This may sting a little."

Montoya inhaled sharply. It felt like liquid fire. "Diablo!"

One corner of Helm's mouth quirked upward. "It's an herbal tincture: yellow dock root and indian hemp to prevent infection. There's a native healer on the rancheria who's teaching me some of the native pharmacopia," he explained as he rebandaged the shoulder. "They're hardly the savages you think them."

"You don't approve of the missions, Doctor?"

Helm began to repack his bag. "I don't approve of slavery."

"Hardly slavery." Montoya carefully pulled his shirt around himself and began to fasten the buttons. "The good fathers teach them, civilize them, and in time-"

"And in time they become what? A gente de razon: loyal servants and workers bound by fear of both God and man." For a second time he almost fell into their familiar rhythm of challenge and response, but he drew a calming breath and picked up his bag to leave.

As reluctant as Montoya had been to summon his physician, he was now equally unwilling to let him and his self-righteousness escape so easily. "You would have made a good Jesuit, Doctor." The cryptic statement stopped the man as he reached the door and he looked back with suspicious, narrowed eyes. Montoya raised his hands in rhetorical defense. "Oh no, I do not mean it that way. To the English, perhaps, the Jesuits have become a byword for cunning and intrigue, for betrayal. But that is a misunderstanding. No," he continued. "The Society of Jesus is nothing if not loyal. But they are loyal only to God and obedient to no nation, no king, no man on earth except their Vicar-General. They have such zeal, such idealism: scholars, scientists, artists, even reclaimed prodigal soldiers like Saint Ignatius himself. But that is hardly surprising: converted sinners always make the most implacable evangelists, don't you find?"

A haunted expression darkened Helm's features. "Maybe," he murmured as if to himself. "Maybe because they know how difficult faith can be. Maybe because they need so desperately to believe it's possible." He rested his bag on the floor by the door. " But I fail to see-"

"The Jesuits pioneered the mission system you disapprove of so, Doctor, though they never set foot in Alta California. They went alone sometimes, but mostly in pairs like the teachers of the early Church, into the wilderness of this New World. They learned the native languages and customs. They would probably have listened to your healer, too," Montoya remarked. "And mixed your infernal wound potion. I greatly prefer your willow bark medicine, by the way."

Helm managed a brief smile, but he said nothing. Montoya began to pace about the room. "Father Antonio Montoya," he began again after a moment, glancing out of the corner of his eye to guage Helm's reaction to the name. "He spent his life among the savages along the Paraguay and Parana rivers. He and his Jesuits preached the Faith. They charmed the native caciques into abandoning their jungle villages and leading their people into the missions, resettling them on lands the native tribes could claim as their own. All of which only made them more convenient prey for the slave-traders of Sao Paulo." He paused. "And within lifetime all that Father Antonio had built was destroyed, his converts killed or enslaved by bandeirantes. And in that, my dear Doctor, you may observe the brutal price of idealism." He expected Helm to disagree, to champion the nobility of the failure, but the doctor kept silent; perhaps somehow he realized that he had no need to argue, that this Montoya had always been half-envious of his predecessor's courage and will, his faith and integrity.

"Even that failure couldn't stop the priests. They started again, and this time they flourished. For nearly a century the Jesuit province of Paraguay was technically Spanish, but in effect it was its own entity, a native kingdom in its own right. Others had gone to the Americas searching for El Dorado; the Jesuits created it." Montoya passed his eyes over the comforts of his room, the trappings of his pseudo-imperial life. His own carefully constructed El Dorado now appeared to him only so much gilded vanity. He frowned: he was losing control of his own parable. "The Jesuit lands became rich, far richer than the colonies along the coast, and so the missions-and the Jesuits and their dangerous ideas about the equality of all Christian souls--became a threat. The Jesuits were expelled from all Spanish territories. The missions were turned over to priests more willing to compromise with earthly kings. Perhaps they were less effective, less zealous-or perhaps only more pragmatic."

"And the moral of this history?" Helm asked quietly

"The eternal conflict between idealism and pragmatism." Between the two of them. "Theoretically the mission lands are only held in trust by the Crown and the Church until the converts were ready to take control of them. Effectively... well, you see how the system works. But tell me, if the missions were dissolved, how long do you think the indios would keep their land? How long before the dons took it all for their own? At least this way they have a home on the rancherias."

"An interesting argument." Helm hesitated a moment, then walked over to where the Colonel stood. "But what would Antonio Montoya have thought of your slaughtering innocent men?" The question, the stance offered challenge, the familiar currency of their friendship.

Montoya smiled. "I would not call the renegades innocent."

"Pedro, Carlos and Estefan. They have names. But I didn't mean them; I meant the Chunut. Or didn't you know your savages had a name as a people?"

"They aided the rebels. They fought us."

"Some might say they only defended themselves." He paused a moment. "And after they surrendered?"

"It was necessary. An object lesson." Montoya shrugged. "That horrifies you? Really, you must have seen such things before." Helm looked away. "Besides, I had too few men, too few supplies to keep them all prisoner, and their deaths made the women all the more governable. It was necessary."

"Is it so easy for you to kill?" Helm's voice was barely more than a whisper in the gloom.

Montoya drew back as if struck. They were no longer talking about the missions or about the battle. The conversation had taken a very personal turn. "Not always," he admitted. No, sending Grisham to murder his friend had been one of the most difficult things he had ever done. He had stood at his window that afternoon as well, staring blankly out of the plaza. Wondering absurdly whether, when the moment came, he would feel that restorative bullet shatter his own brain. Waiting. But he had thought it a necessary sacrifice. He met Helm's gaze. "I won't apologize for doing what had to be done."

But had that betrayal been so necessary, after all? He had hardly been surprised when Helm confronted Grisham about drugging Vera Hidalgo. That had been all but inevitable: the deception could not have continued forever. "What are you going to do about it?" Helm had demanded, afire with the seductively dangerous, passionate intensity of his convictions. Whatever complicity he suspected-for the doctor was no gullible innocent unacquainted with deceit-he expected Montoya to do the right thing. And at that moment, Montoya had known, he could have done it. He could have pretended shock; he could have denounced his captain. Escape from the morass the whole affair had become-salvation-had been only a word away. He had hesitated, weighing the alternatives. He had seen the flicker of fear in Grisham's eyes before the choice, and the surprise and outrage in Helm's afterward. And having betrayed his friend's trust, Montoya could not believe he would not be betrayed in return.

So now they stood here, the two of them, in a room where the frail lamplight had ever less power to keep the dark at bay.

Finally Helm turned to go. Montoya instinctively extended his hand to stop him. For a long moment it seemed as if he might pull away. "I have to go." He looked back over his shoulder. His hazel eyes caught the light. "But it will be all right," he said with hesitant gentleness. "The wound will be painful for a while, and there will be a scar. But it will heal."

Come to me now
lay your hands over me
even if it's a lie
say it will be all right
and I shall believe

Broken in two
I know you're on to me
that I only come home
when I'm so all alone
but I do believe

That not everything is gonna be the way
you think it ought to be
Seems like every time I try to make it right
it all comes down on me
Please say honestly
you won't give up on me
And I shall believe

Open the door
and show me your face tonight
I know it's true
no one heals me like you
and you hold the key

Never again
would I turn away from you
I'm so heavy tonight
but your love is all right
and I do believe

That not everything is gonna be the way
you think it ought to be
Seems like every time I try to make it right
it all comes down on me
Please say honestly
you won't give up on me
And I shall believe
I shall believe
I shall believe

A couple of historical/textual notes:

St. Ignatius of Loyola founded the Society of Jesus in 1540. An aristocratic soldier, Loyola experienced a religious conversion while convalescing from wounds after a battle.

The Jesuit Antonio Ruiz Montoya published a narrative of his missionary efforts among the Guarani of South America in 1639. The first 11 Jesuit missions on the Paraguay were destroyed by bandeirantes (slave-traders) in the 1620's and 30's. The second phase of 30 missions were far more successful, perhaps in part because the Spanish Crown had been persuaded to allow the Jesuits to arm their converts and form a native militia.

The Jesuits were also responsible for missionary efforts in California. At the time of the Society's expulsion from all Spanish territories in 1767, their missions in Baja California were handed over to the Dominicans. Their plans for missions in Alta California were carried out eventually by the Franciscans.

Pedro, Carlos and Estefan are, of course, fictional characters. Their rebellion is loosely based on the Chumash uprising of 1824, which began at Mission Santa Ynez and soon spread to La Purissima and Santa Barbara. Our Colonel's pursuit and battle I based on a retaliatory raid against a Yokut raiding party made by Jose Antonio Sanchez of the San Francisco Presidio in 1824. And for those who know Central CaliforniaèThe setting for my fictional battle is roughly the marshy meadow where in 1850 Lt. George Derby met a band of Chunut which had, in fact, taken in runaways from Mission San Luis Obispo. In his "Report of the Tulare Valley" (a survey undertaken for the U S Army) he calls the stream Dick's Creek. It is probably to be identified with Avenal Creek. His expedition followed a trail over the mountains from the coast, his route paralleling much of what is Highway 46.

END