The Priest's Burden

"North," he said. "A missionary expedition. The Ute people."

She looked at him for a long time from her chair by the cold fireplace. Her hands, which shook badly now, were folded in her lap. "Your father went north," she said. "When he was young. Before you were born."

Esteban kept his face still. "Yes. He surveyed the northern territories."

"He came back different." She paused. "He never went again."

"No," Esteban said. "He never did."

She looked at him a while longer, and he had the unpleasant sensation of being read like a document, accurately and without sympathy. Then she unfolded her hands and reached into the pouch at her waist and produced her rosary — black beads, a plain silver cross — and held it out to him. "Take this," she said. "I have another."

He took it. He did not say he would be fine. He thanked her and held her hands for a moment, which was their customary goodbye, and he went back down the three steps into the April dust and the blowing cottonwood seeds that were just beginning to drift through the Santa Fe streets like early snow.

He was twenty-three years old and in the ordinary run of things — the things people could see — he was exactly what he appeared to be: a Franciscan priest of genuine gifts and genuine conviction, assigned to the small mission chapel of San Cristóbal on the eastern edge of the city, serving a congregation of perhaps eighty families. He was not a great preacher in the theatrical sense — he was not the kind of man who worked himself into colored heat, who pounded the pulpit, who wept openly for effect. He was something rarer: a preacher who thought while he spoke. His sermons had the quality of a man working something out in public, and his congregation leaned forward in their pews because they wanted to know what he would conclude.

He had his grandmother Isabela's face — the long jaw, the deep-set dark eyes, the cheekbones that caught light from an oblique angle and gave him an expression of permanent mild surprise. He had his grandfather Alejandro's hands — the long fingers, the steadiness, the particular quality of stillness when he was concentrating that made him look, at those moments, as if he had been carved from patience. He was not tall. He was composed in the way that some small and precise people are composed: entirely, with nothing left over.

The congregation of San Cristóbal loved him without quite understanding why, which is perhaps the best kind of love — instinctive, undiscursive, reliable. They brought him things. Tamales wrapped in corn husks. Bundles of dried sage. A woolen blanket in February from old Señora Montoya, who was ninety and very small and had arrived at the chapel door in the middle of a snowstorm carrying the blanket across both arms like an offering. He had sick-visited eleven families through the winter, had baptized four children, had buried two elders and a young man who had fallen from a roof, had arbitrated a property dispute between two brothers that had been festering since their father's death in 1738. He was competent and present and, in the ways that mattered, good.

And for eighteen months, in the hours before dawn when his cell was dark and the city was silent, he had been doing something else entirely.

The colonial cartography office kept its records in a large, poorly ventilated room at the back of the governor's administrative building — a room that smelled of tallow and decaying paper and the particular dry musk of information that no one had needed in decades. He had gone there first in October of 1740, telling the archive clerk he was researching land grants in the northern territories for a parishioner's inheritance question, which was almost true. He had spent two afternoons that week with his hands in the boxes of survey records from the 1690s and early 1700s, and he had found the reference he had been half-expecting and half-dreading to find.

Valerio Survey of Northern Territories, 1699-1700. Commissioned by the Royal Surveying Corps, Santa Fe, under authority of Gov. Cubero. Filed incomplete. See notation: pages 14 through 22 of primary survey journal not submitted. See also: Cartographer A. Valerio (dec. 1715), primary; Cartographer M. Valerio, assistant.

He had read the notation three times. His grandfather and his father. Both of them. And the pages missing — fourteen through twenty-two of the primary journal — would have covered the northern mountain section of the survey. He had sat for a while with his hands flat on the document box, breathing the old paper smell, understanding that the missing pages were not lost. They were hidden. His grandfather had kept them. And they had traveled, somehow, through thirty years and two deaths and one ordinary life in Santa Fe, into a leather journal tucked into the back of a family Bible.

He had spent the following months cross-referencing. He found a reassignment order from 1702 for a Captain Domingo Salazar — transferred to Chihuahua, the notation marked with a small red asterisk that in the colonial filing system meant disciplinary action related but unpublished . He found a death record from 1731 for one Diego Tafoya, listed as Pueblo interpreter, colonial service, d. natural causes, Santa Fe. The name Diego appeared three times in his father Mateo's section of the journal he had found, always in connection with the northern survey — Diego translates well; Diego is uneasy today; Diego will not say why. He was building a picture whose outlines he had already guessed and whose details confirmed, piece by piece, what the map had told him in a single glance: that something had happened in those mountains in 1699 and 1700, and that his family had been at the center of it, and that the center of it was marked on a calfskin map with a six-pointed asterisk pressed deep into the hide by a man who believed that some things should be hidden but could not bring himself to destroy them.

The map had been the last piece. He had not known it was there — could not have known — until the Bible shifted in his hands on a February midnight and gave it up like a held breath finally released.

Father Superior Garza received him in the large whitewashed office at the center of the administrative building — a room deliberately designed to communicate comfort and power, with its good chairs and its paintings of the Annunciation and its single tall window that looked out onto the plaza where the fountain ran, when it ran, which was not always. Garza was a florid man, thick in the chest and neck, with a complexion that suggested long acquaintance with red wine and the particular self-satisfaction of a man who has correctly identified which way the institutional winds blow and has spent thirty years walking in that direction. He smelled of tobacco from the Oaxacan blend he kept in a cedarwood box on the corner of the desk. He was not a bad man, in the way that a comfortable stone is not a hard stone — the softness was not virtue, it was simply the absence of friction.

He had read Esteban's letter twice, Esteban could tell. There was a quality of over-prepared ease in the way Garza sat — the particular negligence of a man who has composed himself for an audience.

"A missionary expedition to the Ute people," Garza said. He set the letter on the desk without looking at it. "An ambitious undertaking for a young priest."

"The Ute have had very little sustained contact with the mission system," Esteban said. "The Dominguez and Escalante route — which I believe is being proposed for the coming decades — will pass through their territory. A preparatory mission now seems prudent."

He had rehearsed this. It was true, and therefore it was easy to say with conviction. He was becoming, he was starting to understand, very good at true things that were also incomplete things.

Garza nodded slowly. He picked up the letter and read a section of it again — not, Esteban thought, because he had forgotten what it said, but because he wanted Esteban to watch him considering it. "The northern route," Garza said. "Into the Uinta range."

"There have been stories," Garza said carefully, with the air of a man mentioning something casually that he has been thinking about very specifically. "From the old surveys. The Valerio survey — I believe that was your family's name, was it not? Your grandfather?"

Esteban felt something shift in his chest. He kept his face composed. "My grandfather and father both surveyed the northern territories, yes. In 1699 and 1700."

"The survey was filed incomplete," Garza said. He was watching Esteban now with a steadiness that Esteban recognized as the watching of a man who is trying to calibrate how much the other person knows. "There were — mineral reports, I believe. Unconfirmed. Things that were spoken of but never fully documented."

"I'm not aware of any mineral reports," Esteban said. This was true. The reports did not exist. The reports had been deliberately omitted from the filing. He was telling the truth in a way that concealed everything that mattered.