The Staircase (23 page)

And so it was that I saddled Ben, and Sister Roberta took a horse from the stables, and together we went about town that Saturday afternoon, to see if anyone had come in contact with the carpenter.

We first went to the lumberyard, where the man said no, the carpenter had never been there. He had never placed an order. The Bishop owed him no money.

"Then where did he get the wood?" Sister Roberta murmured.

The sun shown warm, already melting the snow. There was the excitement of the coming holiday in the air. We saw goods piled high, money exchanging hands; we smelled hot, fresh bread and coffee, roasting piñon nuts. Gaming tables were set up, and gentlemen of leisure and some soldiers were partaking in this vice. We asked at booth after booth. Some of the bazaar owners knew me because of Mrs. Lacey. Always, the answer was the same.

"No, we have not seen him."

"Nobody like that has been here."

On the way home we had to move our horses aside because there was a horse race right on the street. I thought I recognized one serape-draped young man as he dashed by on a magnificent steed. Yes, I was sure of it. It was Abeyta. Horse
racing was illegal, but his father would pay the fine, if I knew anything about him from Elinora.

IT WAS DECIDED
there would be a supper in the carpenter's honor, anyway. The following Wednesday evening. All the day girls would be asked to stay, and their parents would be invited.

There was to be stuffed turkey, wild duck, venison, fish, sweet potatoes, plum pudding, sweetmeats, syllabub. The Bishop was to preside. There was even rumor that he would wear his violet vest, something he did only at Christmas.

But the carpenter never came to collect his pay. The tubs he'd used to soak his wood in were nowhere on the property. Nor were his tools. And, of course, we never saw his mule again.

We had a fine dinner in his honor, anyway. And Bishop Lamy wore his violet vest.

FOUR MONTHS LATER,
when I left the convent of Our Lady of Light, the tracks of the new Santa Fe Railroad came onto the plains of New Mexico, only sixty-five miles from Santa Fe. But I was not going that way. I was going to Texas.

Jesse James was in Nashville, Tennessee. There were no real outlaws in Texas anymore, but they did have the Texas Rangers. My daddy was an important manager on the Santa Gertrudis Ranch. He had his own adobe house with a nice courtyard. A Methodist circuit rider came through once a month. There was a school for the children on the ranch, and yes, I could bring Elena.

All my trip had been arranged by Bishop Lamy. Teresa Espinosa, Elena's wet nurse, and her husband, Georgio, and their baby boy were to accompany me. Along with an escort of six
expert riflemen and scouts, supplied by Abeyta's father. There were three wagons in all.

It was a fine April morning. The apricot, cherry, peach, and pear trees were already in bloom. Lilacs were all around. Abeyta and Elinora stood, hand in hand, watching as I made ready to climb on Ben's back. Baby Elena was already sleeping in the back of the wagon.

Then, just before I mounted, Elinora grabbed my arm and whispered something into my ear. Had I heard her right?

I smiled down at everyone, from Ben's back.

I had my cat, my horse, my coin from Jesse James, my books and lessons from the sisters, food in great plenty from Ramona, and the blessing of Bishop Lamy himself, as well as his promise to come and visit.

There were waves and cheers. Then came the "gee" and "haw" and "wo ho," and we were off for the last time down the main street of Santa Fe. People stared at us and waved as we passed. And I was surprised to realize that I felt as if I were leaving home.

I WOULD MISS THEM,
all of them. Even Elinora, whom I'd promised to invite to the ranch in the future.

But, had I heard her right?

There had been a lot of chatter and gay good-byes, but I know what she said. "I did prick your cat in the eyes that day. So if she's not blind—well, didn't you tell me that the carpenter held her?"

I sat, benumbed, on Ben, keeping pace with the wagons. For the last four months, everyone at the school and convent had persisted in believing that the carpenter had been Saint
Joseph. And I'd scoffed at the idea. After all, everything I was stood in the way of believing it.

People had come to see the staircase in droves. Local people and those from out of town. Experts in wood came to examine it and say they knew no wood like it within hundreds of miles around. The girls and the nuns would have their miracle, and they would hold on to it.

"How do you explain how quickly he built it?" they asked me. I said I didn't know. He was a good man. Maybe he sneaked helpers in the back door of the church at night. How did we know?

I knew only one thing. He wasn't Saint Joseph, that carpenter.

As for me, I'd witnessed miracles at Our Lady of Light, all right. Mrs. Lacey, for one. Bishop Lamy, for another. Sister Roberta. Maybe even, in the end, Elinora. And finally, the fact that my father wanted me.

I'd been happy with those miracles. They were enough for me. Until a few moments ago, when Elinora had whispered in my ear. She'd saved her best for last, to try to convince me, when I couldn't come back with a reply. Truth to tell, I didn't have one, anyway. I might never have one.

Now I saw Sister Roberta handing Cleo back to me that day, long months past, and saying, "She's blind." And I knew she'd been blind. And I saw José picking her up and looking at her in the barn and saying only, "She might see again. You must love her and care for her well."

Saint Joseph? Could he have been?

As we passed the hills that led to Fort Marcy, I looked up. Bishop Lamy had had the cemetery repaired. The day was
warming. In the distance the Sangre de Cristo Mountains still had snow on top. But what drifted down on us now were the white seeds of the cottonwood drifts in the fields.

I heard Mrs. Lacey's laugh as we passed old Fort Marcy. "Those Polly Purehearts wouldn't know Saint Joseph if he did come."

THE STAIRCASE
IS A NOVEL
based on one of the most famous legends in Santa Fe, that of the mysterious carpenter who came to build a staircase in the Chapel of Loretto when, with the completion of the chapel in 1878, it was discovered that there was no way to get to the choir loft.

I have used the history of Santa Fe and this legend as a springboard from which to write my fictional story.

The actual story goes that the Sisters of Loretto, brought to Santa Fe in 1852 from Kentucky by Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy to run the Academy of Our Lady of Light, the girls school attached to the chapel, consulted with many builders, carpenters, and architects. They were told that a conventional staircase to the choir loft would take up too much space and that the choir loft should be rebuilt, at great expense, or a ladder used.

The sisters began a novena to Saint Joseph.

Then along came the beggar-man carpenter, with his mule and only three tools, a hammer, a T square, and a saw. Some accounts say he built the spiral staircase—which makes two
complete circles and has thirty-three steps—in two weeks. Others claim it was months. When it was finished, the nuns were so pleased, they planned a feast in his honor. But he was nowhere to be found. And men at the lumberyard where Bishop Lamy had an account for him said they had never seen him. He never came to collect his pay. He was never seen again.

The good sisters concluded that the carpenter beggar-man had been Saint Joseph.

To this day the staircase stands in the chapel, which Bishop Lamy had patterned after the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. Gleaming and renowned, the only difference today is that it has a banister that was added in 1883.

It has been visited by people from all over the world. Made with wooden pegs and not nails, it has been examined over the years by many architectural experts, who cannot account for the wood used, and have determined that it is not to be found anywhere in New Mexico.

THAT IS THE BASIS
of my novel. And, when my husband and I visited Santa Fe in 1999, this story of the staircase was immediately told to us by the shuttle driver as he took us from the airport to our hotel. To be sure, the Chapel of Loretto was one of the first stops in our tour of Santa Fe. I saw and touched the staircase. The story so intrigued me that one of my next stops was the local library, where I went through the clip files on the story and pursued the names of further books to read about the subject.

I knew immediately that I would do a book. The whole idea seemed to present itself to me "of a piece," as one would say in the eighteenth century. Especially when I heard of the girls school also run by the nuns under the direction of Bishop Lamy.

Of course, with the exception of Bishop Lamy, most of the characters I have used are of my own invention. Like Uncle William. But after extensive reading about Santa Fe at that time, including folklore and history, the characters seemed to literally take seed and grow in my mind.

From folklore I borrowed Lozen, woman warrior, and the witches who lived in town at the time. All represent the rich cultural traditions of nineteenth-century New Mexico. And Jesse James, a folk hero of the time to young girls, whose exploits were constantly in the newspapers and who was already himself a legend.

Santa Fe—indeed, all of New Mexico—can be summed up in the two words that seemed to appear in all studies:
spiritual
and
mysterious.
Indeed, mysteries abound that seem to grow out of the mix of Indian, Mexican, and Catholic beliefs and culture.

Imagine being a girl of thirteen seeing this place for the first time, after coming from the staid, workaday, small-town world of Independence, Missouri. Imagine having a father who lost one arm in the war, as well as his Georgia plantation. Imagine being displaced and abandoned here, the only Methodist in a houseful of Catholics, and having just lost your mother.

This is Lizzy Enders. Up until now her fantasy has been to meet Jesse James. Uprooted and placed in a convent in a neglected part of the American frontier, where boys wear dresses on the altar and she is surrounded by lifelike statues of bleeding saints, this Protestant girl from the Midwest finds she has stepped into a hornet's nest of intrigue, where miracles and visions are the order of the day.

I can clearly recollect being of such an age in Catholic school, when the graphic stories the nuns told us about the
beheadings and torture of martyrs, and of Christians being devoured by lions, were a matter of everyday study. We were taught that to die for one's faith was the highest calling, that the most notable achievement in life was a happy death.

I remember wanting to have a vision even more than today's young girls want to see the latest pop star in person.

The next best thing, of course, was to have a calling. Just as clearly, I recollect the envy I and other girls felt when a girl announced she had one. And so, with such memories intact and with the wealth of research I did about Santa Fe, grew my story.

Having read Willa Cather's
Death Comes for the Archbishop,
which is about Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy and his southwestern parish, I came away with nothing but admiration for the man, and I hope I have done him justice in my depiction. Mrs. Lacey is a combination of two people, one from research and one real. (The latter is a Catholic priest in Trenton, New Jersey's Spanish section, who could not walk down a street without being stopped by dozens of people. Once when I walked with him, he paused to either bless or give out money to half a dozen people.)

Elinora, of course, is every introspective young girl's childhood nemesis, the in-your-face rival who violates all rules, yet always seems to come out landing on her feet. The idea of having the girls conduct a hunger strike to get their own way in the school is mine. As is their initial rejection of the carpenter. But girls confined in a convent are not always devout, retiring, and repentant. More often they are rebellious, bored, and dying for adventure. And they will find it in the smallest distraction. They will make the most mundane cause an enchanted challenge.

For me this story had all the ingredients for intrigue. Yet, at the same time, it presented a challenge. Wandering in the unforgiving landscape of New Mexico at her tender age, Lizzy is bordering on becoming a lifetime cynic since her father ran off and her mother died. She nurtures a healthy disrespect of the bloody mysteries of Catholicism. She takes her miracles in small doses. To her, miracles are people: Bishop Lamy, Sister Roberta, even, at the end, Elinora. But most of all the very fact that her father eventually wants her.

Lizzy, whose girlhood soul is still only partially painted over with the graffiti of mistrust and doubt, must stand back from the general acceptance that the beggar-man carpenter she brought around was really Saint Joseph. Yet she must be left one small window of belief open to her—the blind cat, no longer blind since the carpenter held her. Does she believe when she leaves the convent? The jury is still out, as it is still out on the fact that the man who built the actual staircase was Saint Joseph. I wanted to leave it up to the reader to decide.

Lizzy Enders comes reluctantly to Santa Fe and the school, hoping only to find someday in her life her hero, Jesse James. She leaves a better person, yet not quite believing she has met Saint Joseph.

Cather, Willa.
Death Comes for the Archbishop.
New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

Hansen, Ron.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward, Robert Ford.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.

Hillerman, Tony, ed.
The Spell of New Mexico.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976.

Kutz, Jack.
Mysteries and Miracles of New Mexico: Guide Book to the Genuinely Bizarre in the Land of Enchantment.
Corrales, N.M.: Rhombus Publishing Co., 1989.

Lamar, Howard R, ed.
The New Encyclopedia of the American West.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998.