Father Juarez frowned. It was not this man’s place to speak. Was insubordination tolerated by everyone here? Still, once again he recognized the truth in these words. He looked back across the muddy stretch of ground that served as the village’s main road and saw natives tentatively approaching in small groups of two or three. He turned toward Jacinto Paredes. “I want you to gather all of the savages in this village, as well as a translator who can impart my words to them. I am going to give them direction myself, and order them to do God’s bidding and build this church. After I eat and freshen up, I shall address the local populace, and you and your men will begin leading teams who will take turns excavating the site and constructing the foundation. They will work from sunup to sundown on all but the Lord’s day, and we will have our church before another year is past.”
The soldier bowed his acquiescence. “Yes, Your Holiness.”
Father Juarez spoke to the men who had accompanied him and bade them have the slaves unpack his belongings. After choosing the least mean house to occupy for the length of his stay, he was presented with food, and while it was not unlike the repasts he had had in similar outposts, it seemed all the more satisfying for being delivered amid such wretched surroundings.
Finally, he was ready to address the converts, and he stood on a raised cart before the spot where the church was to be built, facing the friars, soldiers and natives who had gathered on the adjoining field, the location where Father Juarez foresaw the installation of a rectory garden. He began with a prayer, an invocation, and with his words being translated by Brother Augusto, all bowed their heads in unison. He went on to stress the importance of erecting a church in the village, a physical building dedicated to worship. The other churches had already been built, he said, or were currently under construction, and the workers here needed to get busy and follow suit or risk the wrath of God.
There was nervous muttering at the translation of this last, worried looks exchanged by the natives, and Father Juarez nodded in satisfaction. Finally, his point was getting across.
“Brother Francisco is gone,” he concluded. “I am in charge now, and I hereby order you to begin construction on God’s church under the direction of myself and Brother Rodrigo.”
To this, there was an answer from a man who seemed to be the leader of the savages.
Insubordination again.
“He says they cannot,” Brother Augusto translated. “He says the place where the church is to be built is bad land. They will build the church if it is moved to another location but will not do so if it remains at this site.”
Father Juarez felt his anger rising. He and his men had been nothing but kind to these natives, had brought them God and culture and farming techniques more advanced than any seen before in this heathen land. And how were they rewarded? How were they repaid? By defiance, not gratitude.
He was not about to have his decisions second-guessed by savages, to have terms dictated by half-naked primitives, and, trying to hold in his fury, he said, “Inform them that this site has been chosen by God, that, as men, they may not question His will nor defy His edict. They will build the church, and they will do so on the consecrated land. It is so ordered, and any unwillingness, any disobedience will meet with swift and sure justice.”
Brother Augusto spoke for a moment in the native tongue. The leader of the savages turned to his people and spoke. The reply he received was a short, ugly word that he repeated to Brother Augusto with what seemed to be a smug satisfaction.
“They will not do it, Your Holiness.”
“What?” Father Juarez felt the heat in his face.
“They refuse,” the translator said.
“Then kill them all. As a lesson to those who would defy the Church and the will of God.”
“Should I warn them of that punishment?” Brother Augusto asked. “Should I tell them that if they—”
“No,” Father Juarez said. “Kill them.”
There was hesitation, and soldiers looked to one another as though for guidance.
“Kill them all!” Father Juarez ordered.
The rifles began firing. There was smoke and screaming, the sound of explosions, savages running and falling, the smell of gunpowder, blood and excrement. When it was all over, when the smoke and dust had cleared, when the chaos had ended and the screaming stopped, there was an eerie silence. Standing on his cart, Father Juarez overlooked the scene. Bloody bodies lay in irregular heaps upon the ground, dozens of them, men, women and children, chests blown open, limbs torn apart.
He remained unmoved.
“Bury them,” he ordered. “We will build the church upon their bones.”
* * *
In the years that followed, Father Juarez came to regret his decision, which had been made in anger and haste. His charge was to tame these savages, to teach them, to convert them from their pagan ways. They were like children and should be punished as such, as he’d learned during the time intervening. His penalty for disobedience and sloth had been too harsh, and he had decided to make his home here at San Jardine to atone for his mistake.
For a mistake it had been. Whether or not this land really had been bad or cursed or evil, as the natives had insisted, it had certainly been stained and tainted by the slaughter he had authorized, and was now as corrupted and debased as the savages had claimed it to be.
The spirits here were not at rest.
Was that his fault? Father Juarez knew not. But more than one good man had been taken from them in the prime of life, felled by spirits unseen, the victim of an unexplainable accident or a suspicious unknown illness. Earlier this week Brother Ignatio, unable to cope with the pressures placed upon him, had taken his own life, drowning himself in the cistern by weighting himself down with rocks and ropes. Father Juarez was grief-stricken and filled with remorse. Brother Ignatio had been his best friend and closest confidant, a studious, industrious servant of God who had dedicated himself to bringing others to the light. As a student of Scripture and a scholar of the Catholic philosophers and theologians, he, more than anyone, had known that to take his own life would keep him eternally from God’s grace. Yet he had died by his own hand.
Father Juarez could not understand such behavior. It made no sense. And for such a devout man to so thoroughly reject his own beliefs, to so flagrantly and irrevocably defy his God … It was beyond his comprehension.
Unless Brother Ignatio had not taken his own life.
Those were the rumors Father Juarez had heard. And it was why he feared for himself. It was wrong of him to have such a focus, and blasphemous to be afraid while under God’s protection in His own church, but when he retired at night to his chamber, when he lay upon his cot and stared up at the painted adobe ceiling, he saw shadows that should not be there, shadows that had no source. Shapes darker than the darkness seemed to move about the room, and he would say his prayers loudly so as to drown out the whispers that called to him, the whispers that knew his name.
Now he worried that if Brother Ignatio had been compelled by demons or spirits to take his own life—or, far worse, if demons or spirits had taken life from him—a similar fate might befall himself.
Already there were reports that Brother Ignatio’s spirit had been seen in the bell tower and in the library, two of the places he haunted most in life. If it were merely the natives, or even the soldiers, who had reported seeing this, Father Juarez might well have dismissed the claims. But two of the friars had seen him as well, Brother Martin up close, and the friar recalled with genuine terror espying a face filled with such anger and hate that it distorted the features into something monstrous.