Baltazar Montoya Character Analysis

“At Ácoma,” [Father Jesus] said, “you can see something very holy. They have their portrait of St. Joseph, sent to them by one of the Kings of Spain, long ago, and it has worked many miracles. If the season is dry, the Ácoma people take the picture down to their farms at Ácoma, and it never fails to produce rain. They have rain when none falls in all the country, and may have crops when the Laguna Indians have none.”

So did they rid their rock of their tyrant, whom on the whole they had liked very well. But everything has its day. […] The women, indeed, took pleasure in watching the garden pine and waste away from thirst, and ventured into the cloisters to laugh and chatter at the whitening foliage of the peach trees, and the green grapes shriveling on the vines.

When the next priest came, years afterward, he found no ill will awaiting him. He was a native Mexican, of unpretentious tastes, who was well satisfied with beans and jerked meat, and let the pueblo turkey flock in the hot dust that had once been Baltazar’s garden. The old peach stumps kept sending up pale sprouts for many years.

Father Latour’s recreation was his garden. He grew such fruit as was hardly to be found even in the old orchards of California; cherries and apricots, apples and quinces, and the peerless pears of France—even the most delicate varieties. He urged the new priests to plant fruit trees wherever they went, and to encourage the Mexicans to add fruit to their starchy diet. Wherever there was a French priest, there should be a garden of fruit trees and vegetables and flowers. He often quoted to his students that passage from their fellow Auvergnat, Pascal: that Man was lost and saved in a garden.

“At Ácoma,” [Father Jesus] said, “you can see something very holy. They have their portrait of St. Joseph, sent to them by one of the Kings of Spain, long ago, and it has worked many miracles. If the season is dry, the Ácoma people take the picture down to their farms at Ácoma, and it never fails to produce rain. They have rain when none falls in all the country, and may have crops when the Laguna Indians have none.”

So did they rid their rock of their tyrant, whom on the whole they had liked very well. But everything has its day. […] The women, indeed, took pleasure in watching the garden pine and waste away from thirst, and ventured into the cloisters to laugh and chatter at the whitening foliage of the peach trees, and the green grapes shriveling on the vines.

When the next priest came, years afterward, he found no ill will awaiting him. He was a native Mexican, of unpretentious tastes, who was well satisfied with beans and jerked meat, and let the pueblo turkey flock in the hot dust that had once been Baltazar’s garden. The old peach stumps kept sending up pale sprouts for many years.

Father Latour’s recreation was his garden. He grew such fruit as was hardly to be found even in the old orchards of California; cherries and apricots, apples and quinces, and the peerless pears of France—even the most delicate varieties. He urged the new priests to plant fruit trees wherever they went, and to encourage the Mexicans to add fruit to their starchy diet. Wherever there was a French priest, there should be a garden of fruit trees and vegetables and flowers. He often quoted to his students that passage from their fellow Auvergnat, Pascal: that Man was lost and saved in a garden.