The Padre

Summary

A sun-bleached Franciscan, Father Sebastian, discovers a wailing newborn swaddled in death on a wind-scoured ridge above the San Gabriel valley; he lifts the mote of flesh from its mother’s stiff embrace and, with a taciturn native woman as wet-nurse, treks back to the cloistered hush of the mission. Years unspool in candle-smoke and choir-prayer until the foundling Jose blooms into lithe devotion, his eyes kindled by incense and bell-metal. A single sidelong glance from Papinta—spirited daughter of the presidio—snaps the thread of vocation; moonlit adobe walls witness their elopement, horses thundering toward the cobalt Pacific. Ignorant of waterholes, the lovers veer into the Sonoran furnace where mirages flicker like deranged cathedrals; their skins blister, lips crack, and Papinta’s song dwindles to a rasp. Salvation arrives in the guise of grizzled American argonauts who nurse Jose through febrile hallucinations while Papinta, desperate, drifts toward another man. Rumor of Jose’s survival rides the desert wind to the Padre’s ear; gaunt with penance, Sebastian sets out, rosary clicking like small bones, and at last drags the prodigal from the sand’s indifferent maw. Reunion is wordless: candle, crucifix, and the sound of surf beyond adobe arches.

Synopsis

It is the early days of California. Father Sebastian, trudging his way on foot from the Mission, his attention is attracted to the wall of an infant coming from the crest of a ridge. He finds the body of a Spanish woman. Sitting beside its dead mother, a tiny baby greets the Padre's gaze. Lifting the infant tenderly in his arms, the Father resumes his journey, accompanied by an Indian woman, to whom he has entrusted the care of the orphaned child. Years pass by and we see the infant grown to manhood strong, handsome and a true worshiper; the bright eyes of a pretty Spanish maiden turn the head of our Jose, causing him to forget his duty. How, after the Padre has warned him of the danger, he disregards the advice of the Father and leaves in the night with his inamorata; how, in their ignorance of the trails, they wander out into the terrible desert and almost die from thirst and the burning heat; how they are found by some American prospectors and nursed back to life; how Jose lays in a delirium of fever and Papinta returns to another, and the long search of the patient Padre for his adopted son, which is rewarded at last by finding him. The settings are real and beautiful, the locations being chosen from in and about San Gabriel Mission, the sea coast, the Sierra Madre Mountains and the great desert of southern California.