DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP BY WILLA CATHER
I read Cather’s novel across July and August (I read so slowly). I actively miss it. There are two mules in it, named Contento and Angelica; like the main characters, Father Latour and Father Vaillant, they spend their lives together (though in the end the human characters go their separate, destined ways).
Nothing happens, but everything happens, as the two priests live out their mission and their friendship in the new American New Mexico Territory, which of course is the old Indigenous Southwest:
They stopped just west of the pueblo a little before sunset…two large communal houses, shaped like pyramids, gold-colored in the afternoon light, with the purple mountain lying just behind them. Gold-colored men in white burnouses came out on the stairlike flights of roofs, and stood still as statues, apparently watching the changing light on the mountain. There was a religious silence over the place; no sound at all but the bleating of goats coming home through clouds of golden dust.
Honestly I nearly cried when I was done. Every description like a setting sun. Passage after passage like folded drape, unfolding. As in a very old theater, when the velvet cloth falls.