The Ghost of Brother Patrick

A heavy snow fell from the moonless sky. Winds swirled intermittently, vacillating between gentle breezes and hammering gusts. Brother Patrick huddled freezing against the back wall of the single room mission. Father Johannson and Brother Markos were already dead, having been killed by the savages a week earlier. With shivering, trembling hands, Brother Patrick made the sign of the cross and prayed. He prayed daily, almost hourly, for relief. His food would be exhausted in a few days, and the blizzard showed no sighs of abating. He was about out of firewood, too. The only two items he possessed in great quantity were water and faith. He believed that his God would grant him salvation, and he would be relived. Their sojourn to spread the good word had degenerated into a primitive battle for survival. The savages had completely rejected Christianity, despite the clerics' best efforts. On of the problems, the missions believed, was that the savages did not understand English and could not truly embrace the Word of the Lord.

The savages, actually a centuries-established tribe of Kiowa, had, at first, invited the Brother Patrick and his companions into their company offering food and supplies. However, when the white visitors openly mocked the medicine man and declared his authority to be invalid, the Kiowa chief politely asked them to leave. But the visitors persisted, deriding ancient beliefs and traditions, all for an unknowable deity and an unusual object called a cross. The chief never wanted to harm the clerics, but they would simply not go away, having built a little structure only a mile from the main Kiowa settlement. Reluctantly, he ordered his warriors to kill the clerics and put a stop to this nonsense once and for all. Two were caught away from the mission, but the third stayed inside with the door secured. The snowstorm provided the perfect opportunity to finish him off. The chief himself went with his warriors that night.

Brother Patrick could hear nothing except the wind, and when the door was kicked in, he was deep in prayer. He looked up to see the stoic face of the chief looking down at him. Brother Patrick repeatedly made the sign of the cross and muttered prayer after prayer. The chief reached out and picked up the journal in which Brother Patrick had written.

"You are incorrect," the chief said in English to an astonished Brother Patrick. "I do understand your tongue, and I do understand your attempts to convert my people. We have no need for your god, just as you have no need for any of ours. I asked you to go, but you did not. Now, my stubborn and foolish visitor, you will die."

Brother Patrick could not scream without his severed tongue. As the wooden mission burned, Brother Patrick, bound from the ceiling by his outstretched hands, finally understood the moral futility of his endeavor, and in a gesture of defiant outrage, hoped that his death would be a lesson to others.

The Kiowa warrior peered through the sights of the Winchester at the lone rider approaching the settlement. After decades of trade and conflict with the European settlers, such weapons were prized possessions among many Native American tribesmen. Seeing the rider wore the simple robes of a friar, the warrior did not fire, but lowered his rifle. He approached the man, and smiling he took the horse's reins and led them into the camp. About thirty towering tepees arranged in a rough concentric pattern around a large center area dominated by an enormous fire pit.

A tribal elder, resplendent in a long, feathered headdress, emerged from one of the tepees close to the center.

The friar dismounted and tentatively approached the elder. "My name is Brother Frederick," he said extending a hand. "Most people just call me Brother Fred. I'm a Marianist monk, and we're establishing a mission about half a day's ride to the east." He pointed in the general easterly direction.