House Made of Dawn: 4. The Longhair, July 25 Summary & Analysis

At the feast of Santiago, Father Olguin tells a story about Santiago. In the story, Santiago disguises himself as a peasant and saves the lives of an elderly couple who offer him hospitality. They kill and cook their only rooster to thank him. Later, Santiago wins the hand of a princess in a tournament, but the king dislikes Santiago and orders him killed. The rooster emerges from Santiago’s mouth and warns him of the king’s order, and Santiago defeats the royal soldiers. At the end of his travels, he sacrifices his horse and the rooster to create cultivated plants and domestic animals for the Pueblo people.

Later that afternoon, Father Olguin walks through Walatowa with Angela. He stops to talk to some townspeople, and Angela moves on without him. She appreciates the strong and varied scents of the village, and she follows the sound of drumming to the Middle, an ancient ceremonial area in the center of Walatowa. Father Olguin joins her, and they watch the ceremony begin. Several men and boys ride into the Middle on horseback, and Angela recognizes Abel among them. Another rider is a large albino man in dark glasses. The men compete to pull a rooster from where it is buried in a hole in the ground, and Angela is frustrated at Abel’s lack of grace in his attempts. She deceives him with a smile as he passes her.

The albino man grabs the rooster, and as he passes Angela, she is disgusted by his ugliness. Once he has the rooster, the other men wait for the winner to choose one of them. He chooses Abel, trapping Abel’s horse against the wall and beating Abel bloody with the body of the rooster. When the albino man drops the rooster’s dead body, the townswomen throw water on it as a sacrifice. The experience exhausts Angela. She feels emotionally drained and like she’s been sacrificed, which reminds her of reminds her of the first time she had sex.

Late that night, a sleepless Father Olguin, dressed in a sweatshirt, smokes some cigarettes and reads a journal from 1874 written by a priest called Nicolás. Most of the rest of the chapter consists of these journal entries. On November 16th, he writes about his persistent cough and two brothers, Viviano and Francisco, who cause trouble at church. The next day, he briefly paraphrases a Biblical verse about gift-giving. In following entries, he speaks to God about his illness and mentions visiting an old woman on her deathbed. The old woman dies, and when he attends her funeral, he is displeased that her family and community follow traditional burial rites. Nicolás also notes that despite their mischief, he believes Viviano and Francisco to be good and pious altar boys.

On Christmas Day, Nicolás writes about the Christmas Mass and the logistical difficulties of obtaining a statue of an infant Jesus. He also complains about the chanting and drumming outside the church and hopes Francisco will come by. The next entry is from January 5th the following year. Upon Nicolás’s return from a missionary trip to Cuba, he hears that an albino child named Juan Reyes Fragua has been born in the village. Nicolás advises the parents to baptize the baby as soon as possible. Meanwhile, Nicolás’s illness continues to worsen.

Father Olguin reads a letter written from Nicolás to Nicolás’s brother in October 1888. Nicolás thanks his brother for his gift of books and reflects on the death that approaches as his health deteriorates. He tells his brother that Francisco has betrayed him by continuing to practice his people’s traditional religion, which Nicolás equates with Satanism. Nicolás is personally wounded by this betrayal. He relates a time when a young Francisco fell into the river and Nicolás had the boy stand naked by the fire to warm up. The tone of the letter grows increasingly unhinged as Nicolás accuses his brother’s wife of turning his brother against Nicolás. He closes the letter with long, rambling ponderings on God.

Father Olguin finishes reading. He takes comfort in associating himself with the holy Nicolás. He goes back to sleep, but he has a deformed eye that doesn’t close properly. At the Benevides house, Angela returns home. The house seems to her “a black organic mass” birthed from the canyon, rather than a man-made construct. She no longer sees the house as a place she is visiting, but instead as her dominion for the foreseeable future. She feels that the house, like her, carries secrets.