Blessed McGill: A Book Review

"In my life, whenever I wanted to pray I didn't have time to," I said, " and when I had time to I didn't need to."

-Peter McGill

Texas's First Catholic Saint

Shrake, Edwin. Blessed McGill. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1968.

Edwin "Bud" Shrake's Blessed McGill is not for the pious or the squeamish. It's not for the pure, historical authoritarian. It's definitely not for the reader looking for a typical six-guns blazing, bosom-heaving kind-hearted whiskey-slugging madam goes good, ride off into the yellow setting sun kind of western. No. Blessed McGill is for the rest of us that enjoy the black-humor in life and not afraid to embrace the fallibility of our most enduring personal luggage.

Blessed McGill is the story of Peter Hermano McGill, Texas's first Catholic saint. If you haven't heard of him, well, it's because this is a novel. McGill is a young Austinite who, with his father, saves an Kiowan woman and her son, Jacob Charles Gerhardt, from the hands of a roving band of Confederates looking for Union spies, which they claim Gerhardt's father was and subsequently kill. Upon his father's death, Jacob and his mother live with the McGill's until Luther, the McGill's freed slave, attempts to rape Jacob's mother and is killed by Jacob. Because of his Indian ancestry, Jacob flees expecting the town to lynch him for killing another man. Jacob returns to the western plain and the Kiowan roots given to him by his mother. This sets the stage for a future run-in between McGill and Jacob Gerhardt, who takes on the new Indian name Octavio, given for his strong sining voice. Years later, as McGill earns the Comanche name, He-Who-Will-Not-Die, he and Octavio's paths cross again, and eventually McGill and Octavio trade the greatest loves of their lives for their own vanities.

The narrative of Blessed McGill is written as a journal in the later days of McGill's life in the mountains of Taos, New Mexico. Shrake, although only his second novel, shows his chops as the burgeoning voice of Texas letters. He deftly handles writing with a down-home, backwoods country slant to apply authenticity to the journal, while not betraying too much of the artist's voice. Where some writers get lost, think Zora Neale Hurston, trying to catch every nuance of a dialect and country-way folkism in the narrative (often leaving the reader trying to decipher word-to-word), Shrake takes command of the English language and the Texan lexicon and meld them into an immensely readable and believable mid-19th century travel journal.

Where Blessed McGill really shines, however, is in the themes of religion and love Shrake parodies and attempts to come to terms with. Shrake catches the brutality and existentialism of the Old West, while capturing the growing secularism of early 1960s Texas. Sandwiched between But Not For Love and Strange Peaches we can read the maturing process of Shrake as a writer and a man. We can sense the struggle for spiritual change in Shrake during the tumultuous 1960s through the growth of McGill through Reconstruction Texas. But it is here Shrake also shows us all religion is mysticism and we must all eventually give up what we love to get what we ultimately want. In the end, however, Shrake has the last laugh: is it Father Higgins, the Catholic Missionary, or Peter Hermano McGill who writes the beatified journal of Blessed McGill?