There is a mission church at the edge of the village, on the road to the main highway almost dead center between Vaughn and Santa Rosa. The Chapel of St. Helen. It is a beautifully simple, single nave chapel with its main entrance opening, as tradition would have it, toward the west. The altar, too, is modest and without the decoration of reredos to narrate the lives of the saints. Above the altar stands a statue of St. Helen herself, holding the Cross which she was reputed to have discovered during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Around the property there is a chain link fence which protects the church and cemetery from the open range animals roaming freely.
The chapel was not built until 1926.
On January 3, 1911, a regional newspaper reported that the Reverend Father B. Alphonso Halterman of Puerto de Luna would be returning to Vaughn in three weeks time to unite in marriage four Spanish couples. Three of the couples lived in Vaughn. The church there was built by the workers of the nearby rock quarry entirely of tin cans and wooden crates, emptied of their blasting powder and dynamite, and filled instead with dirt and rock. The cans were stacked in double rows, twelve foot high, for the walls, and the crevices were plastered with adobe. When the church was dedicated the previous summer, it had a roof made from two large wagon sheets supported by a length of railway steel for the ridgepole. The bell hung from one corner by a short piece of discarded steel, and was rung by a long piece of otherwise useless iron bar. By the time the priest’s circuit led Halterman back to the crossroads village to celebrate a Mass and welcome the new year, the people of Vaughn had laid a permanent roof atop the unique walls to ensure a warm and comfortable service.
On the appointed day, a Saturday, the ceremony started with three brides and three grooms, dressed in the finest suits and dresses they could afford, all kneeling before the altar, the priest standing above them. Each held a baptismal candle. Behind them were chairs where the novios would sit after the ceremony. The padrinos, the godparents chosen from the families and friends, were standing to the side awaiting their instruction.
The Reverend Father Halterman welcomed everyone and extended his gratitude to all on behalf of the novios standing before him. The ceremony itself was very brief, each person, in their turn, pledging their promise to be true in good times and bad, in sickness and in health. He then called upon each of the padrinos y madrinas to come forward and place the lazos over the heads of the brides and grooms, the rosary reminding them that they should never be far from one another without inflicting pain. The ritual of the lazos was an ancient one, passed from father to son, mother to daughter, from Spain to Mexico, and now it lives still in New Mexico. Each padrino then passed the arras to the priest to be blessed before he in turn passed them each to the grooms. The grooms presented the arras, a small box containing thirteen coins as a dowry to his new wife, a promise to provide for the family that will grow from their union. Each wife, in turn, accepted the arras as a symbol of her trust in her new husband. This completed, the priest invited the newly married novios to sit in the chairs while the parents and family members came to give them la bendición.
Each of the grooms and their new brides lit the Christ candle of Easter with their baptismal candles as a symbol of the new light and hope that their marriage would bring to their future lives together. Thus the mass was ended, and the novios with their large parties of family and friends climbed back into their wagons or mounted their horses and rode off to the houses of the brides. There, the newspaper reported, each of the brides’ families would host a dinner and a dance.
In Pastora, where the fourth couple lived, the pot sat cold over the dead embers, the pork fat congealed on the top of the soup; the tortillas still stacked in the basket were stiffening. The pungent scent of beans and onions in rice still filled the corners of the tiny adobe. If you listened closely, through the black night, you could hear the sound of the rifle shots fired into the air, one after another; the violin and guitar music playing a marcha against which the novios were introduced back into their community. If you closed your eyes, you could see them dancing.
Albuquerque Journal, January 23, 1911. Headline: Takes Own Life on Eve of Wedding, Guadalupe County Young Woman Shoots Self Below Heart, Reloads Rifle and Sends Another Bullet Through Body. On February 20, a jury found her step-father guilty of her murder. If the Chapel of St. Helen had been there, then . . . .
How do I find out why?