Lizzy Enders’s relationship with José

Lizzy Enders’s relationship with José is a quiet exchange of attention and care that changes both what she can imagine doing for her father and what José is willing to do for her community. He listens when she is distressed, offers counsel without demanding forgiveness, and treats her care for others as consequential. In turn, Lizzy invites him to the work at the convent, seeks his judgment, and tries to persuade him to stay. Their bond becomes especially significant when the carpenter who once advised her about a letter also holds Cleo, speaks tenderly about the kitten’s chance of sight, and leaves Lizzy with a memory that later unsettles her certainty about miracles.

A Listener in the Barn

José’s attentiveness first emerges in the barn, where the lantern-lit animals and the ordinary work of the place frame a conversation unlike the formal instruction Lizzy receives at school. After discussing his own troubles, he notices that she seems troubled and says he heard her talking to Ben. Lizzy admits that she always talks to the horse because Ben listens. José does not dismiss this attachment or turn the exchange back to himself; he asks whether she has heard from her father.

Lizzy explains that her father’s letter concerned his plans to find work on a ranch in Texas, the money he expected to earn, and the price of cattle. It did not apologize for leaving her, though it asked her to write back. She cannot find it in her heart to answer. José responds from his own experience of family and work: fathers worry about finding employment, and work can seem more important to a family than the people doing it. He does not tell Lizzy that her hurt is mistaken. Instead, he offers another way to understand what may be happening while recognizing the burden that work places on a father.

When Lizzy objects that she does not want to write, José says that her father knows what he has done and may be waiting for forgiveness. She need not say that she forgives him; a letter would be enough. The distinction matters to their relationship: José proposes contact without asking Lizzy to deny the injury of being left behind. He urges her to think about it because life is brief and people can wait too long to say things. His counsel does not instantly settle her feelings, but it gives her a possible first step that does not require a reconciliation she is not ready to promise.

Trust in Difficult Matters

Lizzy also turns to José when she is troubled by a note intended for Elinora. She worries that giving it to her could cause harm: it is from a boy at the school, asks Elinora to meet him that night, and indicates that they have already been meeting. Lizzy fears that Elinora may run away with him and that the situation would deeply hurt Elinora’s uncle, the bishop. She acknowledges that she may not be the right person to intervene, especially since Elinora does not like her, but still brings the problem to José.

The confidence is revealing even without a recorded resolution to the dilemma in these scenes. Lizzy presents José with information that she believes could hurt people she cares about, and she explains the competing obligations as she sees them: concern for Elinora, concern for the bishop, and uncertainty about her own authority. The earlier conversation about her father has established José as someone who can listen without turning pain into a simple command. Her decision to confide in him shows that his influence rests not only on his trade or his presence in the barn, but on the trust she has begun to place in his judgment.

That trust is reciprocal in a different sense. José does not treat Lizzy as a child whose concerns are beneath notice. He listens to the seriousness with which she describes the note and the possible consequences. The scenes place his counsel within the everyday labor of the barn, rather than in a position of official authority: he is a carpenter and a man who has experienced separation, but he is also someone Lizzy can approach when the convent’s complicated loyalties leave her unsure what to do.

The Carpenter Lizzy Asks to Stay

José’s relationship with Lizzy is also bound to the staircase and to his unsettled place at the convent. He had come because Lizzy invited him, and he came for her. In the kitchen, he had grown familiar enough to speak about how he hoped he had influenced her for the better. He is lonely and without a family nearby; he has said that he had to leave his own family to fend for themselves. Lizzy’s willingness to write to her father therefore matters to him personally. He might feel that helping her take that step could make up, in some measure, for what he could not do for his own family.

When Lizzy seeks him out, José is mending his sandals on a bale of hay. She tells him she hopes to convince him to stay. He answers that he is not wanted and that the bad feeling in the place pulls people under like an undercurrent in the sea. His response makes clear that the question is not merely whether the carpenter has more work to do. He feels the hostility around him and is unsure that his presence is welcome.

Lizzy produces the letter she has written to her father and asks José to read it. He takes his time, stroking his beard and nodding. When he finishes, he calls it a good letter and says that it bodes good feeling. The exchange joins the personal and practical stakes of his decision: Lizzy has acted on the counsel he gave her, and the letter offers him evidence that his influence has mattered to her. She then tells him that if her father asks her to come live with him, she will likely go. She imagines taking Cleo and Ben, and says she will ask Mother Magdalena whether she can take Elena and give the baby a home. She admits to herself that she is lying to José’s face, a qualification that keeps her promise from being a simple or entirely settled plan.

José asks whether she would do all of that for him merely to keep him for a week, taking food and lodging without charge. Lizzy says she has always wanted a little sister, but cannot look him full in the face. His question recognizes the emotional weight of what she has offered and the possibility that her appeal is meant to persuade him. He agrees to stay for the week. The decision is limited, not a pledge to remain indefinitely, but it gives Lizzy and the convent time: if Saint Joseph does not come, José can finish the staircase for Christmas.

Care, Faith, and the Meaning of a Miracle

The relationship deepens through their shared attention to Cleo. José asks Lizzy what she will do if her father calls her to live with him, and she says she will take the kitten with her. When Cleo emerges from Lizzy’s pocket, José is startled, then cups his hands so she can be placed in them. Lizzy explains that the kitten is blind because of what the girls did. José strokes Cleo gently and responds to the cruelty with sadness, not blame directed at Lizzy. When Lizzy asks whether Cleo might see again, he says she might and tells her to love and care for the kitten well. Lizzy promises that she will.

José’s response fits a broader understanding of faith that he shares with Lizzy. Though she rarely sees him praying in church, he tells her that there are other places to pray and other ways to worship. When she asks whether asafetida can undo the Catholic baptism given to Mrs. Lacey while she was in a coma, José says he has never heard of such a thing. He does not claim certainty about religious rules. Instead, he says that God loves them all alike and is not a punishing God keeping account of human errors. In his view, God made and loved people and wants them to enjoy the beautiful things of the world, including Cleo and Elena.

This conversation gives Lizzy a form of reassurance that is not based on institutional authority or on a guarantee that a miracle will occur. In the barn, among the animals eating their food, she feels a peace that makes her think things will be all right. She asks José whether he will complete the staircase for Christmas if Saint Joseph does not come, and he promises that he will. The promise is practical, but it is also an expression of the care between them: José offers his labor, while Lizzy has already shown that she wants him to be treated as welcome rather than as an unwanted recipient of charity.

A Memory That Reopens the Question

After the girls pray at the chapel, Lizzy runs away because she does not believe the man is Saint Joseph. She remembers that he spoke with her, listened to her troubles, held Cleo, advised her about her father, and told her that he was sad to leave his own family. She also remembers that he was hurt when the girls did not want him around. These details make him, in her mind, a particular man with burdens and feelings, not simply a figure from a devotional story.

Later, however, the memory of José holding Cleo returns with new force. Lizzy recalls that Sister Roberta had identified the kitten as blind and that José had answered that she might see again, urging Lizzy to love and care for her. Lizzy’s recollection does not confirm that Cleo’s sight was restored by José, nor does it prove that he was Saint Joseph. It does show how his gentle words have remained attached to the possibility of a miracle. Her question about whether José could have been the saint leaves the matter open.

That uncertainty gives their relationship its final resonance. José’s importance to Lizzy does not depend on identifying him as supernatural: he has already listened when she felt abandoned, helped her imagine writing to her father without pretending her hurt had vanished, accepted her invitation, and held a vulnerable animal with tenderness. Yet the later possibility changes how she reads those ordinary acts. The carpenter who came for her, who stayed when she asked, and who spoke hopefully about Cleo becomes part of the story’s unresolved boundary between human kindness and miraculous intervention.