by James Blake
Richard Davison gave John Roger a scrawled list of the regional haciendas with which the Trade Wind Company had contracts for coffee and tobacco and specifying the general terms of each of those agreements. He told John Roger it might be a good while before he could provide him with any other records of the company’s coffee and tobacco dealings. He had always kept most business details in his head and been lax about organizing the paperwork, or even reviewing it beyond a quick look at the net income. Since he’d moved to New Orleans, his papers were in greater disorder than ever. John Roger said those records weren’t important. “All I need to know is this,” he said, tapping a finger on the list of haciendas.
Richard Davison slapped him on the back. “You’re the man for the job, all right. Just the same, I promise I’ll get you them other records soon as I can.” And he departed for New Orleans.
The next two months sped by in a blur of planning and preparation. Elizabeth Anne hired a tutor in Spanish and worked hard at her daily lessons and was quizzed on them by John Roger every night. There was a farewell party at the Bartlett home in Concord, and then some days later yet another one at the family’s Rockport estate. Dozens of well-wishers showed up at Boston Harbor to see them off on a raw, gray morning in late winter. Mrs Bartlett wept as if at a funeral. John Roger and Elizabeth Anne waved and waved from the deck rail, hugging close and smiling at the widening world as the ship drew away from the dock.
VILLA RICA
DE LA VERA CRUZ
The city was bright white under the morning sun when the steamer churned past the yellowrock island prison of San Juan de Ulúa and into the harbor of Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, the name long since shortened to Veracruz. The steamer eased up to the dock amid blasts of horns and whistles. The air heavy and tainted with marine decay. A loud Babel of stevedores all along the wharf. Flocks of vultures spiraling over the town, roosting on the rooftops. With their wrinkled red heads and heavy cloaks of black feather they looked to John Roger like a hideous union of undertakers in patient wait of work.
“My God, they’re ugly,” Elizabeth Anne said, holding to his arm at the deck rail.
“Not the most cheerful sight, are they? You’re not sorry we came?”
“Sorry? Johnny, if I had a tail it would be wagging in a blur.”
He bent to her ear and said she had a lovely tail, and she grinned and kissed his cheek. She was feeling better than she had in days, having enjoyed the voyage until rough waters in the Florida Strait afflicted her with a severe nausea. Her stomach had not properly recovered since, and John Roger had gently teased her about the lingering first-time seasickness of someone who had been sailing since she was a child.
Through his connections in the consular service, her Uncle Elliott had arranged for them to be met at the dock by the American consul, a loquacious little Texan named Charles Patterson. He stood but a couple of inches above five feet, his eyes below the level of Elizabeth Anne’s. His sizable mustache was as white as his suit, and his coat flap bulged at the revolver on his hip. He had a team and wagon standing by for their luggage, and as they waited for it to be offloaded he advised them to favor of a wardrobe of light cottons and linen. He said that contrary to the common wisdom, there were four seasons in the tropics—the hot-and-humid, the hot-and-rainy, and very fine spring and fall seasons of about two weeks each.
“It’s nice enough weather now,” Patterson said, “but pretty soon the place’ll turn into a damned caldron—beg pardon, mam. It’s but one reason you don’t find a lot of Americans here other than those passing through on the way to the capital and higher country. Me, I’m from Galveston, so wet heat’s nothing new. Truth be told, I like it. Been here since the end of Mister Polk’s War. Call me a odd duck.”
In Spanish, John Roger said he was sure he would prefer the local climate over the winters of New England. Patterson smiled and with equal fluency told him it was a fine thing he could speak Spanish. He said it was shameful so many Americans who came to live and work in Mexico didn’t know a word of the language and still didn’t when they left. In Spanish more heavily accented than theirs, Elizabeth Anne said she must be an odd duck too—amusing them with her literal translation of the English idiom as “un pato extraño”—because she also liked the tropic heat.
“Truth to tell, the heat won’t hardly be your biggest worry here,” Patterson said. “I assume you folk been told how bad this place is for the yellow jack.”
John Roger said they had indeed been apprised of the region’s notorious susceptibility to yellow fever. “There was a lively debate at the captain’s table one evening,” he said, “as to whether garlic or quinine was the better prophylactic.”
Patterson made a pained face. “I’ve known folk to eat enough garlic to knock over a buzzard with their breath and drink quinine till their ears rang like church bells, and Mister Jack still took them. Me, I had it when I was a kid, so it can’t get me again. If you and the missus aint had it yet, well, I have to tell you the only thing that’ll keep you safe from it is awful good luck.”
“Well then,” Elizabeth Anne said, “I’d say we are as well protected as can be, as we are certainly blessed with good luck.”
“Glad to know it,” Patterson said. “Best thing in the world, good luck. Except for sometimes. Like this gambler fella I knew. Wasn’t all that skillful, actually, but just about always come out winners. Everbody at the card table always cussing him for a lucky so-and-so and he’d just smile and say he’d ruther be lucky than good. Said it an awful lot. Everbody knew what he meant by it and probly most of them agreed. But it’s the sort of thing can start setting teeth on edge if it gets said too often, and no matter how lucky a fella is with the cards, the luck aint been invented that’ll help much when some sore loser gets tired of hearing about your luck and takes a mind to lean across the table and shoot you in the eye. Which is what happened to this fella I’m talking about. Guess you could say he was a little too lucky for his own good.”
Elizabeth Anne gave John Roger a sidelong frown. “An instructive parable, Mr Patterson,” John Roger said. “But it seems to me that the fellow’s failing was not so much an excess of good luck as an excess of talking about it.”
“Yessir, that too,” Patterson said. “The Mexicans say the quickest way to have your luck go bad is to talk about how good it is.”
“I take your point, Mr Patterson,” Elizabeth Anne said, “and I will make no further mention of our you-know-what.”
“Call me Charley,” Patterson said.
He had their baggage loaded onto the wagon and gave the driver delivery directions and sent him on his way. Then escorted the couple to the Trade Wind Company office near the far end of the wharf so John Roger could look it over. The place was infested with cockroaches but otherwise in good order, needing only a scrubbing and some new furniture. To keep the roaches in check, Patterson advised buying a couple of iguanas at the nearest market and setting them loose in the office. There was an adjoining warehouse for storing the coffee and tobacco before its export to New Orleans. Elizabeth Anne took two steps through its door before whirling right back out, sickened by the lingering stench of the fishmeal formerly stored there. Patterson said he could recommend a good crew to scour the room clean.
They went out onto the malecón—the seawall promenade fronting the harbor—then crossed over to the zócalo. The arcades were lined with shops and the handcarts of vendors. The square teemed with businessmen in pastel suits, peons in white cotton, beggar women in black head shawls asquat on the church steps, their skeletal brown hands extended to the passing world. There were spouting fountains, walkways flanked with wrought-iron benches and towering palms and broad shade trees shrilling with parrots. The redolence of flowers mingled with the aroma of coffee and the piquancy of cooking spices and the stinks of garbage and animal droppings and open privies. Marimba bands chiming at various points of the square. Patterson said he hoped they liked that sort of music because they would be hearing a great lot
of it. They passed an alleyway where a pair of buzzards gorged on a dog carcass and Elizabeth Anne remarked on the scavengers’ profusion. Patterson said to be grateful for them, they were the city’s main means of street sanitation. In the shade of an arcade stood several lines of persons awaiting their turn at one of the tables manned by scribes who for a fee would write any sort of document from a government petition to a personal letter. “Love letters, mostly,” Patterson said. “Lots of love letters. Somebody has to write them for the Romeos and somebody has to read them to the Juliets.”
John Roger was surprised at the number of people with discernible Negroid features. According to Richard Davison the Spanish had brought Negro slaves to Mexico but they proved unnecessary in the face of so much available Indian labor. Patterson said that was so. “You’ll find plenty enough niggers all over the Caribbean, Lord knows, but hardly any in Mexico except for some of the port towns, and the most of them right here in True Cross City. Way back when, they mixed with the Indians to make a breed called zambos. Pardos, some call them. Gave the mestizos and mulattos somebody to look down on. Whatever their race, all Veracruzanos are called jarochos. It’s a word the old Spaniards used for insolent, profane people, and believe you me, you won’t find a more foul-mouthed folk anywhere in the country. There’s an old joke that if God banned cussing in Veracruz you’d have a city full of mutes.”
At Elliott Bartlett’s behest, Patterson had seen to the rental and readiness of their new home. It was only two blocks from the zócalo, a large two-story house in a well-tended neighborhood called Colonia Brisas. It fronted a street shaded by palms and was enclosed by high stone walls whose tops were lined with broken bottles affixed in cement. There were two front entryways—a heavy wooden door reinforced with iron bars, and a wide carriage gate of wood six inches thick. The gates opened onto a spacious cobblestone courtyard with a large circular fountain centered with a statue of Poseidon brandishing a trident and spouting water from his mouth. There were clusters of banana plants ten feet high, mango trees red-yellow with fruit. Clay pots of flowers hanging all along the portales. The smell was of florescence and mossy stone. The residence was staffed with an elderly female cook, a pair of teenage housemaids, and a young man with a game leg who lived in the carriage house and served as a general handyman. Patterson made the introductions all around and gave the Wolfes a tour of the place, then bid them good day and went back to the consulate.
That evening, they ascended the indoor stairway to the rooftop where there was wickerwork furniture under a sturdy ramada of vines and palm fronds. Up there was a sea breeze and they could view a greater span of the starry sky, could see the harbor lights and the glow of the central plaza through the trees.
Elizabeth Anne kissed him and said, “Thank you, dear man, for bringing me to this brave new world.”
The nausea that had begun on the voyage continued to trouble Elizabeth Anne, and though she was sure it would eventually ease, it did not, and John Roger grew concerned. They had been in Mexico more than a month before she acceded to his urging that she have a medical examination. Patterson referred her to an expatriate English nurse, a lank horse-faced widow named Beckett whose husband, a doctor, had died of yellow fever a few years before. “She’s good as any doc in town,” Patterson said.
It took only a few minutes for Nurse Beckett to determine that Elizabeth Anne was pregnant. “Two months should be my guess, perhaps a bit more,” she said.
Elizabeth Anne thought she must be mistaken. How could it be, after three years of fruitless effort? “But are you absolutely certain?” she said.
“Doubtless,” Nurse Beckett said.
“There’s no possibility of error?”
Nurse Beckett smiled. “Be assured, Mrs Wolfe, the only question is whether the child will be male or female.”
John Roger’s first reaction to Lizzie’s report was also incredulity—and then he whooped in elation. That night they held each other close and talked till a late hour about their grand turn of fortune.
When he gave the news to Patterson the next noonday, the little man insisted they repair to a cantina for a congratulatory cup of rum. They ended up having several, over the course of which Patterson became wistful and his drawl more pronounced. He told John Roger he’d been a widower for sixteen years. Except for the loss of his wife, his greatest regret was their failure to have children. She miscarried their first two and had not conceived again.
“It’s all we got to leave of ourselves in this world is children,” Patterson said. “Man or woman without a child dies and it’s like they never lived except to add a little more dust to the earth. The fella who said a wife and kids are like hostages to fortune and put an end to a man’s adventuring days and so forth was probably right, but I’ll tell you what—I’da quit my adventuring days long ago in trade for a living child. I’d give an arm today if Dame Fortune was willing to make the deal.”
They took leave of each other as the city was rousing from the midday siesta. The shops reopening, the zócalo resuming its bustle. John Roger watched Patterson crossing the square with the precise stride of a man who knows he’s drunk and wants not to let it show.
John Roger didn’t know why—maybe because of all the talk about children—but his father had come to mind. Roger Blake Wolfe, the outlaw stranger. He had not often thought about him since his days at Dartmouth, but since coming to Mexico he’d occasionally dreamt of him. He could never recall much about the dreams except that his father’s face was always indistinct and yet he seemed always to be smiling. Jimmy had told Elizabeth Anne of John Roger’s having being orphaned in childhood and reared by an aunt and of the loss at sea of his mariner brother, Samuel, and John Roger had thanked her for her expression of sympathy. During their courtship he had frequently come very near to telling her the truth but had each time resisted the inclination, fearing that her love for him might be bruised by the fact of his outlaw father. It pained him to persist in the falsehood, but once they were married he felt he had let the lie go on for too long to rectify it, and so never had.
For reasons less explicable, ever since his arrival in Veracruz he had resisted the impulse to search in the local archives for information about his father. But now, standing outside the cantina and goaded by both the afternoon’s rum and the fact of his own impending fatherhood, he more strongly than ever felt the urge to learn what he could about Roger Blake Wolfe. Across the plaza was the municipal building where the public records were archived. He consulted his pocketwatch. Then crossed the plaza and went into the building. In his brief time in Veracruz he had become well acquainted with the unruliness of Mexican recordkeeping and was not yet as adept as he would become at navigating its disorder, and it took him a while to uncover the sparse records pertaining to his father.
It was late afternoon when he came back out. He paused at the top step and gazed across the plaza at the cathedral. At the wall where the firing squad executions took place. Patterson had confided that during his first few years in Veracruz he had attended a number of public executions before losing interest. “I never did hear any last words worth remembering,” he said, “and after a while the entertainment wasn’t hardly worth the standing in the sun amongst all them people.”
Right there’s where he took his last breath, John Roger thought. He imagined his father against the wall and facing the muskets. Contained in the archival records was a newspaper report by an eyewitness journalist who included such details as the condemned man’s neat grooming and fearless—even cheerful—attitude, and told of a scrap two young women got into over him. Told of his rejection of a blindfold and of his casual bearing to the very end. And told too of his decapitation, yet another detail absent from the British Embassy’s letter to his widow.
He looked toward the harbor and the San Juan de Ulúa fortress where the head had been displayed from the tower. Where was it now, his father’s skull? Was it yet intact somewhere? Did it lie at the bottom of the sea, little fish passing t
hrough the empty sockets and the casing that had housed his mind? Had it been blown into the mountains and reduced to shards? Pulverized to dust and scattered on the wind?
He took a mule trolley to the graveyard, where according to the records the headless remains had been interred. He searched all the crooked rows of vaults and gravestones as the tree shadows deepened and the air grew heavier, but he found no grave with the name of his father. He spied a gravedigger at work and told him of his search and was told that several hurricanes had hit the city since 1829 and the flood of each one had opened dozens of graves and carried their contents away and maybe that was happened to the one he was looking for.
When he debarked from the return trolley to the zócalo, the red sun was almost down to the rooftops. He was crossing the square when he spotted a sketch artist, a white-haired old man, sitting under a tree alongside the arcade of the scribes. A sign attached to his easel said “retratos.” And he had an inspiration.
He sat down on the stool facing the old man, who smiled and said, “A su servicio, señor. Tinta o carboncillo? Grande o chico?” An ink drawing cost more than one of charcoal and took a little longer to make, but the detail was more faithful. A full-sheet sketch of course cost more than a half-sheet. John Roger chose a half-sheet ink portrait, and the old man set to work with deft flicks of his quill, the nib darting between ink pot and paper, his eyes cutting between John Roger’s face and the sketch pad. He finished the drawing in minutes. John Roger looked it over and expressed admiration for the likeness. “Otra cosa más,” he told the artist. And described the beard he wanted added to the face.
The old man shrugged and said, “Muy bien, señor.” And went to work again, twice pausing to make sure John Roger was satisfied with the way the beard was shaping. When the alteration was complete, the old man handed him the drawing and John Roger stared hard at it. The finished face was exactly as his mother had many times described it to him and his brother.
