Country of the Bad Wolfes

by James Blake

  The child was a boy. They named him John Samuel.

  By the end of the Wolfes’ second year in Mexico the Trade Wind Company was earning higher revenues from coffee and tobacco imports than Richard Davison had ever dared to expect. John Roger had improved the logistics of the business, reducing the costs of transporting the commodities from the haciendas to the port and then shipping them on to New Orleans. And because not so much as a cupful of coffee had gone missing from the company’s warehouse under John Roger’s management, Richard was now convinced the Mexican broker had been pilfering the coffee he’d reported stolen every year. “But never mind that,” he wrote to John Roger. “I doubt we could prove it and it wouldn’t be worth the trouble nor expense to try. Its a business insult and that aint the same as a personal one. I anyway learned a long time ago to cut my losses and don’t worry about yesterday. What counts is today and tomorrow.” He was so pleased with John Roger’s work that he not only raised his salary for the second year in a row but also put him on a commission. And John Roger prospered.

  He and Lizzie had sometimes talked about making a trip to Mexico City to acquaint themselves with that storied metropolis. But it would be nearly two decades yet before the rail line to the capital was completed, and the stagecoach trip was long and arduous, and they did not want to be away for so long from John Samuel, who for years yet would be too young for such a rugged journey. But they loved Veracruz and it was no hardship to keep to it. They often swam off the beach in the early sunrise before John Roger went to the Trade Wind office. They strolled the malecón in the late afternoons after his day’s work, sometimes walking all the way to the outskirt of the foreboding Chinese district where outsiders rarely entered and from which its denizens rarely ventured. They had not even known of the Chinese quarter until Charles Patterson thought to warn them about it. “There’s nothing in Chink Town you want to see up close,” he told them. “Take my word for it and keep out of there.” John Roger had assured him they would mind his caution, but as soon as they parted his company they went at once to see that foreign locale for themselves. They had neither one seen a Chinese before nor visited in such an foreign world. The streets here even narrower than in the rest of the city, labyrinthine and smoke-misted, devoid of wagons but crowded with pedestrians and pushcarts, with kiosks vending plucked ducks and shock-eyed pigs and the flensed and headless but unmistakable carcasses of dogs of every size. Where also were sold still other less-identifiable meats and curious vegetables and roots and herbs of tangy scents that mingled with the mélange of unfamiliar smells. Buyers and hawkers bartering loud in what sounded like the speech of cats. Elizabeth Anne held close to John Roger’s arm. Their stares were unrequited, their presence unacknowledged by even a glance that they were aware of, yet no one in that throng so much as brushed against them. They felt like overlarge and ungainly ghosts remanded to some alien afterworld. On the way home John Roger cocked an eyebrow and asked if she would care to return sometime. “I’ll let you know,” she said, and never would.

  They sometimes had dinner at a zócalo restaurant, then joined the spirited crowd of sweaty dancers by the park bandstand. On such nights they would come home at a late hour with their blood in high excitement and go up to the rooftop and make love under the winking stars. They desired more children, but despite their frequent attempts she did not conceive again. Not even after a double effort under the April full moon, which Josefina had assured Elizabeth Anne was the night most auspicious for the womb to accept a man’s seed. Elizabeth Anne discussed their failing hopes with Nurse Beckett, who told her it was just as well, considering her ordeal in delivering John Samuel, whose conception had clearly been a case of lightning in a bottle.

  The good fortune of their first two years in Veracruz included the city’s being spared from its chronic epidemics of yellow fever. El vómito negro, the Mexicans called it, because of its deadliest salient trait. There was a mild outbreak in their second year but the sickness inexplicably quit the city before its contagion could spread. Then late in their third summer the yellow jack struck again—hard—and once more Elizabeth Anne and John Samuel nearly died in each other’s close company.

  Both of the young maids were also stricken. The household’s four victims lay under blankets in a shivering, soaking sweat, moaning with the pain in their heads and joints, soiling their beds, vomiting into chamber pots, eyes and skin going yellow. The house was a mephitic reek. Having contracted the disease in the past, Josefina and Beto the handyman were now immune, and by some blessing of genetics John Roger was among those naturally resistant to it. An understanding of the pathology of yellow fever was still a half century in the future, and there was little a doctor of the day could do for the afflicted beyond prescription of quinine, cold compresses for the forehead, mustard plasters for the feet, and quantities of hot tea. They advised the populace to keep their windows open to the fresh air day and night.

  John Roger spent most of every day tending to Elizabeth Anne. When he was not drying her brow or spooning broth to her or holding the pot for her to vomit into or cleaning her and changing her sheets, he would be reading to her from her favored volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets, suspecting that his words had little register in her fevered mind but hoping the sound of his voice was itself some comfort. Josefina sneaked a dead beetle called a crucifijo under Elizabeth Anne’s pillow and another one under John Samuel’s. Characterized by a thin red cross on its black back, the bug was a rare sort long regarded by the local Indians as a curative for the vómito negro. Josefina had found only those two crucifijos in the garden, else she would have put some under the pillows of the maids as well.

  The plague worsened. The stench of the sickness carried through the narrow streets. So too the raspings and bangings of the coffin makers, the lachrymose wails of the bereaved. There were daily processions to the cemetery. Doors all over town were hung with black crepe. No one in the city dared to shake hands or even stand too close to another. The two young maids now bled from the mouth and nose and could not keep from screaming their pain. When their vomit began to look like black coffee grounds Josefina made the sign of the cross over them. They died within a few hours of each other, and their meager corteges were added to the succession of mourning parties trudging to the graveyard.

  At length the epidemic diminished and then at last was gone and both Elizabeth Anne and John Samuel recovered. She would hereafter fatigue more easily than before and have to take greater care in the sun, but John Samuel’s skirmish with the disease had no more lasting effect than did the desperate struggle of his birth. He was not yet three years old and his eyes were now green as his mother’s, his hair the same coppery shade. He would grow into a hale, clever, polite boy and would earn the unanimous praise of his tutors. But he would always be a solitary soul, even after he married and became a father. He would never form a close friendship nor regret the lack of one, and nobody—not his parents, not his brothers, not his wife or children—would ever really know him. He would not shed a tear in his life until his final moments. And his happiest memories would forever be of his mother coming to his room in the evenings to sing him to sleep.

  Toward the end of their fourth year the news and public discourse was mostly of war. Since its humiliating defeat by the United States and the loss of half of its territory to the Yankees, Mexico had been fighting with itself more often than not. With rarely as much as a few months’ peace between them, one uprising followed another, as first this political faction and then that one conceived a new plan of national government and declared itself in rebellion against the incumbent regime. Even when a revolt succeeded for a brief time, nothing would change in the lives of the impoverished multitude, and the country’s leadership would remain as autocratic and avaricious and unstable as ever. Now the nation was embroiled in its most brutal civil war yet—the War of the Reform, between the Liberals of Benito Juárez, whose principal objective was an end to Church power in Mexico, and the national Conservativ
es, an alliance of the ecclesiastical and the secular rich, who opposed any change to their privileged order.

  As in most other wars, this one was largely fought in the interior of the country and had but small impact on Veracruz, which had not been badly damaged by warfare since the Yankee invasion. But Mexico was now of so little interest to its newly grown behemoth of a neighbor that news of its latest internecine bloodshed hardly carried beyond Texas, an unawareness reflected in Mrs Bartlett’s letters to her daughter. They were always full of questions about her grandson but made only cursory inquiry of what else might be new and implied a total ignorance of Mexican affairs.

  There was a federal garrison near the Veracruz port, but it was always quick to ally itself with any general who arrived with a larger force and declared himself in command of the city. In every such instance, pressgangs would scour the streets for recruits. Males of military age stayed out of sight until the occupiers departed, usually before long, and then the city would revert to its easy ways until the next time it was taken over.

  Every war also prompted some among Mexico City’s moneyed class to flee to Veracruz in readiness to take refuge outside the country if need be. The War of the Reform brought a greater number than usual of such affluent refugees. And as always, they sold jewelry at bargain prices in order to have ample hard money in hand. Even as John Roger was persuading Richard Davison to expand the company’s range of imports to include a variety of exquisite ornamentation wrought by Spanish and Indian craftsmen of the past three centuries—necklaces and brooches and bracelets and rings—he was already buying all the refugee jewelry he could. Richard found a ready market for it and the company’s profits rose to new heights. And John Roger grew richer still.

  RECKONINGS

  It was in the late summer of that fourth year that John Roger received a packet from New Orleans containing records of Trade Wind business in Mexico prior to his employment. Richard’s enclosed note said, “Heres the stuff I promised, sorry it took so long to round it all up but you anyway didnt need it just like you said you didnt to do the good job youve done. Never much cared for working with papers my self. Do with them what you will.” John Roger smiled at the thought that the man surely did keep a promise, no matter how long it might take. He was certain that by this time there could be nothing in the old records of use to him, and he thought of pitching them in the waste can, but it was not in his nature to get rid of any papers he had not at least scanned, so he emptied the packet’s contents onto his desktop and began sorting through them.

  Among the papers were the Mexican broker’s annual invoices to the company for the coffee and tobacco he had received from the various haciendas and in turn shipped to the United States. For the past four years John Roger had sent similar invoices to Richard Davison. It was no surprise to see that the amounts of a commodity delivered to the broker by each of the haciendas had varied from one year to the next, some years more, some years less. With one exception. During the years of the broker’s service, the annual delivery of coffee by a hacienda named La Sombra Verde was always the largest of any plantation. And always greater from year to year. It had by far earned more money from the Trade Wind Company than any of the other haciendas. It puzzled John Roger that the name of the company’s most productive plantation for those years was only vaguely familiar to him. He referred to his own invoices and saw that La Sombra Verde had not only produced less coffee in each of the past four years than in any of the previous six, but less by far than all the other plantations. Either the hacienda had undergone a monumental reversal in productivity—coincident with John Roger’s assumption of Trade Wind management in Mexico—or the broker had been inflating its figures. He shuffled through the papers and found the broker’s annual theft records. The amount of coffee reported as stolen from the warehouse, after delivery by the haciendas, had grown greater every year, but always a little greater than the increase in La Sombra Verde’s reported delivery. The broker hadn’t been so foolish as to let the amounts match exactly.

  Well now. Richard had been cheated, all right, but not in the way he’d thought. The broker hadn’t been stealing coffee out of the warehouse. He’d been charging the company for coffee that didn’t exist.

  Had the owner of the hacienda conspired in the scheme? Every hacendado had to sign the delivery invoice from his own estate. It was not impossible that the broker had substituted forged invoices for the actual, but why do it for the same hacienda every year when it would have been more plausible to forge a different estate’s invoice each time? The only answer was collusion between the broker and La Sombra Verde.

  The question now was, So what? Richard had been right in his suspicion of being cheated, but he was also right that they could never prove it. And as Richard had also said, even if the broker had been cheating, it was over with—it had stopped with John Roger’s takeover of the Mexican branch operations—and the company’s only concern should be with the present and the future.

  But the swindle was too irksome for John Roger to shrug off. He had heard that the broker, whose name was Guillermo Demarco, was still doing business in Veracruz, but he had never had occasion to meet him. Nor was he acquainted with the patrón of La Sombra Verde, one of only two or three hacendados under contract with the Trade Wind he’d not met, having dealt only with their agents who brought the commodities to port.

  The next day, during their weekly lunch date at a zócalo restaurant, he told Patterson all about it. The little Texan didn’t know anything about Guillermo Demarco but said he would make discreet inquiries and let John Roger know what he found out. He did, however, know a good deal about La Sombra Verde. The hacienda was more than 250 years old. It encompassed an area of over forty square miles and its nearest boundary to Veracruz lay about thirty-five miles up the coast. But it was bordered in a very odd fashion, flanking the Río Perdido for a mile to either side at the estate’s widest point and a half mile to either side at its narrowest, all the way from an upland coffee plantation down to the river’s outlet at the Gulf of Mexico. A meandering property that spanned a diverse geography of foothills and pastureland, a portion of rain forest, and a mile of seacoast. The nearest town was Jalapa, ten rugged miles from its westernmost border.

  Originally established by a Spanish nobleman named Valledolid near the end of the sixteenth century, La Sombra Verde had by patrimony passed down through generations of eldest sons, all of them forceful men equal to the responsibilities and duties of a patrón. And then a generation ago it was inherited by twenty-one-year-old Martín Valledolid, an impetuous and romantic young man. He had been the patrón for only a year when he fell in desperate love with a beautiful but spiteful girl named Yasmina Montenegro, who took pleasure in toying with his affections. She lived in Veracruz with her widowed father, a former army officer named Claudio Montenegro. She had always been an exasperation to Claudio and he was as eager to marry her off as she was to be married and gone from him, but he had been hoping for a match of some benefit to himself. In Martin Valledolid’s rapture with Yasmina, he recognized a singular opportunity. He denied him the girl’s hand except in wager against the title to La Sombra Verde. Martín refused the proposition twice but was too addled by love to refuse it the third time, and in the presence of a dozen astounded witnesses he lost the hacienda on the turn of a card. His family reviled him for his monumental stupidity. His younger brother attacked him and broke his nose and jaw. After a futile series of legal efforts to retain the property, the family disavowed Martín and resettled in Córdoba.

  For his part, Claudio said it seemed only fair to permit Martín to marry Yasmina anyway—though he insisted they would have to make their own way through life—and the young man was overcome with gratitude. The couple rented a house in Veracruz, where Martín secured employment as a customs officer at the port. But they had been wed only six months when he discovered Yasmina’s cuckoldry. When he confronted her, she laughed and admitted to several lovers, whereupon he throttled her and
then drowned himself in the harbor. He left a note accusing Claudio of having cheated him out of the hacienda and he put a curse on the place for as long as it was in Montenegro hands. Claudio made a proper show of public mourning for his daughter and son-in-law and said poor Martín had obviously and tragically become deranged. And in private said good riddance to them both and laughed at Martín’s curse.

  But no sooner had he gained ownership of La Sombra Verde than its fecund coffee farm, which had always kept the hacienda solvent, was ravaged by a blight that inexplicably exempted every other coffee plantation in the state. In the years since, the farm had never achieved even half of its former yield but had managed to bring in just enough money from year to year to maintain the hacienda’s strained subsistence.

  The coffee farm’s setback was in keeping with the Montenegro family’s long history of misfortune. Most of its males died in infancy and its females were disposed to early madness. It was whispered that such propensities were signs of incestuous breeding. A neighboring hacendado named Beltrán did not whisper it softly enough, however, and when Claudio got wind of what he’d said he rode directly to Beltrán’s estate and gave him the choice of a duel or a public admission that he was a liar and a cowardly son of a whore. They met at a riverside meadow at sunrise and fought with pistols at forty paces. Claudio took a minor wound to the hip but his own ball lodged in Beltrán’s gut and the man lay in agony for four days before dying. The episode inspired a greater caution among the local gossip-prone, and from then on, the Montenegros were as zealous in defense of their family honor as any Creole clan of classical lineage.