Country of the Bad Wolfes

by James Blake

  Looking from his window John Samuel was wondering the same things. And hoping hard. By daybreak they could barely descry the smoke cloud of the fire steaming itself out against the wetness of the jungle.

  Later that morning came word that Buenaventura’s daily outbound train had derailed. The sabotaged tracks had come apart under its wheels before it even got off the estate. A crew went out to repair the rails—but as before, rifles opened fire from the trees and the workers retreated to the compound.

  The destruction of the tracks was strong implication that the twins were still at large, else Lopez would have no reason to persist. But what if Lopez had given the order to uncouple the rails before he went to the cove in search of the boys?

  Then at midafternoon came a report that both of the main entrances to the hacienda had been blocked by felled trees and that a labor crew had again been warned off by rifleshots—and the proof that the twins were still unfound seemed irrefutable. But had they sailed off before their hunters arrived at the cove, or were they in hiding in the jungle, or somewhere else on the hacienda? And if they had got away and Lopez wasn’t sure of it, how much longer would the man persist in his afflictions of Buenaventura before he gave up?

  As if those two haven’t caused enough misery, John Samuel thought. Now they bring this on me.

  That night a fire broke out at one of the coffee warehouses and its entire store was lost. A few hours later the slaughterhouse was in flames and the damage was extensive. In the last hour and a half of darkness, one of the stables at Rancho Isabela was set ablaze. The hands were able to rescue the horses but the stable would be reduced to ashes.

  When Amos Bentley arrived for his usual Sunday supper with Sofía Reina and María Palomina he found them in red-eyed sorrow. They told him the news of John Roger’s murder and he said Oh my God and slumped onto a sofa and cried like a child. Sófi and María Palomina sat to either side of him and crooned consolations and stroked his head even as they brushed at their own tears. They all three stayed up most of the night, talking of John Roger and bemoaning the loss of him. Next morning Sófi went to the nearest telegraph station and sent a wire of commiseration to her brother and the rest of the family at Buenaventura.

  On Tuesday came the telegram from Bruno about General Espinosa and the man named Lopez whom he’d sent in search of the twins and about Bruno’s fear that disaster might ensue. And now, atop their bereavement, Sófi and María Palomina were afraid too.

  Think of poor Felicia, María Palomina said. So near to giving birth. Imagine her worry! Who is this man, this damned general, to cause such fear to everyone?

  Gloria! Sófi said.

  What? her mother said, confused.

  Gloria! We have to tell Gloria! Sófi said. Gloria’s husband was a friend of President Díaz. Her husband’s father still worked for him. Maybe Gloria could get one or the other of them to speak to him about this and maybe he would do something to help Buenaventura.

  María Palomina’s face was bald disbelief. Maybe who would? The president? The president, Sofita? She bit her lower lip and regarded her daughter as if the girl had lost her mind.

  The idea suddenly seemed to Sófi as preposterous as it did to her mother. But what else was there to try?

  Rather than use a public telegraph for such a sensitive message, Sófi went to Amos, who himself knew Morse code and whose office in the Nevada Mining Company building was equipped with its own telegraph apparatus for private correspondence with far-flung clients. She showed him Bruno’s latest wire and he shared her concern and of course would do what he could to help. Addressing the transmission to Gloria Wolfe y Blanco de Little at the station of the Hacienda Patria Chica, Amos tapped out Sófi’s message, informing Gloria of their Uncle John’s killing and all else that Bruno had said and asking if her husband or father-in-law could in any way be of assistance to Buenaventura.

  Sófi then wanted Amos to send a message to Bruno to let him know she had told everything to their sister, who might be able to help. Amos tried, but Buenaventura was not receiving. The line must be down, he told Sófi.

  Sófi had been home three hours when a messenger arrived from the Nevada Mining Company with a sealed envelope for her from Mr Amos Bentley. It contained a wire from Gloria that said, The matter is being attended to. Be brave.

  CREEDS OF FRATERNITY

  A few days before Gloria received Sófi’s telegram, she and Louis had quarreled about his dalliance with one of the girls in the hacienda laundry. I won’t be like those stupid Creole wives who pretend never to know what’s going on behind their backs, Gloria said. Not me, mister! And because he was no more bred to the role of a hacendado than she was to that of a hacendado’s wife, Louis could not muster the lordliness to ignore her protests and by a cold stare and utter silence make clear that he would do as he damned well pleased. Rather, he chose to profess outrage at the allegation and demanded to know who had told her such a malicious falsehood. She would not reveal that the information had come from her devoted personal maid Leila, who had wept in telling her of seeing Louis and the girl coming out of his office just off the main courtyard, the girl still straightening her clothes. Besides, Gloria knew her husband well and she could see the lie in his eyes. I’m warning you, she said. I won’t be humiliated. Warning me? Louis said. He had an urge to slap her, and that he didn’t was not entirely due to gallantry. Whenever she was truly angry, the look in her eyes gave him pause, it always had. In the four days since the argument, they had not said more than a few words to each other. Edward Little had meanwhile arrived for a visit and was aware of the tension between them, but he never intervened in their marital disputes nor even commented on them.

  When Gloria read her sister’s telegram she put aside her resentment and went to Louis and said, “I need your help,” and handed him the wire. He read it, and then together they went to the library to see his father.

  Edward put aside his volume of Our Mutual Friend and read the message. He asked Gloria how old her twin cousins were. She wasn’t sure but believed it was about two years younger than her Luis Charón, which would make them sixteen.

  “The fella deviling the place aint the problem, it’s the general he works for, that Espinosa,” Louis said. “Find out for me where he is and I’ll do the rest.”

  Edward affected to study the wire as he deliberated the situation. He knew that Gloria had never met her Uncle John Wolfe, the American hacendado her family in Mexico City had not known of until a chance meeting between him and her brother a couple of years ago. Gloria had got the story from her little sister Sófi and in turn related it at the supper table one night while Edward was visiting. She also announced that, as her sister and brother had done, she had added Wolfe to her name, which was now Gloria Tomasina Wolfe y Blanco de Little. Louis joked that he had to take a deep breath just to say it. The Littles had thought it an interesting story, but both men—as well as Gloria herself—had known too much happenchance in their own lives to be awed by the coincidence of her family’s reunion. Gloria told them how much better her Uncle John had made the lives of her mother and sister and how happy her brother had been to go live at the uncle’s hacienda. It seemed unfair, she said, that the only sad part about the reunion fell to Uncle John, who’d made everyone else so happy. According to her sister, Uncle John had thought his brother—Gloria’s father—had been dead for many years before he actually was, and did not learn the truth until many years after he actually died.

  Poor Uncle John, Gloria said. Bruno said he cried when he heard of his brother’s terrible punishments as a San Patricio.

  Anyone observing Edward Little at the moment Gloria disclosed the detail of the San Patricios would have seen no sign of the jolt it gave him, so helpful was his disfigured face in disguising his emotions. He busied himself with his pipe as Louis said, “Whoa there, girl. Your pa was a Saint Paddy? I never even knew he’d been in that war.”

  Edward’s younger sons, Zachary Jack and John Louis, were listening
hard. Now sixteen and fourteen years old, respectively, they were hard-muscled ranch hands but versed in social etiquette by their Aunt Gloria, as they called her, and they knew not to intrude on the conversation of their elders.

  That Gloria had revealed something she had not intended to was obvious from her sudden flush. She looked down at her plate and stirred the lamb stew with her fork. “No. I mean yes,” she said. “Yes he was a San Patricio, and no I never told you.”

  “How come?”

  She looked at Edward, who sat puffing his pipe with an affected casualness. Then said to her husband, “I did not tell you because you and your father are Americans. I was afraid you would both be disgusted by my father as a traitor to your country.” She hesitated a second before adding, “And that you would think less of me. For being daughter to him.”

  For a second, Louis Little fixed her with a blank stare—then chuckled as if she’d made a witticism and he had just caught on to it. He looked at his father, who showed a small smile. The two boys were smiling too. They’d never heard of a Saint Paddy but they were amused by Louis’s amusement. They would soon enough investigate the subject and learn about the Patricios.

  “Listen darlin,” Louis said, “first of all, it wouldn’t matter to me who your daddy was. If he was a damned horse thief or even worse, a preacher, or a damned politician”—that got a smile from his father and a laugh from the boys—“it wouldn’t have a thing to do with how I see you. What I don’t understand is how you could think I’d be disgusted by a man who turned his coat against the United States government when you damn well know I did too. I quit the Union, didn’t I? Quit it and fought against it. On account of it quit me, or it anyway quit the bargain it was supposed to keep with the state of Louisiana. I don’t believe I’m a traitor, though. How can you betray a country that’s already betrayed you? For all I know, your daddy felt the same way. My daddy speaks for himself, but I expect he’d agree there’s all kinds of reasons a man might side against his country and some of them can be right ones.” He turned to Edward. “You told me once you rode with a bunch of Mexicans scouting for the U.S. of A. in that war back then. Did they disgust you, the traitor Mexicans you rode with?”

  “They did not,” Edward said. “They were doing what they believed right.”

  “See?” Louis said to Gloria.

  Edward had not, however, told Louis that the Mexicans he had ridden with had been convicted of numerous acts of banditry and murder before and during the war, and that he himself and another gringo, the only two non-Mexicans in the gang, had been sentenced to be hanged along with them. The entire bunch was spared from the gallows only because General Winfield Scott, commander of the American invaders, was desperate for scouts who knew the country between Veracruz and Mexico City, and every man of the gang agreed to so serve him. They became General Scott’s so-called Spy Company—a foolish name, given that they were not spies but scouts. They were outfitted in distinctive uniforms and provided with fine mounts and armed with the best of American cavalry weapons. The Mexicans of the Spy Company had felt no qualms about fighting against their country. Had in fact exulted at the chance to get even with any number of Mexican enemies, especially the authorities who had wanted to hang them. In siding with the Americans, they had saved themselves from execution, which seemed to Edward as right a reason as any for turning one’s coat. Every man’s first obedience was to the law of self-preservation, and anybody who said different was a damned fool or a damned liar. In full fact, Edward’s association with men of tenuous allegiances had begun even before his membership in the Mexican gang—though no one of his family knew that, either. At the age of seventeen he had ridden with a band of scalp hunters, most of them Americans but some from who-knew-where and who spoke languages Edward had not heard before or since, plus a handful of Shawnee trackers. A company of men with the common purpose of killing Indians for the bounty on their scalps but with no abiding loyalty save each man to himself. Yet Edward believed that each of them must have felt as he did—that in such a company of friendless isolates and outcast wanderers he was among his true breed. A breed bound to the fate that befell them on a hellish afternoon in Mexico’s northern wildlands when they were set upon by a host of Comanches and every man of them slaughtered save for Edward, who survived despite wounds whose scars would stay with him to the grave. And absent his scalp.

  “I am glad neither of you hate me for my father,” Gloria said.

  “You coulda been glad about it a lot sooner if you hadn’t kept it a secret all this time,” Louis said.

  Yes, she said. Now she knew that.

  “What other secrets you been keeping from me?” Louis said, smiling.

  Well, if you must know, Gloria said, I’m really Chinese.

  Even Edward joined in the laughter.

  It was yet another of his lifelong secrets that he too was kin to a captured and convicted, flogged and branded San Patricio—his brother, John. Unlike Gloria’s father, however, John had escaped from captivity after his punishment. His liberation was planned by Edward and effected by a wealthy Mexican woman, a devoted champion of the San Patricios, assisted by a few men in her employ. The woman and three of the men, posing as lawyers she had retained to assist the Patricios, made an evening visit to the prison and were very clever about disguising John Little so that he could leave with her in the place of one of her men, who would stay behind. They were out the prison gate and almost to her carriage when the plan came undone. There was a gunfight on the street and the carriage driver and the two men with the woman were killed, the woman herself arrested, but John Little escaped into the night. Edward had witnessed the fight from a few blocks down the street where he had been waiting for his brother to be brought to him, a saddled horse ready. He was searching the streets for John when he saw a crowd of men fleeing a back-alley cantina. In that deserted tavern he found his brother hanging from the rafters. Lynched by American soldiers who’d known him for a Saint Patrick by the brand on his face. Johnny. Murdered at nineteen.

  He had kept John a secret not because he felt shamed by him but because of his own shame in having failed to protect him, no matter John was his elder by a year. They had somehow got lost of each other in New Orleans in the year before the Mexican War, on their way from Florida to Texas to make their fortune. He did not see John again until almost two years later when the American army assaulted the Mexican force making a desperate stand at the gates to Mexico City. The Spy Company had been with the attackers, the Saint Patricks with the defenders, and amid the pandemonium of the battle’s culminating hand-to-hand carnage came the bewildering instant when he and John recognized each other among the berserkers—and then both of them went down with bad wounds. Edward had healed sufficiently to be in the crowd of spectating American soldiers when the surviving Saint Patricks were punished. For almost forty years now he had carried the guilt of his helpless witness to John’s flogging and branding along with the other Patricios who had been spared the noose. He did not know how his brother had come to be with the turncoats, but knew without doubt that Johnny must have found some breed of fellowship among them, a brotherhood of sorts, else he would not have sided with them, for sure not to the end. Edward could not help but feel included in that fraternity. The brothers of his brother were his brothers too. Hence did he feel bound to defend the family of his daughter-in-law, she who was daughter to a San Patricio.

  He had never met General Espinosa but he had heard Díaz speak of him. He was young for a general and a favorite of Porfirio, who was going to be unhappy about this. Which was why Edward would not assign the job to any of his agents. He would not place any of them at direct risk of the president’s wrath. He could not be sure that Porfirio would forgive even Louis.

  He set aside Sofia’s telegram and said, “I’ll take care of it.”

  “I can do it,” Louis said.

  “I know you can, but it has to be me.”

  “Why’s that? Because he’s a friend of Porfirio
’s? Hell, Pórfi don’t have to know it had anything to do with us.”

  “Of course he does, son.”

  Louis held his father’s gaze. “Yeah, well. Even so. I’m willing to take my chances with him.”

  “I said I’ll do it.”

  He turned to Gloria. You may tell your sister the matter is being attended to, but do not mention my name. Not now or later.

  “Muy bien, Papá Eduardo,” Gloria said.

  THE POWER

  HIS SISTER MARRIED

  In addition to Patria Chica’s general telegraph line, there was a private one in Edward’s study. For the rest of that evening he swapped messages with his agency’s main office at Chapultepec Castle and studied topographic maps. The agency office was belowground, in a stone room that had once served as a dungeon and a section of which still did. Stored there were files on every member of the federal government, every state governor and important political chief in the country, every general officer in the Mexican military. By two in the morning he knew all he needed to know about General Mauricio Espinosa de la Santa Cruz and his residence near Durango City. He then slept three hours and woke refreshed.

  The dawn horizon was a hazy pink when his train left the Patria Chica depot. The train consisted of two cars behind the locomotive, one for himself and one carrying his horse. That afternoon it halted in the high country a few miles outside of Durango City. The umber landscape isolate and hardrock. Mountain peaks looming and dark with timber, low ranges brown as old bone in the arid distance. Edward saddled the horse, a sturdy pony bred for just such country, and tied on his saddlebags and then the deerskin sheath containing his rifle—a Sharps chambered to fire a 550-grain bullet a half inch in diameter powered by a cartridge with ninety grains of black powder. With just such a rifle had buffalo killers been able to fell their quarry from as far away as a mile. He hupped the pony onto an old timber trail that led to the other side of the mountain. The train went ahead to the city’s station, there to await him.