Country of the Bad Wolfes

by James Blake

  The rail line to Brownsville was less than twenty-five miles long but spanned a number of short bridges in traversing the marshiest regions. The wagon road alongside the track was intermittently corduroyed with logs. But there were wide expanses of drier ground too, vast pale sand flats, here and there clustered with prickly pear cactus and stands of mesquite. In some places the thorny brush was so dense it seemed to them not man nor beast could penetrate it. Chaparral, the locals called such countryside, sometimes el monte. The twins liked its roughness. Marina thought it was an ugly place, but she agreed the immense sky was dazzling.

  The track terminated at the freight platforms at the east end of Levee Street. A clamorous place where goods for Mexico were loaded onto carts and conveyed to the ferry landings on the river. From a clerk in the freight office they got directions to the White Star Land & Title Company. It was only a few blocks distant, mostly by way of Elizabeth Street, the town’s main thoroughfare. Elizabeth Street! The trio grinned at each other. They asked the clerk which was the best hotel in town and he directed them a block north to the Miller. He said they could be assured of fairly clean sheets and practically no bedbugs and of being mostly among Americans, but, as close as it was to the ferry landings, it could get pretty noisy. “Then again,” the man said, “who ever heard of a quiet border town?”

  They went to the hotel and James and Marina sat in the lobby while Blake registered, and then they set out again. On this market Saturday afternoon the town was loud with traffic and a babble of Spanish and English. Elizabeth Street was a graded dirt thoroughfare teeming with wagons and carts and buggies and horsemen, its sidewalks with pedestrians. Many of its buildings were two-storied and had verandahs, and most of the single-floor structures had wooden awnings to shade the sidewalk. There was a thin haze of dust. Odors of horse droppings and aromas of Mexican cooking at once familiar and yet of somewhat different piquancy. The muddy smell of the river. There was no shortage of saloons.

  How strange it was, Marina said. Mexico was just across the river but it seemed so very far away. And although she was walking on a street in the United States, there were so many Mexicans around her she did not feel like she was in the United States.

  “I’ll wager it’s the same way all along the border from here to California,” James Sebastian said. “Like a country all its own.”

  Blake agreed. It’s all that English and Spanish being spoken at the same time, he said. And so much of it mixed together. “What’s the word that . . . patois. You hear those fellas we just went by? Hey Juan, the jefe’s looquiándo for you.”

  James laughed. “Looking and buscando. Border lingo. It’s what happens when one language gets in bed with another.”

  “You have a much dirty mind,” Marina said.

  “It’s what you love about me,” James said.

  She punched his arm. “Sinvergüenza.”

  They stopped in at a bank. Its air of decorum a contrast to the boisterousness of the street. While James Sebastian conferred with a bank officer named Fredricks about opening a joint account in his and his brother’s name—speaking in easy emulation of Charley Patterson’s East Texas accent and using his real name—it was Blake’s turn to sit with Marina in the lobby. The banker’s smile widened as James took bundles of currency from the valise and placed them on the desktop and then emptied the bags of gold and silver specie. Fredricks made quick work of arranging the bundles and coins into neat stacks. Nearly half the money was in Mexican pesos but he was glad to convert it to dollars at the official exchange rate. It was a deposit of uncommon size and the man could not stop smiling. James beckoned Blackie to the desk to cosign the account form. Fredricks asked where they hailed from and James said they were born in Galveston and lived there till they were nine, when they moved with their parents to Veracruz, where their father had been posted as an assistant to the American consul. The banker was impressed—then tendered his condolences when James added that they had lost both parents to yellow fever the previous summer. They had come to the border with an eye to investing part of their inheritance in some promising enterprise, but they wanted to take their time about it and first get acquainted with the region and its economy, with the character of the town and the local ways, before deciding where to place the funds. “Very sage,” said Mr Fredricks. He kept glancing at the valise in Blake’s hand. It was exactly like the one James had emptied of its money and the man was obvious in his hope that there was more to come. But they ignored his pointed looks at it. It held their operating money. Once they took up residence somewhere they would decide where to keep it cached. They shook the banker’s hand and departed with Marina between them.

  Where Elizabeth Street met the perimeter of Fort Brown they turned north and at the next corner found the White Star office. They presented the deed to an agent named Ben Watson, an agreeable man of middle years. When James told him he won the property in a card game in Mexico, Watson nodded as if it were a commonplace occurrence. They gave him the same brief sketch of themselves they had given banker Fredricks, and he too was impressed and commiserative by turn. They saw his curiosity about Marina and introduced her. He shook her proffered hand, said in accented Spanish he was charmed, and thenceforth addressed her as Señora Wolfe, assuming she was married to one or the other, and nobody corrected him. In his presence they addressed her only in Spanish, and he said they surely spoke it well for Americans.

  He examined the deed to make sure the two transfers recorded on the back of it were in order, then got out the ledger in which the original title was recorded and found no liens entered against it. According to the record, Watson told them, their property had once upon a time been part of a Spanish land grant. Much of South Texas had once been part of one grant or another. Who could say why the Spaniard who held the grant had measured off the portion of it described in their deed, or why in 1875 the deed was transferred to a man named Mizzell. “Could be the Mizzell fella bought it,” Watson said, “or could be he won it in a bet, same as you did. Or could be he somehow hornswoggled the Spaniard’s descendants out of it through the courts. There’s been plenty of that sort of thing in South Texas with regard to land grants, I can tell you.” At James’s request he drew up a new deed in the name of both brothers, then Marina and one of the office clerks signed as witnesses and Watson entered the transaction in the company ledger. He would also record the new deed with the county clerk.

  There was a map of Cameron County on the wall and he showed them where the property was. It was bounded on the south by the Rio Grande and on the north by a creek that ran about a mile below the Point Isabel rail line and roughly parallel to it. The creek had never received an official name and so had been called Nameless Creek for as long as anybody could remember. Traversing the twins’ property was a road with state right-of-way from Brownsville to Boca Chica Pass. The property was six miles long, somewhat less than three miles wide at its west end and somewhat more than three along its east side. But owing to the river’s meanders, the width between the north and south boundaries varied from barely a mile in some places to almost four miles at others, and so the area of their land was at best a loose estimate.

  “An average of two and a half miles between the creek and the river is as good a guess as any,” Watson said. “That would give you roughly fifteen square miles. Good-sized piece of land, but if you’ll pardon me for saying so, fellas, it aint really much good for anything. Most of it’s too mucky for raising cattle and it’s way too risky for farming. Even if you cleared it for planting—and there’s parts of it I don’t believe you could clear in a lifetime—that region floods over so often you couldn’t hardly count on a crop. Brownsville’s got a levee, but out there the river comes over the banks just about every time there’s a big storm or even a steady spell of hard rain.”

  “Yeah, well,” James Sebastian said, “we aint thinking to farm it, Mr Watson. Could be we’ll just use it for picnics and such. For going out to look at the birds.”

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sp; Watson’s smile was wry. “Every man to his own pleasures, I always say.”

  “This a lake?” Blake Cortéz said, putting his finger to a crescent figure near a sharp bend in the river along their property.

  “Oxbow,” Watson said. “What around here they call a resaca. That’s a good-sized one.” He pointed to an S-shape and said, “Here’s another, see? Another over here. There’s so many around these parts no map can show them all. This whole tip of Texas is delta country, boys. Low and mostly soggy. River floods over pretty regular and a resaca is what sometimes gets left behind when the river draws back. Others of them get made where the river loops around real tight on itself so there’s a coupla bends close together and then one day the current breaks across from one bend to the other, takes a sort of shortcut, you might say. The cutoff loop left behind pretty soon gets plugged up at both ends with silt and such and presto, you got another resaca.”

  The north and south boundaries—a creek and a river, respectively—were as definite as boundaries could be, but Watson didn’t know if the property lines along the west and east side had ever been staked out. Because they were direct north-south lines, they were simple enough to establish on paper, but at the actual site the line could be hard to stake out if there was a lot of brush or trees in the way of it. Like all the company’s agents he was a licensed surveyor, and he proposed to take the brothers out to the property the next day. If the boundaries had not been staked, he would sight and stake them for the standard fee. The twins said that would be just fine.

  They went back to Elizabeth Street and had supper in a café near the Miller Hotel. When they came out the city lamplighter was making his rounds from post to post, lifting the glass globes and lighting the kerosene wicks. They had bought a county map like Watson’s and were up late that night, poring over it, until Marina prevailed on them to come to bed.

  Watson collected them at the appointed eight o’clock hour in a dual-seat buggy powered by a brace of husky mules. Blake Cortéz sat beside him, Marina and James Sebastian in the rear. Tucked behind the back seat was Watson’s instrument case and a basket lunch Mrs Watson had packed for him and his clients. The twins had tried to dissuade Marina from coming, saying it was likely to be a long day of tracking around in the dirt, but she had insisted on going and said she would not hold them at fault if she got bored. The day promised to be another fine one that would get warm but not hot. Steeple bells pealing. Except for the church-bound, traffic was sparse, and once they were out of town they saw not another soul.

  The Boca Chica road was little more than a rugged trail through the same marsh and sand flats and chaparral they’d seen along the rail line. But in the distance to their right, all along the river bottoms, the landscape was thick with trees—ebonies and acacias and cottonwoods, and above all, tall shaggy palm trees, wide groves of them, one after another, sporadically interspersed with stretches of high brush or grassy flats that afforded brief views of the river.

  “You’ll find bunches of them palms all the way down the river to the gulf,” Watson said. “It’s how come the first Spanish to land here called it Río de las Palmas. Used to be they grew for miles upriver too, way up past Brownsville. The farmers and ranchers thought they were a nuisance and cleared them out.”

  About ten miles from town Watson turned the mules north, the buggy rocking and swaying over the uneven ground, and they soon arrived at the creek and reined up. He unfurled a map and checked the coordinates on the deed once more, then opened up his instrument case and got out the tripod and transit. He was good at his work and it took him but a few minutes to locate the northwest corner of the property and he marked it with a wooden stake. They saw that the western property line would run straight to southward without encountering any trees or heavy brush. “The Spaniard who laid out this boundary sure picked the right spot to do it,” Watson said. “I’ll wager the east line won’t have no more obstruction than this one.”

  He took a due-south sighting with one twin holding the marking pole for him about seventy yards away, moving the pole right or left as Watson indicated with an upraised arm while peering through the scope. When the marking pole was in line with the sighting, Watson snapped his hand down at the wrist and the other twin drove a stake in the ground. In this manner did they advance southward on foot, setting a stake every hundred yards. The twins were within twenty yards of the river when they set the last stake but they still couldn’t see the water for the high barrier of carrizo cane along the bank. When they went closer, however, they heard the current’s rush in the reeds.

  They returned to the buggy and ate the basket lunch. Marina was uncomplaining but the twins sensed she was wishing she had stayed at the hotel. Blake unfurled the map and he and James studied it as they ate their boiled eggs and beef sandwiches. They intermittently looked up from it and off to southeastward. “Say, Mr Watson, this shading along the river,” James said, running a finger over that part of the map, “is it all palms?”

  “That it is,” Watson said. “You fellas got the biggest bunch of em in the county.” His mien was commiserative. “Too bad there aint much you can do with the things. No good for lumber. Makes a poor firewood, so smoky. It’s a job just to make your way through them palms, what with hardwoods and shrub all mixed in with them. I tell you, boys, there’s probly places in there nobody’s ever set foot. Me, I don’t go tracking around in any such jungle, not if I got a choice. Give me streets and sidewalks.”

  After lunch they drove eastward along the creek until by Watson’s estimate they were near the corner of the property, and he again found the spot with no difficulty. They repeated the process for staking out the property line—and Watson won the bet with himself that it would be as free of tree obstruction as the west line.

  As they headed back to Brownsville the sun was more than halfway down the sky and reddening. Watson looked tired but satisfied with his day’s work. Marina dozed in her seat, the brim of her hat pulled low over her face. The twins kept looking back down the road and grinning at each other. Plan forming.

  ROOTS

  They were eager to begin exploring the palm groves along the river, an area Watson had estimated at about six square miles. As they had expected, Marina did not want to go with them and slog around in the mud and live in a tent the whole while. But they did not want to leave her alone in the Miller Hotel. Even in the middle of the night it was as loud as they had been warned, and it housed a number of rough men. The twins would not put her at risk of being accosted or harassed in their absence. They spent the next days looking for a house to rent but there were few available and they had to settle for an old weathered clapboard on Adams Street and near the Market Square. Its outhouse was falling apart and the roof needed repair and the house demanded a thorough cleansing, but Marina agreed it was better than the Miller.

  Over the next two weeks, while Marina gave the interior of the house a good scrubbing, the twins repaired the privy and reshingled the roof and replaced the broken windows. By then they were into the new year. They had strolled down Elizabeth Street on New Year’s Eve, beholding the arrival of 1893 in a din of fireworks and gunshots and high howlings in the streets. Though smaller than Tampico, Brownsville was rougher, and not only on festive occasions. In their first weeks in town they would witness a number of fistfights in the street, a group of raucous spectators always looking on until police arrived. Sometimes knives came into play and someone got badly cut. There were nights they heard gunfire near or far. It was an uncommon week the newspaper lacked a report of at least one killing.

  They took Marina around town to buy household items and cookware. A market stood handy at the street corner. They bought a wagon and a brace of mules, and while she was arranging the house to her satisfaction they drove to Point Isabel to check on the Marina Dos. They retrieved the Colts and shotgun and the rest of their clothes and the document case, locked up the sloop and drove back to Brownsville. That night there was a heavy rainstorm and in the morning th
ey discovered the roof still had a leak and they had to reset a few shingles. Water had run down a closet wall and got into the document case, but the contents were sealed in oilpaper packets and undamaged. Except for one packet with a tear through which the water had seeped and smeared unrecognizable the ink portrait their father had labeled as that of Roger Blake Wolfe.

  They went to a barbershop where Blake had his beard shaved off and they had their hair shorn in the same short style. The customers waiting their turn were as awed as the barber by the brothers’ transformation into an indistinguishable pair but for one’s lower face being paler than the other’s, and three days of outdoor work would remove that difference so that even Marina would again find it hard to tell who was who from more than a few feet away. The twins told her there was no need to hide their twinship on this side of the border. They had expected some sardonic remark about reverting to the dullness of twins in her bed, but she made none. She seemed out of sorts and avoided their eyes. They told each other she was just uneasy about their going away for a while, that she wasn’t yet very comfortable in this borderland world.

  They bought camp bedding and tools and supplies. She was not going with them so they saw no need of a tent. Early one morning they gave her a sum of money and one of the derringers, though she protested she did not want it. Then kissed her each in turn and said they would be back in two weeks or so.

  They explored from west to east and in a week arrived at the largest of the property’s palm groves. There were yet a few more groves to the east of this one, but from out on the road they could see that those palms were neither as tall nor as dense as these. They left the wagon and the tethered mules in a high growth of scrub in the chaparral and out of view of anyone who might pass by on the road—a remote likelihood, as in all the time they had been there they had not see a single wagon or horseman pass in either direction. There was a stream where the mules could water and grass for them to feed on. They waited till the sun was well up before they entered the grove, machetes in hand and their bedrolls and rucksacks slung on their shoulders. This was the thickest grove yet and some of the palms looked to be forty feet high. They had to hack their way through much of the underbrush and were often in mud to the shins. Past midday they were in a segment of grove so dense it was in twilight, and after another few hours they began to suspect they might be going in a circle. Then they saw light through the trees ahead and as they drew closer to it they felt a slight incline under their feet. They came out of the palms and into in a large sunlit clearing—a rectangular expanse about seventy yards west to east and forty yards north to south, the south side abutting the gray-green river, which they could see through gaps in the reeds and cane.