Country of the Bad Wolfes

THE TURNCOAT’S TRIALS

In February of 1845 the United States annexed the nine-year-old Republic of Texas and six months later was still in diplomatic dispute with Mexico over the location of the border between the two countries. The U.S. insisted, as Texas always had, that the border was the Rio Grande. And as always, Mexico insisted it was at the Nueces River, more than a hundred miles north. But it had now become obvious that President James Knox Polk’s greater ambition was to acquire the necessary territory to expand the Yankee republic all the way to the Pacific. Acquire it by whatever means necessary. Newspapers across the country carried heated opinions on both sides of the issue. At the same time that the president was proposing diplomatic resolutions to the border argument—all of them so unfavorable to Mexico that it could never agree to them—he dispatched the benignly named Army of Observation under the command of General Zachary Taylor to the mouth of the Nueces River. Taylor’s ostensible purpose was to protect Texas against Mexican invasion, but as everyone knew, including the Mexicans, Mr Polk was in fact making ready an invasion of his own.

Even before taking refuge in the ranks, Samuel Thomas had been aware of the war talk. But the risk of combat in Mexico seemed a lesser one than facing a murder charge in Portsmouth. He was not the only one in the company on the run from legal complications, and there were of course patriots in the ranks, and no shortage of callow youths in quest of battlefield glory, but the majority of his comrades had enlisted for the ageless reason of escape from poverty. A number of them had arrived on immigrant ships, mostly Irishmen fled from the Famine. But the America they’d landed in was predominantly Protestant and of English stock, and its larger cities were hotbeds of nativist loathing of the foreign tide staining its shores, especially of the Paddies and their slavish papist faith. It was a hatred no less virulent than what the Hibernians had endured in Britain and as much a barrier to any but the most abject jobs. Rather than dig privies or scrounge in the streets for survival, many of them enlisted in the army, believing it a lesser adversity.

In late winter their regiment at last received the order to join General Taylor in Texas. For most of the company, and certainly for Samuel Thomas, who had never been outside New Hampshire before his enlistment, the journey from New York to the Gulf of Mexico was an education in American geography and regional societies. Traversing a countryside early thawing to mud, they were transported by wagons to Pittsburgh and there put aboard a sternwheel steamboat that carried them west along the Ohio River and through country budding with incipient greenery. Where the Ohio joined the Mississippi they transferred onto a side-wheeler for the trip south. The Old Man, the boatmen called the great river, and Samuel Thomas was awestruck by its breadth. The country they passed through grew more distinct from that which they left behind. The dense woodlands along the banks occasionally gave way to verdant pasturelands and fields of black earth so fertile he could smell it from the railing. He saw turtles the size of saddlebags sunning themselves on mud banks and driftwood. Saw a bald eagle high on a pine eviscerating a limp panther cub in its talons. Saw a trio of boys hauling onto the bank a hooked catfish bigger than any of them.

They churned downriver through days of surpassing loveliness and then entered an unseasonable heat broken by sporadic rainfall. When they were not sopped with rain they were sodden with sweat. They passed by a sequence of port towns and made brief moorings at some of them for fuel and supplies. Towns loud and rough and seeming like foreign countries, so profuse were they with Negroes, with the drawling speech of blacks and whites alike. The river journey ended at New Orleans, where they passed two joyous days and nights and Samuel Thomas spent the best two dollars of his life for the pleasures of an octoroon girl with caramel skin and nipples dark as chocolate and a mouth like red fruit. It was said the city suffered from chronic afflictions of fire and flood and devastating storm, that it was notorious for yellow fever and murder and every sort of carnal delinquency. But Samuel Thomas fancied its bohemian character and exuberant wickedness, and he felt somehow more at home in his two days there than he’d ever felt in Portsmouth. He thought he might someday return to stay.

They shipped out on the steamship Alabama. His first view of the Gulf of Mexico was under a low morning sun that made an undulant gold of the water’s surface. He was struck by the dissimilarity of smell from the North Atlantic, the squalling gulls of different cry and character from those of New England. The pelicans were a novel entertainment—graceful on the wing, but in repose so like comical, jowly, big-bottomed bureaucrats. The ship steamed into the gulf under high billowing clouds of dazzling white, and the mainland shrank from view off the starboard.

The weather held well. They were four days on the placid sea before sighting the dark line of the Texas coast. They moored that evening off the shallows of Corpus Christi Bay, the army campfires on the beach glimmering like a fallen rain of stars. In the morning they debarked onto lighters and were ferried ashore. The ship’s crew had already told them much about this badland of winter northers sharp as razors and endless sweltering summers, about the hordes of insects and rattlesnakes, the scourge of cactus and thorny brush, the sand storms that could blind a man sure if he were not careful of his eyes. Considering that Taylor’s army had been here since the previous summer, the new men were surprised to find the camp in high spirits and a flurry of activity. Then learned that Taylor had only an hour earlier received orders to march down to the Rio Grande, Mexican objections be damned. War had not yet been declared, but its imminence could be felt in the camp’s excitement as the soldiers got ready to move out in the morning. “You’re a right lucky bunch to be going straight to the elephant and not spend more than one night in this shithole,” a red-eyed corporal told Samuel Thomas. “A right lucky bunch.”

They set out well before sunrise, off to “see the elephant,” the day’s expression for novel adventure. An hour into the march, in the gray light of dawn, Samuel Thomas got his first look at General Taylor, Old Rough and Ready himself, as he rode his white horse past the column. Craggy-faced, clad in a checkered shirt and coarse pants held up by suspenders, shod in brogans and wearing a tattered straw hat. “Looks like a damned farmer, don’t he?” said a grinning man marching next to Samuel Thomas. “But there aint no better general in the whole army.”

Day after day they marched from dawn to just before sundown, trekking through sun and wind and rain, through sandy flatland covered with mesquites and bramble and thorny scrub brush of all sorts. Three weeks after departing Corpus Christi they arrived at the Rio Grande. Taylor ordered construction to begin at once on a fort directly across from Matamoros and its garrison of Mexican lancers. He christened it Fort Texas, though one of his officers said they should call it Dogtown in deference to all the scrawny mutts at large in the vicinity. It would be two years yet before that raw riparian ground gave rise to the hamlet of Brownsville, but thus was Samuel Thomas the first of the Wolfes to set foot there.

He was there only a short time. On the march from Corpus Christi he had cultivated a hatred of the army far exceeding that of most enlisted men. The root of his antipathy had been planted at Fort Hamilton when he was caught dicing in the wagon shed with two other trainees. All the next day, under guard and in full view of the camp, the three of them were made to stand atop upright barrels on a layer of shattered bricks. It was a constant strain to maintain balance on the unsteady barrelheads, and each man several times fell to the broken brick. At sunset they were helped off the barrels, bruised and aching, bloody of knees and hands, and would be stiff-jointed for days. The punishment made Samuel Thomas resentful, but its severity paled in contrast to what he witnessed on the way to Fort Texas and during his time there. While he understood that severe offenses called for severe punishments, he was enraged by the stark cruelty of some of the penalties inflicted for minor infractions. It was one thing to flog a man bloody for sleeping on guard, quite another to lash him for failure to salute an officer. Or to brand him on the forehead with the “HD” of the habitual drunkard because he stood too tipsy at morning muster. A rifle laxly carried or a tunic improperly buttoned, a surly glance at an officer, an insufficient alacrity in obeying a command—and a soldier could find himself straddling a sawhorse for hours with his hands tied behind him and weights attached to his ankles. Or lugging a ball and chain for a week. Or wearing a heavy iron collar affixed with spokes that made it impossible to lay his head down for sleep. Or passing a few hours sitting bucked and gagged on the ground—immobilized with his knees drawn up and his arms bound around them and a stout stick set crosswise under the knees and over the arms.

In an army whose officers were largely nativist and Protestant, it was only natural that the most maltreated in the ranks were Irishmen, three of whom—Jack Riley, John Little, and Lucas Malone—Samuel had become friends with during the southward march. Though he had no giveaway accent, he had at once been taken for Irish by Riley, and he admitted to an Irish grandfather. In keeping daily company with these men, Samuel Thomas began to assume a mild brogue, though he was unaware of it until they were almost to the Rio Grande and Lucas Malone said, “Listen to this lad, willya? Bedamn if he’s not sounding like he was weaned in County Cork.”

Malone and John Little hated the army with even greater fervor than Samuel Thomas did. Both of them had been punished harshly numerous times, for one offense or another. Both had undergone the buck and gag, and Little had once worn the spiked collar, and Malone had taken a ride on the sawhorse on their first day at the Rio Grande. And though he’d never yet been physically punished, Jack Riley was no less galled than either of them. He had served almost ten years in the British army and earned a sergeant’s stripes even in the face of English bigotry, then had mustered out and migrated to America and joined the Yankee ranks, confident that his military experience would soon win him another sergeancy as well as the respect denied him in Her Majesty’s service. But he found the Irish were as much scorned by the Yanks as by John Bull, and in the six months since his American enlistment he had grown convinced he would never become a sergeant. As a man of sizable self-esteem, it enraged him to be rebuked by college-boy officers not half the soldier he was. The injury to his pride cut deep as a whip.

They had been on the Rio Grande four days when the corporal in charge of Samuel Thomas’s labor detail shot a nearby dog for no reason but boredom. The gut-wounded animal screamed and ran a short distance and fell down but kept trying to run, yowling and turning in a tight circle on the blood-muddying ground for an interminable half minute before John Little drove a pick through its head to end its misery. The corporal was recharging his pistol and didn’t notice Samuel Thomas stalking toward him until too late to avoid the punch that knocked him sprawling with two dislodged teeth. It was Samuel Thomas’s intention to kick the man to death but before he could commence he was subdued by others, including Malone, who hissed into his ear, “Hold enough, lad! Put the boot to him and you’ll be fucked most truly.”

That evening he was convicted of assault on a non-commissioned officer and was sentenced to the loss of six months’ wages, disqualification for promotion for two years, and a week of the buck and gag from daybreak to sunset.

For much of the following week Fort Texas was pounded by rainstorms, and Samuel Thomas was soaked without respite as he sat trussed and gagged in the mud, seething in his fury. On the third day of his punishment, the camp woke to find its soggy grounds littered with leaflets strewn by infiltrators in the night. Printed in English and signed by the Mexican commander in Matamoros, the flyers exhorted immigrant Yankee soldiers, especially the Catholics, to reject the imperialistic mission of the slave-owning, Protestant United States and join with anti-slavery Mexico in defense of its sovereignty and national faith. They promised enlistment bonuses, good pay, and land grants of 320 acres to every Yankee who would fight for the righteous Mexican side. Before the end of the day, the first desertions were reported.

Zachary Taylor was irate. He increased the number of river sentries and ordered them to shoot any man trying to cross over who refused the command to turn back. Over the next days six men would be shot in the water and four others drowned, but thirty or so would make it to the other side. When Jack Riley ambled up to where Samuel Thomas sat bucked and gagged and asked him in low voice if he was for going across, Samuel Thomas did not hesitate to nod. But he was under tent arrest every night of his week of punishment, so they had to wait until he’d completed it. Each day of the buck drove the pain deeper into the roots of his back, and when he was freed of the restraints for the seventh time he could not get to his feet without assistance and it was an agony to straighten up. Still, he was with Riley and Little and Malone that night when they sneaked along the shadows past the fort guards and crawled through the brush down to the river and eased into the water with their boots tied together and hung around their necks.

The river was misty silver under a bright moon but smelled of rot and tasted of mud. The current was stronger than usual with the runoff of the recent rains and Samuel Thomas wasn’t the only one of them close to panic as they were carried downstream while struggling to swim across. Their frenetic splashings alerted the sentries, who shouted a warning and then opened fire. Rifles balls smacked the water around them and John Little was hit in the calf and Lucas Malone nicked along the ribs but they all four made the opposing bank and clambered up through the cattails and into the cover of the trees. Mexican soldiers presently appeared, bayonets at the ready, but when the quartet declared their desire to fight for the Mexican cause, they were welcomed like brothers and taken to the garrison to have their wounds treated.

Thus began the band of Yankee army deserters known in Mexico as the gallant San Patricios—so named because most of them were Irish Catholics—and in the remoter pages of American history as the turncoat Saint Patrick Battalion. The unit’s numbers grew as U.S. desertions continued, and they were formed into an artillery company under command of a Mexican captain, though Lieutenant Jack Riley was the executive officer and their true leader. In their first action against their former comrades, a week before the American declaration of war, the San Patricios bombarded Fort Texas and in the process killed one Major Jacob Brown, in whose honor the fort was renamed and Brownsville would be christened.

Everywhere they went this legion of foreigners pledged to Mexico’s defense was honored by people of every social class. The Patricios were surprised to find that not all Mexicans were brownskinned, though the great mass of them were, being either Indian or, more likely, mestizo, the burgeoning Spanish-Indian caste that had over the past two centuries come to comprise the majority of the population. But the ruling native class, the peak of the social pyramid, was the Creole—the Spanish descendents whose Caucasian blood remained free of Indian taint. They were a courtly society, educated, formal of speech and manner, given to religious ostentation and devoted to European tradition. They were also passionate about their honor, both family and personal, and vehement in redressing injury to it.

In the course of their deployments over the following year, the San Patricios marched through sierra ranges of jagged peaks and thick timber, through deep canyons misted blue with the spray of booming rivers. They traversed broad plains of green and yellow grasses rippling in the wind like a restless sea. They crossed pale deserts flat as tables extending to the burning horizons and shimmering in the heat. They heard the roar of cougars in the mountain nights, their evenings in open country quivered with wolf howls and the high crying of coyotes. In Tampico they were granted two days of liberty and sported on the beach a few miles from town. Samuel Thomas had known only the cold cobalt water of the sharp-shelved North Atlantic coast and he reveled in the warm green clarity of the gulf shallows. They swam, lazed on the sand, got sunburned. They cut coconuts off the trees and hacked open the husks and punched holes in the eyes of the brown nut with their bayonets to get to the cool sweet milk, the most delectable drink Samuel Thomas had ever put tongue to. Where but in heaven might a man get milk from the trees? He relished the spicy native cooking and acquired a taste for the coppery sting of tequila and the smoky burn of mescal. He delighted in the skiffle music of the villages and learned a variety of rustic dances. He had an affinity for the Spanish language and gained swift fluency with it, a great advantage with the camp women who traveled with the army and cooked for it and tended its wounds. Most of these women were young and given to playful laughter and mischievous banter. Any camp woman could share herself with whomever she wished but also had the right to refuse anyone, and a man who tried to take her against her will risked a maiming from his comrades.

The Patricios were a formidable force, dealing heavy casualties in their every engagement and stoking ever higher the vengeful wrath of the Yankees—or “gringos,” as the Americans were now known in Mexico, a newly-coined pejorative that would long outlast the war. But as the fighting progressed, the turncoats began to understand that Mexico could not win and that their own future was headed toward an ultimate choice of dying in battle or at the end of an American rope. Their desperation made them the more intrepid. General Lopez de Santa Ana, the supreme commander of the Mexican army, would later say that if he’d had but five hundred more men of the Patricios’ mettle he could have won the war.

The Saint Patricks fought at Monterrey, at Saltillo, at Buena Vista, at Cerro Gordo. And then, in the war’s decisive and bloodiest battle, on an infernal August afternoon at a place called Churubusco, at the very gates of Mexico City, they were done for. Some managed to escape but two-thirds of them were killed in that fight and the rest taken prisoner, many of them with severe wounds. Samuel Thomas’s left hand was mutilated by shrapnel, his hipbone pierced by a bayonet. He would never again be able to sit a horse, and the thumb and remaining two fingers of his ruined hand would never come unclawed.

Seventy Saint Patricks stood trial for desertion. They were made to wear their unwashed and bloodied Mexican uniforms in court, exuding a reek that intensified the hateful grimaces in the room and seemed in keeping with the odiousness of their crime. Every man of them was convicted and sentenced to hang.

In his judicial review, however, General Winfield Scott pardoned five of the condemned outright on different legal bases, and he spared fifteen others on the ground that they had deserted prior to the declaration of war and so were exempt from the death penalty. Those fifteen—including Samuel Thomas, Jack Riley, and John Little—were sentenced instead to fifty lashes on the bare back and the “D” brand of the deserter burned into their right cheek. Because Lucas Malone’s desertion had erroneously been recorded as occurring six weeks after it actually did, and because the court would give no credence to his comrades’ attestations that he had deserted with them before the declaration of war, he remained among the condemned. “Aint it the shits?” Malone said. “I keep my skin through all the fightin and get done in by some jackass of a clerk.”

Samuel Thomas was among those who received their punishment in front of hundreds of witnessing American soldiers in the main plaza of San Angel, a village on the outskirt of the capital. In the center of the plaza stood a newly erected gallows consisting of a single long crossbeam from which dangled sixteen noosed ropes—the others of the condemned would be executed over the next three days. Set in a row under the crossbeam were eight small mule-drawn carts, and in each one stood a pair of San Patricios with their hands bound behind them. The carts faced a line of trees along one side of the plaza where the men to be flogged were stripped bare to the waist and each one tied to a tree trunk. The officer in charge kept loud count as the whippings were laid on. Samuel Thomas locked his jaws to keep from crying out but he passed out on the thirty-ninth lash. After the fiftieth, he was revived with a pail of water so he would be conscious for his branding. Two men held his head fast while another applied the glowing iron directly below his eye and he smelled his own searing flesh and bone and screamed in violation of his vow that he would not. It went even worse for Riley, who was the most hated of the deserters for being their leader. His brand was applied upside down, purportedly by accident, and so, to the loud approval of the spectating troops, the officer in charge ordered that it be burned correctly into his other cheek. Riley had managed to hold silent the first time but could not stifle himself the second, and his screams roused a great and happy chorus of derision.

Then the hangings. White hoods were drawn over the heads of the condemned and the nooses snugged round their necks. At an officer’s signal, the muleteers’ whips cracked and the carts rumbled out from under the crossbeam and the plaza rang with cheers. A fortunate few of the gibbeted died instantly of snapped necks but most of them, including Lucas Malone, strangled to death, choking with awful sounds as their hysterical feet sought purchase on the empty air and their trousers darkened with piss and shit. The flogged and branded were then made to dig the hanged men’s graves and bury them, Samuel Thomas scooping at the earth with a trowel in his one good hand.

With the fall of Mexico City, the war was over in every sense but officially. It was another five months before the signing in early 1848 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, by which compact Mexico ceded to the United States an enormous portion of land that extended the American border to the Pacific coast. But it was still another month before the treaty was accepted by the American Senate, and then another two and a half months before it was ratified by Mexico. And all that while, the captive Saint Patricks labored daily with picks and shovels in a garbage pit a quarter-mile wide at the edge of the city, a monstrous crater writhing with rats and swarming with flies and aflutter with great flocks of carrion birds. Into this pit were emptied daily wagonloads of every sort of refuse and organic rot, including carcasses of animals large and small, the discard of miscarriages and abortions. The fetor made their eyes water and stung their throats even through the bandanas they wore over nose and mouth, and every man of them had bloodshot eyes and a chronic cough.

They were at first incarcerated in the Acordada Penitentiary, near the center of the capital, and every morning before going to the pit they unloaded dead bodies from the municipal wagons that each dawn collected them off the streets and alleyways, as many of them victims of murder as of exposure and malnutrition and alcohol poisoning and disease and total exhaustion of the will to live. These dead were displayed on the prison’s front steps all day and night for anyone to claim. Those still there the next morning were then removed to make room for the new day’s corpses and were taken for burial in the potter’s field adjoining the garbage pit.

After two of the Patricios escaped from the city penitentiary—both breakouts abetted by visitors—the prisoners were moved to the nearby fortress of Chapultepec castle and visiting privileges were curtailed. One of the escapees had been a diminutive man named Duhan, who dressed himself in smuggled women’s clothing and then simply walked out with the female visitors when they departed. The other to escape was John Little, who had spoken hardly at all since their capture at Churubusco. His liberation also entailed a disguise sneaked in to him by a woman visitor, a rich Mexican sympathetic to the Patricios, though none of them had any notion of why she had specifically chosen John Little to help escape. His disguise was designed to let him walk out in place of a servant who had accompanied her, but the guards became aware of the ruse just as the party was exiting the prison and was within sight of the carriage waiting at the curb. A gunfight ensued and the woman’s two employees were killed and the woman herself arrested. But John Little made away, and none of his comrades would ever know what became of him.

On a day in late spring, less than two weeks before the last American troops withdrew from Mexico, the Saint Patricks were mustered into the central courtyard and there shorn of their hair, every man of them razored to the scalp, blood lacing down their heads, and then made to march in single file around the yard to a drum-and-fife rendition of “The Rogue’s March” while they were vilified and spat upon by the troops. And were finally directed out the front gate and set free. Jack Riley and a few other stalwarts would return to the Mexican army, but the others had had enough of the soldier’s life, and after sharing a common cell for nine months most of them had had enough of each other. As soon as they were into the park and out of view of the American soldiers they began drifting apart in different directions without words of farewell nor mentions of destination, and few of them would meet again. As for the promise of land grants, it had been made by a government anticipating victory over the Yankees and since then usurped many times over.

Even if he’d had the use of both hands and could walk properly, Samuel Thomas would never have returned to the ranks. Nor would he go back to the U.S. The brand on his face was a mark of Cain to Americans and he would be a despised pariah. He might have done as some of the other Patricios had and disfigured the “D” to an unrecognizable scar, but the scar would still attract notice and raise questions, as would his crippled hand and pronounced limp. To say the maimings were war wounds would oblige him to answer queries about the unit he had served with and of some of his officers and comrades. And what of his name? “Samuel H. Thomas” was on the official roster of punished deserters, so he would have to revert to his real one or assume another one altogether. There were any number of pitfalls to such deceits, just as there were to any personal history he might invent for the past two years that did not include the war but accounted for his maimings. Such were the arguments he gave himself and he accepted them as sound enough. But the main reason he would not go home was his brother. He could neither lie to John Roger nor face him with the truth. His twin—the collegian, the man of principle—would never understand his desertion and for sure not his turned coat. Better that Johnny should imagine him dead by whatever misadventure struck his fancy than to see what had become of him. And to learn why. So he stayed in Mexico City.

Through the rest of that summer he was frequently drunk, as much to blunt his memory as to ease his chronic pains. He kept to the heart of the city, which had been little damaged by the war and where the fashionable neighborhoods of the privileged flanked the Plaza de la Constitución, the vast central square and center of the federal government. This main plaza was more commonly called the zócalo—and the term had come to refer to any town’s main square that contained a cathedral and municipal building.

He got money for liquor by stealing from church poor boxes, by robbing drunks on the late-night streets. He wrested bottles from weaker men. He occasionally encountered a bartender or patron who took his branded face for a badge of honor and stood him a few drinks. He fed at the alley doors of restaurants where a man might be meted leftovers when the dinner trade was done, or in whose garbage cans he might find something still edible, but on some days he ate nothing. A friendly vendor of old clothing provided him with a shirt and pants and a woolen poncho to replace his tattered uniform. He somehow obtained a sombrero. From a distance he looked like one more dispossessed peón at large on the capital’s teeming streets. He slept in the parks. When the weather was inclement he took shelter in pulquerías, the most squalid of drinking places but where a man could sleep undisturbed in a corner among a litter of other homeless drunks. He spent his days ambling about the central city. He washed at public fountains. He sat on park benches and observed without curiosity the city’s passing spectacle. He had lost all interest in the doings of the world and ignored even discarded newspapers and broadsheets except as insulation against cold nights. He one day saw a former Patricio comrade on the street, wearing a spanking new Mexican army uniform, and ducked into the crowd before the soldier caught sight of him.

His was a solitary existence and by now he could conceive of no other. But the streets were especially dangerous for a man alone. The capital was rife with rateros and brutos—thieves and roving gangs of young thugs—and the city’s police force of the time was small and poorly trained. People of the better classes did not venture outside after dark except in groups and with hired bodyguards. The first time he was set upon was in the darkness of a park where he slept in the shrubbery, and he lost a front tooth and was robbed of his shoes. The episode clarified to him the severity of his handicaps and how dim-witted he was to be weaponless. From a marketplace meat stall he stole a boning knife and honed its curved seven-inch blade sharper still on the stone rim of a fountain. Two nights later when a trio of thugs swooped on him he slashed the throat of one and wounded both of the others before they scrabbled away in a cursing retreat. He stripped the sandals from the one he killed, took the few centavos in his pocket. In the months that followed he killed at least three more assailants and bloodied a number of others in driving them off. He gained a daunting reputation among the local street gangs. El Yanqui Feo, they called him, and most of them eventually let him be. But he remained a challenge to young street toughs wanting to make a name for themselves, and his clothes were rarely free of recent blood stains.

So did his days pass. Each the same as the one before. Each tomorrow his vague and only future. Every dawn’s waking one more astonishment. He was twenty years old and felt decrepit.

In the last days of September came a cold and chronic rain. He got sick, grew weak and dizzy, went about in a sweating chill. His body felt peculiar, as though its flesh was barely clinging to its bones. One morning he was nearly run over as he crossed a street, staggering back as the mule team clopped by. It was a municipal wagon with a load of corpses loosely covered with a tarp. He clearly saw the face of one at the bottom of the pile—eyes open and teeth bared in a grimace that might have passed for a maniacal grin. The face, Samuel Thomas was certain, winked at him.

On a raw dank night, walking in a small plaza of bright shops and restaurants a few blocks north of the zócalo, he was seized by a sudden sensation of being weightless and then the earth tipped under him and he fell unconscious on the sidewalk. But even in the better parts of town the prostrate forms of insensate drunks were a common sight, and passersby on their way to supper or the theater stepped around him with no more interest than if he had been a hole in the ground. The common sentiment about bodies on the central streets was that they would either revive and move on or be picked up in the morning by the collection wagons.

He came to awareness under a sky of iron gray. A young woman was crouched beside him, studying him with curiosity. She wore an apron and held a broom and had a white crescent scar at the outer corner of one eye. She asked if he were wounded. He said he didn’t think so. His voice sounded to him like a stranger’s. He tried to get up but fell back and nearly passed out again. She put the back of her hand to his cheek and then a palm to his forehead, then said she would be right back.

In her absence he was unsure whether she had been real or imagined. But then she returned, accompanied by a grayhaired man with a black eye patch. They helped him to stand and steered him a short way down the sidewalk and into a small café cast in soft yellow light and infused with the aromas of coffee and sausage and cinnamon. There were tables covered with white cloth and a small bar with a few stools. Samuel Thomas was unsure if he in fact apologized for his stink or if he only thought he did. Then nearly took the girl and old man down with him as he fell in a swoon.

He awoke on a cot in a dimly lighted storeroom. The sole window was small and high and the daylight in it was as gray as he’d last seen it. An oil lamp with its wick set low burned on a small table beside the cot. The air pungent with peppery odors. The walls were hung with cookware, the ceiling with strings of dried sausages and chiles, the shelves held condiments, sacks of sugar and salt and maize and wheat flour. There were casks of beer and cases of bottled wine. In a corner of the room, a rat lay with its neck under the sprung bail of the trap, its eyes like little pink balloons and the cheese white in its mouth. Samuel was under a blanket and wearing a night shirt. He only vaguely recalled someone undressing him, washing him with a warm cloth, holding a glass to his lips. A wonderful liquor of a kind he had never tasted before.

He’d been awake but a few minutes when the door opened slightly and the girl looked in and saw his open eyes, and smiled. She went away and a few minutes later came back with a tray of food and set it on the little bedside table. She said he had slept around the clock. He guessed her to be a few years older than himself.

She put a cool palm to his forehead and smiled. Your fever is nearly gone, she said in the clearly enunciated Spanish of those educated in the capital.

She leaned down to take a look into the chamber pot under the bed. She said that she had at first feared he had eaten something spoiled or drunk bad water, but had since decided he was not poisoned, only malnourished. A few days of rest and proper feeding, she told him, and he should be fine.

She helped him to sit up. On the tray was a steaming bowl of the tripe stew called menudo, seasoned with lemon juice and chopped green chile, and a small plate of white rice topped with a fried egg. He felt he could feed himself but did not object when she sat on the edge of the cot and began spooning the menudo to him. She said her name was María Palomina Blanco Lobos. The one-eyed man was her grandfather Bruno Blanco. He owned the café, La Rosa Mariposa, and she had been helping him to operate it since she was a child. They lived in an apartment upstairs and had no family but each other.

The food was delicious but he could not finish half of it before he was sated. She said it was an excellent sign that he had any appetite at all. He asked if he might have some of whatever it was they had given him to drink before. A French brandy, she told him, then left the room and returned a minute later with a small glass of the reddish liquor. He sipped from it and felt its sweet burn down his throat.

He asked why they were being so kind to him. Did they take in every man they found lying on the sidewalk?

Of course not, she said. It was the mark on his face. She knew what it meant. She and her grandfather had read about the San Patricios in the newspapers. Bruno Blanco too had once been a brave fighter, in the long war for independence begun by the great Father Hidalgo. Even after he saw Hidalgo’s severed head on display at Guanajuato, Bruno Blanco had continued to fight against the brute Spaniards until independence was won. That was how he lost his eye, in that war.

But I still do not know your name, she said. “Como se llama?”

“Samuel Tomás,” he said.

Are you Irish?

No, he said.

“Ah pues, eres americano.” She smiled.

Not anymore, he said.

She seemed puzzled by that but let it pass. “Tomás no es su apellido, verdad?”

No, he said, his family name was Wolfe.

“Wooolf,” she said, trying it on her tongue. Then asked why he smiled.

He asked if she knew what the name meant.

No. What?

“Lobo.”

“En verdad? Lo mismo como la familia de mi mamá?”

Well, not quite the same. For one thing, her mother’s maiden name was in plural form—Lobos—but his name was not. Also, his surname had an “e” on the end. “En inglés no hay una ‘e’ en la palabra para el lobo.”

Even so, she said, the coincidence of their family names was a little curious.

He said he supposed so.

Where had he learned to speak Spanish?

Everywhere between Matamoros and Mexico City.

Well, she said with a smile, she did not mean to be rude, but it sounded like it. His grammar was good, but that accent! It had to be the only one of its kind in Mexico.

He returned her smile. The brandy warmed him. He asked about the scar and she said she’d got it from a fight with a ratero who stole her purse on the street about a year ago. Some weeks after, she and her grandfather were shopping in the rowdy Volador Market behind the zócalo when she spotted the thief in a packed crowd in front of a kiosk, watching a puppet show. Bruno Blanco asked if she were absolutely sure, and she was. Her grandfather had then eased through the crowd and up alongside the thief and so neatly stabbed him in the heart from behind that he was dead without a cry. As her grandfather withdrew from the crowd, the man sank in the press of people around him without drawing more than a glance of irritation at one more drunk passing out in public.

Your grandfather is an honorable and capable man, but I would have made the bastard look at you before I killed him. So he would know why he was getting it.

She studied his eyes. I believe you.

You have beautiful skin.

She blushed even as she laughed at his sudden compliment. Then held out an arm for his inspection and said, “Leche teñida por un poquito de café.” Her family had been Creole until Grandfather Bruno married a mestiza. It was that grandmother who put the trace of milk-and-coffee in her complexion.

Had she ever been married?

No, but she had been engaged to an army officer when she was sixteen. He was sent to Sonora to fight Yaquis, and a month before he was due to return for their wedding he took an arrow in the leg. The wound became infected and the leg had to be cut off. He wrote her a letter saying he would understand if she decided not to marry him now that he was an incomplete man. She wrote back to tell him not to be foolish, that she didn’t care if he was without a leg. But the infection had poisoned his blood and by the time her letter got to the military hospital he had been dead almost a week.

Did you love him very much?

Yes. But now I cannot clearly remember his face.

You have no picture of him?

No. From her apron pocket she produced a black cigarillo and set it between her teeth, then rasped a lucifer into flame and put it to the end of the little cigar. The smoke was blue and sweet. The only women he’d ever seen smoke were some of the girls of the Blue Mermaid and some women of the Mexican outlands. He was taken with her easy confidence. She smiled and asked if he wanted a puff, then held the cigarillo to his lips. It was moist with the touch of her tongue. The act seemed to him somehow more intimate than any he had ever shared with even a naked woman.

She closed her fingers around his clawed hand and said, Listen. And told him that even after she saw the brand on his face she had been in doubt of what to do. She had thought to leave him on the sidewalk to recover on his own or to die, whichever way fate would have it.

It was like a little trial in my head, she said. One side argued that I should help you because you fought for my country and the other side said not to be foolish, life in this terrible time is dangerous enough without bringing a stranger under our roof, especially a foreigner. A man who has killed so many might choose to kill us too for whatever reason enters his head. And then you opened your eyes. When I saw them it was decided. You have true eyes.

He said he was glad the verdict went his way. He would have hated to become one more corpse for the dead wagon to collect.

You are luckier than you know, she said. I was decided before I saw you smile. I do not mean to insult you, but with that hole in your teeth and the way that scar pulls your face, it is not the kind of smile to make others smile back. If I had seen you smile before deciding about you . . . well, who knows what the verdict might have been.

She laughed. And his grimace of a grin widened.

He accepted Bruno Blanco’s offer of employment as the café’s barman, a job he could do with one good hand and one bad one. He could live in the storeroom, old Bruno said. He had been there a week when she tiptoed down the stairs in the middle of the night and slipped into his cot. After a month of it, Bruno Blanco said they should stop thinking they were fooling anyone and might as well live together in her room with the larger and more comfortable bed. In the darkness of their trysts she had shed silent tears as her fingers traced the whip scars on his back, and when she saw them in the lamplight she cried harder yet and cursed the whoresons who had given them to him. Cursed all armies of the earth as gangs of barbarians.

They had been together only two months when she proposed marriage because she wanted children. But if you do not want to be a father, she said, we can continue as we are. You are my first importance. And because there was nothing he wished to do with his life other than what he was doing, nowhere he wished to be other than where he was, he could think of no objection to marriage or fatherhood and so said all right.

They never spoke of love. She would in time tell him that she had never had a better friend, but he knew it was not true, knew her grandfather had been a better friend to her than anyone else could ever be. But she did not know he told the same lie, for she was unaware of his brother. He had told her he was an orphaned only child. He lied for no reason but to keep things simple, and he assumed she did too.

But he had not lied about no longer regarding himself as an American. When they married in January he renounced his Anglo surname and took her family name for his own. María Palomina Blanco y Blanco was congratulated for her marriage to a gallant defender of Mexico, a man the more noble for his greater allegiance to justice than to birthplace. Old Bruno beamed with pride in his fine grandson-in-law.

So. He entered a life of daily routine that called for no hard decisions and required no plans and demanded no accounting of his past. He was an able bartender, efficient and circumspect, and as the job called for more listening than talking, it suited him well. The place catered to a respectable patronage, most of it neighborhood shopkeepers and residents, regular customers of long standing. Their gazes at his brand were mostly discreet, and he was never questioned about the war that gave it to him.

He had told María Palomina of his liking for the hornpipe and having been taught to play it by his grandfather, and she one day spied one in a pawnshop window and bought it for him. He found he could clutch it well enough with his clawed hand while the fingers of his good one worked the note holes. She clapped and shouted “Bravo!” when in spite of his bad hip he managed a few hobbling steps of a sailor’s jig as he played a tweedling tune.

He acquired the habit of a daily walk around the neighborhood before lunch, but never went farther than three blocks in any direction. Whenever he approached that outer boundary he got a hollow feeling in his stomach, a peculiar sensation that if he went any farther he would have a hard time finding his way back. It was not something he could fully explain even to himself and he would never even try to explain it to anyone else.

His enduring pleasure was drink. Every night after the café closed he would sit at the bar with a bottle and glass for another few hours, on occasion until nearly dawn. María Palomina sometimes joined him for a drink or two and sometimes old Bruno as well, but usually they left him to imbibe by himself, as they sensed he preferred to do. He was a quiet drunk and a tidy one, never clumsy or impolite, and possessed a constitution that well tolerated hangover. If María Palomina ever wondered what thoughts he kept in those late inebriate nights, she never asked. Had she done so, and had he answered truthfully, he could only have said that he was fairly sure he thought of nothing at all, and when he did think about things, he could never remember them the morning after, nor tried very hard to.

Their first child, Gloria Tomasina, was born the next winter, and a year later came Bruno Tomás. The year after that saw the birth of Mariano, who lived but six days. A month after the infant’s funeral their grief was enlarged when Old Bruno died in his sleep. Their last child, born in the summer of 1853, they christened Sofía Reina.