Country of the Bad Wolfes

VILLA RICA

DE LA VERA CRUZ

The city was bright white under the morning sun when the steamer churned past the yellowrock island prison of San Juan de Ulúa and into the harbor of Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, the name long since shortened to Veracruz. The steamer eased up to the dock amid blasts of horns and whistles. The air heavy and tainted with marine decay. A loud Babel of stevedores all along the wharf. Flocks of vultures spiraling over the town, roosting on the rooftops. With their wrinkled red heads and heavy cloaks of black feather they looked to John Roger like a hideous union of undertakers in patient wait of work.

“My God, they’re ugly,” Elizabeth Anne said, holding to his arm at the deck rail.

“Not the most cheerful sight, are they? You’re not sorry we came?”

“Sorry? Johnny, if I had a tail it would be wagging in a blur.”

He bent to her ear and said she had a lovely tail, and she grinned and kissed his cheek. She was feeling better than she had in days, having enjoyed the voyage until rough waters in the Florida Strait afflicted her with a severe nausea. Her stomach had not properly recovered since, and John Roger had gently teased her about the lingering first-time seasickness of someone who had been sailing since she was a child.

Through his connections in the consular service, her Uncle Elliott had arranged for them to be met at the dock by the American consul, a loquacious little Texan named Charles Patterson. He stood but a couple of inches above five feet, his eyes below the level of Elizabeth Anne’s. His sizable mustache was as white as his suit, and his coat flap bulged at the revolver on his hip. He had a team and wagon standing by for their luggage, and as they waited for it to be offloaded he advised them to favor of a wardrobe of light cottons and linen. He said that contrary to the common wisdom, there were four seasons in the tropics—the hot-and-humid, the hot-and-rainy, and very fine spring and fall seasons of about two weeks each.

“It’s nice enough weather now,” Patterson said, “but pretty soon the place’ll turn into a damned caldron—beg pardon, mam. It’s but one reason you don’t find a lot of Americans here other than those passing through on the way to the capital and higher country. Me, I’m from Galveston, so wet heat’s nothing new. Truth be told, I like it. Been here since the end of Mister Polk’s War. Call me a odd duck.”

In Spanish, John Roger said he was sure he would prefer the local climate over the winters of New England. Patterson smiled and with equal fluency told him it was a fine thing he could speak Spanish. He said it was shameful so many Americans who came to live and work in Mexico didn’t know a word of the language and still didn’t when they left. In Spanish more heavily accented than theirs, Elizabeth Anne said she must be an odd duck too—amusing them with her literal translation of the English idiom as “un pato extraño”—because she also liked the tropic heat.

“Truth to tell, the heat won’t hardly be your biggest worry here,” Patterson said. “I assume you folk been told how bad this place is for the yellow jack.”

John Roger said they had indeed been apprised of the region’s notorious susceptibility to yellow fever. “There was a lively debate at the captain’s table one evening,” he said, “as to whether garlic or quinine was the better prophylactic.”

Patterson made a pained face. “I’ve known folk to eat enough garlic to knock over a buzzard with their breath and drink quinine till their ears rang like church bells, and Mister Jack still took them. Me, I had it when I was a kid, so it can’t get me again. If you and the missus aint had it yet, well, I have to tell you the only thing that’ll keep you safe from it is awful good luck.”

“Well then,” Elizabeth Anne said, “I’d say we are as well protected as can be, as we are certainly blessed with good luck.”

“Glad to know it,” Patterson said. “Best thing in the world, good luck. Except for sometimes. Like this gambler fella I knew. Wasn’t all that skillful, actually, but just about always come out winners. Everbody at the card table always cussing him for a lucky so-and-so and he’d just smile and say he’d ruther be lucky than good. Said it an awful lot. Everbody knew what he meant by it and probly most of them agreed. But it’s the sort of thing can start setting teeth on edge if it gets said too often, and no matter how lucky a fella is with the cards, the luck aint been invented that’ll help much when some sore loser gets tired of hearing about your luck and takes a mind to lean across the table and shoot you in the eye. Which is what happened to this fella I’m talking about. Guess you could say he was a little too lucky for his own good.”

Elizabeth Anne gave John Roger a sidelong frown. “An instructive parable, Mr Patterson,” John Roger said. “But it seems to me that the fellow’s failing was not so much an excess of good luck as an excess of talking about it.”

“Yessir, that too,” Patterson said. “The Mexicans say the quickest way to have your luck go bad is to talk about how good it is.”

“I take your point, Mr Patterson,” Elizabeth Anne said, “and I will make no further mention of our you-know-what.”

“Call me Charley,” Patterson said.

He had their baggage loaded onto the wagon and gave the driver delivery directions and sent him on his way. Then escorted the couple to the Trade Wind Company office near the far end of the wharf so John Roger could look it over. The place was infested with cockroaches but otherwise in good order, needing only a scrubbing and some new furniture. To keep the roaches in check, Patterson advised buying a couple of iguanas at the nearest market and setting them loose in the office. There was an adjoining warehouse for storing the coffee and tobacco before its export to New Orleans. Elizabeth Anne took two steps through its door before whirling right back out, sickened by the lingering stench of the fishmeal formerly stored there. Patterson said he could recommend a good crew to scour the room clean.

They went out onto the malecón—the seawall promenade fronting the harbor—then crossed over to the zócalo. The arcades were lined with shops and the handcarts of vendors. The square teemed with businessmen in pastel suits, peons in white cotton, beggar women in black head shawls asquat on the church steps, their skeletal brown hands extended to the passing world. There were spouting fountains, walkways flanked with wrought-iron benches and towering palms and broad shade trees shrilling with parrots. The redolence of flowers mingled with the aroma of coffee and the piquancy of cooking spices and the stinks of garbage and animal droppings and open privies. Marimba bands chiming at various points of the square. Patterson said he hoped they liked that sort of music because they would be hearing a great lot of it. They passed an alleyway where a pair of buzzards gorged on a dog carcass and Elizabeth Anne remarked on the scavengers’ profusion. Patterson said to be grateful for them, they were the city’s main means of street sanitation. In the shade of an arcade stood several lines of persons awaiting their turn at one of the tables manned by scribes who for a fee would write any sort of document from a government petition to a personal letter. “Love letters, mostly,” Patterson said. “Lots of love letters. Somebody has to write them for the Romeos and somebody has to read them to the Juliets.”

John Roger was surprised at the number of people with discernible Negroid features. According to Richard Davison the Spanish had brought Negro slaves to Mexico but they proved unnecessary in the face of so much available Indian labor. Patterson said that was so. “You’ll find plenty enough niggers all over the Caribbean, Lord knows, but hardly any in Mexico except for some of the port towns, and the most of them right here in True Cross City. Way back when, they mixed with the Indians to make a breed called zambos. Pardos, some call them. Gave the mestizos and mulattos somebody to look down on. Whatever their race, all Veracruzanos are called jarochos. It’s a word the old Spaniards used for insolent, profane people, and believe you me, you won’t find a more foul-mouthed folk anywhere in the country. There’s an old joke that if God banned cussing in Veracruz you’d have a city full of mutes.”

At Elliott Bartlett’s behest, Patterson had seen to the rental and readiness of their new home. It was only two blocks from the zócalo, a large two-story house in a well-tended neighborhood called Colonia Brisas. It fronted a street shaded by palms and was enclosed by high stone walls whose tops were lined with broken bottles affixed in cement. There were two front entryways—a heavy wooden door reinforced with iron bars, and a wide carriage gate of wood six inches thick. The gates opened onto a spacious cobblestone courtyard with a large circular fountain centered with a statue of Poseidon brandishing a trident and spouting water from his mouth. There were clusters of banana plants ten feet high, mango trees red-yellow with fruit. Clay pots of flowers hanging all along the portales. The smell was of florescence and mossy stone. The residence was staffed with an elderly female cook, a pair of teenage housemaids, and a young man with a game leg who lived in the carriage house and served as a general handyman. Patterson made the introductions all around and gave the Wolfes a tour of the place, then bid them good day and went back to the consulate.

That evening, they ascended the indoor stairway to the rooftop where there was wickerwork furniture under a sturdy ramada of vines and palm fronds. Up there was a sea breeze and they could view a greater span of the starry sky, could see the harbor lights and the glow of the central plaza through the trees.

Elizabeth Anne kissed him and said, “Thank you, dear man, for bringing me to this brave new world.”

The nausea that had begun on the voyage continued to trouble Elizabeth Anne, and though she was sure it would eventually ease, it did not, and John Roger grew concerned. They had been in Mexico more than a month before she acceded to his urging that she have a medical examination. Patterson referred her to an expatriate English nurse, a lank horse-faced widow named Beckett whose husband, a doctor, had died of yellow fever a few years before. “She’s good as any doc in town,” Patterson said.

It took only a few minutes for Nurse Beckett to determine that Elizabeth Anne was pregnant. “Two months should be my guess, perhaps a bit more,” she said.

Elizabeth Anne thought she must be mistaken. How could it be, after three years of fruitless effort? “But are you absolutely certain?” she said.

“Doubtless,” Nurse Beckett said.

“There’s no possibility of error?”

Nurse Beckett smiled. “Be assured, Mrs Wolfe, the only question is whether the child will be male or female.”

John Roger’s first reaction to Lizzie’s report was also incredulity—and then he whooped in elation. That night they held each other close and talked till a late hour about their grand turn of fortune.

When he gave the news to Patterson the next noonday, the little man insisted they repair to a cantina for a congratulatory cup of rum. They ended up having several, over the course of which Patterson became wistful and his drawl more pronounced. He told John Roger he’d been a widower for sixteen years. Except for the loss of his wife, his greatest regret was their failure to have children. She miscarried their first two and had not conceived again.

“It’s all we got to leave of ourselves in this world is children,” Patterson said. “Man or woman without a child dies and it’s like they never lived except to add a little more dust to the earth. The fella who said a wife and kids are like hostages to fortune and put an end to a man’s adventuring days and so forth was probably right, but I’ll tell you what—I’da quit my adventuring days long ago in trade for a living child. I’d give an arm today if Dame Fortune was willing to make the deal.”

They took leave of each other as the city was rousing from the midday siesta. The shops reopening, the zócalo resuming its bustle. John Roger watched Patterson crossing the square with the precise stride of a man who knows he’s drunk and wants not to let it show.

John Roger didn’t know why—maybe because of all the talk about children—but his father had come to mind. Roger Blake Wolfe, the outlaw stranger. He had not often thought about him since his days at Dartmouth, but since coming to Mexico he’d occasionally dreamt of him. He could never recall much about the dreams except that his father’s face was always indistinct and yet he seemed always to be smiling. Jimmy had told Elizabeth Anne of John Roger’s having being orphaned in childhood and reared by an aunt and of the loss at sea of his mariner brother, Samuel, and John Roger had thanked her for her expression of sympathy. During their courtship he had frequently come very near to telling her the truth but had each time resisted the inclination, fearing that her love for him might be bruised by the fact of his outlaw father. It pained him to persist in the falsehood, but once they were married he felt he had let the lie go on for too long to rectify it, and so never had.

For reasons less explicable, ever since his arrival in Veracruz he had resisted the impulse to search in the local archives for information about his father. But now, standing outside the cantina and goaded by both the afternoon’s rum and the fact of his own impending fatherhood, he more strongly than ever felt the urge to learn what he could about Roger Blake Wolfe. Across the plaza was the municipal building where the public records were archived. He consulted his pocketwatch. Then crossed the plaza and went into the building. In his brief time in Veracruz he had become well acquainted with the unruliness of Mexican recordkeeping and was not yet as adept as he would become at navigating its disorder, and it took him a while to uncover the sparse records pertaining to his father.

It was late afternoon when he came back out. He paused at the top step and gazed across the plaza at the cathedral. At the wall where the firing squad executions took place. Patterson had confided that during his first few years in Veracruz he had attended a number of public executions before losing interest. “I never did hear any last words worth remembering,” he said, “and after a while the entertainment wasn’t hardly worth the standing in the sun amongst all them people.”

Right there’s where he took his last breath, John Roger thought. He imagined his father against the wall and facing the muskets. Contained in the archival records was a newspaper report by an eyewitness journalist who included such details as the condemned man’s neat grooming and fearless—even cheerful—attitude, and told of a scrap two young women got into over him. Told of his rejection of a blindfold and of his casual bearing to the very end. And told too of his decapitation, yet another detail absent from the British Embassy’s letter to his widow.

He looked toward the harbor and the San Juan de Ulúa fortress where the head had been displayed from the tower. Where was it now, his father’s skull? Was it yet intact somewhere? Did it lie at the bottom of the sea, little fish passing through the empty sockets and the casing that had housed his mind? Had it been blown into the mountains and reduced to shards? Pulverized to dust and scattered on the wind?

He took a mule trolley to the graveyard, where according to the records the headless remains had been interred. He searched all the crooked rows of vaults and gravestones as the tree shadows deepened and the air grew heavier, but he found no grave with the name of his father. He spied a gravedigger at work and told him of his search and was told that several hurricanes had hit the city since 1829 and the flood of each one had opened dozens of graves and carried their contents away and maybe that was happened to the one he was looking for.

When he debarked from the return trolley to the zócalo, the red sun was almost down to the rooftops. He was crossing the square when he spotted a sketch artist, a white-haired old man, sitting under a tree alongside the arcade of the scribes. A sign attached to his easel said “retratos.” And he had an inspiration.

He sat down on the stool facing the old man, who smiled and said, “A su servicio, señor. Tinta o carboncillo? Grande o chico?” An ink drawing cost more than one of charcoal and took a little longer to make, but the detail was more faithful. A full-sheet sketch of course cost more than a half-sheet. John Roger chose a half-sheet ink portrait, and the old man set to work with deft flicks of his quill, the nib darting between ink pot and paper, his eyes cutting between John Roger’s face and the sketch pad. He finished the drawing in minutes. John Roger looked it over and expressed admiration for the likeness. “Otra cosa más,” he told the artist. And described the beard he wanted added to the face.

The old man shrugged and said, “Muy bien, señor.” And went to work again, twice pausing to make sure John Roger was satisfied with the way the beard was shaping. When the alteration was complete, the old man handed him the drawing and John Roger stared hard at it. The finished face was exactly as his mother had many times described it to him and his brother.

Hello, father, he thought. Nice to see you.

The sketch became one more concealment in his life. Along the bottom of it, he wrote, “Roger Blake Wolfe (b? - d 1829)” and stored it in the same document case containing the graduation daguerreotype of himself and his brother and the embassy letter about their father. He kept the case in his office at home, in the same desk drawer where under lock and key he stowed the journal he had begun in college and only once or twice put to use since. But on the evening he brought the sketch home, he entered into the journal all that he had learned about his father from the archives and noted his fruitless search for his grave.

He began a correspondence with a London genealogist who over the course of more than two years informed him that his father’s parents were Henry Morgan Wolfe (died London 1835, age 67) of County Galway in Ireland, who’d had a distinguished career in the Royal Navy, and Hedda Juliet Blake (died London 1815, age 37), born to a London family of “inestimable fortune,” in the genealogist’s phrase. John Roger would learn too that Roger Blake Wolfe had been born in London in April of 1797 and had been publicly disinherited by his parents via newspaper promulgation in 1813. The researcher would uncover an 1825 Times report of an act of piracy attributed to the Englishmen Roger Blake Wolfe and the crew of his ship, the York Witch, against the Portuguese trader Doralinda, during the commission of which crime, according to testimony by the Portagee captain, five members of the Doralinda crew were murdered. A later item in the Times would report that several countries, including the United Kingdom, had posted an official bounty for the capture or proved killing of “the Pirate Wolfe.” Insofar as the genealogist would be able to determine, Roger Blake Wolfe had but one sibling, a much younger brother, Harrison Augustus Wolfe, born in September, 1814. Except for the registry of birth, the genealogist would uncover no other documents pertaining to Harrison Augustus save his inclusion on a series of student rosters at the Runnymede Academy of London from 1824 through 1830.

He stored this correspondence in the document case and entered its chief points in his journal. He had no intention of ever revealing the journal’s content to anyone and was not even sure why he recorded it. And then on learning of Lizzie’s pregnancy, he’d suddenly had a reason. He thought it only proper that he leave to his child a factual record of the family ancestry. There would be times, however, when he would doubt the wisdom of this purpose and wonder if his offspring might not be better off never knowing about his criminal forebear. On several instances of such misgiving, he would come very near to pitching every word about Roger Blake Wolfe into the fire.

And too, over the years, he would every so often, and always late at night, sit at his desk behind closed doors and take out the ink portrait and study it intently. As though the face were in fact his father’s and might yet reveal to him some vital secret shared between them.

Their first Veracruz summer was a model of Patterson’s prediction. Steamy days and nights. Torrential rains. A haze of mosquitoes. But even in the increasing discomfort of her pregnancy, Elizabeth Anne loved the coastal summer in all its sultriness and birdsong and riot of colors, its babble of Spanish and incessant marimba tinklings, its mingled smells of tropical flora and saltine gulf and pungent cookery. She loved the thunderstorms that whipped the trees and clattered the shutters and lit the night in flashings of eerie blue, that left the city cool and fresh if only for a few blessed hours. At last did autumn begin to ease down the coast with its mornings of deeper blue and afternoons of longer shadows, its cooler nights and brighter stars. She could not tell John Roger enough how much she cherished this exotic place, its lushness and rhapsodic language, its paradoxical character of mania and melancholy.

Patterson was not the only one to tell them of the dangers at large outside their courtyard gates, to warn them that the town abounded with ruffians and was notorious for street fights and killings. John Roger took the little man’s advice to carry a pocket pistol under his coat whenever he left the house. But they would be in Veracruz for nearly five years before they witnessed any violence greater than the frequent street grapplings between drunks. The most proximate case of murder in those early years occurred one morning at a residence a block from their own. Word of it had flown from the servants of one household to those of the next and within an hour the entire neighborhood knew the story. The man of the house, a jeweler who spent long days at his shop, had killed his wife in culmination of a shouting argument provoked by her pet parrot. The bird had mimicked sexually specific endearments familiar to the husband but which the parrot attached to the name Cristiano, the name of the household’s young gardener, who fled the property at the sound of the first gunshot. That first report delivered a fatal bullet to the wife’s head and was followed by five more shots in quick succession, each of them intended for the parrot, the husband no less enraged at the informer as at the informed upon. The parrot screeched and flapped about the room as bullets smashed glass and glanced off the walls and gouged the furniture and one round rang off a church bell a block away and the last one ricocheted off two walls before piercing the husband’s buttock. The man screamed and fell to the floor as the parrot swooped out the window. Police were summoned, and a short time later husband and wife were carried out on stretchers to be placed in separate wagons, she with a sheet over her face and bound for the undertaker’s, he facedown with a bandaged ass and off to the jail.

Elizabeth Anne got the story from the housemaids and in turn told it to John Roger. Who smiled and said, “We are without question among a mercurial people.”

He had come to agree with Charley Patterson that the most salient traits of the Mexican character were its contradictions and volatilities. Mexicans were at once a people affable and suspicious, convivial and violent. No one was better-mannered than a Mexican or as quick to turn dangerous. One moment he might be laughing and joking, and the next in a murderous rage. In the midst of singing the joys of life or the glories of womanhood, he could abruptly give way to weeping over life’s relentless sorrows or cursing women’s eternal treacheries. There was a marked incongruity between the effusiveness of Mexican politeness and the stark fact of Mexican distrust. Between a Mexican’s easy hospitality and his deliberate isolation. “Mi casa es su casa,” a Mexican would aver with utmost earnestness, even as the barred gates of his house and the high broken-glass-topped walls surrounding it made clear his desire to keep the world without. “A su servicio,” the Mexican would maintain, even as he stood ready to take umbrage at the first hint of being deemed subservient. While the Creoles were not exempt from these traits—perhaps even had them to greater degree but were better able to mask them behind the ornate and ritual civility of their class—they were most obvious in the mestizos, the country’s principal caste, whose emotional and contradictory nature, Patterson professed, was the natural legacy of its origin.

“Just imagine coming from people of two different races that had not a blamed thing in common except a love of blood in every which way,” Patterson said. “Imagine knowing your white daddy was a robber and killer just crazy with greed who raped your Indian momma who herself believed in cutting out people’s hearts to please the gods and eating what was left of the victim. Hardly any wonder the Mexies are they way they are. Sad to say, but they pretty much acquired all the worst traits of both races and little of the good. It’s an interesting subject but some of them can be a mite tender about it. Best not to bring it up in their company.”

Elizabeth Anne was not as much interested in such ethnic generalities as she was fascinated by Mexican folk culture—its ubiquitous spiritualism, its widespread belief in witchcraft and sorcery, in necromancy and ghosts, its pervasive personification of Death, so widely depicted in broadside illustrations and wall posters and murals as an amiable and amused skeletal presence in the midst of the foolish living. Of the many ghost stories she heard from the maids and the old cook—whose name was Josefina Cortéz—none so captivated her as that of La Llorona, the Crying Woman. The way Josefina told it, the Crying Woman had been a Spanish aristocrat who was forsaken by her husband for another woman, a mestiza, and the betrayal so crazed her with fury that she murdered her children in order to punish her husband. On comprehending the horror she had committed, she was consumed with grief and killed herself, but her spirit was condemned to wander through the nights in everlasting search of the little ones’ lost souls. It was a story told with variations in different parts of the country—in some she was not a Spaniard but a poor Indian, and the specific adultery that provoked her to murder the children varied from version to version. But almost every regional variation agreed that whoever had the bad fortune to come upon the Crying Woman and looked into her eyes would be afflicted with her anguish and kill themselves because of it. The young maids nodded in big-eyed accord as Josefina told Elizabeth Anne that to this day you might on some late nights hear La Llorona crying for her children in the streets— “Aaaayyy, mis hijos! Mis hiiiijos!” Sometimes her cries came from a great distance in the countryside, sometimes from just across town, sometimes from the darkness just outside one’s window. The tale prickled the fine hairs of Elizabeth Anne’s nape even as her eyes welled in sympathy for the Crying Woman.

She learned about curanderismo—the primitive and magical healing arts—and of brujería, the practice of witchcraft, both beneficent and malign. Scattered in the back streets of town were a variety of shops where one could buy secret herbs and potions to effect almost any desire of the heart and soul. There were special candles and little books of cryptic incantations to gain favor from an importuned spirit. Charms and amulets and talismans against the evil eye. A curandera could cure ailments defiant of medical science, but a bruja possessed even greater and darker powers. A bruja could invoke hexes, cast spells, instill or cure dementia of every kind. Could commune with the spirits of the dead. And as for love—a dementia so commonplace that most brujas viewed it with the same bored scorn of doctors for the head cold—there were many rituals anyone could employ without the help of a sorceress. A dead hummingbird in a man’s pocket made him irresistible to the opposite sex. A woman wishing to be loved by a particular man should wear a rooster feather next to her heart when she was in his presence, but if she wanted to be loved by many men she should carry the feather in her underwear. A man wanting to seduce a woman should put in her food the leg of a beetle or a pinch of bone dust from a human female skeleton. But he had to be very careful because too much of either ingredient would drive the woman insane past all hope of recovery. Insanity was also a risk if a woman wanting to gain dominance over her husband put an excess of jimson weed in his coffee. It was not hard to understand, Josefina told Elizabeth Anne, why there were so many crazy people in the world, especially lovers.

Elizabeth Anne could not get enough of such lore and superstition. John Roger teased her for her interest in such claptrap, as he termed it. He wondered aloud if maybe she had put a bit too much jimson weed in his coffee and then drunk it herself by mistake. She crossed her eyes and affected to babble as if mentally unhinged. Then beamed at his happy laughter.

As soon as she’d learned of her impending motherhood she had written her parents the news. They were elated—but her mother pleaded with Elizabeth Anne to come home to have the baby.

“Surely you wish the child to be born on American ground,” Mrs Bartlett wrote. “And certainly you must be even more aware than I of the hazards of giving birth in that primitive land. Come home, darling daughter, for the safety of the child as well as your own.”

John Roger saw the sadness in her eyes as she read the letter to him. Just as he was about to say that if she wanted to have the child in New Hampshire it would be all right with him, she said, “Poor Mother. She simply cannot comprehend that I am home.”

Through the offices of Charles Patterson, the Wolfes had become acquainted with a number of well-placed persons—British and American entrepreneurs, municipal officials, prominent Mexican businessmen, and several hacendados who kept a second residence in Veracruz. The city’s mayor was a friend. So too the young captain of police, Ramón Mendoza, whose small force was almost exclusively employed in keeping order in the zócalo and patrolling the neighborhoods of the affluent. Although the Wolfes adhered to the protocols of their social class and hosted their share of formal dinner parties, they as always preferred their own company, and even before Elizabeth Anne’s advancing pregnancy made it easy to beg off from party invitations, they took guilty pride in their finesse at fabricating plausible excuses.

They were, however, very curious about the hacienda world they had heard so much about, and when a hacendado friend invited them to attend his daughter’s quinceañera—the traditional celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday, marking her passage into womanhood—they happily accepted. Because of Elizabeth Anne’s pregnancy, John Roger had at first been unsure if they should make the trip, but she was only in her fourth month and she assured him she felt quite up to it.

The hacienda was named Corazón de la Virgen and lay twenty-five miles southwest of the city. There was a special mass for the girl on the morning of her birthday, then a reception and a formal dinner, then a party with four hundred guests. The gala lasted until sunrise and then everyone departed for home except for a few special guests, including the Wolfes, who were hosted for another two days, until the birthday girl was taken to the port in Veracruz to embark on a chaperoned two-month stay in Paris, her parents’ main gift to her.

As in the standard design of most haciendas, its hub was a high-walled compound that was a small town unto itself. While most of the hacienda’s workers lived outside the compound, within it was a residential quarter for the most important employees. The compound contained a plaza with a communal well, a church, stables, corrals, stock pens, granaries, workshops, a store where the workers could purchase goods on credit. There was an armory sufficient to a military company, and next to it the quarters for the band of former soldiers the patrón employed to protect his property and, whenever necessary, enforce his will. The center of the compound was the family residence—the casa grande—itself walled off from the rest of the compound and sometimes also referred to as the hacienda. The casa grande enclave had its own well and stable, several patios, various flower and vegetable gardens, a small fruit orchard. The two-story house had more than enough bedrooms to accommodate the special guests. Its ballroom had mirrored walls and a lofty ceiling hung with chandeliers. It had a wide spiral staircase to the second floor. The lamplit and high-shadowed hallways were hung with ornate tapestries and oil portraits of an ancestral line predating the founding of New Spain. There were kitchens and bathing rooms, dining halls and drawing rooms and dens, two libraries, a billiard room, a chapel. Both the compound walls and the casa grande’s rooftop were lined with battlements. “You could hold off the world from in here,” John Roger told Elizabeth Anne.

Their host provided a buggy for them to explore the property as they wished, and on each morning of their visit they rose early and had breakfast while most of the other guests continued to sleep off the effects of the night before, and then they went for a long ride, each day ranging in a different direction to see another part of the sixty-square-mile estate.

“It’s like a country of its own,” Elizabeth Anne said. “The villages are its various towns and the compound is its capital city. The casa grande is the capitol building. If we owned such a place, you would be its president and I the vice-president. Our child would serve as our cabinet.”

John Roger said it sounded rather a roguish government, especially if their child should be a girl and render the majority of its administration female. Elizabeth Anne slapped his arm in sham umbrage.

On the trip back to Veracruz they talked and talked about the splendors of hacienda life.

The baby was born on the night of November the first, directly amid the Days of the Dead, the annual two-day celebration in honor of the deceased and of Death herself—and the date nearly proved prophetic for both mother and child. Awkwardly positioned, the baby could not come out. Elizabeth Anne screamed against her will while in an outer room John Roger paced, tormented by her suffering and enraged at his helplessness.

Nurse Beckett was blood to the wrists and dripping with sweat when she deferred in desperation to Josefina, who had much experience as a midwife and was assisting. The old woman reached into Elizabeth Anne and felt the baby and crooned to it as she tried to turn it. Elizabeth Anne screamed louder.

Josefina felt the child shift slightly and implored, “Empuje, hija! Empuje! Ya viene!”

Elizabeth Anne pushed with all her remaining strength and Josefina guided the child with her hand and a moment later it emerged into the larger world. Blood-coated and blue-skinned and unbreathing.

“O my dear God,” Nurse Beckett said.

Josefina freed the infant of the cord round its neck and then alternately blew into its nose and mouth. In the other room John Roger stood arrested in dread at the sudden cessation of his wife’s screams. Then nearly jumped at the first of the baby’s squalls.

At length he was permitted to enter the room. It yet held a raw smell of pain and blood. Elizabeth Anne lay still and waxen and he knew with cold conviction that she was dead and seemed himself to forget how to breathe. Then her eyes opened and she saw him and managed a weak smile—and he grinned and brushed at his eyes and sat on the bed and put his hand to her face.

Nurse Beckett said it had been a near thing. The bleeding had been profuse and difficult to stem. But the baby was faring well and appeared to be free of defect, and Mrs Wolfe was young and strong and should recover satisfactorily. Josefina positioned the swaddled infant in John Roger’s arms and he sat on the edge of the bed and held the baby for Elizabeth Anne to see. She smiled and her eyes shone.

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 Conservatives, 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.