Country of the Bad Wolfes

ENSENADA DE ISABEL

They made a gradual acquaintance with the entire hacienda, exploring it by buggy, on horseback, in canoe, afoot, until they’d seen all of it except for a section of rain forest along the lower river—which, so far as anyone knew, had never been penetrated even by Indians—and no part of the estate was dearer to them than its little cove at the mouth of the Río Perdido some twelve miles below the compound as the crow flew. The route to get there, however, was hardly as direct as crow flight. And although the river snaked through the jungle all the way to the coast, it was of little use for downriver transport because of the rapids that began just four miles below the compound docks, a stretch of whitewater so daunting that not even the hacienda’s most able boatmen would brave them. A few had tried it in years past and had never been seen again. It was supposed that the rapids ran for many miles, but no one knew for sure.

The first time John Roger and Elizabeth Anne went to the cove, they left the compound three hours before dawn and were conveyed by a lantern-lit raft through the river darkness to a small dockage about a half mile above the rapids. Even at that distance they could faintly hear the whitewater rush. From this lower landing they proceeded by ox wagon, with supplies and camping gear, on a narrow trail that had been hacked out many years before by the crew of fishermen whose periodic duty it had been to provide Hernán Montenegro with the oysters and crabs and shrimp he cherished. Reynaldo the mayordomo knew of no one who had ever been to the cove but those fishing crews. The fishermen had praised the prettiness and the bounty of the place, but said that if they had had a choice they would rather forgo the rigors of getting there, and they wished Don Hernán had not had such a liking for shellfish. They would scoop oysters and net crabs and shrimp until they had sackfuls of each, then smoke the entire catch to preserve it for the return trip. And then one night, about a year before his death, Don Hernán had become violently sick after a meal of the smoked oysters. The servants tending to him could hardly believe the quantities of vomit and horrifically stinking shit he produced on that interminable night, and they thought it a wonder that he survived it. At daybreak he looked like he’d lost twenty pounds and was as sickly pale as wax. He never again ate shellfish of any form, and so far as Reynaldo knew, no one had been to the hacienda’s seashore since.

The track held close to the river’s meander and in places was so narrow the foliage brushed against both sides of the wagon as they swayed and tilted over the uneven ground. Both the driver and their guard were Indians, the guard riding behind on a burro. Both men armed with machetes and shotguns. Although the disorder of the Reform War had worsened the national plague of banditry, robbers were most unlikely in this jungle—but jaguars and wild boars and poisonous snakes were not. Under his leather jacket John Roger carried a .36-caliber Colt in a shoulder holster, and in Elizabeth Anne’s handbag was a .41-caliber derringer. To fend against the rage of mosquitoes they had covered their faces and necks and hands with a unguent of Josefina’s concoction that smelled so foul they questioned whether the mosquitoes might not be the lesser torment.

Under a high shadowing canopy of trees shrill with birds and monkeys, the air grew hotter and wetter, riper in its smells of vegetation. The light was an eerie green. John Roger had been fretful of Elizabeth Anne risking her health in such close heat, but she assured him she felt fine. It was his guess that in some places they were hardly more than ten yards from the river and never farther than twenty, but the undergrowth was so heavy that at no point did they get so much as a glimpse of the water. They might not have known the river was there but for the rumble of the rapids, which grew louder and louder until they were abreast of them for several miles in which the green air was misty with vapor and they had to raise their voices to be heard. He wanted to have a look, but to get near enough to the riverbank would have required an hour or more of hacking with machetes by all three men, an expense of valuable time they could not afford. And too, there was the matter of jaguars and boars and snakes. They pressed on, the roar of the rapids gradually diminishing back to a rumble, and after a while longer they heard only the river’s low hiss through the bankside reeds.

Near day’s end they emerged from the closing darkness of the river into the last afternoon light of the cove. It was an oval some eighty yards wide from the landward to the seaward side and half again that long from north to south. The trailhead was near the cove’s northwest end, within sight of the river mouth. The cove surface looked like a slightly warped mirror of green glass, much darker at this hour than it would be under the overhead sun. They could not see the inlet on the other side because it did not open directly to the gulf but lay between a pair of narrow and overlapping tongues of land parallel to the coastline and dense with coconut palms. The trees blocked their view of the ocean but they could hear the swash of small waves on the outer shore. On the cove’s landward side the jungle ended on a small bluff that sloped down onto a smooth white beach. The beach curved all the way around the south end of the cove and was askitter with crabs of red-and-blue.

“My God, it’s so beautiful,” Elizabeth Anne said. She pointed to the bluff. “Up there, Johnny, up there’s the place for a house.”

John Roger told the guard and driver to relax, and the two men settled themselves under a tree and began to roll cigarettes. He and Elizabeth Anne then took off their shoes and walked barefoot out on the beach, crabs sidling out of the way ahead of them. They went up the slope to the little bluff and found that although it was not quite high enough for them to see the gulf on the other side of the palms, there was a steady breeze that kept off the mosquitoes. John Roger agreed it was a fine spot to build a house.

They went back down to the beach and walked around to the other side of the cove and went through the palms and there the gulf was. As far as they could see to north and south a high wall of palms leaning to landward was fronted by a sand-and-rock beach barely ten yards wide at any point at this hour of ebb tide. The gentle waves rolled in low and crested as small breakers, spraying on the rocky shore and rushing over it in a foaming sheet and then running back out again.

They backtracked through the palms to the cove beach and headed for the inlet and before they got there the sand under their feet became stony ground. The inlet formed a pass less than fifteen feet wide and about fifteen yards long from its outer mouth to its inner one, both banks craggy with rocks. It looked about four feet deep at the ebb and John Roger guessed it would rise close to two feet at high tide. On the inland side of the pass the bottom grass leaned toward the cove with the incoming current but on the outer side where they stood the grass was pulled the other way by the current going out.

“See how the current makes an easy circuit all the way around?” John Roger said, gesturing with his arm. “But through this pass it moves pretty fast coming in and going out.” He picked up a coconut and dropped it into the water and it whipped away on the outgoing current and around the outer tongue of the inlet. It carried out into the gulf for about fifty feet before it slowed to an easy bobbing and began drifting toward the southward shore.

The outer mouth presented a difficult angle of approach from the open water. John Roger thought only expert hands might be able to sail a boat through this pass without either hitting the rocky projection of its outer tongue or veering into the leeward rocks. Elizabeth Anne grinned and said she was game whenever he was.

Because the inlet faced up the coast and its outer arm overlapped the inner one and was so thick with palms, it was impossible to see it from anywhere out on the gulf except if you were north of the inlet and very close to the shore, and even then you would have to be looking hard for it. “You could sail by within fifty yards and never see this opening,” John Roger said.

“Our own secret harbor,” Elizabeth Anne said. “I love it.”

He christened the cove Ensenada de Isabel and rued the lack of a flag to plant.

Josefina had supplied them with an oilskin sack of food—a stack of tortillas bundled in a damp cloth, a pouch of dried beef, two jugs of cooked beans, and a bag of oranges. In the last red light of day John Roger made a fire on the bluff and Elizabeth Anne invited the driver and guard to come and sup with them. The men had brought their own provisions and had made a campfire near the wagon, but they accepted the Wolfes’ invitation. After supper John Roger told them they could sleep in the wagon, and he and Elizabeth Anne went up on the bluff, up where the crabs did not go, and huddled on one blanket and covered themselves with another against the evening’s cool breeze.

He woke twice in the night, savoring the sea breeze, the crush of stars, the bronze gibbous moon low in the east. The feel of Lizzie snugged against him. The second time, just as he was about to doze off again, he heard her murmur, “This is heaven.” And next time woke to a radiant sunrise.

They got back to the compound after dark, and later that night, in the privacy of his office, John Roger took out the journal he had not opened in years and recorded his happy plans.

It took a year to build the house and improve the trail for getting to it. John Roger spent long periods encamped at the cove with the labor crews and supervising the construction. He had the wagon track lengthened from the river mouth to the landing at the hacienda compound and improved the trail the full length of its entire river-hugging wind through the jungle. Each time he came home for a visit he was leaner, harder of muscle, more darkly sunbrowned. After the first few months, he forwent shaving and his beard grew black and wild. Elizabeth Anne was roused by his brutish appearance. When she said he now looked more like a pirate than even her Uncle Richard, he affected a menacing leer and advanced on her, saying in low growl, “Arrgh, me captive beauty, it’s yer sweet flesh I’ll have for me sport”—and she let a gleeful cry as he tumbled her into bed. She loved the beard and asked him to keep it and she trimmed it for him. She missed him terribly in his absences and chafed at her long exclusion from her cherished cove. She pleaded to go back with him and swore she would not complain about living in a tent until the house was ready to move into. But he would not permit her to see it until it was completed.

In the long weeks without him, her sanctuary against loneliness was the company of Josefina and young John Samuel. The boy liked being the center of her attention while his father was away, but although he was not shy he did not talk very much, not even when he and his mother were alone together. Elizabeth Anne would love him dearly to the end of her life without comprehending him. Josefina, on the other hand, liked to talk and was a good listener in turn, and Elizabeth Anne took pleasure in their conversations. Everyone of the casa grande knew that Josefina was from the state of Chihuahua—her accent was irrefutable testament to her roots in that northern region. But Elizabeth Anne was the only one to know that Josefina’s entire family except for herself and her younger brother Gonsalvo had been killed and her village razed when she was twelve years old.

Elizabeth Anne asked who killed them and Josefina shrugged and said, “Hombres con armas.” It was a war, she said, there was always a war, always men with guns, and war was no less cruel to those who did not fight in it than to those who did. After losing their parents and home, she and Gonsalvo decided to go to Veracruz to live with the family of their maternal aunt. Besides the fact that their aunt lived there, they knew nothing of Veracruz except that it was far away to the southeast and was next to the sea. Not until afterward did they learn it was a journey of a thousand miles as the eagle flies but truly much farther, crossing every sort of terrain, including the eastern sierras. They sometimes got rides on passing wagons, but they walked more often than they rode. Many things happened and they saw much that was wonderful and much that was terrible and met many people and heard many strange languages. They crossed the mountains in the company of another displaced family and it seemed the crossing would never end and she would never be warm again. One of Gonsalvo’s hands was badly frostbitten and two fingers had to be removed. Eleven years old, Josefina said, and you never saw a boy so brave. He never made a sound except to take a deep breath when the man chopped both fingers at once with a hatchet and then again when he closed the wounds with a hot knife. The trip took a year. Their aunt’s family welcomed them and wept for their loss and marveled at their trek from Chihuahua. Gonsalvo fell in love with the gulf the moment he saw it, and he soon learned to swim in it and swam almost every day. But the sea frightened Josefina and she never went into it any deeper than her knees. In their second summer on the coast they both caught the yellow fever and she survived but Gonsalvo did not. She had lived in Veracruz state ever since.

Had she ever married?

Yes. Once. His name was Lotario Quito. He was a gentle man—too gentle, God forgive her for saying so, but it was the truth. There are times in a man’s life when rashness is necessary but the capacity for rashness was not in Lotario. Still, one cannot help but love whom one loves, and they loved each other very much. He was a clerk in a bookstore and earned extra money by writing letters and other documents for illiterates who came to his little table at the zócalo. That she herself could not read was of no matter to him. He would have given her a reading lesson whenever she asked, but only when she asked, because he was afraid that if he should suggest a lesson to her she might think he was implying that she was dull and in need of education, but he did not think that and did not wish to offend her. Even after he told her this and she said she would not take offense, he would never ask if she wished a lesson, and because she did not want to disturb his own reading in the evening, she would not ask for lessons and so never did learn to read and write. They had been married almost two years—and had produced one child, who died in his sleep in his second month—when a pair of thugs accosted them on the street late one night after a dance. They were forced into an alley and the thugs took turns raping her while the other held a razor to Lotario’s throat. They took his money and his father’s pocketwatch and shattered his spectacles for the meanness of it. They were laughing when they walked away, not even running. Lotario’s weeping was so piteous it broke her heart. He could not stop crying, even after they got home, and she held him close all night, crooning to him as to a child frighted by a bad dream.

Elizabeth Anne was tearful on hearing the story and Josefina chided her for it, saying that life was after all full of bad times as well as good ones, and even a bad time, if it did not cause unbearable pain, was better than being killed. In plain truth, she said, she was not without good luck on that night of the thugs, as they did not make her pregnant. As for Lotario, some months later a hurricane hit the city, and as was often the case the storm was followed by a typhoid epidemic, and he caught the disease and died.

Had she had any close gentlemen friends since then? That was how Elizabeth Anne phrased it—close gentlemen friends—and they both blushed a little at what she was really asking. Well, missus, Josefina answered, I can only say that some were closer than others and some more gentlemanly—and they laughed like schoolgirls.

There finally came the day when John Roger drove Elizabeth Anne in a mule wagon, just the two of them, along the improved trail to the cove, now a drive of ten hours from the compound—in fair weather, anyhow. And there he presented her with the house, lovely and bright with whitewash in the shade of the tall palms on the rise above the beach. Crafted of hardwoods and set ten feet off the ground on pilings two feet thick, it was as solid as an ark and would withstand every hurricane and flood. Its roof peaked and shingled with slate and fitted with a widow’s walk. It had only four rooms, but the wide run-around verandah gave the house a sense of greater spaciousness. The gulf was visible from the verandah—and from up on the widow’s walk it seemed to Elizabeth Anne that she could see all the way to the blue curve of the earth. The house had tall shuttered windows, a kitchen with a stove, a plumbing system piped from a pair of cisterns in the back of the building. There was a fireplace, a feature far more nostalgic than practical, which would see use but a few days a year. A small stable stood off to the side of the house, designed to keep out even the strongest of jaguars, and directly off the beach in front of the house, a stout narrow dock extended fifteen yards into the water at low tide.

“For the sailboat we’re going to get,” John Roger said.

Elizabeth Anne flung herself on him, locking her legs around him and kissing him all over his face, and he couldn’t balance himself against her weight with just one arm and they tumbled onto the sand in a laughing heap.

Over the following years it would be their custom to come out to this isolate world every couple of months with a store of supplies and spend a week or so in blissful privacy. He grew adept at one-armed swimming, and they would swim across to the inner mouth of the inlet and into the incoming current and let it carry them gently all the way around the cove and then swim out of it onto the beach just short of the rocky pass where the current accelerated and went whipping around the outer point of the inlet.

They scandalized themselves the first time they swam naked at sundown and then made love dog-fashion on the beach. They bathed together in the large wooden tub behind the house, washed each other’s hair, dried each other off. Besides sandals, she wore only a sleeveless shirt of his that hung to her thighs and he but a pair of pants he’d cut off at the knees. They professed mock concern about reverting to a primitive state. They preferred to sleep in the big hammock on the verandah rather than on the indoor bed and liked to lie awake and watch the moon rise over the gulf and see the fiery sparklings of fish breaking the surface in the cove. The nights were raucous with the ringing of frogs, with sudden frantic splashings, with indefinable shrieks from the black wilderness behind the house. Nights of rain brought a darkness exceeding all imagination, in which only the force of gravity let them define up from down. They sometimes heard the low resonant growl of a jaguar—and sometimes a scream that never failed to make them flinch and clutch to each other even as they giggled at their own fright. They joked about slathering themselves with Josefina’s salve to keep the jaguars from eating them in their sleep, and damn the risk of asphyxiation.

At a Veracruz boatyard he bought a small fishing sloop and had the name Lizzie painted on the stern. It had a little cabin just fore of the fish hold and was very light and maneuverable, its draft so shallow that John Roger joked that they could sail it on the streets of Veracruz in the rainy season. They studied every navigational map available and were not surprised to see that their cove was marked on none of them. They pored over the charts and estimated where the inlet would be. He could manage the tiller with one arm, and with Elizabeth Anne working the sheets, her straw sombrero snugged down tight by a chin thong and its brim flapping in the wind, they set sail up the coast under a bright sky of dizzying blue and towering clouds in the distance.

The water was so clear they could see the grassy bottom far below them. Elizabeth Anne asked how deep he thought it was. “Four or five fathoms,” he said. And she recited:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

She could not know the chilliness he’d felt on his first encounter with those lines in his Shakespeare studies at Dartmouth. Hearing her recite them, he felt the same chill, together with a sudden melancholy—and a rush of guilt for never having told her the truth of his father. Then upbraided himself for this turn of mind and pushed the thoughts away. “A fine recitation, young miss,” he said. “It’s top marks for you.”

“Thank you, kind sir.” She attempted a curtsy but lost her balance as the boat pitched on a swell and she just did manage to catch hold of a stay to keep from falling on her backside.

“That’ll teach ye to try that la-de-da stuff on the briny, ye fancy-bred wench,” he said in his best mariner growl.

She made a rude face at him.

When a band of dolphins surfaced within yards of the boat and frolicked alongside it, Elizabeth Anne waved to them and called hello and told them they were a fine-looking bunch. “Don’t they have the happiest faces you’ve ever seen?” she yelled over the rush of the wind. He returned her grin and regarded her face and thought, No darling girl, they don’t.

They were 150 yards off the coast as they approached that stretch of it where they thought the cove would be, and he tillered the boat to shoreward. The Lizzie rose and dipped on the easy swells, its mainsail and jib outslung and bright. They had set their course by dead reckoning and were confident it would get them near enough to the cove to see the house, which they would then use to get their bearing on the inlet. They had also calculated that the tide would be within four hours of its flood and high enough that they were in no danger of going aground in the shallow approach to the inlet. But the wind had been stronger than usual and the Lizzie even faster than they had expected. When John Roger observed that they would be going in when the tide had barely reversed its ebb, Elizabeth Anne grinned and said, “Good! We seafarers love a challenge!”

The house being white, they were sure it would be easy enough to spot it against the dark jungle. From out on the open sea, however, the jungle seemed even denser, its shadows deeper. Less than a hundred yards off the coast they still did not see it. Nor did they at sixty yards, with the bottom risen to fifteen feet and coming up fast. “Oh, good Christ,” John Roger said. “Where is it?”

Elizabeth Anne snatched up the telescope and began to scan the jungle shoreline. The scope’s view was so tightly compassed she had to scan swiftly and she feared she might overlook the house. The sloop rose and dipped and bore toward the rocky coast. They were now only forty yards offshore and in less than ten feet of water over a bottom fast becoming rock. They thought they’d made a mistake in their calculations. Then there was only four feet between them and the rushing bottom and he knew they were going to tear up the hull if he didn’t come about in the next few seconds. And Lizzie yelled “There!” and pointed.

He looked hard and saw it. Nestled in the shadows of the trees and barely visible in the jungle canopy. And he knew where the inlet was. He yelled “Hard to port!” and yanked on the tiller. Holding to the mast, Elizabeth Anne ducked under the quick swipe of the boom as the boat turned sharply and they felt the keel’s slight scrape against the bottom as the sails whumped tight as drumheads and the boat heeled hard to leeward in a broad reach and bolted forward.

They hurtled toward the small mouth of the cove and John Roger’s tillering was nothing short of artful. With as much finesse as if they’d done it a hundred times before, they sped through the inlet with four feet to spare on the leeward side. The mainsail softened in the sudden fall of wind behind the palm trees and then they were clear of the passage and John Roger steered the boat to starboard and into the tranquility of Ensenada de Isabel.

“Whooo-eee!” Elizabeth Anne yelled.

The mainsail luffed and she loosed its sheet and let the sail drop, and the jib carried them most of the way across the cove before she freed its line too and the little sail fell slack. John Roger steered the Lizzie’s glide toward the outer end of the pier and when the bow lightly glanced it Elizabeth Anne leaped from the deck with a line in hand and made it fast to a mooring post.

And they were home. Happy as children.

Although they revered their privacy at the beach house, the enjoyment of their retreats was diluted by guilt over leaving John Samuel at home in Josefina’s care. The boy was now almost seven, and in fact he didn’t mind staying home while they were gone, preferring as he did to be near his gray pony, John Roger’s present to him on his sixth birthday. Horses were the boy’s great joy, and he rode with admirable skill and confidence for one so young. He was five when his father one day leaned down from his stallion and whisked him up onto the saddle and against his chest and took him for a galloping ride that had the boy yelling with exhilaration. When John Roger jumped the horse over a high fence rail the boy whooped and Elizabeth Anne, watching, bit her lip. John Samuel afterward described the experience to his mother as feeling like he had ridden the wind.

Still, they felt derelict for excluding him from their trips to the cove, and during a spell of fine December weather they finally took him with them for a week’s stay. They asked Josefina to go, too, but she declined, saying she had not lived to such an old age just to get eaten by a tiger.

They were surprised by John Samuel’s indifference to the pleasures of the place. He had learned to swim in the river but did not really like it, even less in saltwater, and fishing held no allure for him. When they took him for a sail on the Lizzie—his first venture on a boat other than a river dugout—they had no sooner cleared the inlet, leaving the placid water of the cove for the mild rise and fall of the gulf’s swells, than he sickened and threw up. John Roger told him it was nothing to be ashamed of, he would get his sea legs soon enough, he came from a family of born sailors, after all. John Samuel nodded and made no complaint, but the farther they sailed into open water the more forceful his stomach’s rebellion, and at Elizabeth Anne’s request John Roger turned back.

The next day, while John Roger reminisced to him about the times he and his brother had set trot lines in Portsmouth creeks, they rigged such a line between the river dock and the opposite bank, and the day after that John Samuel helped his father to collect the fish off the hooks. But his parents could see that his interest in these activities was less real than shammed for their sake, and so they left him to his preferred diversion of sitting on the verandah and reading books about horses. His mealtime conversation was almost wholly about his pony and his hope that it was getting proper care from the stable hand he’d left in charge of it.

John Samuel would not go to the cove again, not with them nor anyone else nor by himself. From then on, whenever they readied to go to the beach house, they would tell him he was welcome to come and he would pretend to mull the invitation before saying he thought he should stay and care for his horse, and they would say that was fine, they understood. This ritual would persist for a year before they eventually overcame their guilt and ceased to offer the dutiful invitation. From then on they simply let him know when they were going and for how long, leaving him in Josefina’s custody, and he would always respond with a wish for them to have a good time. Which, in the primitive privacy of their haven, they always did.