Country of the Bad Wolfes

BRUNO AND FELICIA

In June Sofía Reina received a letter from Gloria telling of Luis Charón’s enlistment in the army on his seventeenth birthday. My God! Gloria wrote. One day they’re eight years old and playing at being soldiers with stick rifles and the next they’re big enough to join a real army! Where do the years go!

Luis’s true ambition was the Guardia Rural, but he would not do other than as his Grandfather Edward advised, which to serve two years in the army—the first year as a private in an infantry company to acquire understanding of life in the ranks, the second as an officer, to learn leadership—before transferring to the Rurales.

Came the dog days. August marked nine months since John Roger’s only trip to Mexico City and Bruno Tomás’s move to Buenaventura. They had both maintained a correspondence with María Palomina and Sofía Reina, and in his most recent letter John Roger had again apologized to them for not having made a return visit. That the Blanco women had failed to keep their own promise to visit Buenaventura was understandable in view of the handicap that had befallen María Palomina. She had been demonstrating a lively dance step to Sófi and Amos one evening when a loose tile gave way under her foot and she fractured the ankle. At first she insisted it wasn’t broken, just badly sprained, and there was no need for a doctor. She bound it herself and hobbled about for more than a week until the foot was so darkly swollen that the pain of it pounded with every heartbeat. By which time surgery was necessary. The doctor told her that had she waited another day she would certainly have lost the foot. As it was, even after a lengthy recuperation, she could not walk, or even stand, on the foot for very long before the pain became unbearable, and she cursed the incompetency of the medical profession. She wanted to make a trip to Buenaventura anyway, but Sófi would not agree to it, not until her mother could walk with her cane at least one block without limp or grimace. Unable to pass that test after many efforts, María Palomina had to accept that the foot would never get better and she would not be making a long trip anywhere.

John Roger had been unable to return to the capital because of Buenaventura’s demands on his time. The coffee farm had produced yet another record yield, requiring still more bookkeeping and more correspondence, and more meetings than ever with buyers. And as with María Palomina, a broken bone figured in his circumstance, though it was not his bone but that of his venerable mayordomo. Now sixty years old, Reynaldo had some months before fractured a leg in a fall from a horse, and the next seven weeks had been the busiest of John Roger’s life on the hacienda as he attended to the mayordomo’s duties as well as his own. He might have been overwhelmed but for John Samuel’s help—and that of Bruno Tomás. Since appointing Bruno foreman of the horse ranch, John Samuel had devoted most of his time to assisting John Roger with Buenaventura business.

Nevertheless, John Roger wrote, ten months without making a visit to his Mexico City kin was unforgivable, and he promised María Palomina that he and Bruno would go for a visit in October for sure. In closing, he said Bruno had something interesting to tell her and Sófi in his own accompanying letter. And he thus left it to Bruno to break the news of his imminent marriage, which was so soon to take place it would be an accomplished fact before the Blanco women’s letters of response arrived at the hacienda.

The girl was Felicia Flor Méndez, seventeen-year-old sister to Rogelio Méndez, who was eleven years her senior and a longtime wrangler at the hacienda. Like Rogelio, Felicia was born and raised on Buenaventura, and he had been her only immediate family since she was thirteen. She had worked in the seamstress shop until the previous October, when their uncle in Córdoba died and she went there to live with her invalid widowed aunt, who had no one else to care for her. Felicia loved Buenaventura and did not like having to be away from it, much less indefinitely, but neither was she one to shirk an obligation to family. She had been at Córdoba a month when Bruno Tomás arrived at Buenaventura—and three weeks later he had a memorable fistfight with her brother.

Bruno had known that some of the wranglers would resent him for an interloper who’d got the foreman’s job by dint of being nephew to the patrón, and they did. But once they saw how well he knew horses and that he was willing to work as hard and get as sweaty and filthy as any man of them—unlike Don Juanito, whom they respected, yes, but who but rarely got his clothes dirty—they began to grant him a due respect. But Rogelio Méndez remained unimpressed and persisted in his recalcitrance. He had been a wrangler at the hacienda since age fourteen and was the best breaker of mustangs on the place, excluding perhaps the twins, who in the estimation of many had no equal in the handling of horses. Rogelio had been Don Juanito’s segundo since the inception of Rancho Isabela, and he had been confident that he would be named foreman if Don Juanito should ever give up the job. But then this cousin from Mexico City comes along, this fucking Bruno—who wasn’t even a Creole like his Wolfe kin, for Christ’s sake!—and just like that, he’s the foreman.

Bruno heard the gossip about Rogelio’s resentment and understood how he felt. But after three weeks of giving deaf ear to the man’s snide mutterings and enduring his insolent attitude in hope that he would soon enough adjust to the situation, he knew he had to do something about it or lose the other wranglers’ respect.

It happened the next day. One minute they were walking past each other just outside the main corral, and the next they were down in the dirt and punching and then up on their feet and punching harder. They fought for half an hour and not a man looking on had seen a better fistfight or one more evenly matched. Finally, wheezing like asthmatics, clothes ripped, lacerated faces smeared with blood and snot and dirt, eyes and lips and ears bloated red and purple, fists swollen, they stood teetering in front of each other. Rogelio somehow mustered the strength to swing one more time and Bruno somehow managed to sidestep without falling and the punch missed and Rogelio’s momentum carried him in a sideways stutter step for a few feet before he collapsed. He managed to sit up but could not stand.

Bruno dropped his hands to his sides. Chest heaving, knees trembling. Rogelio looked up at him and gasped, Fuck. Bruno nodded and huffed, Yeah. He hawked bloody snot and spat off to the side, then asked Rogelio if the fight was over or if he just wanted time to catch his breath.

Rogelio’s forearms rested on his upraised knees. He stared at the ground and made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “No más. Ya me ganaste.”

Thank Christ, Bruno thought. He did not think he could have raised his hands again. Knew he could not have reformed them into fists. I hope, he said, still panting, you will continue to be the segundo.

Rogelio grunted with the effort of looking up again. All right, he said. But I still think I should be the foreman.

I know. But you’re not. I am. Oh man, I hope we don’t have to do this again.

Nah, hell. You hit too fucking hard.

I hit too fucking hard?

Their grotesque smiles were the best their mauled mouths could muster. Bruno put a hand down to help Rogelio to his feet. They groaned at the effort and Rogelio did not make it halfway up before they both went sprawling—and they joined in the wranglers’ laughter, their bruised ribs aching.

By day’s end the news of the fight had carried to every corner of the hacienda. It had already circulated throughout the casa grande when Bruno arrived at the dining room that evening, his neat suit and tie in ludicrous contrast to his bruised and tinctured misshapen face. Vicki Clara cooed over him with solicitude, but John Samuel was angered by the whole thing. He had worked with Rogelio and thought him a fine segundo, but for the man to start a fight with the new foremen—the patrón’s nephew, no less!—was a transgression that had to be punished.

Bruno said the fight had been his own doing as much as Rogelio’s, and that Rogelio had been punished. If you think I look bad, he said, you should see him.

John Roger smiled and Vicki Clara shook her head in exasperation with the ways of men. John Samuel sighed and half-raised his hands and said, Very well, you’re the foreman who has to work with him.

The Córdoban aunt proved to be an interesting companion and was valiant and good-humored to her last breath, which she exhaled on an early morning in July. Though saddened by the old woman’s passing, Felicia Flor Méndez was happy to return to Buenaventura. She had been home a week when her brother invited Bruno to supper and introduced him to her as his foreman, Bruno Tomás Wolfe y Blanco—a name change Bruno and his sister Sófi had decided on as more accurate to their parentage.

Like many a brother with a little sister both pretty and unafraid of men, Rogelio had been fretful for Felicia Flor’s virtue from the day her breasts began to bloom. The whole time she had been away at their aunt’s he lived in apprehension that she would succumb to some charming son of a bitch. He wanted nothing for her so much as the safety of marriage and motherhood. Various young wranglers had courted her from the time she turned fifteen but none had struck her fancy. She was too damned choosy was her problem. What do you want, Rogelio asked her, some guy in shining armor like in a goddammed fairy tale? Of course not, she said. A suit of armor would rust very fast in this climate. That was another thing, her sassy tongue. His hope that she and Bruno might like each other and that something might come of it was rooted more in desperation than in reason. It was crazy to think she would give serious thought to a man thirty-four years old or that a man of thirty-four would put up with her impudence. Rogelio could not have imagined the mutual smiting that took place within minutes of their meeting.

Two weeks later, despite his great fear that she would reject him as an infatuated, impulsive, middle-aged fool, Bruno Tomás asked Felicia Flor to marry him. She gave him a gaping, wide-eyed stare and said, My God, Mr Wolfe—she who had been calling him Bruno, even Brunito, these two weeks—are you truly serious? She was able to sustain her aspect of incredulity for several long seconds as his face sagged with disappointment and regret before she grinned and said, I was afraid you’d never ask. Twenty minutes later they rushed in on Rogelio as he was eating supper and Bruno petitioned him for his sister’s hand. Rogelio swabbed chili sauce from his mouth and stared as if confronted by crazyhouse escapees. And said Yeah, sure, of course. Jesus, you two!

That was two days before Bruno’s letter to his mother, which he wrote six days before the wedding. He told María Palomina that the minute he’d seen Felicia he knew she was the one for him. Anticipating María Palomina’s desire for him to be married in Mexico City so that she and Sófi could attend the ceremony, he told her he wished he could be married in the capital but to do that he would have to wait until such time as the ranch was not so busy as it was now, but he loved Felicia so much he didn’t want to wait a minute longer than necessary to make her his wife. He said Felicia felt the same way and they both hoped very much that she understood and would not be too angry with them. Not until the end of the letter did he make known that Felicia Flor was seventeen years old, and yes, that made him twice her age, but she was a very wise girl and she was really not too young for him.

When Sófi read Bruno’s letter to their mother—who refused to get spectacles though her eyes were no longer what they used to be—and got to the part about the difference in their ages, María Palomina said, Too young for him? Listen, I know my son, and if she’s seventeen she’s way too old for him! A twelve-year-old is too old for him!

In truth, María Palomina was delighted at the news of Bruno’s marriage, which took place on the same day she received his letter. Delighted in spite of her immediate suspicion that the real reason for their haste to marry was the age-old one of having put the cart before the donkey by starting the family before the wedding. In which case, his claim of knowing the girl less than a month was of course a lie too, intended to keep her from having the suspicion she was having. What a silly boy he was, she told Sófi, to think he could fool his mother. Or think that the reason for his hasty marriage could mean as much to her as the fact that he had finally taken a wife.

In her letter of response, dictated to Sófi, María Palomina told Bruno that she was of course very vexed that he did not get married in Mexico City, but she understood and she forgave him. She asked to know everything about Felicia. Bruno wrote back that his bride was petite and beautiful and smart and beautiful and such a wonderful dancer that she had even been able to teach him to dance—him! with his three left feet! And did he mention how beautiful she was? You will see for yourself very soon, my dearest Mother, Bruno wrote. Uncle John and I and Felicia will be there sometime in early October.

Sofía Reina too sent Bruno a letter of congratulations. And hoped in secret that their mother was correct in her suspicion about the marriage. Because otherwise Bruno was telling the truth and couldn’t wait to marry Felicia. Perhaps out of love, as he claimed, but also, perhaps, because of his great desire to get the girl into bed as soon as he could. It might be that he was at least as much in thrall to his lust for the girl as to his love of her. This possibility made Sófi uneasy, convinced as she now was that the family was cursed by twin passions. Some in the family—herself chief among them, maybe her brother too—were in thrall to the passions of the flesh. And some—her father a prime example and her uncle perhaps another—to a passion for risks of blood. She prayed for God to have mercy on them all, but especially on those of them who might be damned by both.