Country of the Bad Wolfes

25 JULY 1886

The church bells are clanging the imminence of the ten o’clock mass at which Juan Sotero Wolfe—being raised in his mother’s Roman Catholic faith without objection from his agnostic father—will make his first Holy Communion. The Bishop of Pachuca, a long-time familiar of Victoria Clara’s parents before they passed away, has come to administer the sacrament himself. The mood of the hacienda is loud with merriment in anticipation of the fiesta to follow the mass. The great double doors of the compound’s main gate will be open wide all day to ease the coming and going of villagers from both Santa Rosalba and Agua Negra. A pair of marimba bands are setting up on far opposite sides of the plaza fountain. Sides of beef and kid are roasting over open fire pits, and the aromas carry across the plaza and into the cool dimness of the church to mingle with the fragrances of incense and flowers and women’s perfumes. The church hums with low-voiced conversations as the pews fill. The front center pew is reserved for the patrón and his family but the only ones to have arrived are John Samuel and Victoria Clara and Juan Sotero.

In the kitchen of the casa grande, Josefina hobbles about on her cane, alternately scolding the scouring technique of the young maid laboring on that morning’s breakfast cookware and harrying a boy in the adjoining patio who is charged with keeping the water hot in a pair of large bathing tubs. The scrub maid is a pretty seventeen-year-old named Concha who was promoted to the kitchen from the laundry only days earlier.

Marina Colmillo tends the fire in the stove, then consults the small clock on the wall and extracts two handfuls of sugar lumps from a tin container and places them on the end of the wall counter in readiness for John Roger. It is his habit to go to the stable every morning and give the sugar to his horses. She then sets to work at the center counter, carving raw chickens for a stew. Most of the household will be dining on the fiesta’s offerings, but the twins will be here today and their favorite meal is her chicken-and-chiles stew and so she will have it ready for them. It has been two months since she last saw them, and she cannot stop smiling in her eagerness.

John Roger appears in the doorway between kitchen and dining room. He wears an immaculate white suit, one sleeve folded and pinned by the upstairs maid who also knots his ties. In the ten months since the loss of his grandson he looks to have aged a decade, and the suit hangs loose on his gaunt frame. His nose webbed with red veins. His hair and short beard the color of ash. His eyes dark pouched.

“Todavía no han llegado?” he says.

Not yet, Josefina says. But they will be here any minute.

They promised Doña Victoria they would be here, John Roger says. And feels foolish for saying it. For whining like a petulant child.

Don’t worry, Don Juan, Josefina says, they wouldn’t disappoint their little nephew. Their baths are hot and their suits are ready. It won’t take them a minute to clean up and be dressed.

Tell them I want them in that church, I don’t care how late they are. You understand?

She blinks at his peremptory tone. “Sí, señor, a sus ordenes. Le entiendo perfectamente.”

He is familiar with her trick of formal address and blank look whenever she takes offense at his tone. Coming from her, such formality has always suggested more of impertinence than respect. He feels his vexation on his face and is the more irritated for letting the crone see she has succeeded in riling him.

In case I don’t see them before the mass, John Roger says, I want you to tell them to see me afterwards. Immediately afterwards. In my office.

“Muy bien, señor.”

I mean it, madam. He points a finger at her. Be very sure you tell them what I said.

“Claro que sí, señor.” And adds that she is sure they will be along any minute now, but if they should be late it will be for reasons that could not be helped.

He turns and goes. Yet once again irked by her defense of them, whom she has ever and always defended against him in every case of contention, large or small, however right he might be, however wrong they. He has already left the house before Marina notices the sugar lumps still on the counter.

He had lain awake through most of the night, reviewing the decision of which he intended to apprise the three of them today. The twins would resume their monthly visits as before, and during those visits they and John Samuel would sit to dinner with the rest of the family. And if, as before, they couldn’t do it except by not saying a word to each other or even looking at each other, fine, very well, so be it. But they were going to do it for as long as he, their father, was still alive. He had by Jesus had enough of this rift. Whoever of them could not agree to the terms could leave Buenaventura—yes, leave! The family could hardly be more fractured for the departure of one or two of them than it was at present. But . . . whoever chose to leave would surrender his inheritance. That should get their attention. They all knew John Samuel would by dint of primogeniture inherit Buenaventura, but, as they would be informed today, his inheritance would not include that portion of the estate from just below the rapids all the way to the coast. He would bequeath that region to the twins. The deed to it had already been drawn and signed and needed only registration to become official. He would within the week submit it to his Veracruz legal firm, together with his will, specifying that the deed be officially registered immediately upon his death. But he wasn’t dead yet, and a will could easily enough be changed, an unregistered deed easily enough torn up. Simple as that. So would he tell the three of them in his office right after this church thing. His decision would go down hard with John Samuel, but there was no chance that he would pack his trunks, not him, to whom nothing on earth mattered more than becoming the next patrón, even of a hacienda made smaller by the bequeathal to the twins. The twins, John Roger knew, were the question. They loved Ensenada de Isabel and would of course love to own it. Yet he wasn’t sure they wouldn’t give it up rather than yield to what they might view as an ultimatum. The trick would be in the manner of his appeal. You boys want that place for yourselves? Free of your brother’s authority over it? Resume the visits. It’s no surrender, gentlemen, just a recommencement of our agreement, a matter of honoring your word. So he would say to them before sending for John Samuel. He hadn’t seen them in ten months, for Christ’s sake! Enough was enough.

Barely ten minutes after John Roger departs, Josefina’s attention turns toward the garden door and she says, “Hay están.” She calls to the boy tending the tubs that he can go now, and the boy waves and scoots away through the patio gate. Marina has to listen hard for a moment more before she too hears the boys’ faint laughter from the garden, and she smiles at Josefina. Nobody knows the old woman’s age—it is a household joke of long standing that she was the cook on Noah’s Ark—but she still has the hearing of a fox.

That the twins have chosen to come in by their garden route makes it clear they know how late they are and that they don’t want to run into their father before getting to the church. The young maid, Concha, is alight with excitement. She has never met the twins and has seen them only from a distance, but she has heard much about them from the women in the laundry, most of it scandalous and therefore enticing.

The garden door bangs open and they come stomping in, still laughing over some shared joke, charging the room with masculine energy and infusing the air with the effluvia of the sweat and blood caked on their clothes and seasoned with the smell of campfire smoke. They are hatless and their hair dusty. For the last two weeks they have been taking crocodile hides on the river, the skins now drying at the cove.

“Pues, al fin llegan estos brutos desgraciados!” Josefina says. She whacks at the boys with her cane, berating them for their lateness and their filthy stinking state and the trouble they have caused her with their father.

They laugh and fend her blows, and then Blake Cortéz snatches her to him and pins her skinny arms against her sides and kisses her full on the mouth. He says he’s damned glad a crocodile isn’t as tough as she is or they wouldn’t have collected a single hide. Marina has often marveled at the blush only the twins can raise in the brown wither of Josefina’s face.

Let go of me, Blackie, you good-for-nothing, Josefina says, trying to wriggle free. He kisses her again, then hops back from her with his fists raised like a pugilist, exhibiting a fancy footwork and feinting with lefts and rights, saying, “Come on, you old warhorse, I’m ready for you. This one’s for the championship.”

She swats at his arms with the cane and calls him a wicked child and says she’s told him a thousand times not to talk that gringo talk to her. She drives him rearward toward the patio door, ordering him to get into the bathtub this minute, they are late enough as it is.

“Oye! Pero quién es esa hermosa?” James Sebastian says, taking notice of Concha at the other end of the room.

Never mind that, Marina says. Get in those tubs and clean up, there’s no time for foolishness. As she pushes James toward the patio door, he grins and fondles her bottom and whispers in her ear that he has missed her terribly and how about sneaking into the tub with him. Marina slaps his hand away and calls him a donkey and cuts a look at Josefina, whose attention is still fixed on driving Blackie toward the patio with jabs of her cane. It frets Marina that James could be so indiscreet. But she knows how he feels. When the twins entered the kitchen it had been all she could do to keep from running to them and kissing them with all her might. She had done that once, after not having seen them for six months. Had come into the kitchen and seen them standing there, just arrived, and even in Josefina’s presence she could not refrain from kissing them each in turn with all her heart until Josefina said, Enough, girl, for God’s sake, let the poor boys catch their breath. She had felt her face flush and expected Josefina to be shocked, but the old woman simply busied herself at making the boys something to eat. She and the twins have now been lovers for more than two years and she cannot believe Josefina is still unaware of it.

Her incredulity is well-founded, for Josefina has in fact been aware of her sexual relation with the twins since it began. She had at first been dismayed by the realization that Marina had accepted the boys as lovers, but the more she turned it over in her mind the less it troubled her, until at last she felt obliged to ask the Holy Mother’s forgiveness for her lack of moral affront. Where, after all, was the sin? The boys’ cheekiness with Marina was but a flimsy veil over their adoration of her, and Marina was still a fairly young woman with a young woman’s natural appetites and she loved them too and knew how to guard against conception. Who could have taught them better than she what they should know most about women? And who else has ever given her the respect and protection she deserves? Who else has ever defended her honor as they did last summer when they accompanied her to the hacienda market to carry back a side of beef and that fool of a muleskinner called out that if she would place a sack over her head he’d be willing to play with her body? He was a very large man of rough repute but no match for the two of them. They went at him from opposite flanks like a pair of boar dogs and got him down fast and began beating him in the face with a cobblestone and surely would have killed him if Marina had not managed to make them desist. Even so, they pounded the man’s face to a ruination worse than hers, fracturing it so severely he would for the rest of his life have to breathe through his mouth and have trouble making himself understood. They had already acquired a reputation as ferocious fighters but after the public maiming of the muleskinner there were few men who weren’t at least a little bit afraid of them—and they were only fifteen at the time. When their father heard about the fight he said nothing of it to them or to Marina but summoned Josefina to get the details, and she had sensed both Don Juan’s pride in their gallantry and his dismay at their viciousness. Like their father, Josefina fears for the twins’ future. Fears it because of the men they are becoming and cannot be prevented from becoming and the dangers such men seem naturally to attract and those they seem naturally to seek out. And yet she cannot but admire them for their bravery and love them the more for their devotion to Marina. In a girlhood of so long ago it seems more like some tale she once heard told than an actual part of her past, Josefina had learned that the only man of worth to a woman was one who was willing to kill for her, a truth that was proved in her own marriage to a man who was not of that sort. In her prayers to the Holy Mother she has allowed that if there is sin in the love between the twins and Marina, then she herself, Josefina María Cortéz de Quito, must be held to a share of that sin, because she cannot condemn it.

Marina is trying to shove James out the door, but he laughs and braces himself against his brother, who has also become aware of Concha and stands fast in the doorway, grinning at her. Despite herself, blushing Concha is smiling back.

Get into those baths, you little pigs! says Josefina, half their size, flailing at them with her walking stick.

The twins yip in mock pain and affect to flinch at the blows as they stumble rearward into the patio, holding to each other as if to keep from falling. They trade a grinning look—and then swiftly unbuckle their belts and drop their pants and grab their cocks and wag them at the women.

Concha squeals and whirls about with her back to them as Josefina screeches, You’ll burn in hell, both of you! You filthy evil things!

Marina slams the door shut on the boys’ wild laughter and slumps against it in a caricature of slack-jawed exhaustion.

Josefina issues a groaning sigh as she eases into a chair. “Jesucristo,” she says, “que par de bárbaros!”

Concha looks from one woman to the other, her hands at her mouth, her brown face darker yet with embarrassment.

And then all three of them break into a cackling laughter louder than the boys outside.

From the shade of the alamo tree, he keeps intent watch on the casa grande’s courtyard gate. The steeple bells in their final clangoring summons to the ceremonial mass. He is familiar with the patrón’s habits and knows that before he does anything else he will come to the horses to give them their treat. He takes the flask from his coat and uncorks it and has a drink and re-seals it and tucks it away.

His heart jumps when he sees the white-suited patrón come out the casa grande gate. Unaccompanied, as usual. Excellent. He puts his hand inside his coat and fingers the haft of the knife snug in its sheath under the heavy money belt. The derringer in his coat will have no part in this. To be done as it should, the act calls for the blade. Face to face. So the gringo will see who is doing it, and seeing who, will die knowing why.

But now the patrón stops and pats at his coat pockets, then tosses his head in irritation and looks back toward the casa grande. He takes his watch from a vest fob and checks the time, then puts away the watch and heads for the other end of the plaza and the church.

The circumstance is clear enough. The old bastard forgot the sugar. What to do? To ride after him would put him on his guard. With that damned pistol everybody knows about. A revolver with the barrel cut short for easier carry under his coat. There is nothing to do except stay put and wait until after the mass. Then he thinks, Idiot! Why will he come to the stable afterward? He will go straight back to the house is what he will do. While you stand here with your thumb up your ass.

Damn it. To kill him at the stable would have made it all so simple. No one else nearby. Ahorse and out the gate before anyone even thought to give chase. A back trail into the mountains and then a mule track he knows of, unused for years. He would be in Jalapa before sundown and on a train for Mexico City and from there a train to Durango and the protection of his brother. But now what? If you do it at the church you’ve got a lot of people around and you’re a whole lot farther from the main gate. Wait until tomorrow and do it here at the stable like you planned. Be smart. And there’ll be fewer people tomorrow.

No! Today! You’re ready today. And you don’t want fewer people. You want as many as possible to see it. To see what happens to this gringo who spat on your family’s honor!

All right, then. Take the horse over there. You can still mount up fast and get out quick. Goddammit, man, where are your balls?

He leads the horse across the plaza to the church and tethers it to a tree a few yards from the wide breadth of church steps. Then positions himself at the periphery of the crowd assembled outside the doors, hat low over his eyes. And now has only to wait for the end of the mass. Engrossed in his thoughts, he is heedless of late arrivals.

The mass is in progress when the black-suited twins ease through the crowd listening at the open doors. The people grouped at the back of the room make way so that the brothers can stand at the forefront with a clear view of the altar. As those in the rearmost pews become aware of their presence, they make gestures of offering their seats to them, but the twins decline the tenders with their own hand signals.

They see their father in the front pew, his shoulders slumped as never before. To one side of him are John Samuel and Vicki and Juanito Sotero, and next to them Bruno Tomás and his wife Felicia Flor, great with their first child, due in a few weeks. The empty space to the other side of their father is where the twins would be sitting if they had arrived in time. Not until Juan Sotero goes to the altar to receive the communion wafer from the bishop does their father turn to look toward the back of the church and see them. His gaze is tired but reproachful at their lateness. The twins acknowledge him with respectful nods and he nods in turn. Then gives his attention back to Juan Sotero as the boy returns to the pew, hands together in a prayerful attitude contrasting with his wide smile. He sits down and Vicki Clara puts an arm around him and whispers in his ear.

Josefina has told them of their father’s directive to go to his office after the mass. They cannot guess what he wishes to see them about, but have a hunch it will entail John Samuel in some way and that he will be there too, and so the session cannot possibly be anything but unpleasant. As the mass nears its end, Blake says, “Let’s go.”

He freezes at the sight of them emerging from the throng at the doors. They had not been seen in the compound since the business with the horse—almost a year now—and he’d had no reason whatever to think they might be here today. They are walking in his direction and for a petrifying moment he thinks they have already seen him, then realizes they haven’t and he averts his face just as one looks his way. They stride past, almost close enough to touch. He feels a tremor in his fingers and stills it with his fists.

And sees the patrón come out of the church, flanked by family.

They are halfway to the casa grande when Blake Cortéz stops and looks back toward the church, where the crowd is just beginning to exit. James Sebastian looks back at him. “What?”

“I don’t know. Something.”

James looks toward the church. “Good-looking, huh?”

“Not that. Something else. Just barely saw it. Goddammit, what was it?”

“Harm?”

“Has that feel.”

“See Father?”

“Not in that crowd.”

They head back to the church.

As they surge from the church, people are laughing, speaking in shouts to be heard above the clangor of the bells. Children race off toward the far end of the plaza, toward the music and the tables of food. John Roger begins to descend the steps—John Samuel and his family to one side of him, Bruno Tomás and Felicia Flor to the other—and then, directly before him, two steps below, is Alfredo Espinosa, his expression such that for a second John Roger doesn’t recognize him, and then he does, and he smiles and halts, wondering what he might want. Alfredo now smiles too and steps up and places a hand on John Roger’s arm in unseemly familiarity—then locks his hand on the arm and brings up the knife and stabs him with terrific force three fast times. In the abdomen, the stomach, the chest.

The others have already descended another three steps before they are aware John Roger has halted behind them, and when they turn to look he is on the seat of his pants and falling onto his side, hat tumbling, face clenched and teeth bared, hand splayed against his chest. The people to either side of him are agape with shock. John Samuel says “Oh God” and backs down another step. A woman shrieks. Bruno sees the bloom of blood on his uncle’s white coat and sees Alfredo with knife in hand as he is starting to move away. He lunges and grabs him by the collar and Alfredo twists about and slashes Bruno’s arm and face and Bruno lets go as Felicia Flor pulls him to her and gives her back to Alfredo, who slashes again and the blade opens her sleeve without touching flesh. More screams now as others see what’s happening, but most of the churchgoers are still oblivious or in confusion, and Alfredo vanishes among them.

The twins come shouldering through the crowd and see their fallen father, his head cradled in Vicki Clara’s lap and his coat opened to expose a shirtfront sodden with blood so bright they know he will be dead within the minute. Don’t die, Papá, Vicki Clara pleads, don’t die! John Roger’s eyes are wide and keep moving from one looming twin to the other. He wants to say “Sons” but manages only what sound like gasping exhalations. Then his eyes go still and their light is gone.

James Sebastian takes the shortened Colt from his father’s shoulder holster and Blake Cortéz shouts “Pa donde fue?” Hands point and wave in the same direction amid a chorus of strident babblings and the twins charge through the throng, knocking aside men and women and children alike.

In all the turmoil, no one has tried to stop Alfredo before he reaches his mount. He swings up into the saddle, knife still in hand, and heels the horse hard, heading toward the main gate at the other end of the plaza. The twins break through the crowd and spot him. James Sebastian assumes a shooting stance and sights just above the distancing rider to allow for the truncated trajectory of a short-barreled handgun and squeezes off three rounds in measured succession, adjusting his sight after each shot. The first bullet falls short and ricochets up into the horse’s thigh but the animal barely flinches and doesn’t break stride. The people at the far end of the plaza flee for cover. The next round strikes the horse in the hindquarter and it staggers but keeps its feet and Alfredo heels it hard and presses himself low against its neck. The third bullet hits the horse behind the ear and it plunges headfirst and Alfredo hears its neck break like a tree branch as he sails forward and onto the cobbles and goes tumbling to a stop. Blackie would later praise the shot and James would confess he had been trying to hit the rider.

Alfredo scrabbles to his feet, incredulous that he has broken no bone, his heart ramming against his ribs as though trying to make its own getaway. His knife is gone. The twins are coming at a jog and the crowd trotting behind at a distance. He bolts down a narrow alleyway between worker row houses and turns into a wider alley behind the residences, this one lined with animal enclosures—chicken houses and cattle corrals, goat pens and pig sties. He sees another alleyway junction up ahead and runs toward it and then stops short when the twin with the gun comes sprinting out of its shadowed mouth and sees him and turns toward him at a walk. Alfredo whirls around and sees the other twin advancing on him too, Alfredo’s knife in his hand. Onlookers stream out from each of the flanking alleyways but each bunch keeps well back of the twin ahead of it. Alfredo remembers the derringer in his pocket but is too afraid to make a move for it.

It occurs to him that surrender will resolve everything. Surrender, yes! Let them lock him up! What else can they do in the eyes of so many witnesses? He raises his hands high and yells, “Me rendiro! Me rendiro!” He’ll have someone send a telegram to his brother. To General Mauricio Espinosa de la Santa Cruz. Who will speed down here. Then let’s see how long he stays locked up! Then these two sonsofbitches’ll see what’s what!

Look! he yells. All of you, look! He shakes his raised hands. I am surrendering! You see! He keeps shifting his attention from one twin to the other as they approach him from either side. And then they are near enough for him to see their eyes. I surrender! he yells, voice breaking. I surrenderrrrr!

Blake Cortéz stabs him just below the ribs and with a lateral yank slices him open. The pain exceeds any Alfredo could have imagined. He clamps his hands over his exposed viscera and his face contorts but the pain constricts his voice to a rasp. The front of his pants darkens with blood and urine. He falls down, knees drawn up, and moans low. They are next to a pig sty loud with snortings, and a row of little furious eyes peer between the slat rails. The twins look at each other—and then James Sebastian puts his boot against Alfredo’s shoulder and pushes him onto his back and shoots him through each elbow to render his arms useless and Alfredo finds his voice and screams. And then screams higher still as the twins pick him up by the wrists and ankles and sling him over the top rail of the pen. He smacks down into the muck—and then everyone hears the clamorous raven of the pigs. The excruciations of his final minutes.

They take the Dragoon from the top right drawer and then from the middle drawer take a handful of the photographs of their mother and two of their father and one of their parents together. They pick the lock of the lower left drawer and take the ledger and the document case and put the ledger into the case with its other contents. They ignore the other drawers. They have already been to see their father where he is laid out. In deference everyone else left the room. When it was just him and the two of them, they touched him for the first time in their lives. His hand, his hair. Touched his face.

As they head for the office door James Sebastian says, “Hold on” and goes over to the big map of Mexico on the wall. Blake Cortéz comes up beside him.

“Where’ll it be?” James says. Veracruz was out of the question. It was the first place their seekers would look.

“I don’t care as long as it’s near the gulf. I’d rather not live anywhere other.”

“Me neither. North or south?”

“Nothing south but Indians who mostly can’t even speak Spanish.”

“Well then, that just about leaves only here,” James taps a fingertip on the map.

“Fine by me.”

They are midway down the stairs when John Samuel comes through the tall front doors and across the great room at a quick stride, heading for the staircase. As he nears the foot of it he looks up and sees them and stops short. The twins pause a few steps below the middle landing to regard him. They had not seen his face since the horse accident and see now what Bruno meant about his nose and that Josefina was not exaggerating the scar on his cheek. His eyes move from one of them to the other. Linger a moment on the gun each has tucked into the front of his pants. One of them puts a hand on his gun and says, “You aint got a rifle hid on you, do you?”

John Samuel reddens. The twin grins and takes his hand off the Colt.

“I want to talk to you,” John Samuel says. His voice has deepened, no doubt because of the nose.

“Make it quick,” says one.

“I mean in private, not out here in—”

“You have something to say, say it,” says the other.

He seems unsure how to proceed. Then gestures in the direction of the plaza and says, “What you did to that man was . . . was. . . .”

“Discourteous?” one offers. “Ill-mannered?”

“Good God! You two are just—”

“He murdered our father,” says the other. “Yours too, I guess.”

“Yes! Yes, he did! And he deserved to be punished for it. By the courts! Not the way you two—”

“We punished him no more than he deserved.”

“Punished, you say? Christ, you defiled him. What do you think Mauricio . . . do you fools not know who his brother is?”

“Ah, quit your mewling,” says one. “We know about his brother and we aint about to fight his army. We’re leaving. When he gets here you tell him we’re gone and you don’t know where.”

“He’ll know you’re at the cove. He’ll find out and he’ll go there. People talk, especially if they’re afraid. Somebody will tell him.”

“No doubt,” says one. “But don’t worry about us, big brother, we won’t be there for long.”

John Samuel’s surprise is more apparent than he knows. “Where are you going?”

“China. The moon. We aint decided.”

John Samuel glares. “Fine. That’s fine. I don’t care a damn. But don’t ever come back here. I mean it. This place is far more important than you two and I won’t put it at hazard just to protect you from—”

“Protect us?” one says. They laugh and start down the stairs and he steps aside to give them berth. As they pass, he notes the document case and says, “What do you have there? If that’s Father’s it stays here!”

They stop and turn and stare at him. Then grin at the look on his face. Then go off to the kitchen.

Josefina hugs them each in turn. Her withered face looks older than ever. Of course you must go, she says, of course, go quickly. She has never cried in front of them and will not do so now. But her red eyes tell them she has been weeping for their father. When she’d seen the pistols in their pants she’d said, “Ay, Dios.” Said it like a sigh. The Concha girl stands mute at the wash sink, her arms soapy, staring at the twins, at the set of their faces. So different from this morning.

Marina Colmillo had fled the room as soon as they said they were leaving. Both she and Josefina had known at once that they did not simply mean they were going back to the cove but were departing Buenaventura for somewhere else—and with small likelihood of coming back.

Now Marina returns, a little breathless, a sack of clothing in one hand and in the other a small straw case with a handle. Her worldly goods.

Where are you going? says Blake Cortéz.

With you.

No you’re not.

Yes I am.

You can’t come, says James Sebastian.

Why not?

You just can’t.

I’ll follow you.

Don’t be foolish, James says. We’d leave you way behind quick. Lose you easy.

I’ll follow the trail.

We’re not going to stay at the cove, Blake says.

I know.

We’ll be gone before you get there.

Maybe.

You’ll just have to turn around and come all the way back.

I won’t.

Oh? What’ll you do?

Wait.

Wait? You mean there?

Yes.

For what?

For you to come back.

You don’t seem to understand, James says. We may never come back.

Then I will wait there until then.

Until when?

Until you never come back.

The twins stare at her. James turns to Josefina and says, Tell her she can’t come.

It is not for me to tell her, she says.

He blows out a long breath and cuts a look at Blake, who shrugs and says, “Hell man, I don’t know. Maybe.”

Josefina swats at Blake and says, No gringo talk!

James Sebastian points a finger at Marina. The minute you complain, the minute you cause any kind of trouble, we’ll put you on a train right back here. You understand?

Of course I do, she says. I am not sixteen years old.

Josefina smiles at Marina’s rebuke of them for addressing her as if she were the child among them, she who is nearly twice their age.

Yeah, well . . . just so you know, James says.

The boys give Josefina a last quick kiss and put on their hats and take up the food sacks she has prepared for them and head for the door. Where they stop and look back at the two women hugging hard and murmuring endearments to each other.

You coming or not, for Christ’s sake? says Blake.

Josefina watches Marina go to them, the burlap bag over a shoulder, the basket hanging from the crook of an elbow and bumping against her hip.

You’re already slowing us down, James says, taking the basket from her.

All your blah-blah-blah is slowing us down, Marina says. Then turns and mouths a kiss at Josefina, who makes a benedictory sign of the cross at them.

And they are gone.

After his father’s body is taken away to be washed and dressed for that night’s vigil and tomorrow’s funeral, when he will be buried beside Elizabeth Anne in the casa grande graveyard, John Samuel goes to the telegraph office. Everyone within but the telegrapher steps outside to grant him privacy while he dictates a wire to General Mauricio Espinosa, informing him of the morning’s violence. Still shaken by his witness of his father’s killing and the reports of what his brothers did to Alfredo, he cannot bring himself to relate the grislier details, and he tells Mauricio only the bare facts of John Roger’s being stabbed to death by Alfredo who in turn was stabbed to death by the twins.

He sends for Bruno Tomás and Rogelio Méndez to meet with him in his office and is somewhat better composed by the time they arrive. He is brief and to the point. Bruno is now the mayordomo of Buenaventura and Rogelio the foreman of Rancho Isabela.

As they make their way back across the plaza, Rogelio says, Didn’t waste a minute, did he?

John Samuel goes into his father’s office and closes the door and seats himself behind the desk. He feels his father’s absence like a sudden, unseasonable change in weather. But at the same time it feels right to him to be sitting where he is. He opens the middle drawer and passes the next twenty minutes studying the photographs he had not known existed. His childhood pictures seem those of someone he never knew, some boy stranger. The ones he looks at longest are of his mother. He feels a mix of peculiar sensations and the oddest of them is very near to an urge to cry. He remembers the day they collected seashells on the Cove’s gulfside beach and the wind blew up her skirt and he saw her underwear. He wishes he had a picture of that moment. Then feels a hot shame on his face and glances about as if someone may have been watching him and known what he was thinking. And puts the pictures away.

The next drawer he tries is the top left and in it he finds John Roger’s will and an attached document. He scans the will and smiles. Then examines the other document and his smile falls away. It is a prepared deed for the entire eastern tract of Buenaventura, including all of its coast. It is made out in his brothers’ names and ready for legal registration.

Good Christ, he thinks. This almost was.

His hand trembles as he puts the match flame to the paper.

John Samuel’s telegram about the killings does not come as news to Mauricio Espinosa. The general has already received several telegraphed accounts of the bloody morning from other residents of Buenaventura. His father dead but a week and now his brother dead too. The Espinosa de la Cruz family reduced to himself alone.

That stupid kid. Twenty-something years old and still a stupid kid. Witless. Killing the patrón because of a damned job. In front of his family! In front of a hundred witnesses! Based on his own acquaintance with John Wolfe, Mauricio regarded him a good man. His own father, who had known the patrón for more than twenty-five years, had always had high opinion of Don Juan.

Stupid kid.

He pours another drink. He feels partly at fault, having encouraged Alfredo to believe he would make a capable mayordomo. He had done it solely in hope that it might make Alfredo work harder to better himself, so when the time came for him to take over the job he might prove adequate to it. It was less a hope than wishful thinking. You could sooner alter the configuration of the stars than change a man’s character, and Alfredo’s character was not the stuff of a mayordomo. Simple as that. Had he been in the patrón’s place he would not have given the job to Alfredo either.

But the denial of the job to Alfredo was not the point. The whole thing seemed clear enough. The patrón denied Alfredo the job and gave it to his own son, so Alfredo killed the patrón for wronging him—as Alfredo saw it, anyway—and then the patrón’s twin sons killed Alfredo. That Alfredo committed a wrong is without question. And who could argue that the twins were not justified in avenging their father?

However. That they killed Alfredo was also not the point. John Samuel Wolfe’s telegraphed report said of the killings only that Alfredo had killed the patrón with a knife and the twins then knifed Alfredo. But as others of the hacienda have reported to him, that wasn’t all there was to it. For one thing, it was said that Alfredo had surrendered. It was said he was yelling that he surrendered and that everyone in the crowd heard him and that his hands were up. But they killed him anyway. Injustice? Some would so argue. But not he, a cavalry officer who has seen more than his share of killing in hot blood and understands the power of its compulsion. No, injustice was not the point.

However. They stabbed him and shot him and fed him to the pigs—while, it was said, he was still alive. But even if true that he was still alive, that they added to his final suffering, that they prolonged it, well, that was not the point, either. He himself has ordered men burned alive, buried alive.

But in feeding him to the pigs what they were truly doing was making him into pig shit. They had made pig shit of his brother.

That was the fucking point.

The new patrón must’ve thought he could protect his brothers by keeping those details from him. Well, hell, that’s what a big brother’s supposed to do, isn’t it? Can’t really blame the man for that. If he’s ever met John Samuel Wolfe, Mauricio has no recollection of it.

He had mulled whether to send for the body and decided against it. Let them bury him. Except in cases when you really had no choice but to make some public display of honor or respect or suffering or some such thing, the dead were the dead and it didn’t make a bean’s worth of difference who buried them or where or even whether they were buried at all. If a lifetime of soldiering had taught him anything, it was the unsurpassable indifference of the dead. Dust to dust was absolutely right. The only truth ever to come from the mouth of a priest.

He is told they are sixteen years old. Christ. He had seen them only twice on his rare visits to Buenaventura, had first met when they were around eight and seen them again the last time he had been to the hacienda, when they must have been eleven or so. He remembers them as the only truly identical twins he has ever set eyes on. Polite but close-mouthed. With a way of looking at you as if they were studying a picture on a wall. His own father had liked them very much, though he said they could at times be devils. Good. They would feel at home when he sent them to hell.

For many years General Mauricio Espinosa has maintained close at hand a small corps of civilian hirelings for employment in missions outside of official sanction. He now sends for the most reliable of them. Esmeraldo Lopez, a man of wide experience in various forms of warfare, with particular skill in the jungle. He arrives within the hour, saying, Yes, my general.

Mauricio briefs him about the events at Buenaventura and then acquaints him with a rough map he has drawn of the hacienda and instructs him in his mission. He answers Lopez’s few questions, then provides him with money and dispatches him to Veracruz via private train.

Alfredo Espinosa has been dead for eleven hours.