Country of the Bad Wolfes

CULMINATION

The fifteenth of August, 1903.

She has been lying awake for hours when the first faint dawnlight shows in the window. She knows where he is. Knows that this one is not a one-time thing but that he has been seeing her for many weeks. Bad enough to be pitied for a wife whose husband hops from this one to that one to still another. But when he begins repeat visits to one, well, then it’s no longer a matter of wanting to bed others but of wanting to share another’s bed. That makes it something different. Something worse. Something she can no longer endure.

She cannot think anything she has not already thought many times before. Well, enough of thinking. She supposes she should write a letter to the grandchildren but the thought of explication is more tiring than she can stand. He has exhausted her. Let him explain.

She gets out of bed and strips and washes with thoroughness at the basin, avoiding even a glance at her slack breasts in early wither. Then puts on a black dress and her best shoes and sits before her mirror and brushes her hair to a fine loose hang and leaves it that way. Her flaccid flesh evidence of her fifty-three years but her hair yet the lustrous ebony of a girl’s. She goes to the closet in his room and there finds the holstered revolver he long ago taught her to shoot. A single-action, .36-caliber Navy Colt he used in the days of the American Civil War. She checks the chambers and sees all six are charged. Then goes to his neatly made bed and lies down on her back. Legs straight, feet together, head on pillow, eyes on ceiling. She cocks the Colt and holds it in awkward fashion with the muzzle positioned against her breast and over her heart, her fingers around the back of the butt and one thumb against the trigger guard and the other on the trigger. She feels her pulse thumping up through the gun.

Wait a minute. Wait just a goddam minute. This isn’t right.

She removes the gun from her breast and sits up. Sits motionless, pondering. Then gets up and straightens her dress and gives her hair another quick brush and drapes a shawl over her shoulders and takes up the gun and goes downstairs, holding the pistol under the shawl, her arms crossed as if against the morning chill. She leaves the house and goes across the main courtyard and out the gate into the larger compound that even at this early hour is already bustling.

She has rarely ventured into the workers’ quarter, and she receives respectful but puzzled greetings as she passes. Induces whispers about her all-black attire and unpainted face and loose uncovered hair. She has been told where the woman lives and as she turns onto that street she is thinking that she will have to wait for a time before he comes out. And then almost laughs aloud when she spies the woman’s house and sees her door come open and him step out. What timing. As though it had all been planned somewhere sometime long before now and she doesn’t even have to think what to do but only let herself do it. She stops on this side of the street and watches as he turns to give the bitch a parting kiss. Then the door shuts and he starts in her direction. Smiling. His thoughts yet inside the house.

Now he sees her and halts in the middle of the street. Sees her raising the Colt—is that his Navy?—as others on the street are scattering, having seen the gun too. He raises his palms as if he might push away this entire circumstance or at the least fend the bullet and he has no idea what he is about to say and then is on the ground and breathless, the report of the pistolshot still in his ears. A numbness in his chest. He manages to get to one knee, regaining his breath in gasps, and feels a great inflating pain under his ribs. Dark blotches of blood forming in the dust below him, his hat on the ground. He leans back on a haunch, hand to his hot wound and sees her aiming even as she comes toward him. The next bullet smashes his shoulder and swats him half-about and onto his side.

She stands over him and says, “Mírame.” He looks up and sees the small smile above the gun. Does he see the bullet emerge from the bore in the infinitesimal instant before it stains the ground under his head with the ruby ruin of his brain? She shoots him in the face three times more, until the hammer falls on an empty shell. Then drops the gun and looks about. Then in swift sure strides makes for a well at the end of the street and without hesitation goes into it headfirst.

At the corner of the nearest building, Catalina Luisiana Little, eight years old and given to roaming the compound in the early gray hours, witness to the whole thing, hears the deep resonant splash.

By the time Zack Jack and John Louis have been summoned from the ranch, Gloria has been hooked out of the well and taken to the casa grande. Don Louis there too. The two bodies washed and covered with sheets to their chins. On adjacent tables in a room aglow with the amber light of scores of arrayed candles. Ancient women of dark fissured faces and dressed all in black are seated against the walls and loud in their ritual lamentations. Zack Jack and John Louis stand there for a time, looking on their elder brother. His face with four black holes. He whom they called Uncle Louis and who had taught them so many things in their boyhood. And who, as Gloria once told her sister, was more of a father to them than Edward Little had ever been. They regard too their sister-in-law who was Aunt Gloria and the only mother they’d known. Like everyone else of the hacienda except for their father, the brothers knew of Louis Welch’s infidelities and that Aunt Gloria was pained by them. The outcome is no shock.

They send telegraphic notice to their father at Chapultepec but he is at his work somewhere else when the wire arrives and three days will pass before he reads it. By then his eldest son is buried. He tells Porfirio, who weeps. That evening they go to Las Lagrimas de Nuestras Madres but do not dance, only drink to the memory of Louis Welch Little and recount tales of him, begat fifty-eight years ago in Louisiana of a sixteen-year-old girl named Sharon.

The Little brothers also inform Bruno Tomás at Buenaventura, and Sofía Reina and María Palomina in Mexico City, none of whom have seen Gloria since the day of her precipitate marriage to Louis Welch Little thirty-six years before, nor ever met her husband. Bruno mourns for the sister with whom he had at last become familiar through their affectionate correspondence. Sófi and María Palomina are grieved to the bone. And yet, at the same time, Gloria having for years confided to Sófi—and thereby to María Palomina—the infidelities of Louis Welch, they cannot help but feel a guilty pleasure in her remedy of those injuries. From the day they met, María Palomina says, that gringo should have known that she was not a woman to mistreat. Well, Sófi says, he at least should have known it by the time they got married. And they laugh louder than they cried.