Country of the Bad Wolfes

EPILOGUE

They find the four horses. The gold and silver in the saddlebags. Find the moldering head, a pair of lensless spectacles affixed to it with a strip of wire, and bury it, bespectacled, by the roadside. Later in the morning they find the horror at Wolfe Landing amid the smoking grove. The roasted bones in the embers. And that afternoon find the staggering heartbreak at the Levee house, where the Wolfe sons weep for the first time since infancy.

They report to the county sheriff and the chief of police the savagery visited on them by a gang of killers. Inform them that the bastards’ bodies are in the brush a half mile inland from Playa Blanca. Feeding the scavengers.

The next day, after telling Mamá Sófi and Remedios of their intention, the three sons go to the Davis & Sons Mortuary and retrieve their fathers’ bodies and convey them by wagon to the mouth of the river. There, with no witnesses save themselves, holding to the promise their fathers asked of them some time before, the sons bury the twins on a grassy rise with a fine view of the gulf.

Two days after that, there is a funeral service for ten at once in the Brownsville cemetery. For the five Xocotos, the three Fuentes, the two Wolfes. When Wolfe Landing is raised anew, as it will be—just as the house at Playa Blanca will be—Marina Colmillo and Harry Sebastian Wolfe will be reburied there, the first to be interred in the town’s graveyard. The Brownsville funeral is restricted to the families of the deceased, with the exception of James and Pauline Wells. Following the ceremony, the judge has a few quiet words with the three young Wolfe men. They accept his invitation to supper on Sunday next. There are matters he wishes to discuss with them. Propositions. Constable badges.

That night they have supper in the Levee Street house of Remedios Marisól, all of them, every surviving borderland Wolfe—Mamá Sofía, Remedios and her sons Jacky Ríos and César Augusto, her daughter Vicki Angel, the orphaned and now brotherless Morgan James. Also present are the Littles, John Louis and Úrsula, Hector Louis, Catalina. Two tables have been pushed together to accommodate the ten of them and the many platters of food. There are tubs of iced beer, a phonograph player issuing ranchero music. They have all had several rounds of beer when Morgan James recounts the time Marina caught them exposing themselves to Vicki Angel on the beach and threatened to tie their things in a permanent knot, an episode that comes as news to Mamá Sófi and Remedios, who belatedly berate the boys for their nastiness—and then a minute later and despite their blushes they are laughing along with everyone else, including Vicki and Catalina.

So does it go the rest of the night. They eat and drink and dance and tell funny story after funny story about their lost beloveds. In the middle of a dance with Catalina, César Augusto asks her to marry him, and she laughs at that too and says maybe she will, maybe she won’t. He asks what the hell kind of answer that is and she says it’s the kind he gets for now, and he goes out on the porch and sulks. A short time later she goes out to him and gives him the best kiss of his young life and he beams his happiness and asks if that means yes and she says no, it only means maybe she will, maybe she won’t. In that moment he senses the sort of marriage ahead of him if she should finally say yes, which he also senses she has decided to say but in her own good time.

The neighbors shake their heads at the loud music and raucous laughter from the Wolfe house. They regard as most unseemly such a party only hours after burying two of their own and eight friends besides. They should be mourning, the neighbors tell each other. They should be grieving.

The Wolfes are mourning, of course, they are grieving. But grief cannot restrain the shared laughter at their reminiscences of Marina, and of Harry Sebastian, and of the twins. The twins, above all. Who founded this borderland family and who are already the stuff of legend. And whose graves will be forced opened by the next hurricane and their bones borne away to the sea.