Country of the Bad Wolfes Page 14

  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 bou
ght 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.

  SEASONS OF MARS

  AND VENUS AND MORS

  The American Civil War came as no shock to any of them, for they had long sensed it as inevitable. A letter from Mrs Bartlett reported that many of the state’s young men had enlisted and gone off to fight the wretched secessionists, but Jimmy had been commissioned as an army captain and she thanked God her husband had the influence to get him posted in Washington as a records officer. Otherwise, she wrote, the war seemed as distant from New Hampshire as did Mexico. Its most conspicuous effect was a significant increase in profits for the Bartlett paper mills, as purchase orders poured in from the federal government.

  Elizabeth Anne nearly wept in her anger at her mother’s letter. She shared Patterson’s convictions that it was a war between rich northern industrialists and rich southern planters and that the Confederacy’s economic cause was no less compelling than the Union’s and that the North’s denunciation of slavery was rank hypocrisy. She asked John Roger’s promise to stay out of “that criminal folly,” as she phrased it. “I will not be made a widow or have my child left fatherless in the cause of any bigwig’s greed, including my father’s.”