Country of the Bad Wolfes Read online

  Hello, father, he thought. Nice to see you.

  The sketch became one more concealment in his life. Along the bottom of it, he wrote, “Roger Blake Wolfe (b? - d 1829)” and stored it in the same document case containing the graduation daguerreotype of himself and his brother and the embassy letter about their father. He kept the case in his office at home, in the same desk drawer where under lock and key he stowed the journal he had begun in college and only once or twice put to use since. But on the evening he brought the sketch home, he entered into the journal all that he had learned about his father from the archives and noted his fruitless search for his grave.

  He began a correspondence with a London genealogist who over the course of more than two years informed him that his father’s parents were Henry Morgan Wolfe (died London 1835, age 67) of County Galway in Ireland, who’d had a distinguished career in the Royal Navy, and Hedda Juliet Blake (died London 1815, age 37), born to a London family of “inestimable fortune,” in the genealogist’s phrase. John Roger would learn too that Roger Blake Wolfe had been born in London in April of 1797 and had been publicly disinherited by his parents via newspaper promulgation in 1813. The researcher would uncover an 1825 Times report of an act of piracy attributed to the Englishmen Roger Blake Wolfe and the crew of his ship, the York Witch, against the Portuguese trader Doralinda, during the commission of which crime, according to testimony by the Portagee captain, five members of the Doralinda crew were murdered. A later item in the Times would report that several countries, including the United Kingdom, had posted an official bounty for the capture or proved killing of “the Pirate Wolfe.” Insofar as the genealogist would be able to determine, Roger Blake Wolfe had but one sibling, a much younger brother, Harrison Augustus Wolfe, born in September, 1814. Except for the registry of birth, the genealogist would uncover no other documents pertaining to Harrison Augustus save his inclusion on a series of student rosters at the Runnymede Academy of London from 1824 through 1830.

  He stored this correspondence in the document case and entered its chief points in his journal. He had no intention of ever revealing the journal’s content to anyone and was not even sure why he recorded it. And then on learning of Lizzie’s pregnancy, he’d suddenly had a reason. He thought it only proper that he leave to his child a factual record of the family ancestry. There would be times, however, when he would doubt the wisdom of this purpose and wonder if his offspring might not be better off never knowing about his criminal forebear. On several instances of such misgiving, he would come very near to pitching every word about Roger Blake Wolfe into the fire.

  And too, over the years, he would every so often, and always late at night, sit at his desk behind closed doors and take out the ink portrait and study it intently. As though the face were in fact his father’s and might yet reveal to him some vital secret shared between them.

  Their first Veracruz summer was a model of Patterson’s prediction. Steamy days and nights. Torrential rains. A haze of mosquitoes. But even in the increasing discomfort of her pregnancy, Elizabeth Anne loved the coastal summer in all its sultriness and birdsong and riot of colors, its babble of Spanish and incessant marimba tinklings, its mingled smells of tropical flora and saltine gulf and pungent cookery. She loved the thunderstorms that whipped the trees and clattered the shutters and lit the night in flashings of eerie blue, that left the city cool and fresh if only for a few blessed hours. At last did autumn begin to ease down the coast with its mornings of deeper blue and afternoons of longer shadows, its cooler nights and brighter stars. She could not tell John Roger enough how much she cherished this exotic place, its lushness and rhapsodic language, its paradoxical character of mania and melancholy.

  Patterson was not the only one to tell them of the dangers at large outside their courtyard gates, to warn them that the town abounded with ruffians and was notorious for street fights and killings. John Roger took the little man’s advice to carry a pocket pistol under his coat whenever he left the house. But they would be in Veracruz for nearly five years before they witnessed any violence greater than the frequent street grapplings between drunks. The most proximate case of murder in those early years occurred one morning at a residence a block from their own. Word of it had flown from the servants of one household to those of the next and within an hour the entire neighborhood knew the story. The man of the house, a jeweler who spent long days at his shop, had killed his wife in culmination of a shouting argument provoked by her pet parrot. The bird had mimicked sexually specific endearments familiar to the husband but which the parrot attached to the name Cristiano, the name of the household’s young gardener, who fled the property at the sound of the first gunshot. That first report delivered a fatal bullet to the wife’s head and was followed by five more shots in quick succession, each of them intended for the parrot, the husband no less enraged at the informer as at the informed upon. The parrot screeched and flapped about the room as bullets smashed glass and glanced off the walls and gouged the furniture and one round rang off a church bell a block away and the last one ricocheted off two walls before piercing the husband’s buttock. The man screamed and fell to the floor as the parrot swooped out the window. Police were summoned, and a short time later husband and wife were carried out on stretchers to be placed in separate wagons, she with a sheet over her face and bound for the undertaker’s, he facedown with a bandaged ass and off to the jail.

  Elizabeth Anne got the story from the housemaids and in turn told it to John Roger. Who smiled and said, “We are without question among a mercurial people.”

  He had come to agree with Charley Patterson that the most salient traits of the Mexican character were its contradictions and volatilities. Mexicans were at once a people affable and suspicious, convivial and violent. No one was better-mannered than a Mexican or as quick to turn dangerous. One moment he might be laughing and joking, and the next in a murderous rage. In the midst of singing the joys of life or the glories of womanhood, he could abruptly give way to weeping over life’s relentless sorrows or cursing women’s eternal treacheries. There was a marked incongruity between the effusiveness of Mexican politeness and the stark fact of Mexican distrust. Between a Mexican’s easy hospitality and his deliberate isolation. “Mi casa es su casa,” a Mexican would aver with utmost earnestness, even as the barred gates of his house and the high broken-glass-topped walls surrounding it made clear his desire to keep the world without. “A su servicio,” the Mexican would maintain, even as he stood ready to take umbrage at the first hint of being deemed subservient. While the Creoles were not exempt from these traits—perhaps even had them to greater degree but were better able to mask them behind the ornate and ritual civility of their class—they were most obvious in the mestizos, the country’s principal caste, whose emotional and contradictory nature, Patterson professed, was the natural legacy of its origin.

  “Just imagine coming from people of two different races that had not a blamed thing in common except a love of blood in every which way,” Patterson said. “Imagine knowing your white daddy was a robber and killer just crazy with greed who raped your Indian momma who herself believed in cutting out people’s hearts to please the gods and eating what was left of the victim. Hardly any wonder the Mexies are they way they are. Sad to say, but they pretty much acquired all the worst traits of both races and little of the good. It’s an interesting subject but some of them can be a mite tender about it. Best not to bring it up in their company.”

  Elizabeth Anne was not as much interested in such ethnic generalities as she was fascinated by Mexican folk culture—its ubiquitous spiritualism, its widespread belief in witchcraft and sorcery, in necromancy and ghosts, its pervasive personification of Death, so widely depicted in broadside illustrations and wall posters and murals as an amiable and amused skeletal presence in the midst of the foolish living. Of the many ghost stories she heard from the maids and the old cook—whose name was Josefina Cortéz—none so captivated her as that of La Llorona, the Crying Woma
n. The way Josefina told it, the Crying Woman had been a Spanish aristocrat who was forsaken by her husband for another woman, a mestiza, and the betrayal so crazed her with fury that she murdered her children in order to punish her husband. On comprehending the horror she had committed, she was consumed with grief and killed herself, but her spirit was condemned to wander through the nights in everlasting search of the little ones’ lost souls. It was a story told with variations in different parts of the country—in some she was not a Spaniard but a poor Indian, and the specific adultery that provoked her to murder the children varied from version to version. But almost every regional variation agreed that whoever had the bad fortune to come upon the Crying Woman and looked into her eyes would be afflicted with her anguish and kill themselves because of it. The young maids nodded in big-eyed accord as Josefina told Elizabeth Anne that to this day you might on some late nights hear La Llorona crying for her children in the streets— “Aaaayyy, mis hijos! Mis hiiiijos!” Sometimes her cries came from a great distance in the countryside, sometimes from just across town, sometimes from the darkness just outside one’s window. The tale prickled the fine hairs of Elizabeth Anne’s nape even as her eyes welled in sympathy for the Crying Woman.

  She learned about curanderismo—the primitive and magical healing arts—and of brujería, the practice of witchcraft, both beneficent and malign. Scattered in the back streets of town were a variety of shops where one could buy secret herbs and potions to effect almost any desire of the heart and soul. There were special candles and little books of cryptic incantations to gain favor from an importuned spirit. Charms and amulets and talismans against the evil eye. A curandera could cure ailments defiant of medical science, but a bruja possessed even greater and darker powers. A bruja could invoke hexes, cast spells, instill or cure dementia of every kind. Could commune with the spirits of the dead. And as for love—a dementia so commonplace that most brujas viewed it with the same bored scorn of doctors for the head cold—there were many rituals anyone could employ without the help of a sorceress. A dead hummingbird in a man’s pocket made him irresistible to the opposite sex. A woman wishing to be loved by a particular man should wear a rooster feather next to her heart when she was in his presence, but if she wanted to be loved by many men she should carry the feather in her underwear. A man wanting to seduce a woman should put in her food the leg of a beetle or a pinch of bone dust from a human female skeleton. But he had to be very careful because too much of either ingredient would drive the woman insane past all hope of recovery. Insanity was also a risk if a woman wanting to gain dominance over her husband put an excess of jimson weed in his coffee. It was not hard to understand, Josefina told Elizabeth Anne, why there were so many crazy people in the world, especially lovers.

  Elizabeth Anne could not get enough of such lore and superstition. John Roger teased her for her interest in such claptrap, as he termed it. He wondered aloud if maybe she had put a bit too much jimson weed in his coffee and then drunk it herself by mistake. She crossed her eyes and affected to babble as if mentally unhinged. Then beamed at his happy laughter.

  As soon as she’d learned of her impending motherhood she had written her parents the news. They were elated—but her mother pleaded with Elizabeth Anne to come home to have the baby.

  “Surely you wish the child to be born on American ground,” Mrs Bartlett wrote. “And certainly you must be even more aware than I of the hazards of giving birth in that primitive land. Come home, darling daughter, for the safety of the child as well as your own.”

  John Roger saw the sadness in her eyes as she read the letter to him. Just as he was about to say that if she wanted to have the child in New Hampshire it would be all right with him, she said, “Poor Mother. She simply cannot comprehend that I am home.”

  Through the offices of Charles Patterson, the Wolfes had become acquainted with a number of well-placed persons—British and American entrepreneurs, municipal officials, prominent Mexican businessmen, and several hacendados who kept a second residence in Veracruz. The city’s mayor was a friend. So too the young captain of police, Ramón Mendoza, whose small force was almost exclusively employed in keeping order in the zócalo and patrolling the neighborhoods of the affluent. Although the Wolfes adhered to the protocols of their social class and hosted their share of formal dinner parties, they as always preferred their own company, and even before Elizabeth Anne’s advancing pregnancy made it easy to beg off from party invitations, they took guilty pride in their finesse at fabricating plausible excuses.

  They were, however, very curious about the hacienda world they had heard so much about, and when a hacendado friend invited them to attend his daughter’s quinceañera—the traditional celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday, marking her passage into womanhood—they happily accepted. Because of Elizabeth Anne’s pregnancy, John Roger had at first been unsure if they should make the trip, but she was only in her fourth month and she assured him she felt quite up to it.

  The hacienda was named Corazón de la Virgen and lay twenty-five miles southwest of the city. There was a special mass for the girl on the morning of her birthday, then a reception and a formal dinner, then a party with four hundred guests. The gala lasted until sunrise and then everyone departed for home except for a few special guests, including the Wolfes, who were hosted for another two days, until the birthday girl was taken to the port in Veracruz to embark on a chaperoned two-month stay in Paris, her parents’ main gift to her.

  As in the standard design of most haciendas, its hub was a high-walled compound that was a small town unto itself. While most of the hacienda’s workers lived outside the compound, within it was a residential quarter for the most important employees. The compound contained a plaza with a communal well, a church, stables, corrals, stock pens, granaries, workshops, a store where the workers could purchase goods on credit. There was an armory sufficient to a military company, and next to it the quarters for the band of former soldiers the patrón employed to protect his property and, whenever necessary, enforce his will. The center of the compound was the family residence—the casa grande—itself walled off from the rest of the compound and sometimes also referred to as the hacienda. The casa grande enclave had its own well and stable, several patios, various flower and vegetable gardens, a small fruit orchard. The two-story house had more than enough bedrooms to accommodate the special guests. Its ballroom had mirrored walls and a lofty ceiling hung with chandeliers. It had a wide spiral staircase to the second floor. The lamplit and high-shadowed hallways were hung with ornate tapestries and oil portraits of an ancestral line predating the founding of New Spain. There were kitchens and bathing rooms, dining halls and drawing rooms and dens, two libraries, a billiard room, a chapel. Both the compound walls and the casa grande’s rooftop were lined with battlements. “You could hold off the world from in here,” John Roger told Elizabeth Anne.

  Their host provided a buggy for them to explore the property as they wished, and on each morning of their visit they rose early and had breakfast while most of the other guests continued to sleep off the effects of the night before, and then they went for a long ride, each day ranging in a different direction to see another part of the sixty-square-mile estate.

  “It’s like a country of its own,” Elizabeth Anne said. “The villages are its various towns and the compound is its capital city. The casa grande is the capitol building. If we owned such a place, you would be its president and I the vice-president. Our child would serve as our cabinet.”

  John Roger said it sounded rather a roguish government, especially if their child should be a girl and render the majority of its administration female. Elizabeth Anne slapped his arm in sham umbrage.

  On the trip back to Veracruz they talked and talked about the splendors of hacienda life.

  The baby was born on the night of November the first, directly amid the Days of the Dead, the annual two-day celebration in honor of the deceased and of Death herself—and the date nearly proved proph
etic for both mother and child. Awkwardly positioned, the baby could not come out. Elizabeth Anne screamed against her will while in an outer room John Roger paced, tormented by her suffering and enraged at his helplessness.

  Nurse Beckett was blood to the wrists and dripping with sweat when she deferred in desperation to Josefina, who had much experience as a midwife and was assisting. The old woman reached into Elizabeth Anne and felt the baby and crooned to it as she tried to turn it. Elizabeth Anne screamed louder.

  Josefina felt the child shift slightly and implored, “Empuje, hija! Empuje! Ya viene!”

  Elizabeth Anne pushed with all her remaining strength and Josefina guided the child with her hand and a moment later it emerged into the larger world. Blood-coated and blue-skinned and unbreathing.

  “O my dear God,” Nurse Beckett said.

  Josefina freed the infant of the cord round its neck and then alternately blew into its nose and mouth. In the other room John Roger stood arrested in dread at the sudden cessation of his wife’s screams. Then nearly jumped at the first of the baby’s squalls.

  At length he was permitted to enter the room. It yet held a raw smell of pain and blood. Elizabeth Anne lay still and waxen and he knew with cold conviction that she was dead and seemed himself to forget how to breathe. Then her eyes opened and she saw him and managed a weak smile—and he grinned and brushed at his eyes and sat on the bed and put his hand to her face.

  Nurse Beckett said it had been a near thing. The bleeding had been profuse and difficult to stem. But the baby was faring well and appeared to be free of defect, and Mrs Wolfe was young and strong and should recover satisfactorily. Josefina positioned the swaddled infant in John Roger’s arms and he sat on the edge of the bed and held the baby for Elizabeth Anne to see. She smiled and her eyes shone.