Country of the Bad Wolfes

by James Blake

  Some months later, on a sultry summer night at Ensenada de Isabel, as they lay embraced in the big hammock of the cove house verandah and looked out at the stars over the gulf while the jungle blackness chirmed and screeched, Elizabeth Anne reminded him of that night in the garden and of the radiant shooting star and said that the wish she’d made had come true. They were going to have another child.

  “I don’t know why now any more than I knew why last time,” Nurse Beckett said. Her hair had gone grayer and the lines of her face deeper in the nearly fifteen years since John Samuel’s birth. “But at this rate, you’ll be sixty when you have your next one.” Elizabeth Anne gave a gasp of mock shock, and they both burst into girlish giggles.

  Underneath her levity, Nurse Beckett was apprehensive. She had not forgotten Elizabeth Anne’s difficulty in bearing John Samuel at the age of twenty-one, and she was now thirty-six. And though he never said so, John Roger was worried too. As inexplicable as the pregnancy itself, however, was the easiness with which it progressed to term, an easiness that allayed their fears. During her carriage of John Samuel, Elizabeth Anne had been sick almost every morning, but this time did not have a single instance of nausea, or much discomfort of any sort other than the general nuisance of her swelling. The trouble-free pregnancy was the more notable because she bloated even larger this time and her quickening was more pronounced, the stirrings and kicks in her womb more insistent than John Samuel’s had been. Nurse Beckett predicted a strapping boy.

  Even the labor itself was easier than the time before—ensuing shortly after sundown on the eve of the vernal equinox. Josefina, that ageless grandam, was once again on hand to assist Nurse Beckett. John Roger again paced in an adjoining room with his fist in a ready clench to endure Elizabeth Anne’s howls. But she this time made little outcry beyond a few sporadic yelps. Shortly before midnight John Samuel, incipient adulthood already evident in his face, came downstairs in his sleepshirt to ask if the baby had arrived. John Roger said not yet, and they paced together, father and son.

  In the first minutes of the new season, Elizabeth Anne let her only piercing scream of the night, and John Samuel fixed wide eyes on his father. “It’s only natural, son, don’t worry,” John Roger said. “Soon now. Soon.”

  They were still awaiting the baby’s cries of arrival when the bedroom door opened and Nurse Beckett stood there staring at John Roger, unable to cohere into words the dejection on her face. He at once knew the child was dead.

  He rushed past Nurse Beckett into the room with no thought but to embrace Lizzie in their shared bereavement. Her eyes were closed as before, her face as deathly pale. He sat on the edge of the bed and patted her hand and told her everything would all right, then bent to put his arm around her. And only then saw the prodigious soak of blood beneath her and in that same freezing moment felt the uninhabited stillness of her. His breath stopped. He drew back from her and looked about, for a moment blind with shock. And then saw Josefina sitting across the room, her skeletal face the color of earth and hung with the weight of her woe. Holding a swaddled infant in each arm.

  As their father’s wrenching anguish rang through the house, the newborn twins held their unblinking stares on John Samuel at the door, his red glare raging, You killed her! You killed her!

  THE SECOND TWINS

  Even as Elizabeth Anne’s body was being readied for the wake and her grave being dug in the casa grande graveyard and the spreading news of her death raising a collective lament that would for months hang over Buenaventura like a lingering sickness, Reynaldo the mayordomo was sending men to comply with Josefina’s urgent requisition to round up every wet nurse to be found on the compound or in the villages of Santa Rosalba and Agua Negra. Of the thirteen young mestizas brought to her, Josefina dismissed eight out of hand because they were nursing their own infants and she wanted one who would feed only the twins. The other five had lost their babies shortly after birth and were still lactating. From each of them Josefina pinched a drop of milk from a nipple and tongued it off her finger, and by this cryptic assay decided on the youngest of them, Marina Colmillo, barely a month past her fourteenth birthday.

  Only six days earlier Marina’s baby son had been bitten by a poisonous spider and died within hours. She was a shapely thing of early bloom and had been impregnated when raped by a pair of strangers who came upon her washing clothes at a small riverside clearing—jaguar hunters, she believed, judging by their clothes and the guns they carried. She had fought them and clawed one of them blind in one eye and that he did not kill her for it was a wonder. But he wrecked her face in beating her insensible before spending himself in her. Her resultant disfigurement—the scars and missing front teeth and awkward knit of the facial bones—was like some primitive mask. Her only living brother had set out in pursuit of the violators with a machete in his hand but he did not return. Some weeks later, a party of parrot catchers in the jungle came upon his deliquescent corpse, boiling with insects but recognizable by the absent big toe lost in a childhood mishap, the skull bored front and back by the huge bullet of a jaguar gun. Marina had been motherless since age nine, the sole female in a family of violent men, all of them now dead, and ever since the loss of her brother she had been living with family friends. She had always been an isolate soul, even in childhood, and could not abide the company of a clutch of gossiping women, which was why she habitually shunned the communal wash point and did her laundry at a place well upriver from it—and why some in the village believed that what happened to the snooty girl was no less than she deserved. The combined facts of her rape and its consequent bastard and her disfigured face and her lack of shame in any of it—her refusal to turn away from stares, her habit of singing to herself while going about her chores—made for poor odds she would ever receive an offer of marriage.

  She was quartered in a room across a small hallway from the kitchen. Whenever she was not nursing the infants she served as helper to Josefina. Even after the boys were weaned, Josefina would retain the girl as her assistant. And if it could be said that the twins were reared by anyone other than themselves, it was by these two women, one of them already old at the time of their birth and the other not much more than a child herself.

  For planting the seed of them in her, John Roger would always place on himself the foremost blame for Elizabeth Anne’s death. But he would for years carry a suppressed anger at them for being twins and demanding more effort of her to bear them than she could survive. He was aware of this resentment and knew it was irrational and it shamed him, but he could not rid himself of it. Nor of his anger at Nurse Beckett and the medical science she represented. Nor of his bitter sense of betrayal by the crone Josefina for not having saved Lizzie as she had done before. In days to come he would again and again order himself to stop assigning blame for what could not be helped and was no one’s fault. And would time and again fail to obey his own enjoinder. And yet, regardless of his displeasure with Josefina, he would not put the babes into anyone’s care but hers.

  Neither would he ever do otherwise than as Elizabeth Anne had wished, and she had wanted to name the baby, if it should be a boy, Sebastian Cortéz, after her father and Josefina. “I’ve not always been entirely admiring of Father,” Elizabeth Anne had said, “but I’ve always admired his name.” And though he himself did not care for her father’s name, John Roger christened the boys James Sebastian and Blake Cortéz. He had always been partial to “James,” and his choice of “Blake” was a capricious and secret deference to his own father.

  They came into the world, these twins, with an instinctive understanding that it was a treacherous place in which no one could be trusted except each other and that secrecy was a valuable device. They had neither one cried out when Nurse Beckett slapped their bottom—a sure indication, Josefina would tell them, that they were masters of pain and that little could hurt them. And they had emerged from their mother with their eyes open wide, an unmistakable sign to Josefina that God had given them the gift of
seeing the truth of things, and never mind those who would say it was more curse than gift because the truth was more often a despair than a comfort. No gypsy woman with her cards or bones or ball of glass could know the truth of someone so truly as the twins would know it with one good look in the person’s eyes. It was a power granted them from birth and with no need of language, and in their first minutes of life they saw in the eyes of the women in the room that their mother was dead—and saw in their brother’s glare that he held them at fault for it. And only a short time later, as they suckled at Marina Colmillo’s breasts, their father loomed into view and they had their first close look at his face and even through the distortion of his grief they saw his accusation too. During their earliest years they would sometimes see in his eyes the question he would never speak aloud and was perhaps not even conscious of—Why not the two of you instead of her? John Samuel’s opinion would never matter to them, but they would always place a secret value on their father’s estimation, and his silent indictment and the distance he kept from them because of it would be the sole rue of their childhood.

  Josefina herself had proficiency in the language of eyes and so from the start was aware of the twins’ feelings about their father. They were still very young when she told them that they must not believe he did not love them. She had known him a long time and she knew he loved them very much. It was his loss no less than theirs that he could not tell them so. His loss that his own heart had become such a stranger to him. All men were confused by love, Josefina said, some in more terrible ways than others. Their father was confused because he could not help but relate their presence on the earth to their mother’s enraging and sorrowful absence from it. It was unjust and unreasonable that he should hold them in any way responsible for her death and he probably knew it, but love cared nothing for justice or reason. The prisons and madhouses and graveyards were full of people put there by an unbearable loss of love to infidelity or death or some other misfortune. But as always and with all things, Josefina told them, what cannot be remedied must be endured. Their father was a man of many strengths but he did not endure well.

  They could never know how much their father differed from the man he was before their birth. Could never know it despite all that Josefina would tell them of him, she who had known him since his first day in Mexico, and despite what they would learn of him by other means. The father of their early childhood was aloof and unforthcoming and shared little of his company with them except at dinner, the evening meal, the only one to which the four Wolfes sat together, always in suits and ties. Even then, his conversation was usually with John Samuel and mainly about hacienda matters. The dinnertime attention he gave the twins was mostly to correct some deficiency in their table etiquette or reprimand them for some mischief of which they stood accused or interrogate them about some mischief of which they were suspected. John Samuel rarely addressed the twins at all, at the table or any other time, which was fine with them.

  They were in fact very curious about their parents, but their father’s unwillingness to tell of himself or of their mother was made clear to them when they were six years old and asked him what their mother was like. There was an odor about him in those years they would in time come to know as that of mescal. He stared at them with eyes like wet stones and said, “What does it matter?” And left the room. They had pledged to themselves never again to ask him a personal question or request anything of him. Nor would they give him a truthful answer to any question he should ask them—if they should deign to give him any answer at all other than a mute smiling shrug more defiant than words. They loved him, yes, but that did not mean he was the only one who could make rules about how things would be.

  And so it was from Josefina that they got their early learning about their parents. When they asked her how their father lost his arm and she told them the story they grinned like wolf pups. That is your father, the old woman said, the man who killed that hacendado brute. Your father was a lawyer and a man of business before he became patrón of Buenaventura, but I tell you it is not lawyer’s or merchant’s blood in his veins. Or in yours.

  She expected them to ask what kind of blood she believed they and their father possessed, and she could only have said she did not know, except that it was not that of lawyers or merchants. But they only asked, What about John Samuel? She made a gesture of uncertainty and said that Don Juanito was a clever young man and they should respect him as their older brother. But the greater part of his blood was of their mother’s people, who were mostly bookkeepers and politicians, with the exception of her Uncle Richard—Uncle Redbeard, as their mother called him—whom she had loved the most of all her kin for the simple reason that he and she were the only two of their kind in the family. Josefina would over time pass on to the twins all the stories she’d heard from their mother about “Tío Barbarosa” and some of the things he was said to have done, including his attempt to smuggle guns to the rebels during the gringos’ civil war. The boys loved those stories. It was clear enough to them that even though Uncle Redbeard had engaged in various legitimate businesses, he was at heart a rebel for sure and maybe even an outlaw. The way he died, they said, was proof of it.

  Josefina commended their astuteness. It is a saying as old as Mexico, she said. Tell me how you died and I will tell you who you were.

  Their first view of their mother was a framed daguerreotype portrait that Josefina kept on the wall of her little room. Elizabeth Anne had seen her admiring it one day on its parlor shelf and had presented it to her. The photograph had been made in Concord (“Cone-core,” Josefina pronounced it) when Elizabeth Anne was seventeen years old and only a few weeks before her wedding.

  The twins thought she was beautiful. Josefina told them she was even more so in the flesh, that no picture could ever show how beautiful she truly was. When she told them of their mother shooting the younger Montenegro to save their father’s life, their eyes shone. And they studied her picture all the more.

  Of all that she knew about their parents, Josefina would withhold from the twins only the fact of their father’s two bastard children—bastards in that he sired them by women he was not married to, though the children were officially legitimate in being born to married women. Both of those births, and the dire aftermath to one of them, had occurred before the twins were seven years old, and Josefina saw no need to burden them with the shameful fact of their illegitimate siblings.

  But they were always better informed than she knew. They had the ears of cats and missed little of anything even whispered in their proximity, and from earliest childhood they were skilled eavesdroppers and peepers. They were nine when they discovered the cracks in the patio shutters through which they could spy on the maids at their bath—and coincidentally overhear much bathing room gossip. By age eleven they knew all about their baseborn kin but let no one know that they did, and they would soon enough dismiss them as trivial effects of their father’s sporting, of which they were also aware and regarded as insignificant.

  THE BASTARDS

  The first child had preceded the second by a year and was born to Alma Rodríguez, an unmarried eighteen-year-old resident maid in the casa grande. John Roger had been having relations with her for three months when she told him of her condition. He remedied the problem in quick order by finding her a suitable husband, choosing a Veracruz police clerk named Pedro Altamonte, who’d been vouched for by Comandante Mendoza himself. Pedro was an intelligent and good-natured young man, but a birthmark that covered half his face like a brushstroke of purple paint had always made him self-conscious and timorous with women. John Roger had a talk with him, then bought him a new suit to wear and took him to Buenaventura to meet Alma. The clerk’s eyes brightened at his first sight of her, in her best white dress and with a silver ribbon in her indigo hair. The three of them sat in a drawing room and had a frank discussion, and the couple agreed to the marriage. As John Roger had anticipated, knowing Alma for a sensible girl, she was appreciative of
Pedro’s manners and admired his education and bureaucratic position. She made light of the birthmark and said she would sew shirts for him of a color to match. Pedro was happy to gain such a pretty and congenial wife for the simple price of granting his name to the child she carried and swearing to cherish it as his own. He had been told whose it was and he felt honored. John Roger bought them a house for a wedding present.

  Their marriage would be a good one and they would both live to a contented old age. In addition to the first child—a daughter they would name Juana Merced and whose actual father they would always keep secret from her—they would have three more children, all of them girls. They would all survive to adulthood and would be educated at the excellent school of the Sisters of Divine Mercy. After graduation Juana Merced would work for the school as its registrar. She would one day fall in love with a visiting director of a female academy in Barcelona, they would marry in Veracruz, and five months after their arrival in Spain she would give birth to the first of their seven children.

  The matter of the second child was not so free of tribulation. The mother of this one was Katrina Llosa de Ávila. She was also a maid in the casa grande but did not reside in it. Like most of the household help, she lived in one of the little row-houses in the compound’s residential quarter. She was without debate the prettiest woman on the casa grande staff—some, herself among them, would have said on the entire hacienda. The other women resented her for her vanity and because she had always been a flagrant flirt and had stolen the boyfriend of more than one girl. Since childhood she had entertained fantasies of being the wife of a hacendado and living a luxurious life in the manner of Doña Isabel, and she had long admired Don Juan from afar. But even after she had been working in the casa grande for six months, John Roger did not know she existed, as she was assigned to a lower-floor section of the house where he never had cause to go. Not until after the head maid reassigned Katrina to the bedrooms on the upper floors did John Roger take notice of her. On her third day of upstairs duty, he met her in a hallway as she was passing by with a large armload of fresh linen and towels. A pretty girl and a strong one, he said, and asked her name. “Katrina, mi patrón,” she said, and gave him her best smile.