by James Blake
The clearing was high and flat and dry, some three feet above the surrounding ground. It contained moss-hung oaks and cottonwoods, patches of lush grass to their knees. They thought somebody must have axed out the clearing and raised it with a mix of rock and river dredge, a formidable undertaking. But they found not a single stump nor any other sign that the clearing was man-made or even that anyone else had ever been there. The only explanation they could think for the clearing was geographical quirk. Such high and solid ground should not naturally exist in a marshy palm grove, yet here it was. The river at this point was a hundred feet across and they saw that on the Mexican side there was no similar high ground or clearing.
They built a campfire and caught small frogs to use for bait on handlines and in quick order landed four fat catfish, which they filleted and peppered and fried in a pan with lard. They divided the fillets into two tin plates and sat beside the fire with the map spread between them and studied it as they ate. They figured where the clearing was and penciled it on the map and reckoned a distance of five miles from there to the Point Isabel road—though they would have to build a wagon bridge over Nameless Creek—then about twelve miles to Point Isabel itself.
They knew the unexplored groves to the east could not provide such privacy as this, nor, they were certain, a clearing of such good ground. This was the place for a house. A big one on heavy pilings ten feet aboveground, high enough to protect it from any flood lesser than Noah’s. With a verandah. It was no Ensenada de Isabel, of course, but it was on a river and the gulf was but eight miles downstream and it was far from town and its people and its noise and afflictions. The problem was Marina. She had made it plain she didn’t like it out here.
They talked of her recent remoteness and wondered if she might never adapt to this region. What if she hated it even more than they knew? She dearly loved Tampico and would have been very happy had they stayed there forever. Would she prefer to return there, even without them? They had known her all their life and had lived in her company for so long now that they did not like to think of being without her. But they would not have her think she was obliged to remain with them, and they of course would never alter their plans to suit somebody else, not even her. They decided they would tell her quite frankly what she should already know—that she was free to choose her own course. If she wanted to live in town, fine. Go back to Tampico? Very well. To Buenaventura? All right. They would fund her. Whatever her choice.
Vapor rose off the river as the night closed around them. The air heavy with the odors of dank earth and muddy water. They unrolled their bedding next to the fire and settled themselves and talked a while longer. And determined, among other things, to name the clearing Wolfe Landing and their entire property Tierra Wolfe.
As expected, she said she would not live out there, no matter how nice the house they would build. I don’t like it there, she said. They said they understood, and gave her their prepared talk. Told her she could live in town, if that’s what she wanted, but if she did not want to live in Brownsville, well, she could go wherever she chose. They would always see to it she had plenty of money to live on.
Her eyes brimmed. I will not go live somewhere else, she said. I do not want to go away from you. They smiled. They had been almost sure she would say that. That she loved them too much to go away. All right then, Blake said, so you’ll live here and—
Besides, she said, a child should not be apart from his father.
They stared at her.
She said she had suspected her condition for a few weeks before they left Tampico but hadn’t said anything because she wasn’t sure. Now she was sure. Her great fear, she said, was that they would think it had been deliberate. It was not. She would never do that. She was anyway thirty-six years old, for the love of God. Too old for this. She had never wanted to be a mother. It is hard enough tending to you two children, she said with a weak smile. She had always taken precaution, always, but they knew as well as she that there could never be absolute certainty. Now that it happened, she said, the wonder was that it had not happened long before.
They stared at her. I know the question in your mind, she said.
Well? Blake Cortéz said.
She looked from one to the other. How is it possible to know whose?
They nodded. They had another question in mind too but they would not ask it. If she had said she wanted to go to a curandera to resolve the matter, they would have said all right, and would have looked somber in saying it—and would secretly have been relieved. But she did not suggest a curandera, as they knew she would not, even if she really did think she was too old for motherhood.
I have to take the laundry from the clothesline, she said. Before it rains. They watched her go out the back door. The day was nearly cloudless.
“After all these years,” Blake said. “I never expected this. I sure as hell never wanted this.”
“Hell no, you never wanted it. Neither did I. Neither did she. But here it is.”
“I know, I know. So what do we do?”
“ I don’t know. Hell.”
They stood silent a long few seconds.
“Aint but one thing to do. Unless you got another idea,” James said.
Blake shook his head. “Dammit.”
“Yeah.”
“Well hell, then, let’s get it over with.”
James Sebastian took a coin from his pocket. “Call,” he said, and thumbed it spinning in the air. Blake called tails. James caught the coin and slapped it to the back of his other hand and uncovered it for Blake to see. Tails. Blake looked at it without expression. Then looked at his brother. James nodded and sighed.
When Marina Colmillo came back in the house James Sebastian asked her if she would marry him. But even at such a moment they could not resist deviling her. They had their hands in their pockets so she could not see who had the crooked little finger or node on the wrist. They were dressed differently but had not called each other by name since arriving. She gave them a chiding look and then stepped closer to the one who had asked her and told him to stop squinting. And saw the green flaw in his eye.
Yes, James, she said, I will.
Two hours later, on that bright January afternoon, they stood before a justice of the peace and were wed.
The marriage did not change their plan for a river house, but first they had to provide a home for her. They looked at different lots around town before buying a large one on the west end of Levee Street. While they were building a sturdy clapboard house of three bedrooms and a small room in the rear as a servant’s quarters, they continued living in the Adams Street rental. Most days were cool and bright and favorable for hard work but they had not imagined a South Texas winter could some days be so cold. Some mornings the bushes were sheeted with ice. The occasional blue norther burned their faces raw and had them exhaling on their fingers every few minutes.
They finished the house near the end of March, including the privy and fencing and cistern, everything. They insisted Marina should have a live-in maid while they were working at the landing. She felt she could manage well enough by herself but did not want to argue, and so interviewed several applicants before hiring a bilingual seventeen-year-old named Remedios Marisól Delgallo. The girl had grown up in a San Antonio orphanage run by Irish nuns, then went out on her own at fifteen and made her way to Brownsville to see what it was like. She stayed because she liked the spirited border life and had supported herself with intermittent jobs as a housemaid and as occasional assistant to a midwife. The twins had hoped Marina would choose someone older, but she insisted on Remedios, to whom she had taken an immediate liking. She said the girl would not only be of great help with the birth but also in improving her English. When Remedios was introduced to them she was captivated by their identicalness. She did not ask how to tell them apart but she was sharp-eyed and attentive and within two days could address them by name when they were close enough for her to see the telltale little finger and the wrist n
ode.
The house was furnished, the pantry stocked. With a wagonload of tools and kegs of beer, the twins set out for the river property.
To transport materials to the clearing, they first had to make a wagon road through the grove, a process that would take almost as long as all the construction to follow. The shortest distances between the grove perimeter and the clearing traversed the boggiest ground and presented the most obstacles. The best route they could chart ran parallel to the river and was almost a mile long, and still required cutting through scrub and trees. With machetes and axes they hacked and hewed their way through the grove, using the trunks of felled trees to form a corduroy surface which they then graded by shoveling mud and dirt over the logs and packing it down. It was an arduous process and the early stage of it even more difficult for the advent of the rainy season. All in all it took eight months to complete the road, which they finished on a freezing day in December. Then began the long and strenuous months of cutting the pilings and raising them in place in the corner of the clearing where the house was to stand. Once the pilings were in place they would lay the floor across them and then finally begin to build the house itself. After which they would build a dock, then a stable and some sheds. A seasoned construction crew might have finished the entire project, from first to last, in less than a year, less than half the time it would take the two of them. There would be times, as they labored in the clearing, when they would almost decide to hire a crew to finish the job, but they had reckoned their expenses from first to last and the budget would not allow for it. In truth, they were glad they had no choice but to do it all themselves. Because even if they’d had a choice, they would do it themselves. And that, they told each other, would be perverse.
The twins had been baffled when Marina, on marrying James Sebastian, no longer permitted Blake Cortéz to join them in bed. Things are different now, she said. They did not understand. They argued to her that nothing was different except that one of them had married her to give the forthcoming child legitimacy, but for all any of them knew, the child was really Blake’s and she was refusing to make love with the true father. No-no-no, Marina said. When they decided that James would be her husband, they had also decided that James would be the father. She was now the father’s wife and was pledged in faithfulness to him and could make love to no other man. It’s not some other man, James said, it’s Blackie! Besides, what if I say it’s all right? She said it wasn’t up to him to decide that. She admitted that the three of them had always done things by their own rules and lived very free of the world’s opinion, but there were some rules in the world that were greater than their own. Why did one of those rules, Blake said, have to be one about no more me? It just did, she said, and kissed him on the cheek. You have always been my darling Blackie, but now you are my darling brother Blackie.
“Goddammit,” Blake said, “I didn’t know it was gonna mean this.” He turned to James. “Let’s make it two out of three.”
What galled Blake most was not the loss of sex with her. There had always had other girls, in Tampico as well as Buenaventura, none of whom meant anything more to them than an occasional treat of carnal variety, and none of whom, they were certain, Marina had ever been aware of. For sure there were girls in Brownsville and Matamoros as easily to be had. But with Marina, sex was the least of it. It had always been fun with her, yes, but the best thing about it was their sharing of a woman they had loved all their life. James felt the same way. It seemed to them a cruel twist that she should become the first thing in their life they could not share. But if they could not be husband to the same woman or father to the same child, they could at least share the experiences of marriage and fatherhood. Experiences that, on the day Remedios Marisól entered their lives, Blake Cortéz began inclining toward before he was even aware of it.
From the beginning of their project in the palm grove, it was the twins’ custom to go into Brownsville every Saturday to get supplies and visit with Marina and Remedios. The first few times they did not stay until nightfall. They had lunch with the women and then late in the afternoon headed back to the palm grove so they could resume work on the wagon road at daybreak. From the first visit, however, it became James’s and Marina’s ritual to retire to their bedroom after lunch—and to give them more privacy Blake and Remedios would take a walk around town, a routine by which they came to know each other well. Besides being pretty, Remedios was an intelligent and astute girl with a wonderful laugh it pleased Blake to provoke. And too, she had a sassiness much like Marina’s, peppery but never mean. Probably the main reason, the twins believed, Marina had taken such immediate liking to her.
Blake found himself thinking about her during the week’s work on the grove road, and he looked forward to seeing her on Saturdays. She always seemed pleased to see him too. They had known each other a month when he discovered she was even more akin to Marina than he’d thought—in that she had the same bohemian attitude about sex. From then on, when James and Marina went off to one bedroom, Blake and Remedios went off to another, and they stayed with the women overnight, though it cost them half a morning’s work at the clearing on Sundays.
Remedios soon intuited that Blake was falling in love with her, which pleased her very much because she was already enamored of him. But she had early in life acquired the valuable defense of keeping her true feelings out of her eyes, and she did that with him until she could be sure how he felt about her. Marina had confided to her the relationship she’d had with the twins and how sad it had made her to turn away Blackie when she and James married. Remedios thought it exciting that the trio had been able to share themselves as they had, but she secretly fretted that Blake might never feel toward her as he did about Marina. She did not have to fret very long. They had known each other almost four months on the evening in July when he told her he loved her. She saw the truth of it in his eyes and told him she loved him too—and they grinned at each other like fools. Well then, he said, seeing as they loved each other, and knowing that sooner or later she was sure to get pregnant, they might as well get married now as wait until later. Well, she said, it certainly seemed the practical thing to do, all right, and they laughed at themselves for such talk of practicality. But listen, she said. You must ask me. Of course I must, he said. And did. And she said yes. And when they learned of it, James Sebastian and Marina were overjoyed.
The wedding took place on the last Saturday of July. Outside the church after the ceremony, James Sebastian took Blake aside and said that in all fairness he should be permitted to join him in bed with Remedios Marisól until she conceived. After all, they had shared in the making of the child Marina was carrying and it seemed to him only fair they do the same with Remedios’s first. Blake said it sounded fair to him, but he wasn’t sure what Remedios would say. They looked over at her where she stood outside the church doors, talking with the priest and Marina and Mr and Mrs Flores, the good neighbors she had invited to the nuptials.
Large-bellied in her eighth month, Marina caught sight of the twins and studied their faces. Then excused herself from the group and went to James and hugged him and gave him a kiss. And whispered to him, Don’t even dream about it, sonny.
A month later Morgan James Wolfe Colmillo was born in the house on Levee Street during a late-night rainstorm. A healthy bellowing boy of more than eleven pounds. Remedios Marisól did a commendable job of midwifery. The labor had so exhausted Marina that she slept for fourteen hours. The next day, with the baby at her breast, she was not unmindful of the circumstance of suckling a son she had borne to a man she had suckled in his infancy. When she asked James Sebastian why he wanted to name him Morgan, he skirted explication about his great-grandfather and simply said it was a name he had always admired and he hoped it was all right with her. Of course, she said. She liked it, it had a sound of strength. But she would in the first year of his life more often call him Gringito.
With the twins in Brownsville only one day a week, Marina and Remedios bec
ame even closer friends and confidantes. Given the twenty-year difference in their ages, it was only natural the relation between them had a strong semblance of mother and daughter, a bond that became the more pronounced when, a month after Morgan James’s birth, Remedios found she was three months pregnant.
Remedios loved to hear Marina tell of life at Buenaventura. She was hardly able to imagine such grandeur. She was gripped by Marina’s account of the bloody Sunday when they’d had to flee the hacienda before the army arrived to kill the twins. Many of Marina’s recollections of course involved old Josefina, and in speaking of her she sometimes missed her so much she couldn’t hold back her tears. In October she asked the twins if she might now write to Josefina. It had been more than seven years. Maybe Mauricio Espinosa had quit his search for them. Maybe John Samuel was no longer on the watch for a letter that might reveal their whereabouts so that he could inform Mauricio. Josefina would anyhow certainly choose someone worthy of her trust to read the letter to her and write her response.