Country of the Bad Wolfes

by James Blake

  “De nada, fellas,” Wells said. “Here’s to the newest town in Texas and its whole handful of residents!”

  “A handful for now,” Blake Cortéz said. They drank to Wolfe Landing, to their health and long lives.

  The charter for the township of Wolfe Landing would go into effect in the coming May, two months after the birth of Jim Wells County.

  CRIES OF LIBERTY

  They have been careful to spare his tongue, his power of speech, though his screams have abraded his voice to a raw rasp. No tooth remaining in his head. Only one eye. Two fingers left to each hand and not a bone unbroken in either foot. His crotch is red pulp. Edward Little arrives. Despite his eighty-one years he is erect and easy in his carriage and his lean frame and white suit imbue him with a ghostly aspect in the low light of the oil lamps. As always, he pauses just inside the door for the necessary moment to adjust to the smell. A fetor no man of them ever gets used to. He then goes to the table where the rebel lies strapped in his mutilated nakedness. The man’s chest heaves. His wild red eye fixes on Edward Little looming over him. In a low, expressionless voice, Edward assures him that the pains yet in store for him will exceed everything he has so far known of pain, but it will still not kill him. That freedom will be a long time coming, Edward says. But I will promise it to you much sooner if you tell me where your associates may be found.

  The man’s lips work, his breath quickens the more. Edward bends closer to hear what he has to say, then nods and steps back. Now, the man gasps, kill me… for the love of God. Edward smiles at the expression. First I must assure that you have told me the truth, he says. He turns and goes, ignoring the man’s rasping cry of KIILLLL meee!

  He finds Díaz in his chamber and tells him what he learned. Very good, Díaz says. Have you assigned somebody? Edward says he has.

  That same evening eight men are seated at a table in the basement of a house at the western edge of the capital, attending to the final details of their plot, when the door abruptly sunders and a clutch of men rush in with shotguns booming in yellow flares—and in seconds every man of the insurgents lies in a rent sprawl on the blood-sheeting floor.

  On the night of the fifteenth of September of 1910, his eightieth birthday and the eve of the one hundredth anniversary of Mexico’s declaration of independence, President Porfirio Díaz, uniformed in full splendor and having been reelected for the seventh consecutive time just three months earlier, stands on the balcony of the National Palace overlooking the gigantic zócalo blazing with electric lights and packed with two hundred thousand cheering capitalinos. Mexican flags everywhere, bunting of red, green, and white. Díaz clutches a pull rope attached to an overhead bell—the same bell rung in the village of Dolores by Father Miguel Hidalgo in 1810 and since moved to the National Palace by order of Díaz. At eleven o’clock Díaz yanks the pull rope and the bell’s tolls reverberate throughout the center of the city, and in emulation of the cry of independence raised by the great Hidalgo, Díaz shouts “Viva Mexico! Viva Mexico! VIVA MEXICO!” And the zócalo resounds with the crowd’s echoing bellows of “Viva! Viva! VIVA!” There follows a staccato eruption of colorful fireworks and then a frenzy of music, and the national celebration proceeds in full timbre.

  Among the company with Díaz on the palace balcony are a number of federal officials and army generals and an elite squad of bodyguards under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Juan Sotero Wolfe Márquez. Some nine years earlier, Gloria Tomasina had shared with the Littles the news from her brother Bruno that her cousin Juan Sotero Wolfe, an artillery officer, had just received his degree from the army engineering college. Edward Little recalled the name a few years afterward when he and Díaz attended the army’s annual fencing competition and were much impressed with the daring swordplay of one Captain Juan Wolfe, who was barely defeated in the championship match by a cavalry major who won for the third year in a row. A little too daring, that Wolfe fellow, Díaz said, but I admire his style. When Edward told him the Wolfe fellow was Gloria’s cousin, Díaz chuckled and said, Well hell, no wonder he fights the way he does, he said, with the same blood as Gloria’s. Then remembered the deaths at Patria Chica the year before and added, No disrespect to Louis. I know that, Edward said. After pinning the victor’s medal on the cavalry major, Díaz congratulated Captain Wolfe on his fine showing and asked him to come see him the next day. The interview lasted half an hour and concluded with Juan Sotero’s acceptance of Díaz’s offer to join his squad of personal guards. He’s an engineer and likes it, Díaz told Edward, but he’s a good man who puts duty first. Edward wasn’t sure an engineer was a good choice for a bodyguard, but then the military guards were mostly for show, while the president’s real protectors were plainclothes secret policemen under Edward’s authority. Two months later, at the annual dinner Díaz hosted for the Rurales in the best restaurant in the capital, a drunk Rurales colonel walked up to Díaz’s table saying, My president, I have something for you—and reached for a pistol on his hip. Edward’s agents had their guns only halfway drawn before Juan Sotero materialized like a magic trick between the colonel and the president’s table with his saber brandished and its tip at the colonel’s throat. The colonel froze, white-eyed, as Juan Sotero relieved him of a pearl-handled Peacemaker. It turned out the colonel had taken the gun from a bandit chief and simply wanted to give it to the president as a gift. Díaz thanked him for it and everyone had a good laugh and the party resumed. And Díaz looked sidelong at Edward and said, Some engineer, and Edward smiled and nodded.

  Now six years since, Juan Sotero Wolfe is a colonel and has been commander of the president’s military bodyguards for the past three years. His wife of two years, Estér Leticia Hernandez, is a striking Creole poet with eyes as black as her hair, and her charged romantic verse has been published in the capital’s most distinguished literary journal—to the chagrin of her straitlaced parents. The young Wolfe couple resides in a fine house near the south end of Avenida Reforma. Their first child, Juan Román Wolfe Hernandez, was born in July. Their second, Carlos Sebastián, will be born next March.

  The month-long celebration of the centennial of Mexican independence includes sumptuous dinner parties at the National Palace and lavish balls at Chapultepec Castle. Parades upon parades. The celebration is no less a tribute to Porfirio Díaz, whose presidency has now encompassed thirty of the past thirty-four years and in which time he and Mexico have become inseparable concepts. The festivities are attended by international dignitaries bearing gifts and declaiming encomia. The consensus of civilized opinion is that Mexico’s ascendancy to the ranks of the world’s rich and orderly nations could not have come to pass but for Porfirio Díaz. Leo Tolstoy has declared him a “prodigy of nature.” Theodore Roosevelt has extolled him as the greatest statesman of his time, a man who “has done for his country what no other living man has done for any country.” Andrew Carnegie has deemed him “the Moses and Joshua of his people.” U.S. senator and former Secretary of State Elihu Root has called him one of the great men of the world and said he should “be held up to the hero-worship of mankind.” Britain has made him a member of the Order of the Bath. Indeed, his very complexion now differs little from that of the European leaders who lionize him, extensive medical treatment having made his face and hands as pale as any Spaniard’s. His house on the Calle Cadena is decorated entirely in European fashion and staffed exclusively with Caucasian servants. The Man of Stone, his countrymen call him, the Strong Man—though in private many have nicknamed him El Llorón for his easy shed of tears on a variety of occasions. A rendition of the national anthem. A student recitation of a patriotic poem. A funeral for a fellow soldier. A futile personal plea from a mother to spare her son from the firing squad.

  As a man grows older, Díaz more than once said to Edward Little, he may or may not become any wiser but he damn sure better become more careful.

  But even a sly and careful old man can make a bad mistake, and Díaz had made his in an interview for an American magazine e
arly in 1908 when he said he welcomed the formation of an opposition party to replace him in the next election. He claimed he had no desire to continue as president and that at the age of seventy-seven he was satisfied. The truth was that he did and he wasn’t. Perhaps his assertions were intended only to persuade the magazine’s American readers of his democratic outlook and his tolerance for divergent political opinion. But how could he not have foreseen the repercussions? The interview was reprinted all over Mexico and set off a frenzy of maneuvering by a number of presidential aspirants.

  Chief among them was Francisco Madero, who came from a wealthy Coahuila family. Barely five feet tall and high-pitched of voice, Madero had been educated in Europe and the United States and had become an apostle of democracy. In 1909 he published a book advocating an orderly transition from the Porfiriato to a truly democratic republic. The two central principles of his newly formed Anti-Reelection Party were no reelection—obviously—and effective suffrage.

  As Madero gave speeches throughout the country, Díaz was at first amused by him and referred to him as El Loquito, sometimes El Enano. But by the time the two men met in person in the early spring of 1910, Madero’s following had grown impressively, and Díaz was no longer laughing about the Little Lunatic. He had supposed Madero just another power-hungry hacendado, but in their meeting he perceived the ardent sincerity of his views. Listen, Díaz told him, a man needs a lot more than honesty to govern Mexico, don’t you know that? He afterward told Edward Little it was unfair of God to force him to deal with more than one troublesome dwarf in his lifetime. First that fucking Indian Juárez and now this half-pint hidalgo son of a bitch.

  The following month Halley’s Comet blazed across the Mexican sky and the fearful peón populace saw it as an omen of imminent catastrophe.

  By June of 1910, Díaz had had enough of Madero’s public agitations and ordered him arrested on charges of inciting rebellion and insulting the president. Madero was still in jail when the election took place in July. It was officially declared that Díaz had won ninety-nine percent of the vote. After the election Madero was permitted to post bail to get out from behind bars but was kept under house arrest. He escaped in October and fled to El Paso.

  He called for a revolution to begin on the twentieth of November—he who knew nothing of leadership, nothing of warfare, who had no personal experience with violence. But his egalitarian ideals attracted a motley multitude of followers, among them a swelling horde of bitter impoverished illiterates who were ignorant about the workings of democracy and of government but who knew a very great deal about violence. And who were burning with hatred. A hatred bred by the legally sanctioned thefts of their ancestral lands. By unjust imprisonments and brutal whippings. By violations to their women and countless humiliations endured in the witnessing eyes of their sons. A hatred that for the first time since the great uprising of Padre Hidalgo was set loose to exact its retribution in blood.

  By early spring the Revolution was in flaming riot. More and more men with nothing to lose but their lives flocked to the insurgents, turning their machetes against the bosses, the Rurales, the army, against anybody wearing a uniform or a suit. Sacking haciendas. Plundering towns. Breaking open prisons. Wrecking trains. And too, more and more bandits pillaging under the sanction of The Revolution and crying of liberty. Liberty from the law. From every restraint.

  It’s the truth, man, I’m telling you—they busted open Tehuacán! Everybody says so! Killed every goddam guard. Hung the fucking warden from the front gate! Like in Cuernavaca, man, like in Morelia! Let anybody ride with them who wanted to. Gave them horses and guns! Guns, man! Tehuacán, Christ! That’s just down the tracks. Everybody says they’re headed this way. Headed here, Juanito!

  He tries very hard not to expect it. To keep from thinking it even likely. Barely able to breathe for the effort of his restraint. . . .

  CATALINA

  Many years later Catalina would tell her children that their great-great-grandfather had been feared by many men who never even met him and by every man who ever did. Except for Don Porfirio, I suppose, she would say. But then, your great-great-grandfather was probably the only man in Mexico not afraid of Don Porfirio.

  To say she had always been Edward Little’s favorite would be misleading in its implication that he was simply fonder of her than of his own children and other grandchildren. In fact, she was the only one whose company he looked forward to on his visits to Patria Chica. All the things she would love best in life she would learn to love from him. She alone called him Buelito. While she was yet an infant he had carried her about the casa grande courtyard, naming for her the trees and birds, the types of clouds above. She was four when he began taking her for long saddle rides over the hacienda’s expanse, holding her to his chest and teaching her now of the larger world. The language of the land. The secrets of the wind. On long walks at night he instructed her on the nature of the moon, on the stars and their turnings and the unerring maps they provided to those who knew how to read them. He gave her a pony when she was six. When she began wearing Eduardo Luis’s outgrown pants and boots, Gloria objected on the grounds that it was unfeminine, that she was turning into a cowboy, but Edward spoke to Gloria in private and the matter was closed. He took Catalina to the hacienda store and bought her several pairs of pants and had her fitted for boots, and bought her too some pretty dresses to wear when occasion demanded. Though you are much more, he told her, you are also a lady. By the age of eight she had learned from him how to track anything—horses, game, a man afoot. No one else in the family knew of her witness to her grandmother’s murder of her grandfather, but she told Edward all she had seen and described for him even the expressions on their faces in the moment before the first shot—his of a man in nightmare and hers of an amused sleepwalker—and the way her grandmother’s feet slung up as she went into the well. He taught her to shoot when she was twelve and a year later she killed her first deer, dropping it with a head shot from a hundred yards and then dressing it herself under his supervision. At her quinceañera on New Year’s day of 1910 she was beautiful in white finery, and her first dance of the occasion was with him. His gift to her, bestowed in private, was a bone-handled scalping knife he had taken from an Apache warrior he’d killed sixty-four years before.

  Edward Little never explained his predilection for Catalina to anyone—he explained nothing of himself to anyone—and no one of the family, not even her father or grandfather, ever mentioned it. Catalina was Don Eduardo’s darling and that was that. It had occurred to Gloria, who kept the thought to herself, that her father-in-law’s partiality for the girl might be rooted in the loss of his only daughter when she was still a baby. But if that were so, why choose Catalina over Sandra Rosario who had been born first? Gloria had a notion about that too. Sandi was a sensitive child who wept for the injured and the helpless and the all alone, while Catalina . . . well, Gloria had never seen nor heard Catalina cry, not in pain or for any other reason, not even as an infant.

  Given Patria Chica’s isolation and proximity to the railroad, its safety was unsure. In early March when rebel action was reported only fifty miles from San Luis Potosí, Díaz had a company of infantry posted on the outskirts of the hacienda. But still Edward wanted to send Catalina someplace safer, and so of course would send Sandra Rosario too. He put the girls on an army train bound for Monterrey, where the next afternoon they would transfer to another military train and arrive in Matamoros around midnight. He assigned Eduardo Luis to go along as his sisters’ protector until he turned them over to John Louis at the Matamoros station. John Louis would take the girls across the river to his Brownsville home and Eduardo Luis would return to Patria Chica. Catalina asked how long they would have to be away. Until things settle down here, Edward said. He gave her a roll of American currency and hugged her hard and kissed her. Then patted tearful Sandra Rosario on the head and was gone.

  In Monterrey there was a mechanical problem with the train they were supposed
to transfer onto. Wanting to deliver the children on schedule, the officer in charge had a sleeping coach added to a special train about to leave for the Matamoros garrison—a train of only two other cars, one packed with munitions and the other carrying a guard detail of two rifle squads. The train chugged off through a sunset-reddened countryside and then into a desert night made ghostly by an incandescent moon. Catalina lay awake for a time, staring out the window at the night sky and wondering what the border would be like.

  She came awake to a thundering clash of iron as the coach yawed and shuddered and came to a jarring halt. Her head struck the wall and she was unconscious for a moment before becoming aware of her brother shaking her by the shoulder and shouting “Cat! Come on!” Gunfire blasting outside. Men bellowing, howling. Crying out in pain. She found it hard to sit up and then realized the coach was at a sideward tilt. The little amber lights just inside the doors were still on but the air was hazed with dust and smelled of steaming oil. Eduardo Luis wore only pants and boots. She saw the fear in his eyes, the pistol in his hand. Sandra Rosario shrieked from the other end of the coach where men with big hats and wild dark faces had rushed in and one had his arms around Sandi from behind and was dragging her out. As Eduardo Luis started to raise his pistol somebody shot him and he fell to the floor on his back with his eyes rolled up and a red-black hole in his forehead. Catalina tried to get her knife from under the pillow but was grabbed by her gown and yanked rearward. She twisted and tried to wrest free and the gown ripped away and she fell on the floor, naked but for underpants. The man holding the gown stared down at her, grinning under a huge mustache. Then was on her.

  She would not know how many took a turn. Five? Six? The coach windows were gray when the last of them was done. He was the only one of them still in the coach and was having trouble rebuckling his pants belt. He paid no attention to her as she sat up. The floor under her sticky with blood and semen, the pain between her legs like a raw wound. She heard the snortings and stampings of horses, the clatter of heavy wagons. She pulled herself up against the bunk and slid her hand under the pillow. Somebody hollered for the laggard to hurry up, what the hell was he doing, courting her? There was laughter. Without looking up from his struggle with the buckle the man yelled back for them to fuck themselves. She turned to face him and said softly, “Oye, bruto.” The man raised his face to look at her and she backhanded the blade through his neck all the way to the bone. Blood jumped and spattered her breasts. The man staggered, hands to his throat as if trying to hold his head in place as much as stanch the blood throbbing through his fingers and cascading onto his shirt. He tried to cry out but could not. Then tripped over Eduardo Luis and fell facedown and let a gurgling groan and in a moment more went still, blood widening on the floor under his face. There was another shout for him to come on, goddammit. She stood next to the door with the knife ready for whoever came in first. To hell with him, somebody said, he can catch up. She heard them leaving, horsemen and wagons.