by James Blake
She found her clothes and got dressed, nearly falling once from a sudden swirl of dizziness. The floor viscid under her feet. She knelt beside Eduardo Luis and cleaned off his face with her gown and then covered him with it. She had to think hard for a moment to remember he was eighteen. His gun was gone. But the dead man’s gun belt was still on the chair where he’d placed it and she went to it and took the Remington revolver from the holster and emptied the cylinder and saw that all the cartridges had been spent. She reloaded the chambers with bullets from the belt loops and then with the point of her knife made another hole in the belt for the buckle tongue so the belt would fit her. Then put it on and slid her knife under it but had the revolver in hand as she went outside into the light of the risen sun.
The locomotive was canted to one side on the ground beyond the disjointed tracks with its great iron wheels buried to the hubs and a thin haze of steam still rising off the engine. Dead men in every attitude. Some of the attackers and all of the soldiers. Ants already at work on the faces. She did not find Sandra Rosario among the dead but found several canteens of water. In every direction the horizon ran to distant ranges except to the northeast which lay flat all the way to the sky. There was a low dust cloud in the southwest she took to be that of the departed raiders. She had to assume they had Sandi with them. She tried various hats before finding one that wasn’t too big. She had no idea how far she was from Matamoros but knew that the tracks would take her there. She slung a pair of canteens across her chest and started walking.
Near midday a billow of dust rose in the northwest and began to enlarge. She had the Remington in her hand when they came riding up, a band of men of the same breed and aspects as those of the night before. Teeth bright against faces black in the shadow of their sombreros. Every man of them draped with bandoleers and guns and knives, their horses hung with rifles and machetes. They reined up around her, grinning and joking about the pretty soldadera so ready to shoot them all. The leader said he was Tomás Urbina and asked what happened. She told him about the train attack. He asked if she had been violated and when she didn’t answer he cursed her attackers with such artful vileness she nearly smiled. He told two men to take her to Matamoros. She hesitated but a second before clasping the hand reaching down to her and being swung up behind the rider.
It was late in the afternoon when they deposited her at the Matamoros depot. The stationmaster immediately sent a wire to John Louis at Cielo Largo to let him know. John Louis had been informed the evening before of the change in trains and the reason for it, but when the train had still not arrived by morning he was frantic. He had exchanged a half-dozen wires with the Monterrey garrison before finally going back to Cielo Largo and maintaining telegraphic communications from there. When he got to the station it was the first time he and Catalina had seen each other in the five years since he’d left Patria Chica, and he nearly stopped her breath with the force of his embrace. When she told him Eduardo Luis had been killed and Sandi Rosario taken, he said, Oh dear God, and hugged her again to hide his face. She did not tell him of her assault nor of the man she killed, would for years not tell anyone, though she’d have told Buelito if she’d had the chance and pleaded with him to take her along when he set out to hunt them down. John Louis composed himself and then sent a wire to Edward Little.
The entirety of Edward’s responding telegram said, Send Eduardo to Patria Chica. Attend well to the Cat.
Edward Little assigned his best agents, each with his own crew, to search the border in hunt of the train attackers, especially in the towns where most of the trade in guns and munitions took place. Over the following weeks every man of the gang but three was captured and interrogated to the bloody bones before he was granted the mercy of death. Most were in agreement that the girl was taken from the train by Berto González and Chato Ruíz, two of the three who remained unfound. After receiving their shares from the sale of the munitions in Reynosa, González and Ruíz had left the gang, taking the girl with them. Maybe to sell her, maybe for their own fun, nobody knew. Or knew where they’d gone. Some thought Monterrey, some Nuevo Laredo, some Chihuahua City, but nobody knew. Edward’s men would follow every tenuous lead but find no trace of either man nor of Sandra Rosario.
Úrsula had known Catalina since the girl was a baby and she was very happy to have her living with them. Hector Louis had been eight the last time he’d seen her and was now a little shy around his sixteen-year-old cousin who seemed somehow to have grown more than just two years older than he. Though the house was large by Brownsville standards, she had never lived in a place so small, but she didn’t mind. Her room looked out on a backyard full of trees and abutting a small resaca and she marveled at the variety of birds that watered there. She was in a secret apprehension for the first few weeks and formed a contingent plan to sneak off to town and find a curandera—and then was profoundly relieved when her menses came, and she felt as much delivered by chance as injured by it.
The Littles held a fiesta at Cielo Largo to introduce her to the Wolfes, her kin by way of her Grandmother Gloria. They came in a pair of new Model T Ford touring cars, the twins relinquishing most of the driving to the boys, and Jacky Ríos and César Augusto protested to no avail when Blake Cortéz also allotted Vicki Angel a turn behind the wheel. That evening at the banquet table there was much loud discussion about family lineage and Catalina’s relation to the Wolfes. Beyond the solid facts that Samuel Thomas Wolfe was her great-grandfather and John Roger Wolfe her great-granduncle there was much debate about great-uncles and great-aunts and degrees of cousinship until everybody was laughing at the genealogical tangle. It was finally resolved that although they were technically her granduncles and grandaunts, John Louis and the twins would simply be her uncles, Úrsula and Marina and Remedios her aunts, and all their children her cousins. It was only natural that they would abbreviate her name to Cat and that the nickname would carry over into Spanish as La Gata.
She was one more Little who had never seen the ocean until her first time at Playa Blanca. They could now drive there in the Fords, the twins having reinforced the wagon trail from the Boca Chica road to the house and there built a garage to protect the cars from windblown sand. Catalina had learned to swim in the river at Patria Chica but shared her cousins’ preference for swimming in the gulf rather than in a river or resaca. All the boys were in a stir over their long-legged, blue-eyed cousin and vied with each other to teach her how to sail. Jacky Ríos and César Augusto nearly got into a fistfight about it, which seemed to amuse her. She chose Vicki Angel to be her instructor and by the end of that weekend she was sailing like an old hand. A year and a half Catalina’s junior, Vicki Angel adored her cousin and was elated to have another girl in the family, an ally at last in a tribe overrun with rough boys. She took to wearing pants and boots too, whenever Catalina did, and none of the adults objected, so long as the girls never failed to dress properly for mealtimes and social outings. They enrolled Catalina in the same Catholic school for girls that Vicki attended and the two of them walked there together every day in their blue-and-white uniforms. The women were pleased by the novelty of two girls among them, girls at the threshold of womanhood but who still in the way of girls could communicate with each other through mysterious smiling glances that sometimes led to outbursts of laughter for reasons they shared with no one else. The twins too were taken with Catalina. They admired her refusal to give up her Remington revolver to John Louis. He had offered to keep it for her in his gun case, he told the twins, but she preferred to keep it in her room and he could think of no argument by which to deny her. That she knew how to use the gun was evident the first time she took a turn at a family target shooting session and outshot all her cousins except Harry Sebastian, the deadeye of the bunch. And the day she slipped the bonehandled knife from its hip sheath and threw it whirling to pinion a four-foot rattlesnake still writhing after Jacky Ríos had shot it was one more proof she’d been well-trained in self-defense and the arts of weaponry.
She learned everything from Don Eduardo, Úrsula told the twins. Catalina herself never spoke of her great-grandfather to anyone other than Vicki Angel, who would not have betrayed her confidences even under torture.
And if in those first months with the border families Catalina sometimes withdrew into silence or went for long solitary walks at the ranch or on the beach or kept to her room for an afternoon of staring out the window, it was understandable to Marina and Remedios. Just think of what that poor girl had been through! She had seen her brother killed and her sister taken away and God alone knew how frightened she must have been for her own life. Naturally she would sometimes remember that terrible experience and be sad. Give her time. She was young and would learn to live with the pains of the past as we all must. Úrsula agreed, but said that even as a child Catalina had always had a reclusive side to her, some secret part of herself she never shared with anyone. Except probably Don Eduardo. And now Vicki Angel, to whom she seemed even closer than she had been to her own sister. It is a very right name for her, Úrsula said, the Cat.
Hector Louis told his cousins much the same thing. Catalina had always been a little odd, he said. She never asked if she could play with you, you always had to ask her, and sometimes she would and sometimes she wouldn’t. It was like she didn’t really care if anybody asked her to play or not. I always liked her anyway, Hector said, even though she was odd.
“Well she’s not any odder than any of you all, that’s damn for sure!” Vicki Angel said, and stomped off as the boys all laughed at her clumsy profanity.
Harry Sebastian said the really strange thing about the Cat was how well she could shoot and throw that knife. Jacky Ríos said he’d sure like to get his hands on that knife of hers. “There are lots of things of hers I’d like to get my hands on,” Morgan James said with a lascivious smile. All the boys had by this time disposed of their virginity, fourteen-year-old Hector Louis just a couple of months before, when Morgan James, the eldest at seventeen and the most experienced, took him to one of his compliant Mexican girlfriends in Brownsville.
Jacky Ríos told Morgan he better not try anything with the Cat, not only on account of she might gut him with that knife but you weren’t supposed to do such things with your cousin, he’d heard you could go to jail for it.
“Ah hell,” Harry Sebastian said, “she’s so far out on a limb of the family tree she hardly counts as a cousin.”
César Augusto said for them to quit talking about her that way.
“What’s biting your ass?” Morgan said.
“Just don’t talk about her that way, that’s all,” César said.
“Why not?” Jacky Ríos said, winking at the others. “You sweet on her? You gonna marry her?”
And César said, “Yeah, as a matter of fact I am.” And grinned at their laughter.
THE MATRIARCH
In the final days of 1910, some years after finally accepting that she was past all possibility of conception and at last acquiescing to sexual intercourse with Amos Bentley—berating herself for her long abstention even as she thrilled to the act as much as she had the first time in her life, at sixteen with her young soldier husband Melchor—Sofía Reina, age fifty-seven, at last also accepted as fact seventy-two-year-old Amos’s insistence that she was in no way cursed and they should get married before they were too old to even remember each other’s names. Six years earlier, after Victor Nevada died of a stroke, Amos had become an independent assayer and had been making more money than ever. Theirs would be a very comfortable old age, he promised Sófi.
When they told María Palomina they were going to marry, all she said was, It’s about time. They set the date for March.
A few weeks before the wedding, María Palomina awoke early one morning from a pleasant dream of walking hand in hand with Samuel Thomas in Chapultepec Park, both of them yet very young and Samuel Thomas scarless of face and walking without limp. They had never actually gone for such a walk, Samuel Thomas never having gone anywhere beyond a three-block radius of home, and she had not been to Chapultepec since girlhood. But the dream was so real it seemed more remembrance than imagination. Just before she woke from it, Samuel Thomas kissed her hands, first one and then the other, and remarked that they had always been the prettiest he’d ever seen. Then she was awake and looking at her hands. Crippled with arthritis, the knotty fingers as twisted as scrub roots and the gnarled knuckles seized like rusted bearings, they had not been free of pain in years. She suddenly realized that tomorrow was the second of February, her eighty-first birthday. No, no, no, she thought. That’s just too damn old.
And closed her eyes and took a deep breath and released it in a slow settling sigh.
The funeral was three days later and was attended by a handful of neighborhood friends. Sófi’s grief was absolute but when Amos suggested she might want to set back the wedding date she said certainly not and that not even her mother would have wanted them to.
They married as planned on the first Sunday in March. As they were leaving the church, Amos said, “This is the happiest day of my life.” And took three more strides before stopping short and turning to her in disbelief as he clutched his chest. And fell dead.
She shed a few tears and wore black for two weeks, and if her neighbors thought her show of mourning altogether perfunctory and disrespectful, what did she care? She was a lifelong intimate of grief, a practiced expert at mourning, and no longer felt need to make public display of her feelings. And only once did she say, speaking to herself as much as to the sheepish spirit of Amos, I told you, you idiot!
She telegraphed the news to her border kin, and, with no family left to her in Mexico City, asked if she might go to live near them. Marina’s return wire expressed everyone’s condolences and said they would all love to have her with them and that she could take her choice of which family to live with. But Sófi would not burden anyone and insisted on a house of her own. Amos had left her a large inheritance and she sent money to the Wolfes and asked them to please buy a small house for her not too far from theirs. Her friends said she was being rash. Mexico City was the only home she’d ever known and she would wither in the primitive country of the border. Maybe, Sófi said, maybe not. In April she sold her house and moved to Brownsville in the only border crossing she would ever make.
The families received her with an outpouring of felicitous affection. She had for so long looked forward to meeting them all, and was especially effusive toward the twins, who even at the age of forty-one were indistinguishable except to those who knew the identifiers to look for. She was pleased with the little frame house they had selected for her, a block north of the Wolfe homes. She had never lived anywhere but Mexico City but was acquainted with dramatic change and would easily adapt to Brownsville and its ways.
Two years older than Marina, she was by tradition of age entitled to be the new family matriarch—the Mamá Grande. But she protested that Marina was the true matriarch because she had known the twins since their birth and was wife to one of the family’s two heads. For her part, Marina deferred to Sófi as the rightful matriarch because she was not only first cousin to the family heads but was also the daughter of John Roger’s brother and hence the only one in the borderland family to have known both brothers. The twins settled the dispute by decreeing that both women would be accorded the title and respect of Mamá Grande and would be addressed by everyone in the family as Mamá Marina and Mamá Sófi.
But it was Sófi’s singular distinction to have been born and raised in Mexico City, where nobody else in the border families had ever been. They loved to hear her descriptions of the capital, her reminiscences of the Wolfe y Blanco family and her account of how it came to have that surname. They were enrapt by her epic tale of Gloria’s wedding to Louis Welch Little. Were awed by the sad saga of her own marriages and the lamentable outcomes of them all.
It would be years yet, however, before she would tell any of them of her conviction that the family was cursed by its own blood.
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She had been in Brownsville two months when the twins came to her with a document case and told her it contained information she might find interesting. Then opened the case and she saw the banded bunch of photographs, the various packets of letters and other documents, the leatherbound ledger. It was all in English, which she did not know, but they promised to translate it all as time permitted. What was important, they told her, was that she know everything about the family. That she be the keeper of its history. The one to pass it down.