Country of the Bad Wolfes (16 page)

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 Woman. 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 prophetic 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.

The child was a boy. They named him John Samuel.