Country of the Bad Wolfes (23 page)

The track held close to the river's meander and in places was so narrow the foliage brushed against both sides of the wagon as they swayed and tilted over the uneven ground. Both the driver and their guard were Indians, the guard riding behind on a burro. Both men armed with machetes and shotguns. Although the disorder of the Reform War had worsened the national plague of banditry, robbers were most unlikely in this jungle—but jaguars and wild boars and poisonous snakes were not. Under his leather jacket John Roger carried a .36-caliber Colt in a shoulder holster, and in Elizabeth Anne's handbag was a .41-caliber derringer. To fend against the rage of mosquitoes they had covered their faces and necks and hands with a unguent of Josefina's concoction that smelled so foul they questioned whether the mosquitoes might not be the lesser torment.

Under a high shadowing canopy of trees shrill with birds and monkeys, the air grew hotter and wetter, riper in its smells of vegetation. The light was an eerie green. John Roger had been fretful of Elizabeth Anne risking her health in such close heat, but she assured him she felt fine. It was his guess that in some places they were hardly more than ten yards from the river and never farther than twenty, but the undergrowth was so heavy that at no point did they get so much as a glimpse of the water. They might not have known the river was there but for the rumble of the rapids, which grew louder and louder until they were abreast of them for several miles in which the green air was misty with vapor and they had to raise their voices to be heard. He wanted to have a look, but to get near enough to the riverbank would have required an hour or more of hacking with machetes by all three men, an expense of valuable time they could not afford. And too, there was the matter of jaguars and boars and snakes. They pressed on, the roar of the rapids gradually diminishing back to a rumble, and after a while longer they heard only the river's low hiss through the bankside reeds.

Near day's end they emerged from the closing darkness of the river into the last afternoon light of the cove. It was an oval some eighty yards wide from the landward to the seaward side and half again that long from north to south. The trailhead was near the cove's northwest end, within sight of the river mouth. The cove surface looked like a slightly warped mirror of green glass, much darker at this hour than
it would be under the overhead sun. They could not see the inlet on the other side because it did not open directly to the gulf but lay between a pair of narrow and overlapping tongues of land parallel to the coastline and dense with coconut palms. The trees blocked their view of the ocean but they could hear the swash of small waves on the outer shore. On the cove's landward side the jungle ended on a small bluff that sloped down onto a smooth white beach. The beach curved all the way around the south end of the cove and was askitter with crabs of red-and-blue.

“My God, it's so beautiful,” Elizabeth Anne said. She pointed to the bluff. “Up there, Johnny, up there's the place for a house.”

John Roger told the guard and driver to relax, and the two men settled themselves under a tree and began to roll cigarettes. He and Elizabeth Anne then took off their shoes and walked barefoot out on the beach, crabs sidling out of the way ahead of them. They went up the slope to the little bluff and found that although it was not quite high enough for them to see the gulf on the other side of the palms, there was a steady breeze that kept off the mosquitoes. John Roger agreed it was a fine spot to build a house.

They went back down to the beach and walked around to the other side of the cove and went through the palms and there the gulf was. As far as they could see to north and south a high wall of palms leaning to landward was fronted by a sand-and-rock beach barely ten yards wide at any point at this hour of ebb tide. The gentle waves rolled in low and crested as small breakers, spraying on the rocky shore and rushing over it in a foaming sheet and then running back out again.

They backtracked through the palms to the cove beach and headed for the inlet and before they got there the sand under their feet became stony ground. The inlet formed a pass less than fifteen feet wide and about fifteen yards long from its outer mouth to its inner one, both banks craggy with rocks. It looked about four feet deep at the ebb and John Roger guessed it would rise close to two feet at high tide. On the inland side of the pass the bottom grass leaned toward the cove with the incoming current but on the outer side where they stood the grass was pulled the other way by the current going out.

“See how the current makes an easy circuit all the way around?” John Roger said, gesturing with his arm. “But through this pass it moves pretty fast coming in and going out.” He picked up a coconut and dropped it into the water and it whipped away on the outgoing current and around the outer tongue of the inlet. It carried out into the gulf for about fifty feet before it slowed to an easy bobbing and began drifting toward the southward shore.

The outer mouth presented a difficult angle of approach from the open water. John Roger thought only expert hands might be able to sail a boat through this pass without either hitting the rocky projection of its outer tongue or veering into the leeward rocks. Elizabeth Anne grinned and said she was game whenever he was.

Because the inlet faced up the coast and its outer arm overlapped the inner
one and was so thick with palms, it was impossible to see it from anywhere out on the gulf except if you were north of the inlet and very close to the shore, and even then you would have to be looking hard for it. “You could sail by within fifty yards and never see this opening,” John Roger said.

“Our own secret harbor,” Elizabeth Anne said. “I love it.”

He christened the cove Ensenada de Isabel and rued the lack of a flag to plant.

Josefina had supplied them with an oilskin sack of food—a stack of tortillas bundled in a damp cloth, a pouch of dried beef, two jugs of cooked beans, and a bag of oranges. In the last red light of day John Roger made a fire on the bluff and Elizabeth Anne invited the driver and guard to come and sup with them. The men had brought their own provisions and had made a campfire near the wagon, but they accepted the Wolfes' invitation. After supper John Roger told them they could sleep in the wagon, and he and Elizabeth Anne went up on the bluff, up where the crabs did not go, and huddled on one blanket and covered themselves with another against the evening's cool breeze.

He woke twice in the night, savoring the sea breeze, the crush of stars, the bronze gibbous moon low in the east. The feel of Lizzie snugged against him. The second time, just as he was about to doze off again, he heard her murmur, “This is heaven.” And next time woke to a radiant sunrise.

They got back to the compound after dark, and later that night, in the privacy of his office, John Roger took out the journal he had not opened in years and recorded his happy plans.

It took a year to build the house and improve the trail for getting to it. John Roger spent long periods encamped at the cove with the labor crews and supervising the construction. He had the wagon track lengthened from the river mouth to the landing at the hacienda compound and improved the trail the full length of its entire river-hugging wind through the jungle. Each time he came home for a visit he was leaner, harder of muscle, more darkly sunbrowned. After the first few months, he forwent shaving and his beard grew black and wild. Elizabeth Anne was roused by his brutish appearance. When she said he now looked more like a pirate than even her Uncle Richard, he affected a menacing leer and advanced on her, saying in low growl, “Arrgh, me captive beauty, it's yer sweet flesh I'll have for me sport”—and she let a gleeful cry as he tumbled her into bed. She loved the beard and asked him to keep it and she trimmed it for him. She missed him terribly in his absences and chafed at her long exclusion from her cherished cove. She pleaded to go back with him and swore she would not complain about living in a tent until the house was ready to move into. But he would not permit her to see it until it was completed.

In the long weeks without him, her sanctuary against loneliness was the company of Josefina and young John Samuel. The boy liked being the center of her
attention while his father was away, but although he was not shy he did not talk very much, not even when he and his mother were alone together. Elizabeth Anne would love him dearly to the end of her life without comprehending him. Josefina, on the other hand, liked to talk and was a good listener in turn, and Elizabeth Anne took pleasure in their conversations. Everyone of the casa grande knew that Josefina was from the state of Chihuahua—her accent was irrefutable testament to her roots in that northern region. But Elizabeth Anne was the only one to know that Josefina's entire family except for herself and her younger brother Gonsalvo had been killed and her village razed when she was twelve years old.

Elizabeth Anne asked who killed them and Josefina shrugged and said, “Hombres con armas.” It was a war, she said, there was always a war, always men with guns, and war was no less cruel to those who did not fight in it than to those who did. After losing their parents and home, she and Gonsalvo decided to go to Veracruz to live with the family of their maternal aunt. Besides the fact that their aunt lived there, they knew nothing of Veracruz except that it was far away to the southeast and was next to the sea. Not until afterward did they learn it was a journey of a thousand miles as the eagle flies but truly much farther, crossing every sort of terrain, including the eastern sierras. They sometimes got rides on passing wagons, but they walked more often than they rode. Many things happened and they saw much that was wonderful and much that was terrible and met many people and heard many strange languages. They crossed the mountains in the company of another displaced family and it seemed the crossing would never end and she would never be warm again. One of Gonsalvo's hands was badly frostbitten and two fingers had to be removed. Eleven years old, Josefina said, and you never saw a boy so brave. He never made a sound except to take a deep breath when the man chopped both fingers at once with a hatchet and then again when he closed the wounds with a hot knife. The trip took a year. Their aunt's family welcomed them and wept for their loss and marveled at their trek from Chihuahua. Gonsalvo fell in love with the gulf the moment he saw it, and he soon learned to swim in it and swam almost every day. But the sea frightened Josefina and she never went into it any deeper than her knees. In their second summer on the coast they both caught the yellow fever and she survived but Gonsalvo did not. She had lived in Veracruz state ever since.

Had she ever married?

Yes. Once. His name was Lotario Quito. He was a gentle man—
too
gentle, God forgive her for saying so, but it was the truth. There are times in a man's life when rashness is necessary but the capacity for rashness was not in Lotario. Still, one cannot help but love whom one loves, and they loved each other very much. He was a clerk in a bookstore and earned extra money by writing letters and other documents for illiterates who came to his little table at the zócalo. That she herself could not read was of no matter to him. He would have given her a reading lesson whenever she asked, but only when she asked, because he was afraid that if he should
suggest a lesson to her she might think he was implying that she was dull and in need of education, but he did not think that and did not wish to offend her. Even after he told her this and she said she would not take offense, he would never ask if she wished a lesson, and because she did not want to disturb his own reading in the evening, she would not ask for lessons and so never did learn to read and write. They had been married almost two years—and had produced one child, who died in his sleep in his second month—when a pair of thugs accosted them on the street late one night after a dance. They were forced into an alley and the thugs took turns raping her while the other held a razor to Lotario's throat. They took his money and his father's pocketwatch and shattered his spectacles for the meanness of it. They were laughing when they walked away, not even running. Lotario's weeping was so piteous it broke her heart. He could not stop crying, even after they got home, and she held him close all night, crooning to him as to a child frighted by a bad dream.