Country of the Bad Wolfes (26 page)

Actually, she said, I think I love him.

Don Victor's shock was exceeded only by his barely suppressed alarm. He did business with Yankees, yes, but business was a thing apart from personal emotions. He had in truth felt a great bitterness toward Americans ever since their invasion of his country. The only imaginable thing worse than an impoverished son-in-law was an impoverished gringo son-in-law. Over the next days he tried with calm logic to dissuade Teresa from accepting Amos's proposal. He said it would be the gravest of mistakes to marry any man beneath her social station, and worse still one from another culture. But the more he argued against the marriage the more he could see by the set of her face that he was losing ground.

Then one morning she was decided. She told Don Victor she was going to say yes to Amos. There followed a loud and heated argument in which Don Victor only just did manage to restrain himself from forbidding the marriage outright, fearing she would make good on her threat to elope—a threat that did not waver even in the face of his counterthreat to disinherit her if she should marry without his permission.

She confided the entire argument to Amos, who in turn confided it to John Roger, admitting to him that he had gone weak in the knees when Teresa told him of the don's warning of disinheritance. “I'm sure you can understand my concern, John,” he said. “I mean, of course I love her very much and admire her passionate nature and willingness to place love above all and so on and so forth, but one should not permit one's emotions to supersede practical consideration entirely, should one?” John Roger smiled and said, “Not entirely, I shouldn't think.” He understood the practical consideration Amos had in mind was the young lady's birthright, which through marriage would of course also become his.

Don Victor at last offered his daughter a compromise. He would consent to the marriage on condition that she agree to a courtship period of one year to be followed by a formal engagement of yet another year. If she still wanted to marry Mr Bentley after the year of betrothal, they would have his full blessing.

Teresa insisted to Amos that they should refuse her father's conditions. We must not permit him to make the rules for any part of our lives, she argued. If we do, we are no different from his peons, we are only better dressed and better fed. Please, my love, we don't need anything from him.

Amos gently but with equal insistence entreated her to agree to the don's terms. Her father was only trying to assure his only child's happiness, Amos told her in his most earnest manner. By agreeing to Don Victor's conditions, they would prove to him what she already knew—that he, Amos Bentley, loved her so much that he was willing to meet any stipulation to satisfy her father of the sincerity of his
affection. Believe me, my love, said Amos, who had told her of his orphan childhood, I have long known the pain and loneliness of being without a family. You do not want to be estranged from the only family left to you. How much better if we can live in harmony with your father and preserve the family. Don't you see? Don't you agree? Isn't that more reasonable?

She finally gave in. But not without a woeful suspicion that, in some vital aspect, Amos might not be so different from her father. A suspicion that, like her father—perhaps like all men—Amos was not averse to using any tactic necessary, with anyone, in order to have his own way.

In addition to the certainty that young Bentley would persuade Teresa to accept his conditions for their marriage, Don Victor fully expected that, at some point before the elapse of the two years, his daughter's infatuation—he was certain it was no more than that—would come to an end and she would send the gringo packing. Not only did that not happen, but as the don became better acquainted with Amos he found the young man to be quite pleasant and, even more important, possessed of a shrewd talent for business in general and bookkeeping in particular. In fact, Don Victor was so impressed with the young American's talents that, by the day of the wedding, Amos had already been the head bookkeeper of the Nevada Mining Company for almost a year.

The nuptials took place in the ballroom of the Hacienda de las Nevadas. The spring day was bright as a jewel, the air cool and sharp and seasoned with pine. John Roger and Elizabeth Anne were among the guests, as was Charles Patterson. Many of the attendees were from Mexico City, and nearly as many of them British or American as Mexican. Don Victor was effusive in his welcome of the Wolfes and said he had been looking forward to meeting them. After the ceremony, the party sat to a banquet in the central courtyard, followed by dancing to the music of a full orchestra. Spiders of special breed imported from Guatemala had spun canopies of connecting webs from tree to tree in the courtyard and the webs had been sown with gold dust, suffusing the courtyard with a lovely amber haze. At one point John Roger saw a young mestizo waiter gazing in open wonder at the enwebbed gold whose worth he could not have begun to estimate—then receiving a rap to the ear from his overseer who barked for him to get to work if he knew what was good for him.

When Don Victor joined the Wolfes and other guests for a glass of wine at the newlyweds' table, the topic under discussion was national politics. There was a chorus of loud approbation in response to someone's expressed hope that Porfirio Díaz would become the next president, and glasses were raised in tribute to the general. Don Victor took the opportunity to inform the Wolfes that he had been friends with Don Porfirio since the time of the Yankee invasion, when they were
both fifteen. They had served together in a Oaxaca guard battalion composed of schoolboys like themselves, but much to their great disappointment they had not been sent into combat. At the end of the war Victor returned to his engineering education, but Porfirio, who had been studying for the priesthood prior to joining the ranks, had found his true calling as a soldier. Do you know, Don Victor said, that Porfirio's birthday is on the eve of Mexico's day of independence? It's the truth—and what could be more fitting? It was Don Victor's iron opinion that only General Díaz could end the antagonisms between Mexico's many political factions and unify the nation in a common cause. He is destined to be the president, Don Victor said. Take it for a fact.

John Roger had heard the same thing from almost every hacendado of his acquaintance. He thought it curious that so many Creoles held in such esteem a man whose own blood was mostly indigenous. It was no secret that Díaz's mother was a Mixtec Indian and his father a mestizo. Despite a warning look from Amos, John Roger said that Don Victor might be right that General Díaz would one day be president, but Benito Juárez was very popular with the masses and it should be as difficult for Díaz to beat him in the next election as in the last one.

Juárez
! The don spoke the name as if it were a vile taste in his mouth. That heathen half-pint and his filthy Indian rabble are the ruin of the nation. It is long past time for the makers of Mexico to rescue the country from them. General Díaz is our greatest hope, and I assure you, sir, that one way or another he
will
become the president!

Before the don's fervor grew any hotter, Amos Bentley stepped up on a chair and called for everyone's attention and proposed a toast to his dear friend, John Wolfe. I owe my happiness to him, Amos told the assemblage. It was Don Juan who secured my employment with the Trade Wind Company, and it was through the Trade Wind that I was able to make the acquaintance of so many fine people, a series of acquaintances that led me to my darling Teresa Serafina. So here's to you, Don Juan, for your hand in the making of my great happiness. “Salud!”

The toast was cheered and—for the moment—the subject of Díaz set aside.

It was the finest spring they'd known in Mexico. The hacienda abloom with color, the air rich with the aromas of flowers and rain-ripened earth. As they took their post-dinner stroll in the garden one evening, admiring the beauty of the quarter moon, the brightest comet either of them had ever seen flashed across the sky. Elizabeth Anne shut her eyes and he knew she was making a wish, as she always did on spying a shooting star. Then she looked at him and said, “You too, quick!” He smiled and said there was nothing to wish for, that a man could not ask for better fortune than his.

Some months later, on a sultry summer night at Ensenada de Isabel, as they
lay embraced in the big hammock of the cove house verandah and looked out at the stars over the gulf while the jungle blackness chirmed and screeched, Elizabeth Anne reminded him of that night in the garden and of the radiant shooting star and said that the wish she'd made had come true. They were going to have another child.

“I don't know why
now
any more than I knew why last time,” Nurse Beckett said. Her hair had gone grayer and the lines of her face deeper in the nearly fifteen years since John Samuel's birth. “But at this rate, you'll be sixty when you have your next one.” Elizabeth Anne gave a gasp of mock shock, and they both burst into girlish giggles.

Underneath her levity, Nurse Beckett was apprehensive. She had not forgotten Elizabeth Anne's difficulty in bearing John Samuel at the age of twenty-one, and she was now thirty-six. And though he never said so, John Roger was worried too. As inexplicable as the pregnancy itself, however, was the easiness with which it progressed to term, an easiness that allayed their fears. During her carriage of John Samuel, Elizabeth Anne had been sick almost every morning, but this time did not have a single instance of nausea, or much discomfort of any sort other than the general nuisance of her swelling. The trouble-free pregnancy was the more notable because she bloated even larger this time and her quickening was more pronounced, the stirrings and kicks in her womb more insistent than John Samuel's had been. Nurse Beckett predicted a strapping boy.

Even the labor itself was easier than the time before—ensuing shortly after sundown on the eve of the vernal equinox. Josefina, that ageless grandam, was once again on hand to assist Nurse Beckett. John Roger again paced in an adjoining room with his fist in a ready clench to endure Elizabeth Anne's howls. But she this time made little outcry beyond a few sporadic yelps. Shortly before midnight John Samuel, incipient adulthood already evident in his face, came downstairs in his sleepshirt to ask if the baby had arrived. John Roger said not yet, and they paced together, father and son.

In the first minutes of the new season, Elizabeth Anne let her only piercing scream of the night, and John Samuel fixed wide eyes on his father. “It's only natural, son, don't worry,” John Roger said. “Soon now. Soon.”

They were still awaiting the baby's cries of arrival when the bedroom door opened and Nurse Beckett stood there staring at John Roger, unable to cohere into words the dejection on her face. He at once knew the child was dead.