Country of the Bad Wolfes (3 page)

He declined a blindfold and stood smoking a cigar, an insouciant thumb hooked in his belt, as the fusiliers took aim. At the muskets' discharge, a squall of birds burst from the trees and a slow blue cloud of powdersmoke ascended after them. The officer in charge of the execution—a young lieutenant named Montenegro—delivered the customary coup de grâce pistolshot to the head. Then unsheathed his saber and with an expert slash decapitated the corpse.

The head was taken at once to the yellow-rock fortress of San Juan de Ulúa at the mouth of the harbor and placed on a tower pike in warning to all the city and every passing ship. The body was borne off in the donkey cart, and onlookers made the sign of the cross as it passed them on its way to the graveyard. And the two women who had fought over him were not the only ones to dip their skirt hems in the blood puddled in the cobbles.

He was buried in the low-lying cemetery at the south end of the city. He had arranged for a marble headstone engraved with his name and
ad vivum praedo
. But within a week of his interment the marker was stolen by persons unknown.

On its high vantage over the harbor, the head blackened and was fed upon by birds and over time reduced to bare yellow bone with a .54-caliber hole in the parietal and an unremitting grin. The skull disappeared in the next hurricane, and the floodwaters forced open his grave and carried his bones to the sea.

 

 

 

 

 

T
he twin sons of Roger Blake Wolfe were born in late May under the apt sign of Gemini. Mary Margaret named them Samuel Thomas—the elder by three minutes—and John Roger. She and the boys lived with her widower father, John Thomas Parham, in a flat above his Portsmouth tavern, where she tended tables every night. It was a waterfront pub catering to a seaman trade, Mr Parham himself having been thirteen years a merchant officer before a shipboard mishap left him crippled of foot and permanently dependent on a crutch. Except for the first six weeks of her marriage, during which she and Captain Wolfe lived in a rented cottage, the tavern was the only home Mary Margaret had ever known or would. Only nineteen years old when widowed, she would afterward not lack for suitors but she would not marry again. As in the case of Roger Blake Wolfe, no picture of her would pass down through the generations, but her sons would describe her to their children as blue-eyed and slender, with pale brown hair she liked to wear in a braid down her back.

From the time of their early childhood the twins were curious about their father and now and again questioned Mary Margaret about him. Beyond telling them he had been a merchant ship captain and was lost at sea, she was disinclined to discuss him and was skilled at changing the subject. Both her reticence and her falsehoods were rooted in a sense of disgrace. She had not been able to surmount her angry shame over his desertion of her and their unborn children. A shame made all the worse after he had been gone for a year and a half and she received a letter from the British Embassy apprising her that her husband and British subject Roger Blake Wolfe, a captain of pirates and fugitive from justice, had been convicted of murder
by the Mexican government and duly executed in the city of Veracruz. The letter did not relate the particulars of his crime or the means of his execution nor disclose the disposition of his remains, but she did not care to know any of those details. She wept for days in sorrowful and furious mortification. How could the man she loved so dearly have done such dreadful things? How was it possible she had loved a man so different in truth from what he had seemed to her? What other lies had he told her? The more she pondered these questions the more the very notion of love did baffle her.

She demanded her father's promise not to tell her sons of Roger's criminal occupation and ignoble death, and because he was sympathetic to her sentiments Mr Parham so promised. But although he did not say so, he believed she was in error to keep the truth from the twins. He was not so shocked as his daughter by the news about Captain Wolfe. He'd had his hunch about the man from the start, having been acquainted with a number of men disposed to outlawry and having at times even conspired in a bit of furtive business with some of them. This minor criminality was but one secret Mr Parham had kept from his wife and daughter. Another was that his father had been Red Ned Kennedy, the notorious mankiller and highwayman. Mr Parham himself had been unaware of his true paternity until after his mother died of the consumption when he was twelve and he was taken in by her old-maid sister. One day in a fit of meanness the aunt told him all about his nefarious father. “Hanged your pa was,” she told him, “in the public square at Kittery in the glorious year of ‘76, not six months after your birth. Your poor mam so wanting to spare ye the dishonor of him, God pity her, that she quit his name and took back our own. Oh, she thought she had herself a prize, she did, when she married that one with his easy smile and blarney and his promises to be a lawful man. And just look what came of it. Heartbreak and shame and an early widowhood. I'd a thousand times choose to have no man a-tall than be wed to a blackguard like him.” Young Mr Parham had affected a woeful disillusionment in his father in order to satisfy his aunt's righteousness and thereby ease the temper of his stay with her until he was of age to go to sea. But he would all his life harbor a secret pride in a sire who had been so feared in his time, and the only regret he'd ever had in being son to Red Ned Kennedy was that he himself was not more like him. He thought his grandsons might feel the same way to know their own pa had been a “gentleman of fortune,” as the phrase of the day had it. Still, he knew better than to say so to Mary Margaret, who would certainly not agree nor even care to hear it.

But as the twins grew older their entreaties about their father became more insistent and difficult for Mary Margaret to deflect. She knew she could not go on refusing them but her heart remained a divided country in its feelings for her husband and she was uncertain of what to tell them. The boys were eleven when she at last capitulated to their appeals—and little by little, over the months, she acquainted them with Roger Blake Wolfe as she had known him. And in the process of so doing, she discovered that he yet held a greater claim on the sunny south of
her heart than on its frosty north. Still, she never spoke of him to her sons by any name other than “your father,” “Captain Wolfe,” or simply “the captain.” Nor did she soon recant her falsehoods about his true vocation and manner of demise. And her accounts to them omitted of course many private particulars.

She met Roger Blake Wolfe on a summer eve when he came into the tavern for a mug of ale and dish of sausage. Dozens of sailors had wooed Mary Margaret in vain but with Captain Wolfe's first smile she was smitten. He was not tall but carried himself as a tall man. He wore a close pointed beard and his black hair and hazel eyes would be replicated in his sons. So too his cocky grin. He began showing up at the tavern every night and each time she caught sight of him her breath deepened. He gladdened her. Made her laugh. Made her blush and feel warm with his compliments. His speech was tinged with the brogue of his Irish da. He was the only one she ever permitted to call her Maggie. She had known him barely two weeks the first time she sneaked out her window late one night to rendezvous in a moonlit copse above the harbor. She was seventeen. He was her first lover and her last.