Country of the Bad Wolfes (48 page)

When they got back to La Noria it was not there anymore. Only black ruin and a landscape strewn with the carcasses of stock shot dead and fed on by scavengers and decayed to bone and withered hide. Nothing remained of the buildings but sooted stone walls. The cane fields had been burned and sown with salt for good measure. All the wells were poisoned.

This grim report came to Sófi in Gloria's first letter since departing Brownsville more than a year before. It was written at a sugar plantation called La Candelaria, in the south of Veracruz state, where Díaz and the Littles were residing as guests of yet another friend of Don Porfirio. Gloria was thankful to be back in Mexico—the borderland around Matamoros was neither truly Mexican nor American, she said, but a bastard offspring of both countries. But she had expected to return to the Oaxacan highlands, not be brought to this steamy plantation with cane fields on every side and nothing but jungle beyond them. She lived for the day Porfirio took over the country and they could again live in Mexico City, a day she believed would not be long in coming. Many mysterious visitors had been coming and going in recent weeks, Porfirio receiving them in private, and it was her feeling that he was planning another revolt and this time taking much greater care in his preparations. When he wasn't busy with his plans and secret conferences, he was often doting on his newborn son, Deodato, whom everyone called Porfirito. The child was healthy and strong as a colt, and they felt certain that, unlike the unfortunate siblings who preceded him, he would survive infancy.

When Sófi sent Gloria the news of their father's death, she told her only that he had died of illness, wanting to spare her the awful detail of the rabies. But in her reply of months later, all Gloria said about Samuel Thomas's passing was that she could not feel very much about the death of someone she had hardly known, who had kept himself a stranger to his own children. Sófi was appalled by her sister's
attitude toward their father and would not hurt their mother with it. She told María Palomina that Gloria had sent condolences. And her mother smiled and nodded as though she believed it.

The year after Samuel Thomas died, Graciela María was born to Edward and Raquel Little. Edward said he felt himself a lucky man to have a daughter. But later in that same year the region was struck by yet another rage of yellow fever and both Raquel and Graci contracted the disease. The mother died a day after the child.

Edward dug their grave himself in a stifling heat and a haze of mosquitoes, laboring shirtless and hatless, a black bandanna capping his head. The low snifflings of Gloria and Delfina mingled with his huffing and the sound of his spade. Besides the two women and the priest Delfina had summoned, the only ones present were Díaz and Louis Little, and Edward had refused their offers of help with the digging.

None of them knew that Raquel and Graci were not the first beloveds he had buried in this country. None knew he'd had a younger sister and an older brother and when he was sixteen the three had been separated by fell straits in their homeland American South. Two years later during the war with Mexico he had by chance met with both of them again, each in turn, and in both instances had soon after had to bury them. First interring young Maggie in the plains of Tamaulipas, where he discovered her among a wagonload of American whores chasing after General Taylor's army and where she died of the nameless disease that had been killing her for weeks. And then some months later burying nineteen-year-old John in the sierras north of Mexico City after cutting him down from the tavern rafters from which he'd been hanged by American soldiers who found him out for an escaped San Patricio. Edward had sat beside John's grave and bawled his desolation into the wilderness and had been certain of nothing on earth save that he could never in his remaining life know a greater sorrow. He had persisted in that belief for almost thirty years, until at work digging these newer graves he finally comprehended that the sole impossibility regarding human sorrow is to arrive at some unsurpassable limit to it. There was no such thing as sorrow that could not be exceeded. With every spadeful of dirt he flung from the deepening grave he raged the more at his stupidity for ever having believed otherwise.

He forwent a coffin for the woman and child because he would have needed help to set it in the grave. He had shrouded them in a blanket, the infant enfolded in the mother's arms, then sewn the blanket closed and lain them beside the spot where he dug. When the grave was ready he dragged them into his arms and set them at his feet. Then climbed out and picked up his spade and covered them over with the earth from which they'd come. He tamped firm the grave mound with the flat of his spade and then put on his shirt and picked up his tools and walked away without a word. Not until he was beyond earshot did the priest, who had seen the mad fury in his eyes, recite the requiem prayer.

The letter that brought the sorrowful news of Raquel and her baby was the last Sófi received from her sister for almost three years.

Díaz was in his second year as president and Lerdo was in exile in New York when she next heard from Gloria, who was then living at Patria Chica, Edward Little's hacienda some 200 miles northwest of Mexico City.

Edward and Díaz had first seen the place during the war against Lerdo. The surrounding terrain was mostly dry and rocky but a river ran through the eastern range of the estate, and for a few miles along its length it was flanked to either side by lush pastureland. A good road spanned the fifty miles between the estate and the rail line at San Luis Potosí, the nearest town of appreciable size. Edward admired the hacienda for its rugged beauty and geographical isolation, but Díaz said, Hell, man, it's so far into nowhere you'd go crazy out here in a month. You may not want to admit it, Lalo, but you've become a man of the capital like me. Edward said maybe so, but he still liked the place an awful lot.

The estate belonged to a staunch Lerdo supporter named Delacruz who had willingly let Lerdo's federals use it as an outpost and had regularly supplied them with beef. He was put under arrest when Díaz's troops drove the federals off. Díaz had the man brought before him and gave him the choice of deeding the hacienda to Edward Little and then leaving the country forever, or being hanged as a conspirator against the constitutional government—after which his hacienda would be confiscated as rightful reparation and then deeded to Edward Little in reward for his service to Mexico.

So you see, my fucked friend, Díaz told Delacruz, either way Mr Little will own this place. But if you sign it over to him you will save your life and you will save my soldiers the bullets they would use to kill you and you will save my clerks the extra paperwork and above all you will save Mr Little the bother of having to wait longer than he wishes to for legal ownership of the property. You will do much saving. Delacruz signed it over. Díaz said it was always a pleasure to witness a man doing the reasonable thing. There you are, Don Eduardo, he told Edward. Now you'll have a home to go to and rest your weary bones when you retire.

The phrase “patria chica” was a common Mexican reference to one's village or town or home province—one's “little country”—and Edward Little thought it a perfect name for his hacienda.

But even after Díaz was elected president, Edward continued in his employ and so spent most of his time in Mexico City, where one of his perquisites was a fine residence on Bucareli Street, near the zócalo. Díaz had wanted Louis to keep working for him also, but Louis preferred a rancher's life and was happy to manage Patria Chica in his father's stead. His boyhood dream had been to have a ranch of his own one day, but not even in dreams had he imagined himself in charge of a place so grand as Patria Chica.

According to Gloria, Edward Little had become even more distant from everyone since the death of Raquel. From everyone except Díaz. He seemed to have no interest in anything but his work for Don Porfirio—work he never spoke about to anyone in the family. Not even Louis knew what his father's job was. Edward didn't visit the hacienda often, and nobody would see much of him when he did. He would spend most of his time riding by himself to the far reaches of the estate. The visits were always brief, never more than a few days, and he was away for so long between them that each time he came he was more of a stranger to his young sons Zack Jack and John Louis. Their half-brother Louis Welch was more of a father to them than Edward was, Gloria told Sófi. They called him Uncle Louis and called her Aunt Gloria, though she was in fact their sister-in-law, and they were growing up as brothers to her own Luis Charón, who was actually their nephew. Sófi smiled at her sister's sardonic observation that the family tree had grown some very strange branches.

Gloria missed Mexico City very much, but she knew now that Louis did not care for cities and least of all for cities the size of the capital. She had given up all hope that they would ever live there or even go for a visit. This knowledge was a daily sadness. It was peculiar, she wrote, but even though she was now geographically much closer to Mexico City than she had been while in Brownsville, she felt no nearer to it, and in some ways felt even more isolated. Not that she was unhappy with life at Patria Chica, because she wasn't, though she did wish there were more trees. Except for the cottonwoods along the river and a scattering of mesquite stands, there was no outdoor shade to be had and nothing to block the wind that sometimes raised dust storms to imprison her in the house for days. She confessed she felt silly for making these petty complaints, given the luxury of her life. “En verdad estoy encantada,” she wrote. After all, little sister, I'm the wife of a hacendado. Lady of the Manor. Doña Gloria. How could I
not
be happy?

I
n that November when John Roger and the Blancos discovered each other in Mexico City, Gloria had been at Patria Chica for eight years and had known Porfirio Díaz for nine years before that—while John Roger had never even seen the man in person. And Díaz, who only two months earlier been elected to his second presidential term, was celebrating the third anniversary of his marriage to Carmen Romero, daughter to Manuel Romero Rubio, a rich and politically influential man who owned the Jockey Club, the most luxurious gambling establishment in the city and the favored gathering place of the capital's most influential figures. Díaz's first wife, Delfina, had died in the delivery of a stillborn child, and the following year Don Porfirio married Carmen. On the day of their wedding he was fifty-one years old and she was nineteen.

The most surprising thing about their marriage—even more so than their genuine love of each other—was the change that the young Creole bride was able to effect in her much older mestizo husband. Díaz had always exuded a charismatic authority, but even by the end of his first presidency he remained a provincial in both appearance and manner. His hair was an untamed thatch, his drooping mustache a wild thing, his collars unbuttoned more often than not. His speech was shot with profanity and slang and his grammar was egregious. He was prone to broad gestures and loud laughter, to slumping in his chair with his legs outstretched and boots crossed at the ankles. He walked in a habitual haste and took the stairs three at a time. His way with knife and fork in polite company provoked furtive smirks. There was ever a toothpick in a corner of his mouth. While Carmen's father had been proud to see her married to such a powerful man, he had nonetheless felt an inward cringe at the mating of his aristocratic daughter with a mestizo roughneck.
But Díaz was neither too proud to admit his social shortcomings nor to accept instruction from his wife, and he was a swift study. Under her tutelage he learned to comport himself with the poise of a patrician. Carmen taught him how to dress for every occasion. She directed the styling of his hair and mustache in the close-cropped military fashion of European royals. She taught him dining etiquette, taught him how to sit in a chair in gentleman fashion, even how to walk with a stateliness befitting a national leader. She improved his grammar, bettered his diction, refined his speech and gestures. She elevated his entire social demeanor. She was teaching him to speak English and instructing him in world history. Those who had seen him at the inaugural ball of his first presidency could hardly believe it was the same man at his second.