Country of the Bad Wolfes (5 page)

The boys were sixteen when their Grandfather John made a misstep with his crutch near the top of the stairs and broke his neck in the tumble. Mary Margaret inherited the tavern and conscripted the twins as potboys. Each day after school they waited tables and swept the floor, washed mugs and rinsed out cuspidors and reset rat traps in the storeroom. She hired a girl to assist her in the later evenings so the boys could attend to their studies upstairs. But while John Roger was assiduous in his nightly schoolwork, Samuel Thomas more and more frequently slipped out their window to the sublunary enticements of the streets, particularly those at a quayside cathouse called the Blue Mermaid. It was there he had his first coitus, the news of which he gave to his brother with an affected casualness.

John Roger was enthralled. “What's it
like
?” he asked.

“Can't be described,” Samuel Thomas said. “Go with me next time and find out.”

John Roger said he would. But he did not own his brother's daring or disregard for the proprieties, and when the next time came he begged off, saying he had to study.

“Suit yourself. But if you ever change your mind, you're welcome to come along.”

Samuel Thomas's evening rambles always lasted till the wee hours, and on each of his stealthy re-entries through their window, exuding the mingled odors of perfume and ale and sexual residue, he would find John Roger awake and waiting for him, insistent on hearing the details of his escapade before letting him go to sleep.

The vicarious excitement John Roger derived from his brother's exploits made the fact of his own inexperience increasingly intolerable, and one night he finally accompanied Samuel Thomas out the window and down the drainpipe and along the shadowed streets to the Blue Mermaid. He there drank his first full mug of ale and had the first dance of his life with a woman not his mother. When a sailor tripped him for a prank, his brother lashed into the man with a flurry of wicked punches that sent him crashing over a table and streaming blood from his broken nose. The girls cheered the entertainment and John Roger was agawk with admiration. “God almighty, Sammy! You settled his hash!” The bouncer decreed the sailor at fault and booted him from the premises. The girls had been tickled to learn Samuel Thomas had a twin, and when they learned he was virgin they squabbled over which of them would be his initiator. They each enticed John Roger to pick her over the others and he blushed furiously and could not decide until Sammy said, “Just pick one, for Christ's sake!” John Roger pointed at the youngest-looking, a plump genial girl named Megan who looked innocent as a choir girl and, as he soon discovered, had a spider tattoo on her tummy.

They sang on their way home and laughed at the imprecations from the windows of roused sleepers. When they drew near to home they shushed each other with warnings not to wake their mother, and they were furtive as burglars in climbing the pipe back up to their window. Samuel Thomas was asleep as soon as he put head to pillow but John Roger struggled to stay awake, to savor a while longer the heady feeling of having crossed over to the world of men.

The following morning his pleasure gave way to a chill anxiety that he might have contracted a horrid disease. He had read about venereal corruptions in a medical text and the symptomatic descriptions had induced a palpable cringing of his privates. He dared not mention his misgivings to Samuel Thomas who no doubt disdained such fears and would likely laugh at him. He berated himself for a reckless fool and cursed the erotic compulsion that had overwhelmed his good sense. For weeks afterward his every visit to the privy included a meticulous scrutiny of his member for some sign of encroaching infection. When he was finally sure he had come through unscathed, his relief was profound. He never again went on such a frisk with his brother and never told him why not. And swore to himself never again to engage with a whore.

On those occasions when Samuel Thomas came back from a night's cavort with facial bruises, he would explain them to his mother as a consequence of roughhouse
with his brother, whom he accused of not knowing his own strength, and John Roger never failed to provide loyal perjuries of corroboration. But Mary Margaret knew a few things about sneaking through windows and was well aware of Samuel Thomas's nocturnal excursions. She feared his fondness for hazardous entertainments and gave him a warning lecture against them. He listened with due respect and said he would bear her counsel in mind. And then once again, in a pre-dawn hour of a subsequent morning, she woke to faint scrapings as he shinnied up the pipe at the far end of the roof overhang and stole back into his room. It was little consolation to remind herself it would have been as futile for her father to try keeping her from Captain Wolfe. She sensed Samuel Thomas's impatience to be out in the world, and though she could do nothing to dissuade him from his ramblings—she would not stoop to haranguing nor to weeping in plea—she implored him to at least complete his studies at the Madison School and receive his diploma. And he promised her he would.

Two months before her sons' graduations Mary Margaret got sick for the first time in her life. She went to bed with a fever one night and in the morning was sheened with sweat and aching to the bone and too weak to rouse herself. She refused to send for a doctor, saying she would recover soon enough after a cup of broth and bit of rest. The next day she was worse. John Roger fetched a doctor who prescribed a physic and cold compresses and said he would return in the morning. That evening she was delirious. The twins sat at her bedside in the amber light of an oil lamp and took turns mopping her brow and neck. She tossed through the night, her eyes dark hollows, her nightdress pasted to her skin, the shadowed room malodorous with her sickly swelter. Just before dawn she startled them when she suddenly sat up and stared unblinking into a shadowy corner of the room. Then lay back and fixed Samuel Thomas with a stare that glowed like blown embers and said, “Do not be him or ye are damned.” Then said “The light is too bright.” And closed her eyes and died. John Roger wept while Samuel Thomas straightened her nightdress and arranged the bedclothes and washed her face and brushed her hair and then sent for the doctor. For lack of a better guess the medico cited brain fever on the death certificate.

A number of longtime patrons of the pub attended the funeral, and flowers were heaped about the headstone.

Mary Parham Wolfe

1810 - 1845

Beloved Mother

of John and Samuel

In sorting through her belongings they found a loaded derringer in a drawer of her vanity. The handlegrips were of ivory and engraved with RBW. Both of them
wanted the gun and again resorted to the spin of a coin. And that antique agent of fate conferred the pistol on Samuel Thomas.

They received their diplomas in June and that same day posed together in a Market Street studio for a pair of daguerreotype photographs, one for each of them. Standing side by side in their formal graduation dress they presented a double image of a single and somberly handsome seventeen-year-old self. Some weeks later they sold the tavern and took lodging at a sailors' hostel called the Yardarm Inn, where they would reside through the rest of the summer before taking leave of Portsmouth. John Roger was bound for Hanover and the freshman class at Dartmouth, having earned a scholarship by means of his superior academic record, a host of glowing letters of recommendation, and a fine application essay expounding on the nobility of the legal profession. Samuel Thomas had signed as a deck hand with a cargo ship scheduled to set sail five days after his brother left town. The
Atropos
would make several ports of call along the seaboard down to Jacksonville before reversing course back to Portsmouth.

John Roger had favored an equal division of the proceeds from the tavern sale but Samuel Thomas would accept only enough money to see him through until he shipped out. “You'll be needing a fat purse for college a lot more than I'll be needing one at sea.”

They had never before been separated, and during the last hours before his departure for Hanover on the evening coach, John Roger's glumness was plain to see. Over a café supper, Samuel Thomas reminded him that the
Atropos
would be gone for only six months. He promised to go see him at Dartmouth as soon as he returned.

At the coach station, they embraced and wished each other well. Samuel Thomas said he would post a letter from every port of call. “Plan on me being back around the middle of winter,” he said with a grin. “Whether you like it or not.”

It is an ancient joke that to make God laugh you need only tell Him your plans.

After seeing his brother off, Samuel Thomas returned to the Yardarm, but he was not sleepy and tried to pass the time with a small atlas. It was the only book he had packed in his carpetbag together with some clothes and toiletries, the graduation daguerreotype, his grandfather's hornpipe—which he had won by yet another coin toss—and the derringer. But he felt John Roger's absence like a great gap in his chest and the atlas could not hold his attention. He wished the
Atropos
were weighing anchor in the morning rather than in five days. Near midnight he was yet wide awake and decided a long walk and a pint might be of help. He was almost out the door when he remembered that some of the inn's rooms had been
robbed the night before while their residents were away. The only thing in his bag of value to a thief was the derringer, so he retrieved it and put it in his jacket pocket.

He walked a long way down the waterfront with his collar turned up against a chill breeze. He did not desire conversation and so chose a saloon he had not patronized before and where no one knew him. He drank by himself at the end of the bar, downing three slow mugs of ale before taking his leave at just after two o'clock, a pleasant tingle on his lips. The wind had come up and carried a heavy smell of impending rain. The misty lamp-lit streets lay deserted to the late hour and the coming storm.