Country of the Bad Wolfes (64 page)

“Protect us?” one says. They laugh and start down the stairs and he steps aside to give them berth. As they pass, he notes the document case and says, “What do you have there? If that's Father's it stays here!”

They stop and turn and stare at him. Then grin at the look on his face. Then go off to the kitchen.

Josefina hugs them each in turn. Her withered face looks older than ever. Of course you must go, she says, of course, go quickly. She has never cried in front of them and will not do so now. But her red eyes tell them she has been weeping for their father. When she'd seen the pistols in their pants she'd said, “Ay, Dios.” Said it
like a sigh. The Concha girl stands mute at the wash sink, her arms soapy, staring at the twins, at the set of their faces. So different from this morning.

Marina Colmillo had fled the room as soon as they said they were leaving. Both she and Josefina had known at once that they did not simply mean they were going back to the cove but were departing Buenaventura for somewhere else—and with small likelihood of coming back.

Now Marina returns, a little breathless, a sack of clothing in one hand and in the other a small straw case with a handle. Her worldly goods.

Where are
you
going? says Blake Cortéz.

With you.

No you're not.

Yes I am.

You can't come, says James Sebastian.

Why not?

You just can't.

I'll follow you.

Don't be foolish, James says. We'd leave you way behind quick. Lose you easy.

I'll follow the trail.

We're not going to stay at the cove, Blake says.

I know.

We'll be gone before you get there.

Maybe.

You'll just have to turn around and come all the way back.

I won't.

Oh? What'll you do?

Wait.

Wait? You mean there?

Yes.

For what?

For you to come back.

You don't seem to understand, James says. We may never come back.

Then I will wait there until then.

Until
when
?

Until you never come back.

The twins stare at her. James turns to Josefina and says, Tell her she can't come.

It is not for me to tell her, she says.

He blows out a long breath and cuts a look at Blake, who shrugs and says, “Hell man,
I
don't know. Maybe.”

Josefina swats at Blake and says, No gringo talk!

James Sebastian points a finger at Marina. The minute you complain, the minute you cause any kind of trouble, we'll put you on a train right back here. You understand?

Of course I do, she says.
I
am not sixteen years old.

Josefina smiles at Marina's rebuke of them for addressing her as if she were the child among them, she who is nearly twice their age.

Yeah, well . . . just so you know, James says.

The boys give Josefina a last quick kiss and put on their hats and take up the food sacks she has prepared for them and head for the door. Where they stop and look back at the two women hugging hard and murmuring endearments to each other.

You coming or not, for Christ's sake? says Blake.

Josefina watches Marina go to them, the burlap bag over a shoulder, the basket hanging from the crook of an elbow and bumping against her hip.

You're already slowing us down, James says, taking the basket from her.

All your blah-blah-blah is slowing us down, Marina says. Then turns and mouths a kiss at Josefina, who makes a benedictory sign of the cross at them.

And they are gone.

After his father's body is taken away to be washed and dressed for that night's vigil and tomorrow's funeral, when he will be buried beside Elizabeth Anne in the casa grande graveyard, John Samuel goes to the telegraph office. Everyone within but the telegrapher steps outside to grant him privacy while he dictates a wire to General Mauricio Espinosa, informing him of the morning's violence. Still shaken by his witness of his father's killing and the reports of what his brothers did to Alfredo, he cannot bring himself to relate the grislier details, and he tells Mauricio only the bare facts of John Roger's being stabbed to death by Alfredo who in turn was stabbed to death by the twins.

He sends for Bruno Tomás and Rogelio Méndez to meet with him in his office and is somewhat better composed by the time they arrive. He is brief and to the point. Bruno is now the mayordomo of Buenaventura and Rogelio the foreman of Rancho Isabela.

As they make their way back across the plaza, Rogelio says, Didn't waste a minute, did he?

John Samuel goes into his father's office and closes the door and seats himself behind the desk. He feels his father's absence like a sudden, unseasonable change in weather. But at the same time it feels right to him to be sitting where he is. He opens the middle drawer and passes the next twenty minutes studying the photographs he had not known existed. His childhood pictures seem those of someone he never knew, some boy stranger. The ones he looks at longest are of his mother. He feels a mix of peculiar sensations and the oddest of them is very near to an urge to cry.
He remembers the day they collected seashells on the Cove's gulfside beach and the wind blew up her skirt and he saw her underwear. He wishes he had a picture of that moment. Then feels a hot shame on his face and glances about as if someone may have been watching him and known what he was thinking. And puts the pictures away.

The next drawer he tries is the top left and in it he finds John Roger's will and an attached document. He scans the will and smiles. Then examines the other document and his smile falls away. It is a prepared deed for the entire eastern tract of Buenaventura, including all of its coast. It is made out in his brothers' names and ready for legal registration.

Good Christ, he thinks. This almost was.

His hand trembles as he puts the match flame to the paper.

John Samuel's telegram about the killings does not come as news to Mauricio Espinosa. The general has already received several telegraphed accounts of the bloody morning from other residents of Buenaventura. His father dead but a week and now his brother dead too. The Espinosa de la Cruz family reduced to himself alone.

That stupid kid. Twenty-something years old and still a stupid kid. Witless. Killing the patrón because of a damned job. In front of his family! In front of a hundred witnesses! Based on his own acquaintance with John Wolfe, Mauricio regarded him a good man. His own father, who had known the patrón for more than twenty-five years, had always had high opinion of Don Juan.

Stupid kid.

He pours another drink. He feels partly at fault, having encouraged Alfredo to believe he would make a capable mayordomo. He had done it solely in hope that it might make Alfredo work harder to better himself, so when the time came for him to take over the job he might prove adequate to it. It was less a hope than wishful thinking. You could sooner alter the configuration of the stars than change a man's character, and Alfredo's character was not the stuff of a mayordomo. Simple as that. Had he been in the patrón's place he would not have given the job to Alfredo either.

But the denial of the job to Alfredo was not the point. The whole thing seemed clear enough. The patrón denied Alfredo the job and gave it to his own son, so Alfredo killed the patrón for wronging him—as Alfredo saw it, anyway—and then the patrón's twin sons killed Alfredo. That Alfredo committed a wrong is without question. And who could argue that the twins were not justified in avenging their father?

However. That they killed Alfredo was also not the point. John Samuel Wolfe's telegraphed report said of the killings only that Alfredo had killed the patrón with a knife and the twins then knifed Alfredo. But as others of the hacienda have reported to him, that wasn't all there was to it. For one thing, it was said that Alfredo had surrendered. It was said he was yelling that he surrendered and that everyone in the
crowd heard him and that his hands were up. But they killed him anyway. Injustice? Some would so argue. But not he, a cavalry officer who has seen more than his share of killing in hot blood and understands the power of its compulsion. No, injustice was not the point.

However. They stabbed him and shot him and fed him to the pigs—while, it was said, he was still alive. But even if true that he was still alive, that they added to his final suffering, that they prolonged it, well, that was not the point, either. He himself has ordered men burned alive, buried alive.

But in feeding him to the pigs what they were truly doing was making him into pig shit. They had made pig shit of his brother.

That
was the fucking point.

The new patrón must've thought he could protect his brothers by keeping those details from him. Well, hell, that's what a big brother's supposed to do, isn't it? Can't really blame the man for that. If he's ever met John Samuel Wolfe, Mauricio has no recollection of it.

He had mulled whether to send for the body and decided against it. Let them bury him. Except in cases when you really had no choice but to make some public display of honor or respect or suffering or some such thing, the dead were the dead and it didn't make a bean's worth of difference who buried them or where or even whether they were buried at all. If a lifetime of soldiering had taught him anything, it was the unsurpassable indifference of the dead. Dust to dust was absolutely right. The only truth ever to come from the mouth of a priest.