Country of the Bad Wolfes (92 page)

The Littles held a fiesta at Cielo Largo to introduce her to the Wolfes, her kin by way of her Grandmother Gloria. They came in a pair of new Model T Ford touring cars, the twins relinquishing most of the driving to the boys, and Jacky Ríos and César Augusto protested to no avail when Blake Cortéz also allotted Vicki Angel a turn behind the wheel. That evening at the banquet table there was much loud discussion about family lineage and Catalina's relation to the Wolfes. Beyond the solid facts that Samuel Thomas Wolfe was her great-grandfather and John Roger Wolfe her great-granduncle there was much debate about great-uncles and great-aunts and degrees of cousinship until everybody was laughing at the genealogical tangle. It was finally resolved that although they were technically her granduncles and grandaunts, John Louis and the twins would simply be her uncles, Úrsula and
Marina and Remedios her aunts, and all their children her cousins. It was only natural that they would abbreviate her name to Cat and that the nickname would carry over into Spanish as La Gata.

She was one more Little who had never seen the ocean until her first time at Playa Blanca. They could now drive there in the Fords, the twins having reinforced the wagon trail from the Boca Chica road to the house and there built a garage to protect the cars from windblown sand. Catalina had learned to swim in the river at Patria Chica but shared her cousins' preference for swimming in the gulf rather than in a river or resaca. All the boys were in a stir over their long-legged, blue-eyed cousin and vied with each other to teach her how to sail. Jacky Ríos and César Augusto nearly got into a fistfight about it, which seemed to amuse her. She chose Vicki Angel to be her instructor and by the end of that weekend she was sailing like an old hand. A year and a half Catalina's junior, Vicki Angel adored her cousin and was elated to have another girl in the family, an ally at last in a tribe overrun with rough boys. She took to wearing pants and boots too, whenever Catalina did, and none of the adults objected, so long as the girls never failed to dress properly for mealtimes and social outings. They enrolled Catalina in the same Catholic school for girls that Vicki attended and the two of them walked there together every day in their blue-and-white uniforms. The women were pleased by the novelty of two girls among them, girls at the threshold of womanhood but who still in the way of girls could communicate with each other through mysterious smiling glances that sometimes led to outbursts of laughter for reasons they shared with no one else. The twins too were taken with Catalina. They admired her refusal to give up her Remington revolver to John Louis. He had offered to keep it for her in his gun case, he told the twins, but she preferred to keep it in her room and he could think of no argument by which to deny her. That she knew how to use the gun was evident the first time she took a turn at a family target shooting session and outshot all her cousins except Harry Sebastian, the deadeye of the bunch. And the day she slipped the bonehandled knife from its hip sheath and threw it whirling to pinion a four-foot rattlesnake still writhing after Jacky Ríos had shot it was one more proof she'd been well-trained in self-defense and the arts of weaponry. She learned everything from Don Eduardo, Úrsula told the twins. Catalina herself never spoke of her great-grandfather to anyone other than Vicki Angel, who would not have betrayed her confidences even under torture.

And if in those first months with the border families Catalina sometimes withdrew into silence or went for long solitary walks at the ranch or on the beach or kept to her room for an afternoon of staring out the window, it was understandable to Marina and Remedios. Just think of what that poor girl had been through! She had seen her brother killed and her sister taken away and God alone knew how frightened she must have been for her own life. Naturally she would sometimes remember that terrible experience and be sad. Give her time. She was young and
would learn to live with the pains of the past as we all must. Úrsula agreed, but said that even as a child Catalina had always had a reclusive side to her, some secret part of herself she never shared with anyone. Except probably Don Eduardo. And now Vicki Angel, to whom she seemed even closer than she had been to her own sister. It is a very right name for her, Úrsula said, the Cat.

Hector Louis told his cousins much the same thing. Catalina had always been a little odd, he said. She never asked if she could play with you, you always had to ask her, and sometimes she would and sometimes she wouldn't. It was like she didn't really care if anybody asked her to play or not. I always liked her anyway, Hector said, even though she was odd.

“Well she's not any odder than any of
you
all, that's damn for sure!” Vicki Angel said, and stomped off as the boys all laughed at her clumsy profanity.

Harry Sebastian said the really strange thing about the Cat was how well she could shoot and throw that knife. Jacky Ríos said he'd sure like to get his hands on that knife of hers. “There are lots of things of hers
I'd
like to get my hands on,” Morgan James said with a lascivious smile. All the boys had by this time disposed of their virginity, fourteen-year-old Hector Louis just a couple of months before, when Morgan James, the eldest at seventeen and the most experienced, took him to one of his compliant Mexican girlfriends in Brownsville.

Jacky Ríos told Morgan he better not try anything with the Cat, not only on account of she might gut him with that knife but you weren't supposed to do such things with your cousin, he'd heard you could go to jail for it.

“Ah hell,” Harry Sebastian said, “she's so far out on a limb of the family tree she hardly counts as a cousin.”

César Augusto said for them to quit talking about her that way.

“What's biting your ass?” Morgan said.

“Just don't talk about her that way, that's all,” César said.

“Why not?” Jacky Ríos said, winking at the others. “You sweet on her? You gonna
marry
her?”

And César said, “Yeah, as a matter of fact I am.” And grinned at their laughter.

I
n the final days of 1910, some years after finally accepting that she was past all possibility of conception and at last acquiescing to sexual intercourse with Amos Bentley—berating herself for her long abstention even as she thrilled to the act as much as she had the first time in her life, at sixteen with her young soldier husband Melchor—Sofía Reina, age fifty-seven, at last also accepted as fact seventy-two-year-old Amos's insistence that she was in no way cursed and they should get married before they were too old to even remember each other's names. Six years earlier, after Victor Nevada died of a stroke, Amos had become an independent assayer and had been making more money than ever. Theirs would be a very comfortable old age, he promised Sófi.

When they told María Palomina they were going to marry, all she said was, It's about time. They set the date for March.

A few weeks before the wedding, María Palomina awoke early one morning from a pleasant dream of walking hand in hand with Samuel Thomas in Chapultepec Park, both of them yet very young and Samuel Thomas scarless of face and walking without limp. They had never actually gone for such a walk, Samuel Thomas never having gone anywhere beyond a three-block radius of home, and she had not been to Chapultepec since girlhood. But the dream was so real it seemed more remembrance than imagination. Just before she woke from it, Samuel Thomas kissed her hands, first one and then the other, and remarked that they had always been the prettiest he'd ever seen. Then she was awake and looking at her hands. Crippled with arthritis, the knotty fingers as twisted as scrub roots and the gnarled knuckles seized
like rusted bearings, they had not been free of pain in years. She suddenly realized that tomorrow was the second of February, her eighty-first birthday. No, no, no, she thought. That's just
too
damn old.

And closed her eyes and took a deep breath and released it in a slow settling sigh.

The funeral was three days later and was attended by a handful of neighborhood friends. Sófi's grief was absolute but when Amos suggested she might want to set back the wedding date she said certainly not and that not even her mother would have wanted them to.

They married as planned on the first Sunday in March. As they were leaving the church, Amos said, “This is the happiest day of my life.” And took three more strides before stopping short and turning to her in disbelief as he clutched his chest. And fell dead.

She shed a few tears and wore black for two weeks, and if her neighbors thought her show of mourning altogether perfunctory and disrespectful, what did she care? She was a lifelong intimate of grief, a practiced expert at mourning, and no longer felt need to make public display of her feelings. And only once did she say, speaking to herself as much as to the sheepish spirit of Amos, I
told
you, you idiot!

She telegraphed the news to her border kin, and, with no family left to her in Mexico City, asked if she might go to live near them. Marina's return wire expressed everyone's condolences and said they would all love to have her with them and that she could take her choice of which family to live with. But Sófi would not burden anyone and insisted on a house of her own. Amos had left her a large inheritance and she sent money to the Wolfes and asked them to please buy a small house for her not too far from theirs. Her friends said she was being rash. Mexico City was the only home she'd ever known and she would wither in the primitive country of the border. Maybe, Sófi said, maybe not. In April she sold her house and moved to Brownsville in the only border crossing she would ever make.

The families received her with an outpouring of felicitous affection. She had for so long looked forward to meeting them all, and was especially effusive toward the twins, who even at the age of forty-one were indistinguishable except to those who knew the identifiers to look for. She was pleased with the little frame house they had selected for her, a block north of the Wolfe homes. She had never lived anywhere but Mexico City but was acquainted with dramatic change and would easily adapt to Brownsville and its ways.

Two years older than Marina, she was by tradition of age entitled to be the new family matriarch—the Mamá Grande. But she protested that Marina was the true matriarch because she had known the twins since their birth and was wife to
one of the family's two heads. For her part, Marina deferred to Sófi as the rightful matriarch because she was not only first cousin to the family heads but was also the daughter of John Roger's brother and hence the only one in the borderland family to have known both brothers. The twins settled the dispute by decreeing that both women would be accorded the title and respect of Mamá Grande and would be addressed by everyone in the family as Mamá Marina and Mamá Sófi.