Country of the Bad Wolfes (13 page)

Such concupiscence on a wedding night is of course hardly uncommon—the wonder would be that their carnal appetite for one another would not abate over the years. Hugging him close in the early light of their first day as Mr and Mrs John Roger Wolfe, she told him she had not believed she would ever find a mate with whom she could be her true self. He said he never believed he would cease to envy other men for their amorous adventures. She kissed his ear and her smile was sly as she asked, “And now?” Now, he said, he knew that
she
was the quintessential amorous adventure. They laughed in their happiness at making believers of each other.

A
lthough they made love almost nightly, Elizabeth Anne did not conceive in the first year of their marriage. Nor in the second. Nor the third. They concluded she was barren or his seed was lacking, and their disappointment ran deep. But they felt no less fortunate in their shared life. They sought no social entertainment outside of each other and rarely attended parties other than those of her parents. They lived in a lakeside bungalow off Rumford Street, a short walk from the offices of Fletcher, McIntosh & Bartlett. He undertook the study of maritime law and international port regulations and became so expert with them that the firm gained a number of new contracts with major shippers out of Boston. Sebastian Bartlett assured him of a full partnership within three years, which would make him the youngest partner in the firm. Jimmy wasn't jealous. “You're better at this game than everybody in the place except Father, so why shouldn't you be rewarded for it?” he said.

During the third Christmastide of their marriage, Richard Davison came to visit at the Bartlett home. He was the youngest of Alexandra Davison Bartlett's three brothers, and the family's black sheep, but he and Alexandra had always been each other's favorite. While his brothers pursued careers in New York state politics, Richard left home and roamed widely, mostly in the Southland, and tried his hand at different occupations, but he rarely let three months pass without a letter to his sister. He had been a canal boatman, a stagecoach driver, a town marshal, a river port manager. There were rumors, however, of darker undertakings. Of manhunting for bounty in the Carolinas. Of a fatal street fight in Savannah. Of making off with a man's wife in Mississippi. Of partnership in a Cincinnati bawdy house. Mrs Bartlett's veneration of her brother withstood all such gossip, and she would brook no aspersions toward him in her house. Six years earlier in Boston, Richard Davison
had formed the Trade Wind Company to import commodities from Mexico and the Caribbean, and Mrs Bartlett took great satisfaction in informing her family of the firm's growing success. He had visited Concord only once before, in the summer when Elizabeth Anne was six years old, but she had not forgotten his fierce red beard and bright blue eyes, his stubby remnant of a ring finger which he told her had been bitten off by a mermaid. She called him Uncle Redbeard. He had carried her piggyback along the riverbank and made her laugh with his funny stories and vernacular mode of speech that contrasted so bluntly with the formal idiom of the Bartletts.

Alexandra Bartlett had not seen her brother since a Boston trip she'd made some years before, and she was overjoyed to have him under her roof, if for only three days. He was of medium height and sinewy build, his red beard closecropped and shot with gray, his eyes in permanent pinch from years in the sun. His handshake felt to John Roger like a clasp of dry leather. Though Richard's pleasure in his sister's company was apparent, he was reserved with the Bartlett men at the supper table, who in turn were tentative toward him. But he doted on Elizabeth Anne and took an easy liking to John Roger.

That evening, after the others retired, John Roger and Elizabeth Anne continued chatting with Richard over glasses of port in the parlor, seated before a blazing fireplace as moonlit snowfall drifted past the windows. Entreated by his niece to tell of his adventures, Richard recounted comical anecdotes relating to his sundry occupations, one tale after another, and John and Lizzie struggled to muffle their laughter in deference to those abed. So it went, until the hearth fire was reduced to red embers and the clock softly chimed midnight. By which time the conversation had taken various turns and Richard had learned of John Roger's fluency in Spanish and mastery of accounting.

“Bedamn, Johnny,” he said, “if you might not be the very man I'm looking for.”

He told John Roger that he had opened a branch office in New Orleans, where he was headed from here and where he now received all imports. He could cut his intermediary expenses even more if he had a company office in Mexico, from where he imported coffee and tobacco, his most profitable goods. If he had his own trusted man to run things down there he would no longer have to rely on the local Mexican broker who for almost six years had been working on commission as his middleman with the plantations. “Haciendas, the Mexies call them,” Richard said. “They're like the plantations we got down South, only a far sight bigger and fancier, or so I've heard. And just like down South, the owners—hacendados, they're called—they live like kings and got the power of God over the slaves, except in Mexico the slaves are Indians and half-breeds on account of they aint got hardly any niggers. Slavery's supposed to be against their constitution—and who woulda thought they even had such a thing?—but they got slaves just the same, mostly by way of debt to hacienda stores and such. Curious folk, the Mexies. Call us gringos and Yankees and I can understand that, but when they call us North Americans I have to wonder what
continent they think they're a part of. Anyhow, the point is, I got a hunch the Mexie broker's been cheating me from the start. Sends me a report every year of the coffee that gets stole from the warehouse before shipment, coffee I already paid for, you see. But for all I know he's the one stealing it.”

After an extensive correspondence with a Mexican realty firm, he had negotiated a lease for a port office and warehouse, but he hadn't yet found the right man to put in charge of it. “I need somebody with a head on his shoulders and who can talk good Mexican, and you surely fit the bill, Johnny. But the man I'm looking for has got to have the sand to live down there. I won't lie to you, son, it's rough country. Aint been there myself and don't intend ever to go—it's the good ole U S of A for me and I aim to stay put—but I know lots who been there and they all tell me it's rough country, even where you'd be.”

“And where is that?” John Roger said.

“Main port on the gulf. Place called Veracruz. Now, I'll tell you just two more things and I'm done selling. First, you'd have full authority to negotiate for the company down there, and I mean with everybody from the hacendados to the overland transporters to the shippers to the warehouse cleaners. It'd take forever to get anything done if you had to get my OK first on every decision. If after a year you're doing a bad job of it, I'll fire you without discussion. If you're doing a good one, I'll show my appreciation and you can count on that. The other thing is this. Whatever these legal bigwigs are paying you, I'll top it by thirty percent. And in case you don't know it, a Yankee dollar weighs even more down in Mexico. All right, then. What do you say, Johnny? Yay or nay?”

Except for his own brother, John Roger had never met a man less given to beating about the bush. And not until the moment Richard Davison presented him with this prospect did he realize that, even while he excelled as a New England lawyer and was content with the profession, he was not fully satisfied. He yearned for. . . he couldn't say what, exactly. . . . Something Other. A sally into the larger world. An Adventure. The realization was itself no less stunning than the possibility that he had been feeling this way for some time without even knowing it. He hadn't given Mexico a passing thought in years. But now the idea of going there was intoxicating. He turned to Elizabeth Anne to ask if she were amenable to at least discussing the subject, wondering how he might try to sway her. And saw that she was smiling, eyes bright.

“Oh Johnny,” she said. “Do say yay.”

Next morning when they told her family, Sebastian Bartlett was aghast. He said it was beyond folly for John Roger to resign a secure and highly valued position for the sake of a whim. “Odds are you'll not be long in comprehending your error and wanting to return to the firm,” Mr Bartlett said. “But I cannot promise that the partners will be willing to welcome you back into their employ, not in light of this
irresponsible leave of it. And even if they should take you back, your bright prospect for a partnership will undoubtedly have dimmed, if not altogether expired.”

John Roger said he understood the chance he was taking and thanked Mr Bartlett for his concerned advice.

Mrs Bartlett's concern was entirely with her daughter's well-being. Mexico was so far away. Everyone knew it was a place of political chaos, of disease and poverty and ignorance. Every veteran of the war down there described the people as half-caste brutes given to casual murder. Except for its capital city and a handful of colonial towns, the country was nothing but primitive villages dispersed over every sort of wilderness. How could Elizabeth even think of going there to live?

Elizabeth Anne took her mother's hands in her own and said, “Dearest Mother. I love you too. Very much. But I'm going.”

Jimmy drew John Roger aside and wished him well and said he respected his pluck. “I sometimes think of giving up this easeful life and going off to some wild place to try my manly fortune and tomorrow be damned.” He grinned. “But then I always sober up.” He said he knew John Roger would take good care of Lizzie. “She's a pest, of course, but, just between us, I am somewhat fond of her.” John Roger said he'd always had that suspicion. Later that evening, in the privacy of his room, Jimmy presented Elizabeth Anne with the Colt Dragoon as a parting gift. “For protection from those half-caste brutes that so worry Mother,” he said.

Richard Davison gave John Roger a scrawled list of the regional haciendas with which the Trade Wind Company had contracts for coffee and tobacco and specifying the general terms of each of those agreements. He told John Roger it might be a good while before he could provide him with any other records of the company's coffee and tobacco dealings. He had always kept most business details in his head and been lax about organizing the paperwork, or even reviewing it beyond a quick look at the net income. Since he'd moved to New Orleans, his papers were in greater disorder than ever. John Roger said those records weren't important. “All I need to know is this,” he said, tapping a finger on the list of haciendas.

Richard Davison slapped him on the back. “You're the man for the job, all right. Just the same, I promise I'll get you them other records soon as I can.” And he departed for New Orleans.

The next two months sped by in a blur of planning and preparation. Elizabeth Anne hired a tutor in Spanish and worked hard at her daily lessons and was quizzed on them by John Roger every night. There was a farewell party at the Bartlett home in Concord, and then some days later yet another one at the family's Rockport estate. Dozens of well-wishers showed up at Boston Harbor to see them off on a raw, gray morning in late winter. Mrs Bartlett wept as if at a funeral. John Roger and Elizabeth Anne waved and waved from the deck rail, hugging close and smiling at the widening world as the ship drew away from the dock.

T
he city was bright white under the morning sun when the steamer churned past the yellowrock island prison of San Juan de Ulúa and into the harbor of Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, the name long since shortened to Veracruz. The steamer eased up to the dock amid blasts of horns and whistles. The air heavy and tainted with marine decay. A loud Babel of stevedores all along the wharf. Flocks of vultures spiraling over the town, roosting on the rooftops. With their wrinkled red heads and heavy cloaks of black feather they looked to John Roger like a hideous union of undertakers in patient wait of work.