Country of the Bad Wolfes (15 page)

For reasons less explicable, ever since his arrival in Veracruz he had resisted the impulse to search in the local archives for information about his father. But now, standing outside the cantina and goaded by both the afternoon's rum and the fact of his own impending fatherhood, he more strongly than ever felt the urge to learn what he could about Roger Blake Wolfe. Across the plaza was the municipal building where the public records were archived. He consulted his pocketwatch. Then crossed the plaza and went into the building. In his brief time in Veracruz he had become well acquainted with the unruliness of Mexican recordkeeping and was not yet as adept as he would become at navigating its disorder, and it took him a while to uncover the sparse records pertaining to his father.

It was late afternoon when he came back out. He paused at the top step and gazed across the plaza at the cathedral. At the wall where the firing squad executions took place. Patterson had confided that during his first few years in Veracruz he had
attended a number of public executions before losing interest. “I never did hear any last words worth remembering,” he said, “and after a while the entertainment wasn't hardly worth the standing in the sun amongst all them people.”

Right there's where he took his last breath, John Roger thought. He imagined his father against the wall and facing the muskets. Contained in the archival records was a newspaper report by an eyewitness journalist who included such details as the condemned man's neat grooming and fearless—even cheerful—attitude, and told of a scrap two young women got into over him. Told of his rejection of a blindfold and of his casual bearing to the very end. And told too of his decapitation, yet another detail absent from the British Embassy's letter to his widow.

He looked toward the harbor and the San Juan de Ulúa fortress where the head had been displayed from the tower. Where was it now, his father's skull? Was it yet intact somewhere? Did it lie at the bottom of the sea, little fish passing through the empty sockets and the casing that had housed his mind? Had it been blown into the mountains and reduced to shards? Pulverized to dust and scattered on the wind?

He took a mule trolley to the graveyard, where according to the records the headless remains had been interred. He searched all the crooked rows of vaults and gravestones as the tree shadows deepened and the air grew heavier, but he found no grave with the name of his father. He spied a gravedigger at work and told him of his search and was told that several hurricanes had hit the city since 1829 and the flood of each one had opened dozens of graves and carried their contents away and maybe that was happened to the one he was looking for.

When he debarked from the return trolley to the zócalo, the red sun was almost down to the rooftops. He was crossing the square when he spotted a sketch artist, a white-haired old man, sitting under a tree alongside the arcade of the scribes. A sign attached to his easel said “retratos.” And he had an inspiration.

He sat down on the stool facing the old man, who smiled and said, “A su servicio, señor. Tinta o carboncillo? Grande o chico?” An ink drawing cost more than one of charcoal and took a little longer to make, but the detail was more faithful. A full-sheet sketch of course cost more than a half-sheet. John Roger chose a half-sheet ink portrait, and the old man set to work with deft flicks of his quill, the nib darting between ink pot and paper, his eyes cutting between John Roger's face and the sketch pad. He finished the drawing in minutes. John Roger looked it over and expressed admiration for the likeness. “Otra cosa más,” he told the artist. And described the beard he wanted added to the face.

The old man shrugged and said, “Muy bien, señor.” And went to work again, twice pausing to make sure John Roger was satisfied with the way the beard was shaping. When the alteration was complete, the old man handed him the drawing and John Roger stared hard at it. The finished face was exactly as his mother had many times described it to him and his brother.

Hello, father, he thought. Nice to see you.

The sketch became one more concealment in his life. Along the bottom of it, he wrote, “Roger Blake Wolfe (b? - d 1829)” and stored it in the same document case containing the graduation daguerreotype of himself and his brother and the embassy letter about their father. He kept the case in his office at home, in the same desk drawer where under lock and key he stowed the journal he had begun in college and only once or twice put to use since. But on the evening he brought the sketch home, he entered into the journal all that he had learned about his father from the archives and noted his fruitless search for his grave.

He began a correspondence with a London genealogist who over the course of more than two years informed him that his father's parents were Henry Morgan Wolfe (died London 1835, age 67) of County Galway in Ireland, who'd had a distinguished career in the Royal Navy, and Hedda Juliet Blake (died London 1815, age 37), born to a London family of “inestimable fortune,” in the genealogist's phrase. John Roger would learn too that Roger Blake Wolfe had been born in London in April of 1797 and had been publicly disinherited by his parents via newspaper promulgation in 1813. The researcher would uncover an 1825
Times
report of an act of piracy attributed to the Englishmen Roger Blake Wolfe and the crew of his ship, the
York Witch
, against the Portuguese trader
Doralinda
, during the commission of which crime, according to testimony by the Portagee captain, five members of the
Doralinda
crew were murdered. A later item in the
Times
would report that several countries, including the United Kingdom, had posted an official bounty for the capture or proved killing of “the Pirate Wolfe.” Insofar as the genealogist would be able to determine, Roger Blake Wolfe had but one sibling, a much younger brother, Harrison Augustus Wolfe, born in September, 1814. Except for the registry of birth, the genealogist would uncover no other documents pertaining to Harrison Augustus save his inclusion on a series of student rosters at the Runnymede Academy of London from 1824 through 1830.

He stored this correspondence in the document case and entered its chief points in his journal. He had no intention of ever revealing the journal's content to anyone and was not even sure why he recorded it. And then on learning of Lizzie's pregnancy, he'd suddenly had a reason. He thought it only proper that he leave to his child a factual record of the family ancestry. There would be times, however, when he would doubt the wisdom of this purpose and wonder if his offspring might not be better off never knowing about his criminal forebear. On several instances of such misgiving, he would come very near to pitching every word about Roger Blake Wolfe into the fire.

And too, over the years, he would every so often, and always late at night, sit at his desk behind closed doors and take out the ink portrait and study it intently. As though the face were in fact his father's and might yet reveal to him some vital secret shared between them.

Their first Veracruz summer was a model of Patterson's prediction. Steamy days and nights. Torrential rains. A haze of mosquitoes. But even in the increasing discomfort of her pregnancy, Elizabeth Anne loved the coastal summer in all its sultriness and birdsong and riot of colors, its babble of Spanish and incessant marimba tinklings, its mingled smells of tropical flora and saltine gulf and pungent cookery. She loved the thunderstorms that whipped the trees and clattered the shutters and lit the night in flashings of eerie blue, that left the city cool and fresh if only for a few blessed hours. At last did autumn begin to ease down the coast with its mornings of deeper blue and afternoons of longer shadows, its cooler nights and brighter stars. She could not tell John Roger enough how much she cherished this exotic place, its lushness and rhapsodic language, its paradoxical character of mania and melancholy.

Patterson was not the only one to tell them of the dangers at large outside their courtyard gates, to warn them that the town abounded with ruffians and was notorious for street fights and killings. John Roger took the little man's advice to carry a pocket pistol under his coat whenever he left the house. But they would be in Veracruz for nearly five years before they witnessed any violence greater than the frequent street grapplings between drunks. The most proximate case of murder in those early years occurred one morning at a residence a block from their own. Word of it had flown from the servants of one household to those of the next and within an hour the entire neighborhood knew the story. The man of the house, a jeweler who spent long days at his shop, had killed his wife in culmination of a shouting argument provoked by her pet parrot. The bird had mimicked sexually specific endearments familiar to the husband but which the parrot attached to the name Cristiano, the name of the household's young gardener, who fled the property at the sound of the first gunshot. That first report delivered a fatal bullet to the wife's head and was followed by five more shots in quick succession, each of them intended for the parrot, the husband no less enraged at the informer as at the informed upon. The parrot screeched and flapped about the room as bullets smashed glass and glanced off the walls and gouged the furniture and one round rang off a church bell a block away and the last one ricocheted off two walls before piercing the husband's buttock. The man screamed and fell to the floor as the parrot swooped out the window. Police were summoned, and a short time later husband and wife were carried out on stretchers to be placed in separate wagons, she with a sheet over her face and bound for the undertaker's, he facedown with a bandaged ass and off to the jail.

Elizabeth Anne got the story from the housemaids and in turn told it to John Roger. Who smiled and said, “We are without question among a mercurial people.”

He had come to agree with Charley Patterson that the most salient traits of the Mexican character were its contradictions and volatilities. Mexicans were at once a people affable and suspicious, convivial and violent. No one was better-mannered than a Mexican or as quick to turn dangerous. One moment he might be laughing and joking, and the next in a murderous rage. In the midst of singing the joys of
life or the glories of womanhood, he could abruptly give way to weeping over life's relentless sorrows or cursing women's eternal treacheries. There was a marked incongruity between the effusiveness of Mexican politeness and the stark fact of Mexican distrust. Between a Mexican's easy hospitality and his deliberate isolation. “Mi casa es su casa,” a Mexican would aver with utmost earnestness, even as the barred gates of his house and the high broken-glass-topped walls surrounding it made clear his desire to keep the world without. “A su servicio,” the Mexican would maintain, even as he stood ready to take umbrage at the first hint of being deemed subservient. While the Creoles were not exempt from these traits—perhaps even had them to greater degree but were better able to mask them behind the ornate and ritual civility of their class—they were most obvious in the mestizos, the country's principal caste, whose emotional and contradictory nature, Patterson professed, was the natural legacy of its origin.

“Just imagine coming from people of two different races that had not a blamed thing in common except a love of blood in every which way,” Patterson said. “Imagine knowing your white daddy was a robber and killer just crazy with greed who raped your Indian momma who herself believed in cutting out people's hearts to please the gods and eating what was left of the victim. Hardly any wonder the Mexies are they way they are. Sad to say, but they pretty much acquired all the worst traits of both races and little of the good. It's an interesting subject but some of them can be a mite tender about it. Best not to bring it up in their company.”