Country of the Bad Wolfes (25 page)

The next day, while John Roger reminisced to him about the times he and his brother had set trot lines in Portsmouth creeks, they rigged such a line between the river dock and the opposite bank, and the day after that John Samuel helped his father to collect the fish off the hooks. But his parents could see that his interest in these activities was less real than shammed for their sake, and so they left him to his preferred diversion of sitting on the verandah and reading books about horses. His mealtime conversation was almost wholly about his pony and his hope that it was getting proper care from the stable hand he'd left in charge of it.

John Samuel would not go to the cove again, not with them nor anyone else nor by himself. From then on, whenever they readied to go to the beach house, they would tell him he was welcome to come and he would pretend to mull the invitation before saying he thought he should stay and care for his horse, and they would say that was fine, they understood. This ritual would persist for a year before they eventually overcame their guilt and ceased to offer the dutiful invitation. From then on they simply let him know when they were going and for how long, leaving him in Josefina's custody, and he would always respond with a wish for them to have a good time. Which, in the primitive privacy of their haven, they always did.

T
he American Civil War came as no shock to any of them, for they had long sensed it as inevitable. A letter from Mrs Bartlett reported that many of the state's young men had enlisted and gone off to fight the wretched secessionists, but Jimmy had been commissioned as an army captain and she thanked God her husband had the influence to get him posted in Washington as a records officer. Otherwise, she wrote, the war seemed as distant from New Hampshire as did Mexico. Its most conspicuous effect was a significant increase in profits for the Bartlett paper mills, as purchase orders poured in from the federal government.

Elizabeth Anne nearly wept in her anger at her mother's letter. She shared Patterson's convictions that it was a war between rich northern industrialists and rich southern planters and that the Confederacy's economic cause was no less compelling than the Union's and that the North's denunciation of slavery was rank hypocrisy. She asked John Roger's promise to stay out of “that criminal folly,” as she phrased it. “I will not be made a widow or have my child left fatherless in the cause of any bigwig's greed, including my father's.”

John Roger smiled and said that with one arm he could hardly do other than stay out of it. Then saw how near to enraged tears she was and gave his promise.

“Thank you,” she said. “Besides,
this
is our country now.”

He agreed it was. The notion that patriotic fidelity was irrevocably bound to birthplace had always seemed to him logically indefensible. You could not choose where you were born but you could choose where to make your home, and it was to homeland that you owed allegiance. She was right that Mexico had become their home. They had chosen it. They had borne a son who was native to it.

Charles Patterson made no secret of his Confederate sympathies but admitted
his gladness at being too old for the ranks. He had fought for Texas in its war of independence and had been with Houston at San Jacinto, where they slaughtered the Mexican force and then committed a great many defilements of the dead and wounded, and he had seen enough of such mad carnage for one lifetime. He retained his post at the U.S. consulate, absent all hope it would ever fly the flag of the C.S.A. and not unaware of his underlings' jocular references to him as Colonel Dixie. Young Bentley, too, was a Southerner, but had been orphaned in Charleston when he was nine and then lived in a detested foster home until he went away to college on a scholarship, and the idea of risking his life for a cause in which he had no personal stake struck him as absurd.

The war boosted prices for the Trade Wind's coffee and tobacco, and in the first year of hostilities the company's profits boomed. But when Union forces took New Orleans in the spring of ‘62 they robbed the Trade Wind of its store of commodities and razed its warehouses and offices together with all its records. The bad news came to John Roger and Amos in a letter from Richard Davison, who gave them the name of a Yankee entrepreneur in New Orleans eager to assume the contract for Buenaventura's coffee. He himself did not know what he would do next but promised to write to them soon.

They heard nothing from or about him for the next eight months. Then Jimmy Bartlett sent a letter from Washington with the report that Richard Davison had tried to smuggle a shipment of arms past the Federal blockade off the Texas coast and was killed when a gunboat sank his vessel. His body had not been recovered and his kin might never have known what became of him except that his crew's only survivor named him as the captain. Mrs Bartlett, Jimmy wrote, was inconsolable.

On receiving the news about Richard, Elizabeth Anne said only “God
damn
war,” then went up to her room and wept in private. She spoke barely a word during the next few days. She had never said so, but John Roger knew she favored her Uncle Redbeard over her own brother, her own father.

Even as the war in the United States intensified, Mexico got into another war of its own, though this time not with itself. The Reform War had ended in a Liberal victory but left the country bankrupt, forcing President Juárez to declare a two-year suspension of payments on the nation's foreign debt. The moratorium angered European creditors. In a united effort to exact payment, France and Britain and Spain sent troops. John Roger and Elizabeth Anne heard all about it from Patterson and Bentley when they came to visit Buenaventura—about the warships in the Veracruz harbor, the foreign uniforms in the plazas. The Brits and Spanish were soon placated and withdrew, but the French remained, no longer making any secret of their colonial intentions. They were all the more emboldened by the United States' incapacity to enforce its Monroe Doctrine against European incursion in
the Western Hemisphere, distracted as the Americans were with a civil war that threatened their very nationhood. The Church, which had been pillaged by the Juárez liberals, was in vehement support of the French. So too were the majority of Creoles, who believed only a monarchy could both restore civic stability and preserve their economic advantage. Backed by these two powerful Mexican blocs, France sent more soldiers and the war was on. The Juárez republicans achieved some early victories, the most noteworthy in Puebla—where a firebrand young officer and devoted Juarista named José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz gained renown for his battlefield valor. But only a year later the French were ensconced in the capital and Juárez was in refuge in Texas and Díaz was a prisoner of war—though he would soon escape and resume the fight. The year after that, the provisional government of conservatives and French interventionists declared Mexico a Catholic empire and persuaded Erzherzog Maximilian of Austria to accept the Mexican crown.

John Roger and Elizabeth Anne were among the witnesses on the fine day in May when Maximilian arrived in Veracruz on the SMS
Novarra
. In the company of Patterson and Bentley, peering through field glasses from the roof of the U.S. consulate, they had a good look at the lean blond emperor with the lush muttonchop beard as he debarked. On his arm was the Empress Carlotta, a blackhaired beauty with doleful eyes. Maximilian would swiftly come to love Mexico. He would become fluent in Spanish, prefer Mexican food, wear Mexican clothes, esteem Mexican customs and take part in Mexican festivities. But irrespective of his great love for the country, he was no less an invader of it, and the war went on. Veracruz was again spared major damage and the port remained in operation. John Roger contracted with the American agent who had been recommended by Richard Davison and continued to ship coffee to New Orleans. At such far remove from the war, Buenaventura continued to flourish.

Came the news of Appomattox. Shortly after which the reunited States of America warned the French to get out of Mexico. By then the tide had anyway turned against the monarchists in their war with Juárez, and the French—who had been losing battles to the forces of Porfirio Díaz—were swift to disengage, leaving Maximilian on his own. The abandoned emperor fled to Querétaro with the remnant of his imperial army and withstood siege by the Juaristas for one hundred days before surrendering. On a bright June morning in 1867, and notwithstanding the pleas of a number of European heads of state for Benito Juárez to spare him, Maximilian was stood before a firing squad and shouted “Viva Mexico!” before the rifles discharged into his heart. The following day, Porfirio Díaz liberated Mexico City from the last holdouts of the imperial army.

Thus was the Mexican republic restored. And thus did Porfirio Díaz become a national hero. In the course of the war he had twice been badly wounded and twice been captured and twice escaped. He had subsequently led his army in a series of spectacular victories, most of them against superior numbers. When he was told that
Juárez, his estimable mentor, was jealous of his growing fame, Díaz dismissed such talk as foolish rumor. But when he congratulated Juárez on his triumphant return to Mexico City to resume his presidency, the little Indian snubbed him. The insult pained Díaz as much as it angered him, and the two men were evermore estranged.

In the autumn of that year, Díaz unsuccessfully challenged Juárez for the presidency. He was publicly gracious about the defeat, but his pride seethed.

A few months earlier, Amos Bentley had begun courting a comely eighteen-year-old Creole named Teresa Serafina Nevada Marichál, whom he had met at the wedding of a mutual friend. She was the only child of Victor Mordecai Nevada Oquendo, who owned a number of silver mines in western Veracruz state as well as the most lucrative gold mine in eastern Mexico. In addition to his high-country hacienda called Las Nevadas, that overlooked the mines, Don Victor owned a house in Jalapa and another in the heart of Mexico City.

At first, the don gave little import to young Bentley's formal visits to his daughter in Jalapa. Teresa had been receiving suitors since the age of fifteen—the visits always conducted in the parlor and of course always overseen by her trio of dueñas, the watchful old women Teresa referred to as the Three Black Crows. Thus far no aspirant beau had managed even slight purchase on the girl's affections, and that had been fine with Don Victor. None of his sons had survived infancy and he was relying on his daughter to bear him a grandson to whom he would by one means or another bequeath legal title to the Nevada properties. But it was crucial that she choose her husband wisely, and he assumed that she shared his standards for a proper mate. As the beautiful and sole heir of an immensely rich man, she was an outstanding prize, and it was Don Victor's ambition to see her wed into a family no less wealthy than her own and with no heirs but her husband. The first criterion did much to narrow the field of possible candidates, and the second reduced it to a very rare few. Yet Don Victor was optimistic that the right suitor would soon enough present himself. That she entertained so many admirers who stood no chance of gaining her hand was not so much a puzzle to him as an irritation. She had always been a quirksome girl and he supposed it gratified her vanity to receive even the most hopeless of wooers. Whatever the case, she had been motherless since the age of seven and had grown up under his guidance and so could be as headstrong as himself. He knew better than to argue with her if he could help it.

But as the months passed and Amos Bentley's visits persisted, it became clear to Don Victor that Teresa was taking uncommon pleasure in the young gringo's company and he began to sense the seriousness of things. But he had kenned to it too late. Before he could decide what to do, Teresa announced at breakfast one day that Amos had asked her to marry him and she was giving the question serious thought. Don Victor masked his apprehension with a fatherly smile and said, Of
course. You are too kind to break a heart in any way but with gentleness. To know that you have given serious thought to his proposal will soften his disappointment at least a little.