Country of the Bad Wolfes (61 page)

John Roger sighed.

Liar
!

His principal thought as he made his way home.

He told the cleaning maid and the cook to go away and not return until next week. The cook had just prepared dinner and she left everything in covered cookware on the stove to stay warm. There was an open bottle of mescal with a single swallow left in it and he gulped it down. Then opened a fresh bottle and poured a proper drink and sat in the parlor and thought things over. The room grew dark but he did not light a lamp. He slept in the chair and woke and had another drink and then slept again. The next time he woke the windows were gray with dawn and his head pained him pinch-eyed until he assuaged it with mescal.

Over the following days he rose from the chair only to urinate or to eat a few spoonfuls of food from one of the cold pots on the stove or to open another bottle each time he emptied one. When there was nothing more to drink in the house he went to a window and called to a couple of boys practicing rope tricks and gave them some money to fetch him six bottles of mescal from the store. The neighbors were aware that he was keeping to his house and drinking by himself and they sympathized. Poor Alfredo, they said. How he grieves for his father.

Thus did he pass six days and nights. By the fifth night he had determined a course of action and by the sixth he was committed to it. He wanted to send a telegram to his brother to tell him what he was going to do but he knew better than to let a telegrapher read it. In ten minutes the whole hacienda would know his plan, including the patrón. He couldn't tell his brother about it until he saw him in Durango. Just as well. If Mauricio knew what this gringo had done he would want to be the one to make him pay for dishonoring the family. For violating 300 years of tradition. And for what? So his own son could become the mayordomo. Rich gringo whoresons! No respect for honor, for tradition, custom, for anything! His father in his grave barely a week and they didn't have enough respect to postpone their kid's communion fiesta! Well that was fine, just fine. Let's see how much they enjoy their fucking fiesta.

He made his preparations. Then slept a few hours and woke at first light. A sunbright Sunday morning. His throbbing head soon assuaged by a swallow or two of mescal. The clock was chiming eight when he stood before a mirror, freshly shaven and wearing a clean black suit. A .36 two-shot derringer in one coat pocket
and a full flask in the other. His grandfather's military scout knife with its honed seven-inch double-edged blade in its soft leather sheath snugged between pants and belt. The saddlebags over his shoulder held a change of clothes and his father's packed money belt and a loaded five-shot Ehlers Colt. He took a final look around the house in which he had been born and had lived all his life. Then left the house and went out the main gate of the casa grande enclave and into the compound where preparations were underway for the fiesta to follow the mass.

He went to the stable and saddled his horse and tied the saddlebags down tight behind the cantle and led the horse outside and tethered it at a hitching post in the shade of an alamo tree. Then stood leaning against the tree and watching the courtyard gate of the casa grande. Waiting for the patrón.

T
he church bells are clanging the imminence of the ten o'clock mass at which Juan Sotero Wolfe—being raised in his mother's Roman Catholic faith without objection from his agnostic father—will make his first Holy Communion. The Bishop of Pachuca, a long-time familiar of Victoria Clara's parents before they passed away, has come to administer the sacrament himself. The mood of the hacienda is loud with merriment in anticipation of the fiesta to follow the mass. The great double doors of the compound's main gate will be open wide all day to ease the coming and going of villagers from both Santa Rosalba and Agua Negra. A pair of marimba bands are setting up on far opposite sides of the plaza fountain. Sides of beef and kid are roasting over open fire pits, and the aromas carry across the plaza and into the cool dimness of the church to mingle with the fragrances of incense and flowers and women's perfumes. The church hums with low-voiced conversations as the pews fill. The front center pew is reserved for the patrón and his family but the only ones to have arrived are John Samuel and Victoria Clara and Juan Sotero.

In the kitchen of the casa grande, Josefina hobbles about on her cane, alternately scolding the scouring technique of the young maid laboring on that morning's breakfast cookware and harrying a boy in the adjoining patio who is charged with keeping the water hot in a pair of large bathing tubs. The scrub maid is a pretty seventeen-year-old named Concha who was promoted to the kitchen from the laundry only days earlier.

Marina Colmillo tends the fire in the stove, then consults the small clock on the wall and extracts two handfuls of sugar lumps from a tin container and places
them on the end of the wall counter in readiness for John Roger. It is his habit to go to the stable every morning and give the sugar to his horses. She then sets to work at the center counter, carving raw chickens for a stew. Most of the household will be dining on the fiesta's offerings, but the twins will be here today and their favorite meal is her chicken-and-chiles stew and so she will have it ready for them. It has been two months since she last saw them, and she cannot stop smiling in her eagerness.

John Roger appears in the doorway between kitchen and dining room. He wears an immaculate white suit, one sleeve folded and pinned by the upstairs maid who also knots his ties. In the ten months since the loss of his grandson he looks to have aged a decade, and the suit hangs loose on his gaunt frame. His nose webbed with red veins. His hair and short beard the color of ash. His eyes dark pouched.

“Todavía no han llegado?” he says.

Not yet, Josefina says. But they will be here any minute.

They promised Doña Victoria they would be here, John Roger says. And feels foolish for saying it. For whining like a petulant child.

Don't worry, Don Juan, Josefina says, they wouldn't disappoint their little nephew. Their baths are hot and their suits are ready. It won't take them a minute to clean up and be dressed.

Tell them I want them in that church, I don't care how late they are. You understand?

She blinks at his peremptory tone. “Sí, señor, a sus ordenes. Le entiendo perfectamente.”

He is familiar with her trick of formal address and blank look whenever she takes offense at his tone. Coming from her, such formality has always suggested more of impertinence than respect. He feels his vexation on his face and is the more irritated for letting the crone see she has succeeded in riling him.

In case I don't see them before the mass, John Roger says, I want you to tell them to see me afterwards.
Immediately
afterwards. In my office.

“Muy bien, señor.”

I mean it, madam. He points a finger at her. Be very sure you tell them what I said.

“Claro que sí, señor.” And adds that she is sure they will be along any minute now, but if they should be late it will be for reasons that could not be helped.

He turns and goes. Yet once again irked by her defense of them, whom she has ever and always defended against him in every case of contention, large or small, however right he might be, however wrong they. He has already left the house before Marina notices the sugar lumps still on the counter.

He had lain awake through most of the night, reviewing the decision of which he intended to apprise the three of them today. The twins would resume their
monthly visits as before, and during those visits they and John Samuel would sit to dinner with the rest of the family. And if, as before, they couldn't do it except by not saying a word to each other or even looking at each other, fine, very well, so be it. But they were going to do it for as long as he, their father, was still alive. He had by Jesus had enough of this rift. Whoever of them could not agree to the terms could leave Buenaventura—yes, leave! The family could hardly be more fractured for the departure of one or two of them than it was at present.
But
. . . whoever chose to leave would surrender his inheritance.
That
should get their attention. They all knew John Samuel would by dint of primogeniture inherit Buenaventura, but, as they would be informed today, his inheritance would not include that portion of the estate from just below the rapids all the way to the coast. He would bequeath that region to the twins. The deed to it had already been drawn and signed and needed only registration to become official. He would within the week submit it to his Veracruz legal firm, together with his will, specifying that the deed be officially registered immediately upon his death. But he wasn't dead yet, and a will could easily enough be changed, an unregistered deed easily enough torn up. Simple as that. So would he tell the three of them in his office right after this church thing. His decision would go down hard with John Samuel, but there was no chance that he would pack his trunks, not him, to whom nothing on earth mattered more than becoming the next patrón, even of a hacienda made smaller by the bequeathal to the twins. The twins, John Roger knew, were the question. They loved Ensenada de Isabel and would of course love to own it. Yet he wasn't sure they wouldn't give it up rather than yield to what they might view as an ultimatum. The trick would be in the manner of his appeal. You boys want that place for yourselves? Free of your brother's authority over it? Resume the visits. It's no surrender, gentlemen, just a recommencement of our agreement, a matter of honoring your word. So he would say to them before sending for John Samuel. He hadn't seen them in ten months, for Christ's sake! Enough was enough.

Barely ten minutes after John Roger departs, Josefina's attention turns toward the garden door and she says, “Hay están.” She calls to the boy tending the tubs that he can go now, and the boy waves and scoots away through the patio gate. Marina has to listen hard for a moment more before she too hears the boys' faint laughter from the garden, and she smiles at Josefina. Nobody knows the old woman's age—it is a household joke of long standing that she was the cook on Noah's Ark—but she still has the hearing of a fox.