Country of the Bad Wolfes

COUNTRY OF THE

BAD WOLFES

A Novel

BY JAMES CARLOS BLAKE

CINCO PUNTOS PRESS EL PASO, TEXAS

Country of the Bad Wolfes :A Novel.

Copyright © 2012 by James Carlos Blake.

All rights reserved.

IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER,

CARLOS SEBASTIAN BLAKE

(1911-2002)

OTHER WORKS

BY JAMES CARLOS BLAKE

The Killings of Stanley Ketchel

Handsome Harry

Under the Skin

A World of Thieves

Wildwood Boys

Borderlands

Red Grass River

In the Rogue Blood

The Friends of Pancho Villa

The Pistoleer

Therefore, since the world has still

Much good, but much less good than ill,

And while the sun and moon endure

Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,

I’d face it as a wise man would,

And train for ill and not for good.

—A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.

—PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON , Magnolia

What country more dear or defiant than that of our own blood?

—ANONYMOUS

No hay reglas fijas.

—A PRECEPT OF LONG STANDING ALONG THE LOWER RIO GRANDE

PROLOGUE

The family landed in the Western Hemisphere in the person of Roger Blake Wolfe, who arrived with a price on his head. No likeness of him—a sketch, a painting, a daguerreotype—survived through the generations, and the accepted description of him as handsome was based solely on the family’s penchant for romantic fancy and the genetic testament of their own good looks. Even his own sons never knew him in the flesh.

As a matter of record, Roger Blake Wolfe was born in London in 1797. His father was Henry Morgan Wolfe, an Irishman of murky lineage who triumphed over that disadvantage of birth to become a British naval officer and then managed the even more heroic achievement of marrying into a wealthy Knightsbridge family named Blake. Henry Wolfe had high ambitions for his son in the Royal Navy, but Roger, who loved the sea but abhorred regimentation, did not share them. When he ran away at age sixteen, absconding from a maritime academy, his father disinherited him through an announcement in the Times.

Thirteen years later Roger Blake Wolfe was a pirate captain of some notoriety, one of the last of a breed near to extinction by the early 19th century. His ship was named either the Yorick or the York Witch, the former name appearing in some reports and court documents, the latter in others. Although he restricted his freeboot to the waters off Iberia and West Africa and never attacked an English vessel, the British in 1826 acceded to diplomatic imperatives and joined with various aggrieved nations in posting a