There was still much work to do at Wolfe Landing. They would next build a stable for the mules and some horses and maybe a dairy cow, and then assume the harder job of constructing a dock along the bank. And there was still a bridge to build over Nameless Creek. They reckoned they could finish it all by April but it would actually take them until July. They had months ago used up the money in the valise and had since then been making regular withdrawals from the bank. By their estimation, those funds would be nearly depleted by the end of the year. They hadn’t even had time to explore the several other of their palm groves east of the clearing, about three square miles of them, by their reckoning.
One night as they sat by the campfire at Wolfe Landing—an evening nearly silent but for a soft soughing in the palms—they heard a faint but distinctive sound they had not heard since their days on the Rio Perdido. A sequence of low rasping grunts, coming from the darkness beyond the northeast corner of the clearing. James Sebastian said if it wasn’t a bull alligator he would eat every hat in Cameron County. “Let’s go see,” Blake said.
They tucked the Colts in their belts and took up firebrands and went into the palms. It was a dense stand and the firelight was bright against the trunks as the twins wound their way through them. They had gone about twenty yards and almost walked into the resaca before they knew it was there, catching themselves short at its bank. They could not make out the other side, which in the light of the next day they would see was some forty yards distant —and see too that the resaca was crescent-shaped and they were near one of its ends, the other end out of view behind a stand of palms. But standing there in the darkness, they saw the red glowings of alligator eyes on the surface of the black-glass water. They had read that there were alligators in the region—and no crocodiles—but they would give no thought at all to taking hides. They’d had enough of that trade. Yet they liked knowing the alligators were there in that big nearby resaca, and thereafter always listened for their gruntings in the hushed darkness of still nights.
Some weeks later they found a dead man floating in the river reeds where they were constructing the dock. A young mestizo, shirtless and shoeless. Brought down by the current from who knew where, though it could not have been very far, as he had not been long in the water, the eyes not yet eaten, the lips yet intact. There was a small bullet hole above his ear. His pockets were empty but he was no peon—the pants were part of a suit, the hands unscarred, two fingers showed pale bands where rings had been.
The only adequate ground for a grave in that lowland was Wolfe Landing, but they were not about to bury anyone there not family to them. But they had an idea. They bore the body to the resaca and looped one end of a rope around its ankle and lashed the other end securely to a tree and set the corpse in the water. The next day the rope was slack and the dead man gone.
Blake and Remedios’s second child, Cesar Augusto Wolfe Delgallo, was born on the thirtieth of April, exactly one year, to the day, after his brother Jackson Rios. Marina wrote the news to Vicki Clara, from whom there had been no word in nearly six months. When the first four months had passed without response to two of her letters, Marina had written to Bruno Tomas to ask if anything was wrong with Vicki. But in the two months since, that letter too had gone unanswered.
In May came a letter of bleak tidings from Bruno. Vicki Clara had kept secret the worsening condition of her vision until it became apparent to everyone that she could barely see at all. John Samuel had taken her to four different doctors, including two in Mexico City said to be the best eye surgeons in the country. They all agreed there was nothing that could be done to arrest her vision’s accelerating degeneration and predicted she would be blind by spring. And she was. Bruno had not informed the twins and their wives of Vicki’s trouble before now because he had been hoping for some miraculous recovery to report. Juan Sotero had wanted to withdraw from the Veracruz academy and come home to care for his mother, but Vicki dictated a stern telegram forbidding him from doing so. She had asked Bruno to convey her apologies to their Texas kin but she could not bring herself to dictate a letter. She felt it was too unnatural, Bruno wrote, to tell someone what to write for her, felt it was too contrary to the personal nature of a letter, and she simply could not do it. She said she would understand if they should feel the same way about someone else having to read their personal words to her, and she absolved them from any obligation they might feel to continue writing to her. She had excellent caretakers who were never beyond range of her summon. Her great regret was that she had not learned to play a musical instrument and so could not entertain herself that way. She passed her mornings listening to the player piano, her afternoons sitting in the patio shade and, as she liked to say, letting the sensations of the world come to her, its smells and sounds, its feel under her feet and to her hands and face. In the evenings after dinner Bruno read to her. Poetry, novels, and—in much lower voice, lest John Samuel venture into the room while he was at it—letters from their Texas family. John Samuel had offered to read to her and Vicki thanked him but said she preferred Bruno to do it and gave no explanation. In private Bruno told John Samuel he hoped he was not in any way intruding on his prerogatives by reading to Vicki Clara. John Samuel assured him he was not, that he appreciated Bruno’s help in making his wife comfortable as possible. He was unaware how clearly Bruno perceived his relief that he did not have to do it himself. Except when being read to, Vicki preferred solitude, even at mealtimes. She had joked to Bruno that what she needed was a blind friend, then wept and apologized to him for her self-pity. John Samuel would sit with her for an hour every evening before dinner, but if they ever had a conversation Bruno never heard them at it.
“God
“I agree,” Blake Cortez said.
Marina continued to write Vicki a monthly letter with bits of family news, and the twins added a few words at the end of each one. Bruno would read the letters to her as many times as she wished to hear them. He kept his promise to her never to tell Marina or the twins of the tears the letters prompted from her blind eyes. If they find out they make me cry, she said, they may think it a kindness to stop writing.
What neither the Mexico City doctors nor John Samuel told her was that the blindness had been caused by a cancer in her head. They believed the information would only add to her dejection. But as the severity of her headaches worsened, she knew—everyone knew—she was in a grave way. Her power of speech began to falter, then failed altogether, and she was reduced to communicating with chalk and slate until she lost the capacity to spell even the simplest words. She had trouble remembering things. The pain worsened by the day. She locked her jaws against the impulse to scream. Laudanum had been of help for a time and she took larger and more frequent doses of it until it was of help no more. The anguish of her final weeks beggared description. Her sightless eyes were monstrous bulges for the pressure of the growth behind them. Bruno would spare his Texas kin this detail and others even worse. At last, on a bright November afternoon, in answer to her prayers and to the blessed relief of everyone in the casa grande—as the open window admitted birdsong, the faint laughter of children playing beyond the patio walls, the insistent barking of a distant dog—she died. The entire hacienda turned out for the funeral. Not even at John Roger’s requiem service, Bruno wrote in a letter, had he witnessed such an outpouring of grief. Looking every inch a grown man in his cadet uniform, Juan Sotero gave the eulogy for his mother and then returned to Veracruz that evening. John Samuel placed a floral wreath atop the coffin before it was lowered in the ground but did not speak during the entire ceremony.
TRESPASSERS
During the final months of that year they were living off the last of the dwindled bank funds and were unsure what their next move would be. But they at last had the chance to investigate the smaller groves on their property east of Wolfe Landing. They discovered several more resacas, but saw no alligators in them. By the waning days of December they had explored all the groves but the east-most one.
Their map showed that this grove followed the river on a northward curve to about two hundred yards from the Boca Chica road before the river looped southeastward again. They set out at first light with their rolled bedding and camp gear on their backs and machetes in their hands. By mid-afternoon they had advanced through most of
