“For protection from those half-caste brutes that so worry Mother,” he said.
Richard Davison gave John Roger a scrawled list of the regional haciendas with which the Trade Wind Company had contracts for coffee and tobacco and specifying the general terms of each of those agreements. He told John Roger it might be a good while before he could provide him with any other records of the company’s coffee and tobacco dealings. He had always kept most business details in his head and been lax about organizing the paperwork, or even reviewing it beyond a quick look at the net income. Since he’d moved to New Orleans, his papers were in greater disorder than ever. John Roger said those records weren’t important. “All I need to know is this,” he said, tapping a finger on the list of haciendas.
Richard Davison slapped him on the back. “You’re the man for the job, all right. Just the same, I promise I’ll get you them other records soon as I can.” And he departed for New Orleans.
The next two months sped by in a blur of planning and preparation. Elizabeth Anne hired a tutor in Spanish and worked hard at her daily lessons and was quizzed on them by John Roger every night. There was a farewell party at the Bartlett home in Concord, and then some days later yet another one at the family’s Rockport estate. Dozens of well-wishers showed up at Boston Harbor to see them off on a raw, gray morning in late winter. Mrs Bartlett wept as if at a funeral. John Roger and Elizabeth Anne waved and waved from the deck rail, hugging close and smiling at the widening world as the ship drew away from the dock.
VILLA RICA
DE LA VERA CRUZ
The city was bright white under the morning sun when the steamer churned past the yellowrock island prison of San Juan de Ulua and into the harbor of Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, the name long since shortened to Veracruz. The steamer eased up to the dock amid blasts of horns and whistles. The air heavy and tainted with marine decay. A loud Babel of stevedores all along the wharf. Flocks of vultures spiraling over the town, roosting on the rooftops. With their wrinkled red heads and heavy cloaks of black feather they looked to John Roger like a hideous union of undertakers in patient wait of work.
“My God, they’re ugly,” Elizabeth Anne said, holding to his arm at the deck rail.
“Not the most cheerful sight, are they? You’re not sorry we came?”
“Sorry? Johnny, if I had a tail it would be wagging in a blur.”
He bent to her ear and said she had a lovely tail, and she grinned and kissed his cheek. She was feeling better than she had in days, having enjoyed the voyage until rough waters in the Florida Strait afflicted her with a severe nausea. Her stomach had not properly recovered since, and John Roger had gently teased her about the lingering first-time seasickness of someone who had been sailing since she was a child.
Through his connections in the consular service, her Uncle Elliott had arranged for them to be met at the dock by the American consul, a loquacious little Texan named Charles Patterson. He stood but a couple of inches above five feet, his eyes below the level of Elizabeth Anne’s. His sizable mustache was as white as his suit, and his coat flap bulged at the revolver on his hip. He had a team and wagon standing by for their luggage, and as they waited for it to be offloaded he advised them to favor of a wardrobe of light cottons and linen. He said that contrary to the common wisdom, there were four seasons in the tropics—the hot-and-humid, the hot-and-rainy, and very fine spring and fall seasons of about two weeks each.
“It’s nice enough weather now,” Patterson said, “but pretty soon the place’ll turn into a damned caldron—beg pardon, mam. It’s but one reason you don’t find a lot of Americans here other than those passing through on the way to the capital and higher country. Me, I’m from Galveston, so wet heat’s nothing new. Truth be told, I like it. Been here since the end of Mister Polk’s War. Call me a odd duck.”
In Spanish, John Roger said he was sure he would prefer the local climate over the winters of New England. Patterson smiled and with equal fluency told him it was a fine thing he could speak Spanish. He said it was shameful so many Americans who came to live and work in Mexico didn’t know a word of the language and still didn’t when they left. In Spanish more heavily accented than theirs, Elizabeth Anne said she must be an odd duck too—amusing them with her literal translation of the English idiom as “un pato extrano”—because she also liked the tropic heat.
“Truth to tell, the heat won’t hardly be your biggest worry here,” Patterson said. “I assume you folk been told how bad this place is for the yellow jack.”
John Roger said they had indeed been apprised of the region’s notorious susceptibility to yellow fever. “There was a lively debate at the captain’s table one evening,” he said, “as to whether garlic or quinine was the better prophylactic.”
Patterson made a pained face. “I’ve known folk to eat enough garlic to knock over a buzzard with their breath and drink quinine till their ears rang like church bells, and Mister Jack still took them. Me, I had it when I was a kid, so it can’t get me again. If you and the missus aint had it yet, well, I have to tell you the only thing that’ll keep you safe from it is awful good luck.”
“Well then,” Elizabeth Anne said, “I’d say we are as well protected as can be, as we are certainly blessed with good luck.”
“Glad to know it,” Patterson said. “Best thing in the world, good luck. Except for sometimes. Like this gambler fella I knew. Wasn’t all that skillful, actually, but just about always come out winners. Everbody at the card table always cussing him for a lucky so-and-so and he’d just smile and say he’d ruther be lucky than good. Said it an awful lot. Everbody knew what he meant by it and probly most of them agreed. But it’s the sort of thing can start setting teeth on edge if it gets said too often, and no matter how lucky a fella is with the cards, the luck aint been invented that’ll help much when some sore loser gets tired of hearing about your luck and takes a mind to lean across the table and shoot you in the eye. Which is what happened to this fella I’m talking about. Guess you could say he was a little too lucky for his own good.”
Elizabeth Anne gave John Roger a sidelong frown. “An instructive parable, Mr Patterson,” John Roger said. “But it seems to me that the fellow’s failing was not so much an excess of good luck as an excess of talking about it.”
“Yessir, that too,” Patterson said. “The Mexicans say the quickest way to have your luck go bad is to talk about how good it is.”
“I take your point, Mr Patterson,” Elizabeth Anne said, “and I will make no further mention of our you-know- what.”
“Call me Charley,” Patterson said.
He had their baggage loaded onto the wagon and gave the driver delivery directions and sent him on his way. Then escorted the couple to the Trade Wind Company office near the far end of the wharf so John Roger could look it over. The place was infested with cockroaches but otherwise in good order, needing only a scrubbing and some new furniture. To keep the roaches in check, Patterson advised buying a couple of iguanas at the nearest market and setting them loose in the office. There was an adjoining warehouse for storing the coffee and tobacco before its export to New Orleans. Elizabeth Anne took two steps through its door before whirling right back out, sickened by the lingering stench of the fishmeal formerly stored there. Patterson said he could recommend a good crew to scour the room clean.
They went out onto the malecon—the seawall promenade fronting the harbor—then crossed over to the zocalo. The arcades were lined with shops and the handcarts of vendors. The square teemed with businessmen in pastel suits, peons in white cotton, beggar women in black head shawls asquat on the church steps, their skeletal brown hands extended to the passing world. There were spouting fountains, walkways flanked with wrought-iron benches and towering palms and broad shade trees shrilling with parrots. The redolence of flowers mingled with the aroma of coffee and the piquancy of cooking spices and the stinks of garbage and animal droppings and open privies. Marimba bands chiming at various points of the square. Patterson said he hoped they liked that sort of music because they would be hearing a great lot of it. They passed an alleyway where a pair of buzzards gorged on a dog carcass and Elizabeth Anne remarked on the scavengers’ profusion. Patterson said to be grateful for them,
