Country of the Bad Wolfes

been certified and requires only our own signatures and that of Mr Patterson as witness before it is registered and becomes official.

John Roger looked at Patterson. “It’s not right, Charley. She’s giving it away.”

“Como?” said Mrs Albeniz.

Maybe you want to talk it over with Lizzie, Patterson said.

“Leezee?” the woman said.

My wife.

You wish to ask for the opinion of your wife?

No. I don’t have to.

I did not think so. It is the same with the men of this country.

That was not my meaning, John Roger said. My wife’s opinion is of importance to me. I simply meant that I know what she will say. Because we have discussed our, ah, aspirations for the future, you see.

How extraordinary, the woman said. So tell me. What will she say?

John Roger cut a look at Patterson, looked back at the woman, cleared his throat. Yes. She will say yes.

Mrs Albeniz smiled. So we are agreed?

For thirty percent of the property’s worth, John Rodger said.

The woman looked quizzical. Your wife will say for thirty percent?

No, I’m saying for thirty percent.

You are saying. . .? Mr Wolfe, I do not know very much about business, but I know it is contrary to basic principle for a buyer to offer more than a seller asks.

Thirty percent. Agreed?

No, she said. She looked at Patterson and made a small gesture of perplexity.

I would be stealing it at thirty percent, John Roger said to her.

For the love of God, she said, you are stealing nothing. It is my price.”

Thirty percent is—

“Ay, pero que terco!” Twenty-five percent, Mr Wolfe, and that is all. Not one penny more. Now please, sir, let us end this silliness.

He studied her face. She raised her brow in question. He smiled.

She smiled back. “Ah pues, estamos de acuerdo, no? We have, ah . . . como se dice? . . . make the busyness?”

Yes.

He dispatched the news to Richard, who congratulated him for his good fortune but opposed his resignation from the company. He persuaded John Roger to stay on in the Trade Wind’s employ as head bookkeeper, a duty he could fulfill from the hacienda. Twice a month Richard would send him the company’s most recent paperwork for final accounting. The records would be relayed by Amos Bentley, whom, on John Roger’s recommendation, Richard hired to manage the company’s Mexican office.

PART TWO

BUENAVENTURA

Sombra Verde was very different in geographical character from the hacienda Corazon de la Virgen that they had visited some years earlier, but the estates were similar in organization and amenities. It was a self-sustaining settlement, feeding off its cornfields and orchards, its pig farms and chicken roosts and dairy, its beef cattle that was processed into meat at the downriver slaughterhouse. The compound was centered by a plaza with a fountain and a church, a main store, a trio of stables with a large adjoining corral. Also fronting the plaza was the walled enclave containing the casa grande. Though it had three stories, the compact design of the house made it small by hacienda standards, but it was still larger than either of the mansions in which Elizabeth Anne had been reared. It boasted all the usual facilities, including an armory, though few of the arms had seen use since the days of the Valledolids, who had kept in hire a dozen pistoleros, while the Montenegros could scarcely afford to maintain half that many. John Roger told these men their service was no longer required and paid them a discharge bonus and they shrugged and left. At Elizabeth Anne’s suggestion he renamed the estate Buenaventura de la Espada, which over time would be simplified in casual reference to Buenaventura. All of the casa grande’s furniture had been shipped from Spain for the Valledolids, and the Wolfes chose to keep most of it. Elizabeth Anne was especially delighted by the piano in the salon, though it was in bad need of tuning. The only item of furniture they rejected was the bed in their private chamber. It was a mammoth thing of polished mahogany and a feather mattress, but they would not lie where Montenegro had lain. John Roger had the mattress burned and a bookcase made from the fine wood frame. The walls of the residence were cleared of Montenegro portraits and they too went into a fire. He had the bones in every Montenegro grave exhumed from the little cemetery adjoining the casa grande garden and reburied in the communal graveyard of the neighboring village of Santa Rosalba. As the Montenegros had done with the bones of the Valledolids.

Every morning, before breakfast—always prepared for them by Josefina herself, though she now had several helpers in the kitchen—they took coffee on a third-floor balcony from which they could see the huts of Santa Rosalba and its cornfield and the orange sun swelling up from the far reach of the forest. The air cool and redolent of wet foliage. The cock crowings loud. Santa Rosalba was one of two villages on the estate. The other, Agua Negra, was up in the foothills, next to the coffee farm.

They liked to watch the hacienda plaza come to life. The workers from the village arriving at the gate. The head-scarfed women scurrying to the church bell’s call to early mass. Storekeepers dampening and sweeping the sidewalk in front of their shops. Gardeners wheeling their barrows full of tools, the smithy stoking his furnace just inside the stable door, the wranglers at the corral rails. The rising odors of cookfires and dust. At day’s end John Roger and Elizabeth Anne would sit on the other side of the house and watch the sun lower into the western sierras. This balcony overlooked the hacienda’s main docks on the Rio Perdido, the water the color of copper in the late afternoon light. Herons stalked the shallows along the bank. Roosting parrots screeched in the trees. Fishermen moored their dugouts and unloaded their night’s catch of fish and eels and turtles.

After breakfast, it was John Roger’s daily ritual to meet with his estate manager—the mayordomo, Reynaldo Espinosa de la Santa Cruz—and review the day’s schedule and discuss any business of importance. While a patron’s authority was absolute, the chief administrator on most haciendas, the man to whom all lesser supervisors had to answer directly, was the mayordomo. A slim courtly man with a black spade beard and only three years John Roger’s senior, Reynaldo had been the mayordomo for ten years, the latest in a continuous line of Espinosas to have administered the hacienda since its founding in the sixteenth century. His family had served many Valledolid patrones and two Montenegros. He and his wife and children lived in a spacious residence within the casa grande enclave. He had welcomed John Roger with such warm respect that it seemed needless to ask how he felt about the change in owners. Given the man’s knowledge of the hacienda and his expertise in its operation, John Roger naturally wanted him to stay on as his mayordomo, and he was relieved when Reynaldo said, I would be honored to remain in your service, Don Juan.

They met every morning of the week but Sunday, and after their conference John Roger would usually devote himself to reviewing Trade Wind accounts. On Saturdays, after Reynaldo meted out the workers’ weekly wages, paying them one-fourth in silver specie and the rest in script redeemable at the hacienda store, John Roger would