conduct the weekly court session in the compound plaza. He sat at a table in the shade of a tree and settled grievances large and small concerning hacienda residents. Most cases were trivial contentions of property between neighbors—a dispute over the rightful ownership of a stray pig, or of the eggs laid by someone’s hen in someone else’s yard. But at times he was presented with more serious issues. A petition for retribution by a man whose young son was mauled by another man’s dog. A bridegroom’s allegation of fraud whereby his bride in an arranged marriage proved not to be the virgin he had been assured she was. The judicial responsibility was one of the most important of a patron, and John Roger fulfilled it well. He viewed the Saturday courts as a recurrent test of his reasoning and principles of justice, and his judgments earned him wide respect as a man both wise and fair. Elizabeth Anne greatly enjoyed these court sessions and never failed to attend them. It pleased her that in almost every case John Roger’s ruling was such as she herself would have made. She confessed to him that back in their Concord days she’d had a covert hope he would one day run for mayor, as she was convinced he would make a fine one. But as patron of Buenaventura, he had the full powers of an entire government—executive, legislative, and judicial. “Why, it’s better than being governor of New Hampshire!” she said. He laughed and said he believed it was.
During their first months in residence at the hacienda, they sometimes made the daylong journey to Veracruz to spend a few days, but by the end of their first year as hacendados they rarely went to town, and the only times they saw their friends were when they came to Buenaventura. Charles Patterson and Amos Bentley would come to the hacienda on every other Friday for a visit of a day or two. They would bring the most recent editions of American newspapers and their own news of the city and of the country at large. Amos would deliver the latest Trade Wind paperwork for John Roger’s review and collect the records he had examined over the previous fortnight. In the warmest weather they would all don bathing costumes and cool off in the shallow concrete pool in the garden arbor, and after dining in the company of Elizabeth Anne the men would repair to the den for whiskey and cigars and would converse into the night.
Also in that first year a strange and wondrous thing happened—the coffee farm rejuvenated and produced the largest harvest in its history. The next season’s yield would be even greater. Such bountifulness would persist for a long time to come and earn John Roger yet another fortune. There was no rational explanation for the farm’s robust revival after twenty years of meager output, but the villagers believed the farm’s plight had been caused by the legendary curse of Martin Valledolid, and that the cessation of Montenegro proprietorship had ended the curse. But more than that, they believed Don Juan and Dona Isabel were favored by God, and so the hacienda was now divinely blessed.
When Reynaldo told the Wolfes of these popular explanations for the farm’s renewed fertility, they were amused, although Elizabeth Anne thought the villagers could be right. How else explain such a miraculous turn of good fortune except by divine favor? Reynaldo smiled on her like a fond uncle and said that whatever the reason for such fecundity, it had even reached into his own house. His wife had before informed him just the night that she was in the family way.
The Wolfes were thrilled. They knew Reynaldo’s sad history of parenthood. Of the twelve children his wife had born one after the other, nine had died of illness or by accident before their tenth birthday, leaving the family with a sole son, Mauricio, and two daughters. Though Reynaldo and his wife both wanted another son, she had not conceived for the past three years. Until now.
You see! Elizabeth Anne cried. You see how blessed we all are? She hugged Reynaldo in congratulations and said she knew he was hoping for a boy and asked what name he had chosen if it should be.
Alfredo, Reynaldo said.
ENSENADA DE ISABEL
They made a gradual acquaintance with the entire hacienda, exploring it by buggy, on horseback, in canoe, afoot, until they’d seen all of it except for a section of rain forest along the lower river—which, so far as anyone knew, had never been penetrated even by Indians—and no part of the estate was dearer to them than its little cove at the mouth of the Rio Perdido some twelve miles below the compound as the crow flew. The route to get there, however, was hardly as direct as crow flight. And although the river snaked through the jungle all the way to the coast, it was of little use for downriver transport because of the rapids that began just four miles below the compound docks, a stretch of whitewater so daunting that not even the hacienda’s most able boatmen would brave them. A few had tried it in years past and had never been seen again. It was supposed that the rapids ran for many miles, but no one knew for sure.
The first time John Roger and Elizabeth Anne went to the cove, they left the compound three hours before dawn and were conveyed by a lantern-lit raft through the river darkness to a small dockage about a half mile above the rapids. Even at that distance they could faintly hear the whitewater rush. From this lower landing they proceeded by ox wagon, with supplies and camping gear, on a narrow trail that had been hacked out many years before by the crew of fishermen whose periodic duty it had been to provide Hernan Montenegro with the oysters and crabs and shrimp he cherished. Reynaldo the mayordomo knew of no one who had ever been to the cove but those fishing crews. The fishermen had praised the prettiness and the bounty of the place, but said that if they had had a choice they would rather forgo the rigors of getting there, and they wished Don Hernan had not had such a liking for shellfish. They would scoop oysters and net crabs and shrimp until they had sackfuls of each, then smoke the entire catch to preserve it for the return trip. And then one night, about a year before his death, Don Hernan had become violently sick after a meal of the smoked oysters. The servants tending to him could hardly believe the quantities of vomit and horrifically stinking shit he produced on that interminable night, and they thought it a wonder that he survived it. At daybreak he looked like he’d lost twenty pounds and was as sickly pale as wax. He never again ate shellfish of any form, and so far as Reynaldo knew, no one had been to the hacienda’s seashore since.
The track held close to the river’s meander and in places was so narrow the foliage brushed against both sides of the wagon as they swayed and tilted over the uneven ground. Both the driver and their guard were Indians, the guard riding behind on a burro. Both men armed with machetes and shotguns. Although the disorder of the Reform War had worsened the national plague of banditry, robbers were most unlikely in this jungle—but jaguars and wild boars and poisonous snakes were not. Under his leather jacket John Roger carried a .36-caliber Colt in a shoulder holster, and in Elizabeth Anne’s handbag was a .41-caliber derringer. To fend against the rage of mosquitoes they had covered their faces and necks and hands with a unguent of Josefina’s concoction that smelled so foul they questioned whether the mosquitoes might not be the lesser torment.
Under a high shadowing canopy of trees shrill with birds and monkeys, the air grew hotter and wetter, riper in its smells of vegetation. The light was an eerie green. John Roger had been fretful of Elizabeth Anne risking her health in such close heat, but she assured him she felt fine. It was his guess that in some places they were hardly more than ten yards from the river and never farther than twenty, but the undergrowth was so heavy that at no point did they get so much as a glimpse of the water. They might not have known the river was there but for the rumble of the rapids, which grew louder and louder until they were abreast of them for several miles in which the green air was misty with vapor and they had to raise their voices to be heard. He wanted to have a look, but to get near enough to the riverbank would have required an hour or more of hacking with machetes by all three men, an expense of valuable time they could not afford. And too, there was the matter of jaguars and boars and snakes. They pressed on, the roar of the rapids gradually diminishing back to a rumble, and after a while longer they heard only the river’s low hiss through the bankside reeds.
Near day’s end they emerged from the closing darkness of the river into the last afternoon light of the cove. It was an oval some eighty yards wide from the landward to the seaward side and half again that long from north to south. The trailhead was near the cove’s northwest end, within sight of the river mouth. The cove surface looked like a slightly warped mirror of green glass, much darker at this hour than it would be under the overhead sun. They could not see the inlet on the other side because it did not open directly to the gulf but lay between a pair of narrow and overlapping tongues of land parallel to the coastline and dense with coconut palms. The trees blocked their view of the ocean but they could hear the swash of small waves on the outer shore. On the cove’s landward side
