Country of the Bad Wolfes

of the passage and John Roger steered the boat to starboard and into the tranquility of Ensenada de Isabel.

“Whooo-eee!” Elizabeth Anne yelled.

The mainsail luffed and she loosed its sheet and let the sail drop, and the jib carried them most of the way across the cove before she freed its line too and the little sail fell slack. John Roger steered the Lizzie’s glide toward the outer end of the pier and when the bow lightly glanced it Elizabeth Anne leaped from the deck with a line in hand and made it fast to a mooring post.

And they were home. Happy as children.

Although they revered their privacy at the beach house, the enjoyment of their retreats was diluted by guilt over leaving John Samuel at home in Josefina’s care. The boy was now almost seven, and in fact he didn’t mind staying home while they were gone, preferring as he did to be near his gray pony, John Roger’s present to him on his sixth birthday. Horses were the boy’s great joy, and he rode with admirable skill and confidence for one so young. He was five when his father one day leaned down from his stallion and whisked him up onto the saddle and against his chest and took him for a galloping ride that had the boy yelling with exhilaration. When John Roger jumped the horse over a high fence rail the boy whooped and Elizabeth Anne, watching, bit her lip. John Samuel afterward described the experience to his mother as feeling like he had ridden the wind.

Still, they felt derelict for excluding him from their trips to the cove, and during a spell of fine December weather they finally took him with them for a week’s stay. They asked Josefina to go, too, but she declined, saying she had not lived to such an old age just to get eaten by a tiger.

They were surprised by John Samuel’s indifference to the pleasures of the place. He had learned to swim in the river but did not really like it, even less in saltwater, and fishing held no allure for him. When they took him for a sail on the Lizzie—his first venture on a boat other than a river dugout—they had no sooner cleared the inlet, leaving the placid water of the cove for the mild rise and fall of the gulf’s swells, than he sickened and threw up. John Roger told him it was nothing to be ashamed of, he would get his sea legs soon enough, he came from a family of born sailors, after all. John Samuel nodded and made no complaint, but the farther they sailed into open water the more forceful his stomach’s rebellion, and at Elizabeth Anne’s request John Roger turned back.

The next day, while John Roger reminisced to him about the times he and his brother had set trot lines in Portsmouth creeks, they rigged such a line between the river dock and the opposite bank, and the day after that John Samuel helped his father to collect the fish off the hooks. But his parents could see that his interest in these activities was less real than shammed for their sake, and so they left him to his preferred diversion of sitting on the verandah and reading books about horses. His mealtime conversation was almost wholly about his pony and his hope that it was getting proper care from the stable hand he’d left in charge of it.

John Samuel would not go to the cove again, not with them nor anyone else nor by himself. From then on, whenever they readied to go to the beach house, they would tell him he was welcome to come and he would pretend to mull the invitation before saying he thought he should stay and care for his horse, and they would say that was fine, they understood. This ritual would persist for a year before they eventually overcame their guilt and ceased to offer the dutiful invitation. From then on they simply let him know when they were going and for how long, leaving him in Josefina’s custody, and he would always respond with a wish for them to have a good time. Which, in the primitive privacy of their haven, they always did.

SEASONS OF MARS

AND VENUS AND MORS

The American Civil War came as no shock to any of them, for they had long sensed it as inevitable. A letter from Mrs Bartlett reported that many of the state’s young men had enlisted and gone off to fight the wretched secessionists, but Jimmy had been commissioned as an army captain and she thanked God her husband had the influence to get him posted in Washington as a records officer. Otherwise, she wrote, the war seemed as distant from New Hampshire as did Mexico. Its most conspicuous effect was a significant increase in profits for the Bartlett paper mills, as purchase orders poured in from the federal government.

Elizabeth Anne nearly wept in her anger at her mother’s letter. She shared Patterson’s convictions that it was a war between rich northern industrialists and rich southern planters and that the Confederacy’s economic cause was no less compelling than the Union’s and that the North’s denunciation of slavery was rank hypocrisy. She asked John Roger’s promise to stay out of “that criminal folly,” as she phrased it. “I will not be made a widow or have my child left fatherless in the cause of any bigwig’s greed, including my father’s.”

John Roger smiled and said that with one arm he could hardly do other than stay out of it. Then saw how near to enraged tears she was and gave his promise.

“Thank you,” she said. “Besides, this is our country now.”

He agreed it was. The notion that patriotic fidelity was irrevocably bound to birthplace had always seemed to him logically indefensible. You could not choose where you were born but you could choose where to make your home, and it was to homeland that you owed allegiance. She was right that Mexico had become their home. They had chosen it. They had borne a son who was native to it.

Charles Patterson made no secret of his Confederate sympathies but admitted his gladness at being too old for the ranks. He had fought for Texas in its war of independence and had been with Houston at San Jacinto, where they slaughtered the Mexican force and then committed a great many defilements of the dead and wounded, and he had seen enough of such mad carnage for one lifetime. He retained his post at the U.S. consulate, absent all hope it would ever fly the flag of the C.S.A. and not unaware of his underlings’ jocular references to him as Colonel Dixie. Young Bentley, too, was a Southerner, but had been orphaned in Charleston when he was nine and then lived in a detested foster home until he went away to college on a scholarship, and the idea of risking his life for a cause in which he had no personal stake struck him as absurd.

The war boosted prices for the Trade Wind’s coffee and tobacco, and in the first year of hostilities the company’s profits boomed. But when Union forces took New Orleans in the spring of ‘62 they robbed the Trade Wind of its store of commodities and razed its warehouses and offices together with all its records. The bad news came to John Roger and Amos in a letter from Richard Davison, who gave them the name of a Yankee entrepreneur in New Orleans eager to assume the contract for Buenaventura’s coffee. He himself did not know what he would do next but promised to write to them soon.

They heard nothing from or about him for the next eight months. Then Jimmy Bartlett sent a letter from Washington with the report that Richard Davison had tried to smuggle a shipment of arms past the Federal blockade off the Texas coast and was killed when a gunboat sank his vessel. His body had not been recovered and his kin might never have known what became of him except that his crew’s only survivor named him as the captain. Mrs Bartlett, Jimmy wrote, was inconsolable.

On receiving the news about Richard, Elizabeth Anne said only “God damn war,” then went up to her room and wept in private. She spoke barely a word during the next few days. She had never said so, but John Roger knew she favored her Uncle Redbeard over her own brother, her own father.

Even as the war in the United States intensified, Mexico got into another war of its own, though this time not with itself. The Reform War had ended in a Liberal victory but left the country bankrupt, forcing President Juarez to declare a two-year suspension of payments on the nation’s foreign debt. The moratorium angered European creditors. In a united effort to exact payment, France and Britain and Spain sent troops. John Roger and Elizabeth Anne heard all about it from Patterson and Bentley when they came to visit Buenaventura—about the warships in the Veracruz harbor, the foreign uniforms in the plazas. The Brits and Spanish were soon placated and withdrew, but the French remained, no longer making any secret of their colonial intentions. They were all the more emboldened by the United States’ incapacity to enforce its Monroe Doctrine against European incursion in the Western Hemisphere, distracted as the Americans were with a civil war that threatened their very nationhood. The Church, which had been pillaged by the Juarez liberals, was in vehement support of the French. So too were the