packing. Not only did that not happen, but as the don became better acquainted with Amos he found the young man to be quite pleasant and, even more important, possessed of a shrewd talent for business in general and bookkeeping in particular. In fact, Don Victor was so impressed with the young American’s talents that, by the day of the wedding, Amos had already been the head bookkeeper of the Nevada Mining Company for almost a year.
The nuptials took place in the ballroom of the Hacienda de las Nevadas. The spring day was bright as a jewel, the air cool and sharp and seasoned with pine. John Roger and Elizabeth Anne were among the guests, as was Charles Patterson. Many of the attendees were from Mexico City, and nearly as many of them British or American as Mexican. Don Victor was effusive in his welcome of the Wolfes and said he had been looking forward to meeting them. After the ceremony, the party sat to a banquet in the central courtyard, followed by dancing to the music of a full orchestra. Spiders of special breed imported from Guatemala had spun canopies of connecting webs from tree to tree in the courtyard and the webs had been sown with gold dust, suffusing the courtyard with a lovely amber haze. At one point John Roger saw a young mestizo waiter gazing in open wonder at the enwebbed gold whose worth he could not have begun to estimate—then receiving a rap to the ear from his overseer who barked for him to get to work if he knew what was good for him.
When Don Victor joined the Wolfes and other guests for a glass of wine at the newlyweds’ table, the topic under discussion was national politics. There was a chorus of loud approbation in response to someone’s expressed hope that Porfirio Diaz would become the next president, and glasses were raised in tribute to the general. Don Victor took the opportunity to inform the Wolfes that he had been friends with Don Porfirio since the time of the Yankee invasion, when they were both fifteen. They had served together in a Oaxaca guard battalion composed of schoolboys like themselves, but much to their great disappointment they had not been sent into combat. At the end of the war Victor returned to his engineering education, but Porfirio, who had been studying for the priesthood prior to joining the ranks, had found his true calling as a soldier. Do you know, Don Victor said, that Porfirio’s birthday is on the eve of Mexico’s day of independence? It’s the truth—and what could be more fitting? It was Don Victor’s iron opinion that only General Diaz could end the antagonisms between Mexico’s many political factions and unify the nation in a common cause. He is destined to be the president, Don Victor said. Take it for a fact.
John Roger had heard the same thing from almost every hacendado of his acquaintance. He thought it curious that so many Creoles held in such esteem a man whose own blood was mostly indigenous. It was no secret that Diaz’s mother was a Mixtec Indian and his father a mestizo. Despite a warning look from Amos, John Roger said that Don Victor might be right that General Diaz would one day be president, but Benito Juarez was very popular with the masses and it should be as difficult for Diaz to beat him in the next election as in the last one.
Before the don’s fervor grew any hotter, Amos Bentley stepped up on a chair and called for everyone’s attention and proposed a toast to his dear friend, John Wolfe. I owe my happiness to him, Amos told the assemblage. It was Don Juan who secured my employment with the Trade Wind Company, and it was through the Trade Wind that I was able to make the acquaintance of so many fine people, a series of acquaintances that led me to my darling Teresa Serafina. So here’s to you, Don Juan, for your hand in the making of my great happiness. “Salud!”
The toast was cheered and—for the moment—the subject of Diaz set aside.
It was the finest spring they’d known in Mexico. The hacienda abloom with color, the air rich with the aromas of flowers and rain-ripened earth. As they took their post-dinner stroll in the garden one evening, admiring the beauty of the quarter moon, the brightest comet either of them had ever seen flashed across the sky. Elizabeth Anne shut her eyes and he knew she was making a wish, as she always did on spying a shooting star. Then she looked at him and said, “You too, quick!” He smiled and said there was nothing to wish for, that a man could not ask for better fortune than his.
Some months later, on a sultry summer night at Ensenada de Isabel, as they lay embraced in the big hammock of the cove house verandah and looked out at the stars over the gulf while the jungle blackness chirmed and screeched, Elizabeth Anne reminded him of that night in the garden and of the radiant shooting star and said that the wish she’d made had come true. They were going to have another child.
“I don’t know why
Underneath her levity, Nurse Beckett was apprehensive. She had not forgotten Elizabeth Anne’s difficulty in bearing John Samuel at the age of twenty-one, and she was now thirty-six. And though he never said so, John Roger was worried too. As inexplicable as the pregnancy itself, however, was the easiness with which it progressed to term, an easiness that allayed their fears. During her carriage of John Samuel, Elizabeth Anne had been sick almost every morning, but this time did not have a single instance of nausea, or much discomfort of any sort other than the general nuisance of her swelling. The trouble-free pregnancy was the more notable because she bloated even larger this time and her quickening was more pronounced, the stirrings and kicks in her womb more insistent than John Samuel’s had been. Nurse Beckett predicted a strapping boy.
Even the labor itself was easier than the time before—ensuing shortly after sundown on the eve of the vernal equinox. Josefina, that ageless grandam, was once again on hand to assist Nurse Beckett. John Roger again paced in an adjoining room with his fist in a ready clench to endure Elizabeth Anne’s howls. But she this time made little outcry beyond a few sporadic yelps. Shortly before midnight John Samuel, incipient adulthood already evident in his face, came downstairs in his sleepshirt to ask if the baby had arrived. John Roger said not yet, and they paced together, father and son.
In the first minutes of the new season, Elizabeth Anne let her only piercing scream of the night, and John Samuel fixed wide eyes on his father. “It’s only natural, son, don’t worry,” John Roger said. “Soon now. Soon.”
They were still awaiting the baby’s cries of arrival when the bedroom door opened and Nurse Beckett stood there staring at John Roger, unable to cohere into words the dejection on her face. He at once knew the child was dead.
He rushed past Nurse Beckett into the room with no thought but to embrace Lizzie in their shared bereavement. Her eyes were closed as before, her face as deathly pale. He sat on the edge of the bed and patted her hand and told her everything would all right, then bent to put his arm around her. And only then saw the prodigious soak of blood beneath her and in that same freezing moment felt the uninhabited stillness of her. His breath stopped. He drew back from her and looked about, for a moment blind with shock. And then saw Josefina sitting across the room, her skeletal face the color of earth and hung with the weight of her woe. Holding a swaddled infant in each arm.
As their father’s wrenching anguish rang through the house, the newborn twins held their unblinking stares on John Samuel at the door, his red glare raging,
THE SECOND TWINS
Even as Elizabeth Anne’s body was being readied for the wake and her grave being dug in the casa grande graveyard and the spreading news of her death raising a collective lament that would for months hang over Buenaventura like a lingering sickness, Reynaldo the mayordomo was sending men to comply with Josefina’s urgent requisition to round up every wet nurse to be found on the compound or in the villages of Santa Rosalba and Agua Negra. Of the thirteen young mestizas brought to her, Josefina dismissed eight out of hand because they were
