Country of the Bad Wolfes

She of course did not divulge to her sons that she was already carrying them when she had stood at the altar with their father. She believed it was none of their affair and felt no qualm about keeping the secret. But her deliberate lies to them about the captain’s true profession and mode of death troubled her and became ever harder to bear. They were nearly thirteen when she told them the truth. Indeed, let them read it for themselves, handing them the British Embassy’s letter in evidence of the shameful facts. She was prepared for their shock and humiliation. Was prepared to tell them they had no call to feel disgrace, that their father’s criminality was his own dishonor and in no way reflected on them. Their response was not what she was prepared for.

“A pirate!” Samuel Thomas said, turning to his brother. “A pirate captain!”

“Executed for murder!”“

“I’ll wager it wasn’t murder! I’ll wager it was self-defense but he couldn’t prove it!”

“I’ll wager that even if it was murder he had good cause and whoever the fella was had it coming.”

Mr Parham, whom Mary Margaret had permitted to be present, chuckled at their exchange—then swallowed his smile and went mute under his daughter’s furious scowl.

They begged to know more and were disappointed when she said she knew no more to tell. Did she at least know how he had been executed? Had he been hanged? Shot? Buried to his neck in the beach at low tide? She was appalled by their macabre questions and gesticulated in exasperation as she said she didn’t know how he had met his end and didn’t care, that it hardly mattered, after all.

The boys stared at her in wonder. How could such a thing not matter? They looked at each other and shrugged. They could not get enough of reading the letter and would henceforth handle it with the care of surgeons, lest it tear at the folds. Each wanted to be its keeper, so they tossed a coin that put it in John Roger’s custody.

In days to follow, Mary Margaret would sometimes overhear them conversing about their father, speculating on his piratical prowess in comparison to the likes of William Kidd and Edward Teach the Blackbeard and other infamous sea raiders of the past, villains she’d many times heard mentioned in tavern discourse among grown men no less awed by them than were her sons. The twins wondered about his adventures, about duels he’d fought and ships he’d plundered and hapless captives he’d made to walk the plank. Mary Margaret rubbed her temples and sighed to hear them holding forth on keelhauling and how you had to be able to hold your breath a long time and be tough enough to endure the barnacle cuts and be lucky enough that the sharks didn’t get you before you were hauled back out. And because there was no telling what trials their own fortunes held in store and keelhauling might be among them, they thought it wise to take turns timing each other in the practice of holding their breath.

They were keenly intelligent boys and under Mary Margaret’s tutelage had learned to read and write and cipher even before she hired the best teachers in town for them. She instructed them too in basic etiquette and social decorum. They had a liking for music of various sorts but the only instrument to catch their fancy was the hornpipe their Grandfather John had given them on their tenth birthday. He taught them to play that simple flute and a patron showed them how to dance the sailor’s jig its music had been made for. They composed a ditty they entitled “Good Jolly Roger” and Mary Margaret sometimes heard one or the other of them piping it in the late evening behind the closed door of their room. It would always make her want to cry but she never asked them to cease.

Through their early childhood they were so nearly identical in appearance that, except for their mother and grandfather, few could distinguish between them. But around age twelve Samuel Thomas became the slightly huskier, John Roger the slightly taller and more perceptibly serious of mien. They were strong and nimble athletes, especially fond of swimming and wrestling and footracing. When they could find no other competitors, they contended with each other, and sometimes one of them won and sometimes the other, but as they grew older Samuel Thomas more and more often prevailed.

They loved the sea. They taught themselves to sail, to navigate and read the weather. Without their mother’s knowledge and long before she thought them old enough to sail outside the harbor, they were piloting their catboat all the way to the Isles of Shoals. They were on the return leg of one such excursion when the fickle weather of early spring took an abrupt turn and the sky darkened and the sun vanished and the wind came squalling off the open sea. They were a half mile from the harbor when the storm overtook them. The rain struck in a slashing torrent and the swells hove them so high they felt they might be sent flying—then dropped them into troughs so deep they could see nothing but walls of water the color of iron. They feared the sail would be ripped away. Samuel Thomas wrestled the tiller and John Roger bailed in a frenzy and both were wide-eyed with euphoric terror as time and again they were nearly capsized before at last making the harbor. When they got home and Mary Margaret saw their sodden state she scolded them for dunces and wondered aloud how they could do so well in their schooling when they didn’t have sense enough to get out of the rain.

When they turned thirteen, Mary Margaret enrolled them in the Madison School—a local day institution that claimed itself the academic equal of Philips Exeter—paying for their tuition with money she’d saved over the years. And now a signal difference formed between them. John Roger grew to love academics above all else and gained recognition as the best student in the school. He read with omnivorous rapacity and phenomenal retention. He developed the habit of writing a critical summary of every book as soon as he finished reading it. He could with speed and accuracy solve arithmetic problems in his head. He had a natural aptitude for languages and by the age of fifteen was translating Cicero and could read French passably well. He developed an ardent interest in the law and hoped to matriculate at Dartmouth. Samuel Thomas, on the other hand, had become bored with schoolwork, though he continued to earn fair marks by dint of native intellect. The only books that still held his interest were atlases. He spent hours admiring the ships in the harbor. His main pleasures were now in prowling the waterfront alleys, in dicing, in fighting with his fists. Delivering fresh bedclothes to the boys’ room one day while they were at school, Mary Margaret saw an atlas on Samuel Thomas’s desk lying open to a map of the Gulf of Mexico. He had inked a circle around Veracruz and alongside it drawn a skull-and-crossbones with the notation, “Here lies Father.”

On the threshold of young manhood, the brothers were beardless duplicates of their sire, but Mary Margaret could see that Samuel Thomas had inherited the larger measure of his father’s soul, and he was hence her greater worry. She at times wondered if religion might have served to temper his wilder nature and fretted that she’d been wrong to deny such moral instruction to her children. But even in girlhood she had spurned the prevalent Christian view of carnal pleasure as a Deadly Sin, an irreverence that had incited many a loud row with her mother, a devout Catholic.

The boys were sixteen when their Grandfather John made a misstep with his crutch near the top of the stairs and broke his neck in the tumble. Mary Margaret inherited the tavern and conscripted the twins as potboys. Each day after school they waited tables and swept the floor, washed mugs and rinsed out cuspidors and reset rat traps in the storeroom. She hired a girl to assist her in the later evenings so the boys could attend to their studies upstairs. But while John Roger was assiduous in his nightly schoolwork, Samuel Thomas more and more frequently slipped out their window to the sublunary enticements of the streets, particularly those at a quayside cathouse called the Blue Mermaid. It was there he had his first coitus, the news of which he gave to his brother with an affected casualness.

John Roger was enthralled. “What’s it like?” he asked.

“Can’t be described,” Samuel Thomas said. “Go with me next time and find out.”

John Roger said he would. But he did not own his brother’s daring or disregard for the proprieties, and when the next time came he begged off, saying he had to study.

“Suit yourself. But if you ever change your mind, you’re welcome to come along.”

Samuel Thomas’s evening rambles always lasted till the wee hours, and on each of his stealthy re-entries through their window, exuding the mingled odors of perfume and ale and sexual residue, he would find John Roger awake and waiting for him, insistent on hearing the details of his escapade before letting him go to sleep.

The vicarious excitement John Roger derived from his brother’s exploits made the fact of his own