Country of the Bad Wolfes

about it.”

They admired the Colt a while longer and then put it back in its drawer. Then thought to look in the others to see if they held anything of interest. The bottom right drawer and the top left one contained only business records. Then James Sebastian tried the bottom left drawer and said, “Say now.” It was locked.

They examined the keyhole and recognized the kind of lock it contained and smiled at its simplicity. They had crafted skeleton keys that could open any sort of lock to be found in the casa grande, locks to doors and desks and trunks and such, but they liked to keep in practice with simpler implements. James opened his pocketknife and inserted the blade tip into the keyhole and made a careful probe and angled the blade just so and gave it a gentle turn and the lock disengaged.

The drawer held a leather-bound ledger and a document case. They took out the case and opened it and the first thing that came to hand was the framed daguerreotype of John Roger and Samuel Thomas on the day of their high school graduation. They stared at it for a time before James Sebastian said, “Do you believe this?”

“Cuates! Just like us.”

“Not quite like us. One on the left’s a little bigger in the shoulders, you can tell.”

“Yeah. Doesn’t tell us which one’s Father though.”

“Don’t look to be much older than we are. And I thought he looked young in the ones with Momma.”

“So that’s Samuel, eh? Whichever one.”

They had once asked Josefina if their father had any brothers or sisters and she had told them what their mother had told her, that John Roger had been orphaned with no sisters and only one brother, Samuel Thomas, an apprentice officer on a merchant vessel who was eighteen years old when his ship went down. Older or younger brother, they asked, and she said she didn’t know.

“Why didn’t she say they were twins, I wonder?”

“I expect she doesn’t know or she would’ve.”

“If Josefina doesn’t know it’s because Momma didn’t know, either, and why wouldn’t he have told her?”

James shrugged. “If Momma didn’t know, she for sure never saw this picture. Bedamn if Father aint starting to seem like a secret-keeping man.”

They laughed low. And now took from the case a rolled paper and unfurled it and saw that it was two papers—a letter with a bureaucratic heading, and rolled inside of it, an ink portrait.

“Looks like Father,” Blake said of the sketch. “Except Father’s name’s not Roger Blake Wolfe and he aint dead yet, much less since 1829.”

“Grandpap’s my guess.”

“Me too. Damn sure looks like Father, don’t he?”

“It’s how you’ll look at his age.”

“You too.”

The letter was the one from the British Embassy to Mary Parham Wolfe. “Father’s mam, must be,” James said. They read it.

“Man was a goddam pirate.”

“Begging your pardon, mister, he was a goddam captain of pirates. Says so right here, see? Captain.”

“You suppose Momma knew this?”

“I’d wager she didn’t.”

They studied the letter again. “Says executed but not how,” Blake said. “Hung for certain. It’s what they did with pirates. And left them to rot on the rope. Our own granddaddy. Man, aint life just fulla surprise?”

“With a daddy like that, hardly a wonder Father’s killed two fellas.” James Sebastian said. Then grinned. “Two we know of, anyway.”

“A grandpappy like that says something about a coupla other fellas I could name.”

“We couldn’t help it, Judge. It’s in our blood.”

They started to laugh and hushed each other lest they be heard by some passing maid. They extracted two packets of letters. Most of them were to their father from Richard Davison and to their mother from her mother, neither set of much interest to the twins except for the fact of their mother’s maiden name—which they had thought was Barlet because of Josefina’s pronunciation. Davison’s letters were chockablock with details pertaining to the Trade Wind Company. Their Grandmother Bartlett’s abounded with trivia about her family life. The brothers skimmed through them and arrived at the letters to their father from Sebastian Bartlett and James Bartlett, and after skimming these, they read them again.

“Who’s he think he is, blaming Father for what happened to Momma?” Blake Cortez said of Sebastian Bartlett’s letter.

“A son of a bitch is who he is, grandpap or no. That goes for this James galoot too.”

“Uncle James to you.”

“I aint calling anybody uncle writes a letter like this to Father.”

“Reckon he ever did come for Momma’s bones?”

“Hell no. I think he was just blowing hard.”

“Me too. If he’d come here to dig her up, Father would’ve stopped him cold.”

“Hell yes, he would’ve. Would’ve done him like he did that soldier.”

“Or like he did what’s-his-name, the one Josefina said—”

“Montenegro.”

“Yeah, that son of a bitch.”

They opened the leatherbound book and saw what it was and Blake pulled up a chair so he could read along with James Sebastian. Its earliest parts had been inscribed at Dartmouth College and dealt mostly with fellow students and various academic notions. These entries meant little to them and they turned the pages swiftly, slowing only at their father’s intermittent mentions of his mother and her father, Thomas Parham. They were interested most of all in his references to his brother, whose name they learned was Sammy and whom their father wished himself more like. “Our Physiognomies the same but Sammy’s Spirit so much the more daring,” their father wrote. They read of his desire to become a gentleman and of his fear that his classmates might learn the truth of his father’s brigandage and about his brother’s mysterious disappearance from Portsmouth.

“So he doesn’t know what became of old Sammy,” Blake said. “Or didn’t when he wrote this, anyhow.”

“Told Momma he was lost at sea.”

“Maybe that’s what he found out later, after he wrote this.”

“Or maybe it was just another lie.”

“Why lie about his brother? Think maybe he was a murderer too?”

“Who knows? But seeing how scared he was of his school chums finding out about his pa the pirate, I’ll wager he never told Momma about Sammy either.”

“That counts as a lie too. Lie of omission.”

“Wooo, you’re a hard judge, mister,” James said.

“Hey, son, the law’s the law, I always say. Law of the books, law of the truth.”

There was an entry about his upcoming graduation and his disappointment at failing to qualify for valedictorian, and then the journal jumped forward by several months to a nearly illegible passage about his marriage engagement to “Lizzie”—his erratic penmanship occasioned perhaps by euphoria. Then a still greater leap in time to his first notation in Mexico, conveying his happiness over Lizzie’s miraculous pregnancy. The next segment was five pages long and absorbed them above all others, detailing as it did what their father had learned about Roger Blake Wolfe from the Veracruz archives and the London genealogist.

“Well now,” Blake said, “how about this?”

“Now we know. Firing squad.”

“Girls fighting over him even when he’s about to get shot.”

“Buying drinks for his pals. Puffing a cigar. The man had aplomb, no question about it.”

“Aplomb aplenty. How come shot, though? They always hanged pirates.”

“Most likely offered the judge a little something to make it the muskets.”

“You reckon? Hell of a note, having to pay to be shot.”