Country of the Bad Wolfes

Father Benedicto was hoisted up to the dais and an officer held him upright by one arm. White hair disheveled and eyes a red glaze, his collar awry, the old priest protested to Diaz that it would be an offense before God to perform a sacred office in such shameful condition as he was in. Don’t worry, Father, Diaz said. God and I are old comrades. I’ll square you with Him in my prayers tonight. Just keep it short and simple. You ask if they want to be married, they say yes, and you say all right you’re married.

The priest swayed and the officer holding to him said, Easy does it. Another said, The old boy needs a bracer, that’s all. He handed a bottle to the priest and said, Here you go, Moses. Father Benedicto took a deep drink, paused for breath, then took another big swallow. He smacked his lips and gave a contented sigh. The color rose in his cheeks. Diaz grinned and said, Father, you’ll outlive us all.

Sofi pushed her way through the crowd to get to Gloria’s side at the foot of the dais stairs. Gloria smiled to see her and said Hey, girl, I was wondering where you were.

What are you doing? Sofi said.

Getting married, sweetie, what’s it look like?

It looks like you’ve lost your mind.

Gloria laughed and gave Sofi’s cheek an affectionate pat.

The old priest took another drink before Diaz gently detached the bottle from him. Let’s hold off on that for just a minute, Father, he said, and beckoned Louis Little.

“Come on, darlin,” Louis said, “before the old coot passes out again.”

A minute later Gloria was Louis Little’s wife. And by legal definition had also become daughter-in-law to her lifelong friend Raquel Aguilera de Little, who was in fact two months younger than Gloria and herself only three hours a bride. The band struck up a lively tune and the brides each kissed Diaz in turn, and the bridegrooms, father and son, shook his hand, and then both couples headed for the door. As Gloria was being hurried along on Louis Little’s arm, Sofi trotted up beside her and said, Where are you going? What do I tell Mother and Father? What about your clothes? What about—?

Gloria blew her a kiss. I’ll write you, sweetie, I promise! And was gone.

When Sofi got home and told her parents what happened, Maria Palomina said, Oh my dear Jesus, and sat at the table and put her head in her hands. She had not liked Julian Salgado, true, but to lose his life in a stupid duel over her impetuous daughter! Nothing Gloria Tomasina ever did could surprise her, but Maria Palomina had to wonder about the girl’s mental condition. To marry a man she had not known an hour—and even more unbelievable, whose hands were still dripping with the blood of her betrothed!

How could it be, Maria Palomina said, addressing the room at large, that I gave birth to such a one?

She looked at Samuel Thomas, who sat sipping brandy at the other end of the table, scowling at some vision in his head.

I guess we know which side of the family she takes after, Maria Palomina said. My people never produced anybody even a little bit like her.

Samuel Thomas ignored the gibe. He did not care about what happened to Julian Salgado, but he was incensed that Gloria had married an American. A goddam gringo, he said. That stupid girl.

He persisted in his bitter mutterings about it until Maria Palomina, in her irritation with the whole matter, said that if he was so strongly opposed to marriage between Mexicans and Americans, maybe they should have their own holy union annulled. She asked what he was anyway so mad about. He had wanted Gloria gone and she was gone. What did he care who she was gone with?

You know what? Samuel Thomas said. You’re right. You’re absolutely right. To hell with it. Her punishment for marrying an American will be that she’s married to an American.

To which Maria Palomina said, Tell me something I don’t know, Mister Yankee. How long has it been? Eighteen years?

He fixed her with a thin look and she returned it in mock fashion. Then put the back of her hand to her forehead in a theatrical gesture of long-suffering and sighed loudly and said, Eighteen years. Eighteeeen lonnnng yeeears. And cut a sidelong look at him. He tried to hold to his indignation, but then she grinned at him and they both laughed.

Well, I’ll tell you what, Samuel Thomas said, raising his glass. Here’s to eighteen more. Because I can take it, woman, you hear me? I can take it. I’ve taken other punishment almost this bad.

They laughed harder still and Sofi joined in. She had never before heard her father jest and rarely heard him laugh and never with such gusto. He laughed and pounded the table with his fist. Maria Palomina laughed so hard she nearly slipped off her chair, which made them all laugh harder.

They had just got themselves under control when Bruno Tomas came up after closing for the night and said, Hey, everybody, what’s new?

And flinched at the explosion of renewed laughter.

GLORIA LITTLE

Gloria kept her promise to write to Sofi, but her letters were infrequent and most of them brief. In the first seventeen years of her marriage she wrote only eleven letters to her sister, the first of them not until almost a year after her wedding, by which time Bruno Tomas was in the army and Sofi had given up hope of ever hearing from her. Sofi wrote back right away, eight pages, front and back. She would write two more letters to Gloria in the eight months before receiving a second one from her. Such would be the pattern of their correspondence for the rest of Gloria’s life—Sofi writing two or three letters for each one she got from her sister, who would sometimes let more than a year go by between writing one letter and writing the next, and at one point three years would pass without her sending Sofi a line. Even when Sofia sent the news of each of her marriages, of the bereaving loss of each husband, of the wonderful births of her children and of the unbearable deaths of them, there was no telling how long it would be before Gloria wrote back. But respond she always sooner or later did, with buoyant good wishes for each marriage, with high joy at the birth of each child, with deep commiseration at the death of every husband, and, in the two most wrenching letters Sofi ever received in her life, with such keening anguish over the deaths of her infant nephews—whom she never even had a chance to see, to hold in her arms—that Sofi was both times reduced to sobs of renewed grief for her children even as she felt a great swell of love for her sister.

Gloria never wrote to her parents and they never wrote to her, but Sofi always relayed regards between the parties, even when, as was always the case, no actual regards had been tendered.

While infrequent and brief, Gloria’s letters to Sofia Reina provided a sketchy chronicle of her life with Louis Little. For the first four of those years, she and Louis—as well as Raquel and Edward Little—lived at La Noria, a hacienda Diaz received as a gift from his home state of Oaxaca, whose governor happened to be his brother, Felix. Having fallen out with Juarez after the defeat of the French and then losing to him in the presidential election, Diaz had resigned his commission and repaired to La Noria, taking with him thirty hand-picked men of his most formidable cavalry company. Juarez may be the president of Mexico, Diaz would say, but in Oaxaca I am the law. Felix Diaz would grin at this and say it was true. I am the governor, yes, he said, but he is my big brother and our mother always told me I must do as my big brother says. Gloria described Felix to Sofi as shorter and darker than Porfirio, but as handsome, though in a more menacing mode. Felix is as full of shadows, Gloria wrote, as the strange mountains of this place.

Edward and Louis—the younger Little’s Spanish having much improved—were part of Diaz’s small cadre of personal guards that accompanied him whenever he left La Noria, which was usually to Mexico City and sometimes for as long as several weeks. Unlike Diaz’s military guards, who were uniformed and always stayed close to him, the Littles dressed like ranch hands with big sombreros to shadow their faces and with ponchos to hide the pair of revolvers each of them wore on his belt, and they worked at a distance from Diaz, melding into the throngs and moving along the fringes of wherever he might be. Diaz himself sometimes would not know where they were but Edward and Louis always knew where he was and never let him out of sight of both of them at the same time.

In private Diaz had told his military guards that as much as he liked the Littles and found their bilingualism