useful to him, he preferred his nearest protectors to be fellow Mexicans. The soldiers had smiled to hear it. But the fact of the matter, as Diaz confided to the Littles, was that he did not trust his army guards, and he wanted Edward and Louis in a position to keep an eye on them as well as on everybody else. It is a sad truth about my countrymen, Diaz told the Littles, that not one in ten would hesitate to kill his best friend for two pesos, though you can be sure he would attend the funeral and shed the loudest and most heartfelt tears. It is the natural perfidy of their Indian blood. I tell you, my friends, the Aztecs were conquered not by Cortez but by the treachery of the other Indians.
Between themselves, the Littles remarked on Diaz’s increasing penchant for speaking of Indians and mixed- bloods as if he himself were not of them. “I expect the day’s coming when Porfi will be talking about his daddy the Spanish grandee,” Edward Little said to Louis, who grinned along with him.
The four years at La Noria were rife with joyful births and piteous early deaths. Gloria’s son, Luis Charon, was born in the tenth month of her marriage, the only child she would ever have. He had his father’s dark blue eyes and his mother’s ebony hair. She had liked the name Charon on having heard it only once, from a boy calling to a friend in the street. Louis liked it too because of its similarity to his mother’s name of Sharon.
In the fall of the following year Raquel gave birth to a robust son as dusky as herself whom Edward named Zachary Jackson Little. Porfirio and Delfina were the most fecund of the couples, producing two sons and a daughter. But shortly after the birth of the second son both boys were taken by typhoid, and the parents were still grieving for them when the baby girl died in her sleep for no knowable reason.
There came a spring day in their fourth year at La Noria when Diaz and the Littles left their families at the hacienda and went to live in Mexico City in preparation for that summer’s presidential election, in which Diaz once again ran against Juarez. And once again lost. This time Diaz had no doubt that the government had engaged in electoral fraud and that Juarez was absolutely set on perpetuating himself in office for life by any crooked means necessary. In public Diaz said that no law was more vital to Mexico’s future than one to prohibit presidential reelection. In private he said, I won’t lose to that fucking Indian dwarf again. Then went back to La Noria to plan his revolt.
The Littles told their wives to pack for a long trip, that they and the children would be going to the border along with Delfina Diaz to be well removed from danger during the coming trouble. Gloria asked Louis how long they would have to be gone and he said he didn’t know.
On a morning of drizzling rain the women and children boarded a coach guarded by a detachment of Diaz’s cavalry and set off on a journey that was supposed to take ten days but because of bad weather and battered roads took seventeen. The trip was especially hard on Raquel, who was midway through another pregnancy. They were met in Matamoros by friends of Diaz and then ferried across the Rio Bravo to Brownsville, where they would be safer still. They took residence in a rented two-story house at the west end of Elizabeth Street.
In January, Raquel delivered John Louis Little, the only American in their party. His complexion caramel as her own but his auburn hair and green eyes would remind Edward Little of his own mother’s. They hired a young maid named Silvania to help with the housework and the care of the children. Diaz’s rebellion was then in its fourth month and faring badly. Much of the support he had counted on had failed to muster, and his forces were no match for Juarez’s federals. Not Delfina nor either Little wife had heard from her husband since the uprising or knew if he was dead or alive. Their fears grew greater with every report from Mexico of another federal victory.
It was not until spring, when a dapper man named Ramos came to them with a note written in Diaz’s recognizable though barely legible hand that they learned all three men were still alive. The note did not say where they were, only that they were in hiding from the Juaristas but would soon begin making their way to the border.
There followed another two months without any word from their husbands before Ramos reappeared early one morning with another terse note from Diaz. It instructed the women to pack up and go with Ramos. He had brought a team and wagon and the women helped him to load it. That afternoon they ferried across to Matamoros and then began heading southwestward. Their husbands, Ramos told them, were awaiting them at a ranch about ten miles away.
Their route took them through an encampment of a few hundred haggard insurgents where the air was smoky with cookfires and stank of shit. The soldiers smiled at the women, and a few of the officers hailed Ramos in recognition. Then they were on the ranch and rattling past a herd of bony cattle gnawing at the ragged pasture and then a herd of bleating goats thriving on the same spare feed. And then the ranch house came into view.
Their husbands had seen them coming and were waiting on the gallery when Ramos halted the wagon at the front steps. Diaz’s head was bandaged and he had a splint on one hand, Edward carried an arm in a sling, and Louis was hobbling on a cane. Leaving the children to Silvania the maid, the women scrambled down from the wagon and ran up to the porch and threw themselves on the men, who protested the rough treatment of their wounds by such happy affections but could not quit their own grins at the women’s happiness to see them. Through most of that night there were small yelps and sweet moanings from all the bedrooms except the one at the rear of the house, where amid children sleeping like the deaf, Silvania the maid lay awake on her little cot, smiling at the sounds of the happy couplings and feeling so left out she wanted to cry.
Not until after breakfast the next morning did the women find out that Felix Diaz was dead. He had been killed in a little village called Juchitan. Murdered by Oaxacans, Diaz said. His own people. Treacherous bastards. Diaz gave no details, but that night, in the privacy of their bed, Louis told Gloria the story they’d heard from the witness who brought the bad news. Diaz had rewarded the man with a purse of silver for bringing the details—and then shot him in the foot for not having tried to defend Felix, no matter that the man would have been killed too had he tried.
What happened was that Felix had gone to Juchitan to give its men hell for not having joined Porfirio in his fight against Juarez. It was a typically rash thing for Felix to do. Not long before, while he was governor, he’d personally led a troop of militia to Juchitan and hanged five of its residents because of a rumor that they belonged to a local bandit gang. The villagers had all sworn to him the men weren’t bandits but he executed them anyway, saying it was better to be safe than sorry. Then this time Felix went there alone and apparently without a thought to the bitterness he had created on his previous visit. When they saw him ride in alone the Juchitanos could scarcely believe it. They swarmed into the street and pulled him off his horse and punched and clawed him bloody. They gouged out one of his eyes and knocked out his teeth and fried his tongue with a hot iron to put an end to his cursing of them. They sliced off the soles of his feet and paraded him through the village at the end of a rope noosed round his neck, children trotting alongside him and hitting him with sticks and laughing at each other’s mimicry of his seared tongue’s cries of agony. They slung the rope over a tree limb and repeatedly hauled him up off the ground and let him drop and in this way broke both his legs and other bones. As is the way with mobs, the more they did to him the more they wanted to do, became frenzied to do, until they finally lost all control and tore him apart as a dog pack does a hare. Then gathered his remains in a bean sack and buried them.
“Porfirio cried like a child when he heard what they did to Felix,” Louis said. “I’d say that little town’s got a real bad day in its future.”
It did for a fact. Four years hence would come a summer morning when a party of twenty armed riders led by a man the surviving women and children would be able to describe only as having the devil’s own hideous face would descend on Juchitan and drag the mayor from his house without heed of his sworn protests that he had not been the mayor four years ago and they would make him dig up the sack containing Felix’s disjointed and discolored bones and broken skull and then take the mayor to the public square and there behead him and quarter his corpse and hang the five segments of him each from a different tree and then shoot every male who looked above the age of fifteen and shoot too all the livestock and set fire to every hut and cornfield and then ride out again a bare hour after they rode in. Taking with them Felix’s desiccated remnants to receive a respectful interment in a lush Mexico City cemetery.
The three men were not yet fully recovered from their wounds when they got the news of Juarez’s death and Lerdo’s succession to the presidency. Then came word of Lerdo’s proclamation of amnesty to all rebels who would quit the fight. Diaz suspected a ruse. Over the next weeks, he made inquiries via couriers until he was finally convinced Lerdo was sincere. Then notified Lerdo of his acceptance of the amnesty, and the insurrection was
