Country of the Bad Wolfes E-Book

James Carlos Blake

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: The Wolfe Family
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 1021

Beschreibung

A page-turning epic about the making of a borderland crime family, Country of the Bad Wolfes will appeal both to aficionados of family sagas and to fans of hard-knuckled crime novels by the likes of Donald Pollack, Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke and James Ellroy. Basing the novel partly on his own ancestors, Blake presents the story of the Wolfe family - spanning three generations, centring on two sets of identical twins and the women they love, and ranging from New England to the heart of Mexico before arriving at its powerful climax at the Rio Grande. Begat by an Irish-English pirate in New Hampshire in 1828, the Wolfe family follows its manifest destiny into war-torn Mexico. There, through the connection of a mysterious American named Edward Little, their fortunes intertwine with those of Porfirio Díaz, who will rule the country for more than thirty years before his overthrow by the Revolution of 1910. In the course of those tumultuous chapters in American and Mexican history, as Díaz grows in power, the Wolfes grow rich and forge a violent history of their own, spawning a fearsome legacy that will pursue them to a climactic reckoning at the Río Grande.

Leseprobe

COUNTRY OF THE BAD WOLFES

A page-turning epic about the making of a borderland crime family,Country of the Bad Wolfeswill appeal both to aficionados of family sagas and to fans of hard-knuckled crime novels by the likes of Donald Pollack, Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke and James Ellroy.

Basing the novel partly on his own ancestors, Blake presents the story of the Wolfe family—spanning three generations, centring on two sets of identical twins and the women they love, and ranging from New England to the heart of Mexico before arriving at its powerful climax at the Rio Grande.

Begat by an Irish-English pirate in New Hampshire in 1828, the Wolfe family follows its manifest destiny into war-torn Mexico. There, through the connection of a mysterious American named Edward Little, their fortunes intertwine with those of Porfirio Díaz, who will rule the country for more than thirty years before his overthrow by the Revolution of 1910. In the course of those tumultuous chapters in American and Mexican history, as Díaz grows in power, the Wolfes grow rich and forge a violent history of their own, spawning a fearsome legacy that will pursue them to a climactic reckoning at the Río Grande.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Carlos Blakeis one of the America’s most highly regarded living authors of historical crime fiction. Born in Mexico, his family moved regularly when he was a child, living in various towns along the border and coast before finally settling in Texas when he was six. After a stint in the army, Blake attended the University of South Florida and received a Master’s degree from Bowling Green State University, both universities where he would later teach. In 1997 he left teaching to write full-time.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FORCOUNTRY OF THE BAD WOLFES

‘[A] beautifully crafted book … rich in historical detail and featuring memorable characters … takes the historical novel to an entirely new place … an exceptional piece of modern fiction’ –Tuscon Citizen

‘[A] sprawling saga … Blake’s knowledge of the history and particulars of the periods and places where the account takes place reveals close research and almost encyclopedic knowledge, especially in small details … his [is a] prodigious talent’ –Dallas Morning News

‘Blake excels in gorily choreographed fight scenes, with all make and caliber of guns discharging, sabersslashing, and body parts taking wing’–Texas Monthly

‘full of wry humor and thoughtful writing’ –Kirkus Reviews

‘engrossing and wonderfully realized’ –Publishers Weekly

‘[I]mbued with the magical realism of García Márquez … [and] the frontier brutality of Cormac McCarthy … Blake’s story will entertain fans of historical and adventure novels alike’ –Shelf Awareness

‘A literary page-turner … a romantic, violent, panoramic historical saga (written) with a journalist’s eye for detail and a poet’s love of words … a fascinating read’ –San Antonio Express

‘Spanning three generations, [Blake] spins the tale of a family ‘cursed by twin passions.’ Some in the Wolfe clan are ‘in thrall to the passions of the flesh,’ others ‘to a passion for risks of blood,’ and many are ‘damned by both.’ Love and violence rule the day, and are parceled equally between the sexes …Country of the Bad Wolfesis an engrossing novel’ –Texas Observer

‘Over the years, Blake has often been compared to Cormac McCarthy, mainly because both writers often use Mexico as setting and symbol and both are known for focusing on aspects of the human attraction to violence. Blake delivers on both in Country of the Bad Wolfes ... [which] is the first of a rumored series of books about the big bad Wolfes. This first book will lead many readers to look ahead anxiously for the next one’s appearance’–Southwestern American Literature

‘[A] worthy book… Country of the Bad Wolfesis a poetic ... offspring of Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Cormac McCarthy. … The Wolfe family is said to be cursed by ‘passions of the flesh’ and ‘risks of blood’ ... ‘a curse like a ready noose around the neck of every Wolfe.’ In the end, it is the quick, thoughtless choices of flawed men, women, leaders and nations that cause suffering, violence and early death. For Blake, it seems, we are all cursed with that noose around our neck’ –Tucson Weekly

‘A great read from start to finish, full of grit, local color, and a large cast of vibrant characters … this brawling, high-spirited, and superbly realized family saga … offers many pleasures, including endearing characters, unlikely love stories, and all manner of mayhem. Highly recommended for fans of literary fiction’ –Library Journal

‘This is the masterwork that Blake has been working on for years. Don’t be intimidated by the book’s epic, multi-generational scope either. You’ll be absolutely riveted from the first page … Full of fascinating history, the Wolfe family saga is ribald, raunchy and essential reading … don’t miss it’ –Poisoned Pen

‘Blake has a sure-handed grasp of 19th western US history and culture that is every bit as engaging and authentic as say, Cormac McCarthy and Guy Vanderhaeghe and Jim Harrison … [A] skillful and astute narrative … an enthralling tale’ –Our Man in Boston

‘A sprawling, magnificent story of three generations of men, their fortunes, loves and losses, during a fascinating time in the history of the United States and Mexico’ –Bookworks

‘[A] wild tale of family, twins and politics. ... [with] Hemingway-like descriptions.... You won’t want to put this one down until it’s over. ... The Wolfes are a lively bunch ... that make Zorba the Greek look dull.... The book is not for the weak-hearted, or the highly Moral. It will make you squirm a bit, no matter how open-minded or tough you think you are. It is a violent book ... of turbulent times ... [but] there is beauty and love, and antics of a high-spirited family. It is exciting and rewards an intellectual curiosity about how things work, how the world changed, how history is interpreted. You will want the read all of Blake’s books Bravo’ –Helium

‘[A] sweeping family saga [of] adventuring and philandering, smuggling and murdering and politicking in early-1900s Mexico and the borderlands... Blake not only weaves a good fireside yarn, he produces a strong literary tale too. [He] expertly plays with form, changing verb tense and perspective occasionally, slipping back and forth through time and place as though from string to string on a guitar neck.... [And] the women in this novel are also strong, smart, and funny ... men’s equal in Wolfe country’ –Rain Taxi

‘The book is trademark Blake with rogue heroes, duels, and demons and angels of human nature locked in a violent dance with one another. It’s a look at the United States and Mexico and the bloodshed, politics, and history that lies between the borders … As a whole, James Carlos Blake’s work has the feel of lived-in legend. It’s a collection of old folk ballads singing to a new present. And I highly recommend you listen … Country of the Bad Wolfes tells us the best is yet to come’ –Mystery People

‘[In] a story of power and what will be done to keep it, James Carlos Blake puts together a historical novel packed cover to cover with intrigue … a fine and much recommended addition to any historical fiction collection’ –Midwest Book Review

‘This is historical fiction in the manner of Umberto Eco…many-faceted, slow, and savory’ –Booklist

Praise for James Carlos Blake andThe Rules of Wolfe

‘Blake’s literary badlands are uniquely his own’ –GQ

‘For anyone who has never experienced the exceptional talent of the idiosyncratic Blake, this is a wonderful novel to start with...Passionate, bloody and yet incredibly romantic, it is a tribute to the genius of its author’ –Geoffrey Wansell,Daily Mail

‘Nobody writes about blood and guts better than James Carlos Blake’ –Washington Post

James Carlos Blake writes with the muscularity of great pulp novels and the grace of a dancer – from the edge of an America that is forever frontier –James Sallis

‘Blake’s prose is muscular, his dialogue and details are keenly observed… one hell of a ride’ –Booklist

‘Blake’s customary zest for life and death makes his latest modern historical thriller violent, sexy and exciting’ –Kirkus Reviews

‘Blake writes with a fearless precision and a ruthless sensibility, his prose is spare and tough, and his descriptions detailed and cinematic’–Publishers Weekly

‘One of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life’ –Entertainment Weekly

‘James Carlos Blake is a formidable writer [and] a deft stylist, welding the language with power and authority’ –Tucson Weekly

‘James Carlos Blake is of the Cormac McCarthy/Sam Peckinpah school of storytelling: Make it bloody as hell, but make it beautiful’ –Dallas Morning News

‘One of the most original writers in America today’ –Chicago Sun-Times

‘An epic chase’ –Men’s Journal

‘Riveting’ –Latinidad

‘This sand-blasted odyssey is quick, bloody and beautiful with prose as eloquent and unexpected as a cactus flower’ –Madison County Herald

PROLOGUE

The family landed in the Western Hemisphere in the person of Roger Blake Wolfe, who arrived with a price on his head. No likeness of him—a sketch, a painting, a daguerreotype—survived through the generations, and the accepted description of him as handsome was based solely on the family’s penchant for romantic fancy and the genetic testament of their own good looks. Even his own sons never knew him in the flesh.

As a matter of record, Roger Blake Wolfe was born in London in 1797. His father was Henry Morgan Wolfe, an Irishman of murky lineage who triumphed over that disadvantage of birth to become a British naval officer and then managed the even more heroic achievement of marrying into a wealthy Knightsbridge family named Blake. Henry Wolfe had high ambitions for his son in the Royal Navy, but Roger, who loved the sea but abhorred regimentation, did not share them. When he ran away at age sixteen, absconding from a maritime academy, his father disinherited him through an announcement in the Times.

Thirteen years later Roger Blake Wolfe was a pirate captain of some notoriety, one of the last of a breed near to extinction by the early 19th century. His ship was named either the Yorick or the York Witch, the former name appearing in some reports and court documents, the latter in others. Although he restricted his freeboot to the waters off Iberia and West Africa and never attacked an English vessel, the British in 1826 acceded to diplomatic imperatives and joined with various aggrieved nations in posting a reward for his capture, dead or alive. Whereupon Captain Wolfe decided to distance himself from that part of the world. Three of the crew’s Englishmen chose not to go with him and he put them ashore near Lisbon with enough money to make their way home. The first mate said he understood their feelings. He said it was a hard thing to say goodbye forever to one’s home country. Captain Wolfe laughed at that and said it wasn’t so hard when one’s home country wanted to hang one. And set sail across the Atlantic.

Fifteen leagues shy of Nantucket the ship was struck by a ferocious storm and foundered. Only Roger and two of his crew survived the sinking, clutching to a spar in that plunging frigid sea. The storm at last abated during the night but one of the crewmen succumbed to the cold and slipped off into the darkness. Shortly afterward the spar suddenly shook in a phosphorescent agitation and the other crewman vanished, his scream lost to the depths. Roger did not see the shark that took him. Through the rest of the night he expected to be attacked too but was not. The following day broke clear and sun-bright on a calm sea, and by wondrous chance he was spotted by an American whaler bound for home. His fingers had to be pried from the spar and it was hours more before his shivering began to ease under a heavy cover of blankets and sizable doses of rum. He was landed in New Bedford and his adventure condensed to a newspaper item in which he claimed to be Morgan Blake and described the lost ship as a Dutch cargo carrier.

It is anyone’s guess how he occupied himself during the next year or what took him to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where in October of 1827 and under his true name he married Mary Margaret Parham, who at the time believed he was a merchant ship master. Six weeks later he sailed away to southward and she never heard from him again. Six months after his departure she bore his twin sons. The boys were a year old when she received notice of their father’s execution in Mexico.

Archives in Veracruz contain a variety of documents pertaining to Roger Blake Wolfe’s arrest in a waterfront cantina on Christmas Eve of 1828 and his ensuing trial and conviction on charges of piracy and murder in Mexican waters. In keeping with protocol, the British Consulate provided a Mexican attorney for his defense and afterward concurred with the court’s verdict. For reasons unrecorded he was sentenced to be shot rather than hanged, the usual and more ignominious fate of condemned pirates.

The morning of his execution on the first day of February, 1829, was reported to be clear and mild. The central plaza raucous with parrots and marimba bands, with vendors hawking melon slices and coconut milk. The air tanged with the smell of the gulf. The large crowd was composed of every social class and in a mood even more festive than usual for an execution—perhaps, as one newspaper surmised, because of the novelty of the condemned man’s Anglo nationality. When Roger was trundled to the plaza in a donkey cart amid the tolling of steeple bells and made to stand against the church wall in front of the firing squad, there were catcalls and whistles but also much comment on his undaunted demeanor and striking figure. His clothes were fresh-laundered, his beard in neat trim, his hatless black locks tied in a horse tail at his nape.

A diversion occurred when a pair of young women at the fore of the crowd, each claiming to be Captain Roger’s true sweetheart, got into a skirt-hiking scuffle to the delight of the nearest male witnesses. It was said that the pirate himself seemed amused by this contest over his affections. In a valediction rendered through an interpreter, he assured the two girls that he loved them both to equal degree, a sentiment that stirred the crowd to murmurs of both grudging approbation and high skepticism. He gave one of the girls his gold earring and the other a finger ring set with a pearl in the shape of a skull. When he bequeathed his remaining credit at a cantina called Las Sirenas toward as many drinks as it would buy for the regular patrons of that establishment, there were loud cheers of “Viva el capitán!” from the corner of the plaza where that disreputable bunch was assembled.

He declined a blindfold and stood smoking a cigar, an insouciant thumb hooked in his belt, as the fusiliers took aim. At the muskets’ discharge, a squall of birds burst from the trees and a slow blue cloud of powdersmoke ascended after them. The officer in charge of the execution—a young lieutenant named Montenegro—delivered the customary coup de grâce pistolshot to the head. Then unsheathed his saber and with an expert slash decapitated the corpse.

The head was taken at once to the yellow-rock fortress of San Juan de Ulúa at the mouth of the harbor and placed on a tower pike in warning to all the city and every passing ship. The body was borne off in the donkey cart, and onlookers made the sign of the cross as it passed them on its way to the graveyard. And the two women who had fought over him were not the only ones to dip their skirt hems in the blood puddled in the cobbles.

He was buried in the low-lying cemetery at the south end of the city. He had arranged for a marble headstone engraved with his name and ad vivum praedo. But within a week of his interment the marker was stolen by persons unknown.

On its high vantage over the harbor, the head blackened and was fed upon by birds and over time reduced to bare yellow bone with a .54-caliber hole in the parietal and an unremitting grin. The skull disappeared in the next hurricane, and the floodwaters forced open his grave and carried his bones to the sea.

PART ONE

MARY MARGARET AND THE GEMINI

The twin sons of Roger Blake Wolfe were born in late May under the apt sign of Gemini. Mary Margaret named them Samuel Thomas—the elder by three minutes—and John Roger. She and the boys lived with her widower father, John Thomas Parham, in a flat above his Portsmouth tavern, where she tended tables every night. It was a waterfront pub catering to a seaman trade, Mr Parham himself having been thirteen years a merchant officer before a shipboard mishap left him crippled of foot and permanently dependent on a crutch. Except for the first six weeks of her marriage, during which she and Captain Wolfe lived in a rented cottage, the tavern was the only home Mary Margaret had ever known or would. Only nineteen years old when widowed, she would afterward not lack for suitors but she would not marry again. As in the case of Roger Blake Wolfe, no picture of her would pass down through the generations, but her sons would describe her to their children as blue-eyed and slender, with pale brown hair she liked to wear in a braid down her back.

From the time of their early childhood the twins were curious about their father and now and again questioned Mary Margaret about him. Beyond telling them he had been a merchant ship captain and was lost at sea, she was disinclined to discuss him and was skilled at changing the subject. Both her reticence and her falsehoods were rooted in a sense of disgrace. She had not been able to surmount her angry shame over his desertion of her and their unborn children. A shame made all the worse after he had been gone for a year and a half and she received a letter from the British Embassy apprising her that her husband and British subject Roger Blake Wolfe, a captain of pirates and fugitive from justice, had been convicted of murder by the Mexican government and duly executed in the city of Veracruz. The letter did not relate the particulars of his crime or the means of his execution nor disclose the disposition of his remains, but she did not care to know any of those details. She wept for days in sorrowful and furious mortification. How could the man she loved so dearly have done such dreadful things? How was it possible she had loved a man so different in truth from what he had seemed to her? What other lies had he told her? The more she pondered these questions the more the very notion of love did baffle her.

She demanded her father’s promise not to tell her sons of Roger’s criminal occupation and ignoble death, and because he was sympathetic to her sentiments Mr Parham so promised. But although he did not say so, he believed she was in error to keep the truth from the twins. He was not so shocked as his daughter by the news about Captain Wolfe. He’d had his hunch about the man from the start, having been acquainted with a number of men disposed to outlawry and having at times even conspired in a bit of furtive business with some of them. This minor criminality was but one secret Mr Parham had kept from his wife and daughter. Another was that his father had been Red Ned Kennedy, the notorious mankiller and highwayman. Mr Parham himself had been unaware of his true paternity until after his mother died of the consumption when he was twelve and he was taken in by her old-maid sister. One day in a fit of meanness the aunt told him all about his nefarious father. “Hanged your pa was,” she told him, “in the public square at Kittery in the glorious year of ’76, not six months after your birth. Your poor mam so wanting to spare ye the dishonor of him, God pity her, that she quit his name and took back our own. Oh, she thought she had herself a prize, she did, when she married that one with his easy smile and blarney and his promises to be a lawful man. And just look what came of it. Heartbreak and shame and an early widowhood. I’d a thousand times choose to have no man a-tall than be wed to a blackguard like him.” Young Mr Parham had affected a woeful disillusionment in his father in order to satisfy his aunt’s righteousness and thereby ease the temper of his stay with her until he was of age to go to sea. But he would all his life harbor a secret pride in a sire who had been so feared in his time, and the only regret he’d ever had in being son to Red Ned Kennedy was that he himself was not more like him. He thought his grandsons might feel the same way to know their own pa had been a “gentleman of fortune,” as the phrase of the day had it. Still, he knew better than to say so to Mary Margaret, who would certainly not agree nor even care to hear it.

But as the twins grew older their entreaties about their father became more insistent and difficult for Mary Margaret to deflect. She knew she could not go on refusing them but her heart remained a divided country in its feelings for her husband and she was uncertain of what to tell them. The boys were eleven when she at last capitulated to their appeals—and little by little, over the months, she acquainted them with Roger Blake Wolfe as she had known him. And in the process of so doing, she discovered that he yet held a greater claim on the sunny south of her heart than on its frosty north. Still, she never spoke of him to her sons by any name other than “your father,” “Captain Wolfe,” or simply “the captain.” Nor did she soon recant her falsehoods about his true vocation and manner of demise. And her accounts to them omitted of course many private particulars.

She met Roger Blake Wolfe on a summer eve when he came into the tavern for a mug of ale and dish of sausage. Dozens of sailors had wooed Mary Margaret in vain but with Captain Wolfe’s first smile she was smitten. He was not tall but carried himself as a tall man. He wore a close pointed beard and his black hair and hazel eyes would be replicated in his sons. So too his cocky grin. He began showing up at the tavern every night and each time she caught sight of him her breath deepened. He gladdened her. Made her laugh. Made her blush and feel warm with his compliments. His speech was tinged with the brogue of his Irish da. He was the only one she ever permitted to call her Maggie. She had known him barely two weeks the first time she sneaked out her window late one night to rendezvous in a moonlit copse above the harbor. She was seventeen. He was her first lover and her last.

Mr Parham too had taken a shine to the captain and when Mary Margaret, after barely two months’ society with the man, told her father they were in love and wanted to marry right away, he did not object. The next day he received Captain Wolfe at home and granted his request for his daughter’s hand. Mary Margaret was pleased but had expected resistance. Ever since her childhood both her father and her mother, a comely and lettered woman who died when Mary Margaret was twelve, had many times warned her about sailors as a breed not prone to cleave close to the hearth. Her father’s ready acceptance of the marriage convinced her he knew the real reason for her haste.

Her conviction was correct. Mr Parham had easily intuited Mary Margaret’s compelling condition and knew it was not the less compelling for being as old as morality and as common as cliché. Given that the usual course of sailors in such a state of affairs was to abandon the girl to her shameful fate, the real surprise to Mr Parham was Captain Wolfe’s willingness to marry Mary Margaret. It was testimony to the man’s honor that he would not forsake mother and child to the disrepute of bastardy. But while Mr Parham had no doubt of his daughter’s unreserved love for the captain, he knew the captain’s love for her was of a different kind and that probably sooner rather than later the man could not help but break her heart.

On a crisp afternoon in early October they were wed in a maritime chapel overlooking Portsmouth Bay. The next six weeks were the happiest of Mary Margaret’s life. The captain was only twice absent from home and for only a few days each time, once to Gloucester and once to Portland, on business which he did not confide and about which she did not inquire. He had told her little of his past, saying there was little enough to tell. His Irish father a boat builder by trade, his English mother a beauty with a hearty laugh, both of them killed in a house fire when he was a child, and then a London orphanage until he ran away to sea. This bare synopsis was ample to her, as the man himself was her absorption. She liked to watch the play of his form as he axed cordwood, to see his enjoyment in meals of her making, to feel his fingers loosing her hair from its braid, to wake before him early of a morning and watch him still at sleep. To share in his love of dancing. Among her most joyful memories were those of high-stepping with him to the fiddles and pipes on a dancehall Saturday night. Sometimes when he was full of drink he would sing humorous bawdy songs and she would laugh even as she admonished him to mind his manners. He was a man of wit and easy laughter, she told her sons, and had a gift for telling a tale.

“Was he a good fighter?” Samuel Thomas once asked, his eyes avid. And was puzzled by the melancholic look his mother fixed upon him. Then she sighed and said yes, the captain could surely fight. She had witnessed the proof of it one busy evening in the tavern. There was a sudden commotion at the rear of the room and she looked over there to see a large man speaking angrily and pointing a finger in the captain’s face, but she could not hear his words for the clamor of the crowd forming about them. Then she had to stand on a chair to see—and she nearly cried out at the sight of the man brandishing a long-bladed knife such as the shark-fishers used, and the captain barehanded. The circle of spectators moved across the floor with the two men as the sharker advanced on the captain with vicious swipes of the knife. She mimicked the sharker’s action—swishswish swish—and how the captain hopped rearward with his arms outflinging at each pass of the blade. Her eyes were brighter than she knew as she reenacted the fight for her sons, who were spellbound. Then a heavy tankard came to the captain’s hand, and in his next sidestep of the knife he struck the sharker a terrific blow to the head, staggering him. Then hit him again and knocked him stunned and bloody-faced to the floor. He kicked away the knife and stood over him with an easy smile and the room thundered with bellows to finish him, finishhim! The man was on all fours when the captain clubbed him on the crown with the tankard and he buckled like a hammered beef. The walls shook with cheering. The unconscious sharker was dragged away by the heels to be deposited in the alley. The captain grinned whitely in the blackness of his beard and fired a cigar. Then his eyes found her still atop the chair and her hand to her mouth. And he winked.

“Yowwww. . . .” the twins said.

The more Mary Margaret told of him, the more vivid became her recollections—and more than once, as she described the captain’s mischievous laugh or the cant of his sailor’s walk or the distant cast of his eyes when he spoke of the open sea, she would be weeping before she was aware of it.

Came a cold November morning he told her he had been commissioned to transport a cargo out of Gloucester to Savannah and would be gone for perhaps three months. And that afternoon, carpetbag in hand, he kissed her goodbye and patted her haunch, said, “Fare ye well, Maggie darlin,” and left her forever.

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 Phillips 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 inexperience increasingly intolerable, and one night he finally accompanied Samuel Thomas out the window and down the drainpipe and along the shadowed streets to the Blue Mermaid. He there drank his first full mug of ale and had the first dance of his life with a woman not his mother. When a sailor tripped him for a prank, his brother lashed into the man with a flurry of wicked punches that sent him crashing over a table and streaming blood from his broken nose. The girls cheered the entertainment and John Roger was agawk with admiration. “God almighty, Sammy! You settled his hash!” The bouncer decreed the sailor at fault and booted him from the premises. The girls had been tickled to learn Samuel Thomas had a twin, and when they learned he was virgin they squabbled over which of them would be his initiator. They each enticed John Roger to pick her over the others and he blushed furiously and could not decide until Sammy said, “Just pick one, for Christ’s sake!” John Roger pointed at the youngest-looking, a plump genial girl named Megan who looked innocent as a choir girl and, as he soon discovered, had a spider tattoo on her tummy.

They sang on their way home and laughed at the imprecations from the windows of roused sleepers. When they drew near to home they shushed each other with warnings not to wake their mother, and they were furtive as burglars in climbing the pipe back up to their window. Samuel Thomas was asleep as soon as he put head to pillow but John Roger struggled to stay awake, to savor a while longer the heady feeling of having crossed over to the world of men.

The following morning his pleasure gave way to a chill anxiety that he might have contracted a horrid disease. He had read about venereal corruptions in a medical text and the symptomatic descriptions had induced a palpable cringing of his privates. He dared not mention his misgivings to Samuel Thomas who no doubt disdained such fears and would likely laugh at him. He berated himself for a reckless fool and cursed the erotic compulsion that had overwhelmed his good sense. For weeks afterward his every visit to the privy included a meticulous scrutiny of his member for some sign of encroaching infection. When he was finally sure he had come through unscathed, his relief was profound. He never again went on such a frisk with his brother and never told him why not. And swore to himself never again to engage with a whore.

On those occasions when Samuel Thomas came back from a night’s cavort with facial bruises, he would explain them to his mother as a consequence of roughhouse with his brother, whom he accused of not knowing his own strength, and John Roger never failed to provide loyal perjuries of corroboration. But Mary Margaret knew a few things about sneaking through windows and was well aware of Samuel Thomas’s nocturnal excursions. She feared his fondness for hazardous entertainments and gave him a warning lecture against them. He listened with due respect and said he would bear her counsel in mind. And then once again, in a pre-dawn hour of a subsequent morning, she woke to faint scrapings as he shinnied up the pipe at the far end of the roof overhang and stole back into his room. It was little consolation to remind herself it would have been as futile for her father to try keeping her from Captain Wolfe. She sensed Samuel Thomas’s impatience to be out in the world, and though she could do nothing to dissuade him from his ramblings—she would not stoop to haranguing nor to weeping in plea—she implored him to at least complete his studies at the Madison School and receive his diploma. And he promised her he would.

Two months before her sons’ graduations Mary Margaret got sick for the first time in her life. She went to bed with a fever one night and in the morning was sheened with sweat and aching to the bone and too weak to rouse herself. She refused to send for a doctor, saying she would recover soon enough after a cup of broth and bit of rest. The next day she was worse. John Roger fetched a doctor who prescribed a physic and cold compresses and said he would return in the morning. That evening she was delirious. The twins sat at her bedside in the amber light of an oil lamp and took turns mopping her brow and neck. She tossed through the night, her eyes dark hollows, her nightdress pasted to her skin, the shadowed room malodorous with her sickly swelter. Just before dawn she startled them when she suddenly sat up and stared unblinking into a shadowy corner of the room. Then lay back and fixed Samuel Thomas with a stare that glowed like blown embers and said, “Do not be him or ye are damned.” Then said, “The light is too bright.” And closed her eyes and died. John Roger wept while Samuel Thomas straightened her nightdress and arranged the bedclothes and washed her face and brushed her hair and then sent for the doctor. For lack of a better guess the medico cited brain fever on the death certificate.

A number of longtime patrons of the pub attended the funeral, and flowers were heaped about the headstone.

Mary Parham Wolfe

1810 - 1845

Beloved Mother

of John and Samuel

In sorting through her belongings they found a loaded derringer in a drawer of her vanity. The handlegrips were of ivory and engraved with RBW. Both of them wanted the gun and again resorted to the spin of a coin. And that antique agent of fate conferred the pistol on Samuel Thomas.

They received their diplomas in June and that same day posed together in a Market Street studio for a pair of daguerreotype photographs, one for each of them. Standing side by side in their formal graduation dress they presented a double image of a single and somberly handsome seventeen-year-old self. Some weeks later they sold the tavern and took lodging at a sailors’ hostel called the Yardarm Inn, where they would reside through the rest of the summer before taking leave of Portsmouth. John Roger was bound for Hanover and the freshman class at Dartmouth, having earned a scholarship by means of his superior academic record, a host of glowing letters of recommendation, and a fine application essay expounding on the nobility of the legal profession. Samuel Thomas had signed as a deck hand with a cargo ship scheduled to set sail five days after his brother left town. The Atropos would make several ports of call along the seaboard down to Jacksonville before reversing course back to Portsmouth.

John Roger had favored an equal division of the proceeds from the tavern sale but Samuel Thomas would accept only enough money to see him through until he shipped out. “You’ll be needing a fat purse for college a lot more than I’ll be needing one at sea.”

They had never before been separated, and during the last hours before his departure for Hanover on the evening coach, John Roger’s glumness was plain to see. Over a café supper, Samuel Thomas reminded him that the Atropos would be gone for only six months. He promised to go see him at Dartmouth as soon as he returned.

At the coach station, they embraced and wished each other well. Samuel Thomas said he would post a letter from every port of call. “Plan on me being back around the middle of winter,” he said with a grin. “Whether you like it or not.”

It is an ancient joke that to make God laugh you need only tell Him your plans.

After seeing his brother off, Samuel Thomas returned to the Yardarm, but he was not sleepy and tried to pass the time with a small atlas. It was the only book he had packed in his carpetbag together with some clothes and toiletries, the graduation daguerreotype, his grandfather’s hornpipe—which he had won by yet another coin toss—and the derringer. But he felt John Roger’s absence like a great gap in his chest and the atlas could not hold his attention. He wished the Atropos were weighing anchor in the morning rather than in five days. Near midnight he was yet wide awake and decided a long walk and a pint might be of help. He was almost out the door when he remembered that some of the inn’s rooms had been robbed the night before while their residents were away. The only thing in his bag of value to a thief was the derringer, so he retrieved it and put it in his jacket pocket.

He walked a long way down the waterfront with his collar turned up against a chill breeze. He did not desire conversation and so chose a saloon he had not patronized before and where no one knew him. He drank by himself at the end of the bar, downing three slow mugs of ale before taking his leave at just after two o’clock, a pleasant tingle on his lips. The wind had come up and carried a heavy smell of impending rain. The misty lamp-lit streets lay deserted to the late hour and the coming storm.

He had his head down against the wind as he turned a corner—and collided with a large man coming from the other direction, his forehead striking the man in the face, jarring him rearward and bringing blood from his nose. The man’s instant reaction was to yell “Bastard!” and lash out with the truncheon in his hand, striking Samuel Thomas on the ear and knocking off his hat. Samuel Thomas yelped and punched at the man in reflex but missed, and the man rushed at him, flailing in a fury, driving him back against a wall. Then the derringer was in Samuel Thomas’s hand and the pistol cracked with a yellow flash—the first time he’d fired a gun in his life—and the half-inch ball punched through the man’s neck and rang off a lamppost. The man’s head slumped like a puppet’s snipped of its string and his hat rolled off and his body raced it to the ground. Staring at the sprawled figure and the black ribbons of blood unspooling along the cobblestone seams, Samuel Thomas knew the man was dead, and a chaos of sensations coursed through him. Then he saw the watchman brassard on the man’s arm and was jolted with cold dread. He looked all about and saw no one. Then snatched up his hat and ran.

He’d gone two blocks before realizing he still had the gun in his hand and he flung it high onto a rooftop. His ear throbbed and felt to his fingers like a chunk of peeled fruit. He kept to the shadows as he hurried through the empty streets and without destination other than away from the harbor. He held his hat to his head against the strengthening wind and felt the first pricks of rain on his face—and then it was slapping into him in gusting swirls.

His thoughts were a turmoil. What if there were a witness, someone who had been looking on from the shadows? What if there were inquiries at the sailors’ inns and it was learned at the Yardarm of a guest of his description, Samuel Wolfe by name, who had gone out and not returned even to retrieve his carpetbag? He remembered now that his carpetbag still held the photograph of himself and his brother and he had a moment’s frantic impulse to return for it—then cursed himself for a fool and hastened on. To report to the Atropos was out of the question. Someone might check the crew rosters of all ships in harbor. The more he pondered his plight the worse it seemed. Homicide was in any instance a grave matter but the killing of a watchman always roused an outrage. He had once read a newspaper account of a Boston sailor who killed a watchman in a fight and then fled, fearing no one would believe his claim of self-defense. He was shortly run to ground by manhunters seeking the posted reward and his fear was borne out. Although none of the witnesses could say how the fight had started, and though he swore before God and jurymen that he had only been defending himself against a severe and unjustified attack, he was judged guilty of murder and hanged.

Samuel Thomas was sure the bountymen would soon be on his track. He thought to keep walking until he was clear of Portsmouth and into the woods. But then what? He turned at the next corner for no reason other than a fugitive’s instinct to vary his course. And saw up ahead and across the street a handful of men huddled in their coats and standing against the wall in front of an office with a sign identifying it as a recruiting post for the Army of the United States.

It was still raining hard when the sergeant arrived and unlocked the office, giving merry praise to such patriotism as would abide a drenching in order to serve its country. They all went inside and formed a line in front of the sergeant’s desk. When it was Samuel Thomas’s turn before the sergeant and he was asked his name, he said, “Thomas, Samuel Thomas,” believing the alias a clever one, false only in its lack of complete truth. The recruiter began to write it down. “And what’s the middle initial, Mr Thomas?”

He was unprepared for that. “It’s, ah . . . H.” The first letter that came to mind.

The sergeant smiled and entered it. Then looked up again and studied Samuel Thomas’s battered ear. “What was it she hit you with, lad, a fry pan? Well, it’s off to a better mistress now, you can be sure. She’ll clothe ye and feed ye and give ye a rifle. A goodly more than most will do, now aint it?”

Before noon he and seven other enlistees were on a recruiting wagon bound for Fort Hamilton in New York. He had decided he would not write to John Roger for a long while. He could not trust anyone to carry a letter to him without reading it—or worse, permitting it to fall into the wrong hands and be of help to manhunters.

His plan was to hide in the army for a year or so, long enough for the bountymen to give up their search. Then he would desert. He would go to the nearest port and under another name sign on with a ship for New England. He would seek out John Roger in Hanover and apologize for his long silence and explain everything to him.

Such, in any case, was his plan.

THE TURNCOAT’S TRIALS

In February of 1845 the United States annexed the nine-year-old Republic of Texas and six months later was still in diplomatic dispute with Mexico over the location of the border between the two countries. The U.S. insisted, as Texas always had, that the border was the Rio Grande. And as always, Mexico insisted it was at the Nueces River, more than a hundred miles north. But it had now become obvious that President James Knox Polk’s greater ambition was to acquire the necessary territory to expand the Yankee republic all the way to the Pacific. Acquire it by whatever means necessary. Newspapers across the country carried heated opinions on both sides of the issue. At the same time that the president was proposing diplomatic resolutions to the border argument—all of them so unfavorable to Mexico that it could never agree to them—he dispatched the benignly named Army of Observation under the command of General Zachary Taylor to the mouth of the Nueces River. Taylor’s ostensible purpose was to protect Texas against Mexican invasion, but as everyone knew, including the Mexicans, Mr Polk was in fact making ready an invasion of his own.

Even before taking refuge in the ranks, Samuel Thomas had been aware of the war talk. But the risk of combat in Mexico seemed a lesser one than facing a murder charge in Portsmouth. He was not the only one in the company on the run from legal complications, and there were of course patriots in the ranks, and no shortage of callow youths in quest of battlefield glory, but the majority of his comrades had enlisted for the ageless reason of escape from poverty. A number of them had arrived on immigrant ships, mostly Irishmen fled from the Famine. But the America they’d landed in was predominantly Protestant and of English stock, and its larger cities were hotbeds of nativist loathing of the foreign tide staining its shores, especially of the Paddies and their slavish papist faith. It was a hatred no less virulent than what the Hibernians had endured in Britain and as much a barrier to any but the most abject jobs. Rather than dig privies or scrounge in the streets for survival, many of them enlisted in the army, believing it a lesser adversity.

In late winter their regiment at last received the order to join General Taylor in Texas. For most of the company, and certainly for Samuel Thomas, who had never been outside New Hampshire before his enlistment, the journey from New York to the Gulf of Mexico was an education in American geography and regional societies. Traversing a countryside early thawing to mud, they were transported by wagons to Pittsburgh and there put aboard a sternwheel steamboat that carried them west along the Ohio River and through country budding with incipient greenery. Where the Ohio joined the Mississippi they transferred onto a side-wheeler for the trip south. The Old Man, the boatmen called the great river, and Samuel Thomas was awestruck by its breadth. The country they passed through grew more distinct from that which they left behind. The dense woodlands along the banks occasionally gave way to verdant pasturelands and fields of black earth so fertile he could smell it from the railing. He saw turtles the size of saddlebags sunning themselves on mud banks and driftwood. Saw a bald eagle high on a pine eviscerating a limp panther cub in its talons. Saw a trio of boys hauling onto the bank a hooked catfish bigger than any of them.

They churned downriver through days of surpassing loveliness and then entered an unseasonable heat broken by sporadic rainfall. When they were not sopped with rain they were sodden with sweat. They passed by a sequence of port towns and made brief moorings at some of them for fuel and supplies. Towns loud and rough and seeming like foreign countries, so profuse were they with Negroes, with the drawling speech of blacks and whites alike. The river journey ended at New Orleans, where they passed two joyous days and nights and Samuel Thomas spent the best two dollars of his life for the pleasures of an octoroon girl with caramel skin and nipples dark as chocolate and a mouth like red fruit. It was said the city suffered from chronic afflictions of fire and flood and devastating storm, that it was notorious for yellow fever and murder and every sort of carnal delinquency. But Samuel Thomas fancied its bohemian character and exuberant wickedness, and he felt somehow more at home in his two days there than he’d ever felt in Portsmouth. He thought he might someday return to stay.

They shipped out on the steamship Alabama. His first view of the Gulf of Mexico was under a low morning sun that made an undulant gold of the water’s surface. He was struck by the dissimilarity of smell from the North Atlantic, the squalling gulls of different cry and character from those of New England. The pelicans were a novel entertainment—graceful on the wing, but in repose so like comical, jowly, big-bottomed bureaucrats. The ship steamed into the gulf under high billowing clouds of dazzling white, and the mainland shrank from view off the starboard.