Eight days after Díaz’s departure from Mexico, Edward Little, eighty-one years old and uneasy in his bones, wakes to darkness but needs no clock to know it is his hour of rising. He has never had much use for sleep and in the past forty years has rarely retired before midnight or failed to rise before dawn. More recently he has come to regard a night’s sleep with a vague dread, as the surrender of one more of his remaining days, and so he has been waking earlier still. As if even in sleep he senses the waning of time and cannot abide being unconscious in its passing.
Madero is to arrive in the capital today but Edward plans to be gone by then. Yet there is time enough to indulge, in the single instance of his life, a brief lingering in bed. He will miss this city, though he knows he will be missing a place that no longer exists, that has already become someplace other. A truth of our lives, he thinks. All the places we have loved in the past have become someplace other. There is no place to go back to, not for any man. Nothing endures but the beauty of the natural world, and so he will retire to the beauty surrounding Patria Chica. It is a wonder the place was spared. So many rebel gangs in the region and yet none attacked it. No need after all to have sent the children to the border. But you make a decision and live with its consequences. Eduardo Luis dead. Sandra Rosario vanished. But Catalina alive—and what was of greater import? When he gets to Patria Chica he will send for her, first thing.
As he starts to get up he feels the bed quiver queerly. And then the entire house shudders violently and there is a great shattering downpour of glass in every room. The bed tilts and he falls back onto it. The house begins convulsing. The walls shedding scales of plaster, breaking open, falling. Ceiling beams cracking and buckling, sections of roof crashing down. There is a great groan from the earth below and the entire house sways and he is flung to the floor from which he cannot rise for the antic undulations of it. And then the floor itself gives way and he plunges into the roaring black maw of the rent world. And the ruins of his Mexican home follow after and bury him.
It is the worst earthquake in the capital since Mexico’s independence, lasting nearly fifteen minutes and killing several hundred and reducing much of the city to rubble. And still, only hours later, Francisco Madero enters the capital at the head of a long parade of blaring bands and rowdy celebrants. Bands blare and the crowds lining the broken streets weep and cheer in the joy of their deliverance, crying Viva Madero! again and again. Viva Madero! Whom a cabal of army generals led by Victoriano Huerta will assassinate in February of 1913. The ensuing civil war will be the most protracted and most savage in the country’s bloody history—and the onlooking nations of the civilized world will be appalled by Mexico’s brute regression from the pinnacle of the Porfiriato.
SINS OF THE FATHERS
On an early Saturday afternoon they ford the river a few miles west of town and then ride into Brownsville. Four red-eyed horsemen as gray with dust as their mounts, each man of them wearing pistol and knife, each horse hung with rifle and machete, one saddle horn with a stinking gray sack of black-stained bottom attended by a drone of flies. The fighting has made chaos of rail travel, but they managed to bribe their way onto a flatcar of one military transport train after another, moving northward stretch by stretch—to Jalapa, to Tampico, to Ciudad Victoria, where the northward rail line had been destroyed and they bought horses to carry them the last two hundred miles to the border.
Market day. The town abustle. Their horses bare their teeth at honking puttering automobiles amid the wagon traffic. None of the four men speak English but through casual queries of an assortment of Mexican locals they learn everything they need to know. Learn of the Wolfe properties and residences and that the twins are longtime constables of celebrated feats who in the course of doing their duty have killed many bad men. Of course they would be lawmen, Juan Lobo thinks. Of course they would have a home on the seashore and own a great tract of land and call it Tierra Wolfe. Of course.
A Ford touring car is parked alongside one of the Levee Street houses, Marina having come to town earlier today, driven by Harry Sebastian, to have an aching tooth attended by a dentist. They plan to return to the beach in the morning. No neighbors are in sight as the men dismount and lead their horses to the car and tether them to it. Dax and Sarmiento go around to the back and Juan Lobo and Pori to the front.
Harry Sebastian answers the knock at the door. A fat man in dirty clothes, hat in hand, says he is sorry to disturb anyone but he has an important message for Blake and James Wolfe. Harry says neither of them is in town at the moment and there is no telephone where they are, but he will be seeing them tomorrow and will be glad to take the message. Fat Pori brings a revolver up from behind the hat and cocks it as he puts the muzzle to Harry’s forehead and backs him into the parlor. Juan Lobo follows them inside and closes the door. Marina enters from the kitchen, drying her hands with a dishcloth and asking who it was, then freezes, seeing the strangers and the gun to her son’s head.
Go back in the kitchen, Mother, Harry Sebastian says, thinking of his folded knife in his pocket, his pistol in the other room.
Juan Lobo tells her to stay where she is. Then takes a look into the bedrooms and returns with Harry’s gun in his belt and goes into the kitchen and says something to someone at the rear door. Then is back and standing before Marina. She meets his eyes and it is all she can do to hide her fear. Listen, she says. I am Marina Wolfe. You better leave right now and go somewhere far away before my husband hears of this. Juan Lobo grins and says, Which one is he? James Sebastián Wolfe, she says. Poor bastard, Juan Lobo says, married to such a hag.
Don’t talk to her like that, you son of a bitch, Harry Sebastian says. Pori drives a knee into Harry’s crotch and the boy falls down and clutches himself and vomits. Marina starts to scream but Lobo clamps a hand over her mouth and seizes her to him from behind. He nods at Pori who draws his knife and goes down on one knee and thrusts the blade into Harry’s heart.
Marina is wild-eyed, her horrified cries muffled under Lobo’s stifling hand as she fights to free herself. And then her struggle slackens and she can make no cry at all for her slashed throat. Lobo lets her fall and puts up his knife and he and Pori leave.
She crawls through her blood to Harry and puts a stoppering hand to his wound as though the force of her love might save the dead boy before her own slowing heart’s last stumble.
There is a sign, small and low to the ground, the letters carved into it and burned black—Wolfe Landing. An arrow under the name points down a winding road leading through the high grass and mesquite stands into a riverside palm grove and the town within it, its charter not two months old, with a resident population of eight. Only the tops of the tallest trees are still touched by sunlight at this late afternoon hour as the four horsemen turn onto the narrow road. The sky has gone strange, with clouds bunching overhead and to westward but not in the east, out over the sea.