At Elliott Bartlett’s behest, Patterson had seen to the rental and readiness of their new home. It was only two blocks from the zócalo, a large two-story house in a well-tended neighborhood called Colonia Brisas. It fronted a street shaded by palms and was enclosed by high stone walls whose tops were lined with broken bottles affixed in cement. There were two front entryways—a heavy wooden door reinforced with iron bars, and a wide carriage gate of wood six inches thick. The gates opened onto a spacious cobblestone courtyard with a large circular fountain centered with a statue of Poseidon brandishing a trident and spouting water from his mouth. There were clusters of banana plants ten feet high, mango trees red-yellow with fruit. Clay pots of flowers hanging all along the portales. The smell was of florescence and mossy stone. The residence was staffed with an elderly female cook, a pair of teenage housemaids, and a young man with a game leg who lived in the carriage house and served as a general handyman. Patterson made the introductions all around and gave the Wolfes a tour of the place, then bid them good day and went back to the consulate.
That evening, they ascended the indoor stairway to the rooftop where there was wickerwork furniture under a sturdy ramada of vines and palm fronds. Up there was a sea breeze and they could view a greater span of the starry sky, could see the harbor lights and the glow of the central plaza through the trees.
Elizabeth Anne kissed him and said, “Thank you, dear man, for bringing me to this brave new world.”
The nausea that had begun on the voyage continued to trouble Elizabeth Anne, and though she was sure it would eventually ease, it did not, and John Roger grew concerned. They had been in Mexico more than a month before she acceded to his urging that she have a medical examination. Patterson referred her to an expatriate English nurse, a lank horse-faced widow named Beckett whose husband, a doctor, had died of yellow fever a few years before. “She’s good as any doc in town,” Patterson said.
It took only a few minutes for Nurse Beckett to determine that Elizabeth Anne was pregnant. “Two months should be my guess, perhaps a bit more,” she said.
Elizabeth Anne thought she must be mistaken. How could it be, after three years of fruitless effort? “But are you absolutely certain?” she said.
“Doubtless,” Nurse Beckett said.
“There’s no possibility of error?”
Nurse Beckett smiled. “Be assured, Mrs Wolfe, the only question is whether the child will be male or female.”
John Roger’s first reaction to Lizzie’s report was also incredulity—and then he whooped in elation. That night they held each other close and talked till a late hour about their grand turn of fortune.
When he gave the news to Patterson the next noonday, the little man insisted they repair to a cantina for a congratulatory cup of rum. They ended up having several, over the course of which Patterson became wistful and his drawl more pronounced. He told John Roger he’d been a widower for sixteen years. Except for the loss of his wife, his greatest regret was their failure to have children. She miscarried their first two and had not conceived again.
“It’s all we got to leave of ourselves in this world is children,” Patterson said. “Man or woman without a child dies and it’s like they never lived except to add a little more dust to the earth. The fella who said a wife and kids are like hostages to fortune and put an end to a man’s adventuring days and so forth was probably right, but I’ll tell you what—I’da quit my adventuring days long ago in trade for a living child. I’d give an arm today if Dame Fortune was willing to make the deal.”
They took leave of each other as the city was rousing from the midday siesta. The shops reopening, the zócalo resuming its bustle. John Roger watched Patterson crossing the square with the precise stride of a man who knows he’s drunk and wants not to let it show.
John Roger didn’t know why—maybe because of all the talk about children—but his father had come to mind. Roger Blake Wolfe, the outlaw stranger. He had not often thought about him since his days at Dartmouth, but since coming to Mexico he’d occasionally dreamt of him. He could never recall much about the dreams except that his father’s face was always indistinct and yet he seemed always to be smiling. Jimmy had told Elizabeth Anne of John Roger’s having being orphaned in childhood and reared by an aunt and of the loss at sea of his mariner brother, Samuel, and John Roger had thanked her for her expression of sympathy. During their courtship he had frequently come very near to telling her the truth but had each time resisted the inclination, fearing that her love for him might be bruised by the fact of his outlaw father. It pained him to persist in the falsehood, but once they were married he felt he had let the lie go on for too long to rectify it, and so never had.
For reasons less explicable, ever since his arrival in Veracruz he had resisted the impulse to search in the local archives for information about his father. But now, standing outside the cantina and goaded by both the afternoon’s rum and the fact of his own impending fatherhood, he more strongly than ever felt the urge to learn what he could about Roger Blake Wolfe. Across the plaza was the municipal building where the public records were archived. He consulted his pocketwatch. Then crossed the plaza and went into the building. In his brief time in Veracruz he had become well acquainted with the unruliness of Mexican recordkeeping and was not yet as adept as he would become at navigating its disorder, and it took him a while to uncover the sparse records pertaining to his father.
It was late afternoon when he came back out. He paused at the top step and gazed across the plaza at the cathedral. At the wall where the firing squad executions took place. Patterson had confided that during his first few years in Veracruz he had attended a number of public executions before losing interest. “I never did hear any last words worth remembering,” he said, “and after a while the entertainment wasn’t hardly worth the standing in the sun amongst all them people.”
Right there’s where he took his last breath, John Roger thought. He imagined his father against the wall and facing the muskets. Contained in the archival records was a newspaper report by an eyewitness journalist who included such details as the condemned man’s neat grooming and fearless—even cheerful—attitude, and told of a scrap two young women got into over him. Told of his rejection of a blindfold and of his casual bearing to the very end. And told too of his decapitation, yet another detail absent from the British Embassy’s letter to his widow.
He looked toward the harbor and the San Juan de Ulúa fortress where the head had been displayed from the tower. Where was it now, his father’s skull? Was it yet intact somewhere? Did it lie at the bottom of the sea, little fish passing through the empty sockets and the casing that had housed his mind? Had it been blown into the mountains and reduced to shards? Pulverized to dust and scattered on the wind?
He took a mule trolley to the graveyard, where according to the records the headless remains had been interred. He searched all the crooked rows of vaults and gravestones as the tree shadows deepened and the air grew heavier, but he found no grave with the name of his father. He spied a gravedigger at work and told him of his search and was told that several hurricanes had hit the city since 1829 and the flood of each one had opened dozens of graves and carried their contents away and maybe that was happened to the one he was looking for.