As in the standard design of most haciendas, its hub was a high-walled compound that was a small town unto itself. While most of the hacienda’s workers lived outside the compound, within it was a residential quarter for the most important employees. The compound contained a plaza with a communal well, a church, stables, corrals, stock pens, granaries, workshops, a store where the workers could purchase goods on credit. There was an armory sufficient to a military company, and next to it the quarters for the band of former soldiers the patrón employed to protect his property and, whenever necessary, enforce his will. The center of the compound was the family residence—the casa grande—itself walled off from the rest of the compound and sometimes also referred to as the hacienda. The casa grande enclave had its own well and stable, several patios, various flower and vegetable gardens, a small fruit orchard. The two-story house had more than enough bedrooms to accommodate the special guests. Its ballroom had mirrored walls and a lofty ceiling hung with chandeliers. It had a wide spiral staircase to the second floor. The lamplit and high-shadowed hallways were hung with ornate tapestries and oil portraits of an ancestral line predating the founding of New Spain. There were kitchens and bathing rooms, dining halls and drawing rooms and dens, two libraries, a billiard room, a chapel. Both the compound walls and the casa grande’s rooftop were lined with battlements. “You could hold off the world from in here,” John Roger told Elizabeth Anne.
Their host provided a buggy for them to explore the property as they wished, and on each morning of their visit they rose early and had breakfast while most of the other guests continued to sleep off the effects of the night before, and then they went for a long ride, each day ranging in a different direction to see another part of the sixty-square-mile estate.
“It’s like a country of its own,” Elizabeth Anne said. “The villages are its various towns and the compound is its capital city. The casa grande is the capitol building. If we owned such a place, you would be its president and I the vice-president. Our child would serve as our cabinet.”
John Roger said it sounded rather a roguish government, especially if their child should be a girl and render the majority of its administration female. Elizabeth Anne slapped his arm in sham umbrage.
On the trip back to Veracruz they talked and talked about the splendors of hacienda life.
The baby was born on the night of November the first, directly amid the Days of the Dead, the annual two-day celebration in honor of the deceased and of Death herself—and the date nearly proved prophetic for both mother and child. Awkwardly positioned, the baby could not come out. Elizabeth Anne screamed against her will while in an outer room John Roger paced, tormented by her suffering and enraged at his helplessness.
Nurse Beckett was blood to the wrists and dripping with sweat when she deferred in desperation to Josefina, who had much experience as a midwife and was assisting. The old woman reached into Elizabeth Anne and felt the baby and crooned to it as she tried to turn it. Elizabeth Anne screamed louder.
Josefina felt the child shift slightly and implored, “Empuje, hija! Empuje! Ya viene!”
Elizabeth Anne pushed with all her remaining strength and Josefina guided the child with her hand and a moment later it emerged into the larger world. Blood-coated and blue-skinned and unbreathing.
“O my dear God,” Nurse Beckett said.
Josefina freed the infant of the cord round its neck and then alternately blew into its nose and mouth. In the other room John Roger stood arrested in dread at the sudden cessation of his wife’s screams. Then nearly jumped at the first of the baby’s squalls.
At length he was permitted to enter the room. It yet held a raw smell of pain and blood. Elizabeth Anne lay still and waxen and he knew with cold conviction that she was dead and seemed himself to forget how to breathe. Then her eyes opened and she saw him and managed a weak smile—and he grinned and brushed at his eyes and sat on the bed and put his hand to her face.
Nurse Beckett said it had been a near thing. The bleeding had been profuse and difficult to stem. But the baby was faring well and appeared to be free of defect, and Mrs Wolfe was young and strong and should recover satisfactorily. Josefina positioned the swaddled infant in John Roger’s arms and he sat on the edge of the bed and held the baby for Elizabeth Anne to see. She smiled and her eyes shone.
The child was a boy. They named him John Samuel.
By the end of the Wolfes’ second year in Mexico the Trade Wind Company was earning higher revenues from coffee and tobacco imports than Richard Davison had ever dared to expect. John Roger had improved the logistics of the business, reducing the costs of transporting the commodities from the haciendas to the port and then shipping them on to New Orleans. And because not so much as a cupful of coffee had gone missing from the company’s warehouse under John Roger’s management, Richard was now convinced the Mexican broker had been pilfering the coffee he’d reported stolen every year. “But never mind that,” he wrote to John Roger. “I doubt we could prove it and it wouldn’t be worth the trouble nor expense to try. Its a business insult and that aint the same as a personal one. I anyway learned a long time ago to cut my losses and don’t worry about yesterday. What counts is today and tomorrow.” He was so pleased with John Roger’s work that he not only raised his salary for the second year in a row but also put him on a commission. And John Roger prospered.
He and Lizzie had sometimes talked about making a trip to Mexico City to acquaint themselves with that storied metropolis. But it would be nearly two decades yet before the rail line to the capital was completed, and the stagecoach trip was long and arduous, and they did not want to be away for so long from John Samuel, who for years yet would be too young for such a rugged journey. But they loved Veracruz and it was no hardship to keep to it. They often swam off the beach in the early sunrise before John Roger went to the Trade Wind office. They strolled the malecón in the late afternoons after his day’s work, sometimes walking all the way to the outskirt of the foreboding Chinese district where outsiders rarely entered and from which its denizens rarely ventured. They had not even known of the Chinese quarter until Charles Patterson thought to warn them about it. “There’s nothing in Chink Town you want to see up close,” he told them. “Take my word for it and keep out of there.” John Roger had assured him they would mind his caution, but as soon as they parted his company they went at once to see that foreign locale for themselves. They had neither one seen a Chinese before nor visited in such an foreign world. The streets here even narrower than in the rest of the city, labyrinthine and smoke-misted, devoid of wagons but crowded with pedestrians and pushcarts, with kiosks vending plucked ducks and shock-eyed pigs and the flensed and headless but unmistakable carcasses of dogs of every size. Where also were sold still other less-identifiable meats and curious vegetables and roots and herbs of tangy scents that mingled with the mélange of unfamiliar smells. Buyers and hawkers bartering loud in what sounded like the speech of cats. Elizabeth Anne held close to John Roger’s arm. Their stares were unrequited, their presence unacknowledged by even a glance that they were aware of, yet no one in that throng so much as brushed against them. They felt like overlarge and ungainly ghosts remanded to some alien afterworld. On the way home John Roger cocked an eyebrow and asked if she would care to return sometime. “I’ll let you know,” she said, and never would.