He woke twice in the night, savoring the sea breeze, the crush of stars, the bronze gibbous moon low in the east. The feel of Lizzie snugged against him. The second time, just as he was about to doze off again, he heard her murmur, “This is heaven.” And next time woke to a radiant sunrise.
They got back to the compound after dark, and later that night, in the privacy of his office, John Roger took out the journal he had not opened in years and recorded his happy plans.
It took a year to build the house and improve the trail for getting to it. John Roger spent long periods encamped at the cove with the labor crews and supervising the construction. He had the wagon track lengthened from the river mouth to the landing at the hacienda compound and improved the trail the full length of its entire river-hugging wind through the jungle. Each time he came home for a visit he was leaner, harder of muscle, more darkly sunbrowned. After the first few months, he forwent shaving and his beard grew black and wild. Elizabeth Anne was roused by his brutish appearance. When she said he now looked more like a pirate than even her Uncle Richard, he affected a menacing leer and advanced on her, saying in low growl, “Arrgh, me captive beauty, it’s yer sweet flesh I’ll have for me sport”—and she let a gleeful cry as he tumbled her into bed. She loved the beard and asked him to keep it and she trimmed it for him. She missed him terribly in his absences and chafed at her long exclusion from her cherished cove. She pleaded to go back with him and swore she would not complain about living in a tent until the house was ready to move into. But he would not permit her to see it until it was completed.
In the long weeks without him, her sanctuary against loneliness was the company of Josefina and young John Samuel. The boy liked being the center of her attention while his father was away, but although he was not shy he did not talk very much, not even when he and his mother were alone together. Elizabeth Anne would love him dearly to the end of her life without comprehending him. Josefina, on the other hand, liked to talk and was a good listener in turn, and Elizabeth Anne took pleasure in their conversations. Everyone of the casa grande knew that Josefina was from the state of Chihuahua—her accent was irrefutable testament to her roots in that northern region. But Elizabeth Anne was the only one to know that Josefina’s entire family except for herself and her younger brother Gonsalvo had been killed and her village razed when she was twelve years old.
Elizabeth Anne asked who killed them and Josefina shrugged and said, “Hombres con armas.” It was a war, she said, there was always a war, always men with guns, and war was no less cruel to those who did not fight in it than to those who did. After losing their parents and home, she and Gonsalvo decided to go to Veracruz to live with the family of their maternal aunt. Besides the fact that their aunt lived there, they knew nothing of Veracruz except that it was far away to the southeast and was next to the sea. Not until afterward did they learn it was a journey of a thousand miles as the eagle flies but truly much farther, crossing every sort of terrain, including the eastern sierras. They sometimes got rides on passing wagons, but they walked more often than they rode. Many things happened and they saw much that was wonderful and much that was terrible and met many people and heard many strange languages. They crossed the mountains in the company of another displaced family and it seemed the crossing would never end and she would never be warm again. One of Gonsalvo’s hands was badly frostbitten and two fingers had to be removed. Eleven years old, Josefina said, and you never saw a boy so brave. He never made a sound except to take a deep breath when the man chopped both fingers at once with a hatchet and then again when he closed the wounds with a hot knife. The trip took a year. Their aunt’s family welcomed them and wept for their loss and marveled at their trek from Chihuahua. Gonsalvo fell in love with the gulf the moment he saw it, and he soon learned to swim in it and swam almost every day. But the sea frightened Josefina and she never went into it any deeper than her knees. In their second summer on the coast they both caught the yellow fever and she survived but Gonsalvo did not. She had lived in Veracruz state ever since.
Had she ever married?
Yes. Once. His name was Lotario Quito. He was a gentle man—too gentle, God forgive her for saying so, but it was the truth. There are times in a man’s life when rashness is necessary but the capacity for rashness was not in Lotario. Still, one cannot help but love whom one loves, and they loved each other very much. He was a clerk in a bookstore and earned extra money by writing letters and other documents for illiterates who came to his little table at the zócalo. That she herself could not read was of no matter to him. He would have given her a reading lesson whenever she asked, but only when she asked, because he was afraid that if he should suggest a lesson to her she might think he was implying that she was dull and in need of education, but he did not think that and did not wish to offend her. Even after he told her this and she said she would not take offense, he would never ask if she wished a lesson, and because she did not want to disturb his own reading in the evening, she would not ask for lessons and so never did learn to read and write. They had been married almost two years—and had produced one child, who died in his sleep in his second month—when a pair of thugs accosted them on the street late one night after a dance. They were forced into an alley and the thugs took turns raping her while the other held a razor to Lotario’s throat. They took his money and his father’s pocketwatch and shattered his spectacles for the meanness of it. They were laughing when they walked away, not even running. Lotario’s weeping was so piteous it broke her heart. He could not stop crying, even after they got home, and she held him close all night, crooning to him as to a child frighted by a bad dream.
Elizabeth Anne was tearful on hearing the story and Josefina chided her for it, saying that life was after all full of bad times as well as good ones, and even a bad time, if it did not cause unbearable pain, was better than being killed. In plain truth, she said, she was not without good luck on that night of the thugs, as they did not make her pregnant. As for Lotario, some months later a hurricane hit the city, and as was often the case the storm was followed by a typhoid epidemic, and he caught the disease and died.
Had she had any close gentlemen friends since then? That was how Elizabeth Anne phrased it—close gentlemen friends—and they both blushed a little at what she was really asking. Well, missus, Josefina answered, I can only say that some were closer than others and some more gentlemanly—and they laughed like schoolgirls.
There finally came the day when John Roger drove Elizabeth Anne in a mule wagon, just the two of them, along the improved trail to the cove, now a drive of ten hours from the compound—in fair weather, anyhow. And there he presented her with the house, lovely and bright with whitewash in the shade of the tall palms on the rise above the beach. Crafted of hardwoods and set ten feet off the ground on pilings two feet thick, it was as solid as an ark and would withstand every hurricane and flood. Its roof peaked and shingled with slate and fitted with a widow’s walk. It had only four rooms, but the wide run-around verandah gave the house a sense of greater spaciousness. The gulf was visible from the verandah—and from up on the widow’s walk it seemed to Elizabeth Anne that she could see all the way to the blue curve of the earth. The house had tall shuttered windows, a kitchen with a stove, a plumbing system piped from a pair of cisterns in the back of the building. There was a fireplace, a feature far more nostalgic than practical, which would see use but a few days a year. A small stable stood off to the side of the house, designed to keep out even the strongest of jaguars, and directly off the beach in front of the house, a stout narrow dock extended fifteen yards into the water at low tide.