The former Miss Vert dreamed of Galveston — her husband and his friends made it out to be a bustling metropolis — imagining a city without wild Indians, hurricanes, greedy immigrants, or, most importantly, Mexicans. For years now she has spent her time complaining instead of dreaming.
After Frank and Steve depart, Mrs. Stealman gives specific instructions to her servants and shuts herself in her room with her worries:
1Will they find that fugitive, Nepomuceno, today? Yes or no?
2Will his brothers come to the house to appeal for clemency on his behalf? Yes or no?
3Will guests show up or will they think it’s wiser to cancel?
She’s overwhelmed, fretting: “so much expense, and it could be for nothing”; “he may be their brother but he’s a red-bearded rogue”; “I hope they hang him from the nearest tree to take those Mexicans down a peg.”
She opens her diary, as she always does when she needs to bear her soul to a confidante. But she never writes about her guests — that would be bad luck. As a result, her entries are somewhat opaque.
Mrs. Stealman writes in peacock blue ink, as befits her personality and her class.
Her diary is written in the style of letters to her unmarried self. Each entry begins the same way. In cramped letters she writes the sender’s name and address at the top, and in the center in even tighter script, “12 Elizabeth Street, Bruneville, Texas” (Stealman named Bruneville’s main street after his wife despite opposition; he named the street running parallel after his firstborn son, James; and he named the one to the Town Hall Charles after himself). A half-inch lower her handwriting loosens up. Her penmanship is elegant and steady, unlike the figures in her accounts ledger, which look like they’ve been scribbled in a hurry to hide something:
Dear Elizabeth Vert:
What happened today in Bruneville would have made you happy. Finally, something to rejoice about in this godforsaken place. It was high time someone began to enforce law and order and that someone else got their just desserts. The sheriff — for whom you know I hold little regard — tried to arrest one of the drunken greasers who loiter around the Market Square as if it were a den of iniquity. Public decency is destroyed by the Mexicans’ disgusting ways. I don’t wish to offend your sensibilities by sharing tales of drunkenness, dirtiness, depravity, gambling, and loose women. But what happens in the marketplace in the broad light of day before the eyes of women and children is worse than what happens in the most sinister of places.
Good for the sheriff. He’s got to start cleaning up this place somewhere.
But such labors are never carried out unopposed by evil. The drunken greaser resisted. Another Mexican came to his defense. The Sheriff cut him off. The Mexican emptied his pistol into him, but thanks to his poor aim they say the sheriff is only superficially wounded. They’re taking him to Minister Fear’s clinic because Dr. Meal is in Boston. The minister’s new wife, Eleonor, who is a saint (and has the face of one, too), will attend to him.
We all hope he’s in no danger and will be better in a few days. Mexican evil should not be the demise of one of our own!
All this, as I said, is cause for rejoicing. Tomorrow I’ll tell you who the Mexican who wounded the sheriff is, because it’s quite upsetting and I don’t want to ruin your day, although I will share one thing: do you remember the woman with long black hair that people kept telling me about — the one who follows Charles around too closely and whom I suspect he might have feelings for? Well, she was in the crowd cheering on the sheriff for arresting the drunkard. Perhaps she’s so ignorant she never learned this phrase from the book of the holy word: Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. The vixen! The devious vixen. (I came up with this name for her last night when I heard that she had been following Judge White around. She’s chasing a different man every other day!)
I send affectionate greetings, with a dash of hope,
Mrs. Stealman
Rebecca, Sharp’s sister, is so ugly that everyone assumes she’ll become an old maid, despite the fact she’s wealthy. Nothing would make her happier than to marry Alitas — or anyone else — but Sharp is also single and disinclined to marry her off, least of all to a newcomer who has stolen some of his business with the crazy notion of selling dead, plucked chickens in parts — that’s how he got the nickname Alitas, “Wings,” in Spanish. Sharp was dumbfounded by how successful it had been. Some folks buy the heads for soup, some buy just legs or breasts or organs. “People are crazy.”
The news that Shears insulted Nepomuceno makes its way to her house, along with word that Sharp has finally spoken to Alitas. But she hears nothing about the gunshot, they left that part out so as not to worry her. She couldn’t care less that Shears has insulted Nepomuceno — when they were younger she had tried to attract his attention, but in vain; he had eyes only for the widow he ended up marrying (Isa) after the unfortunate episode with Rafaela and a brief, passionate fling with her friend Silda, who died of a broken heart, thanks to Nepomuceno (it would be pointless to try to change her opinion: after what happened with Rafaela, all sorts of tragedies have been pinned on him).
“He spoke to him! There’s still hope!” She’s not sure if she can still bear him children but at least she won’t be an old maid.
Rebecca is overjoyed. In her head she sings, “Alitas, Alitas, ra-ra-ra!”
On the other side of the Río Bravo, in Matasánchez, El Iluminado thinks he must be the last to hear what everyone’s talking about.
He’s coming out of a trance—“The Virgin has spoken to me” (his previous vision had been of the Archangel Michael): “My most enlightened son, you were given your name for a reason; men without faith are like the sleeping Lazarus. A spear flies through the air. Follow it, it will awaken your people and they, the sinners, will be redeemed; but be careful, carry my light at the tip of the spear, and take care not to drink from Devil’s Lake.”
Numbers aren’t his thing, but even El Iluminado can put one and two together (the spear plus Nepomuceno). Should he go join Nepomuceno? Is the Virgin’s apparition a coincidence?
He retreats back into his state of grace, no longer in a delirium, just dreaming.
Maria Elena Carranza knows something’s bothering her son, but she doesn’t know it’s the news that Jones has delivered. Anyone can see that something has come over Felipillo Holandés, but she notices the most. Felipillo is the substitute for her three grown sons, whose departure she’ll never recover from.
She sees them only when they’re on vacation. The eldest, Rafael, studies at Chapultepec Military Academy in the capital. The second, José, is at the state school in Puebla. The third, Alberto, is at Jesuit boarding school in Monterrey.
It was on one of these visits home, four years ago now, that they spotted an enormous black heron resting on the trunk of a kapok that had been uprooted by a hurricane and washed up on the beach during the night. The tree was ravaged yet magisterial. The tide was beginning to come in. Wedged at a right angle between two branches of the trunk was a naked boy in a hollowed out log lined with cotton buds, like a Moses basket, crying. Maria Elena saw him first — her sons’ visit had renewed her feelings of loss and lately she found her eyes following little children. José, Alberto, and Rafael got out of the cart to rescue the abandoned child.
“An hour more and he would have been a goner.”
“He was about to fall out of his crib.”
He looked like he was about three years old. He was so blond his hair was white. He had blue eyes. Maria Elena took him into her arms and the kid stopped crying.