The Winemaker's Daughter, page 12
“The pump works,” he says, all the charm gone from his face, a frightful temper unleashed. “There was nothing wrong with it. You want me to start another one? All three work! And yet . . . those Indian boys cooked to death. Those jumpers cooked to death. This would have saved them. All your brother had to do was be on his game. All he had to do was have his wits about him, be enough of a man, be strong, be enough of a smoke jumper to do what he was trained to do, and those Indian boys would be home with their wives and their girlfriends and their mothers, laughing around a table.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
DURING THE FIRST WEEK of October the sun holds the grapes in a fleeting embrace, and every grower has a decision to make. Already, the nights are so cold that frost whiskers the vines at the higher reaches of the coulee and the pond is topped by thin ice crystals. A cart-wheel of heavy clouds is rolling westward toward the coast and could bring the first snow to the Cascades. But even if it blows north and misses the Columbia basin, the ration of light and heat will soon be gone. Timing is everything in harvesting grapes. Pick early, before the fruit is at full ripeness, and the wine will be tart and astringent. Pick late, when the flavor has peaked, and the must will hint of a wan taste to come later. But pick just right, in the morning after the dew has evaporated, when the skins of the grapes are wrapped tight, the fruit is firm, the sugars are in place, and the acidity has leveled from the big dip in nighttime temperatures, and that convergence of light and chemistry will be embedded in the wine for maybe half a century, holding the epilogue of a story about all the quirks of one year that is never an exact duplicate of another. Someday this grape juice will be described as magnificent and silky with overtones of cedar, or velvety with a touch of cherry, or it will be used as lubricant in a proposal of love or partnership, but in essence it is just one thing—memory in a bottle.
Miguel has two dozen pickers ready to go; he has learned well the details of a perfect harvest and picked up much about the winemaking craft. But he cannot tell his pickers when to start—that job has always belonged to Angelo. There are scientific measures—brix levels, skin thickness, opacity—that most growers use. For Angelo, it comes down to instinct, taste, and superstition.
When Brunella crosses the Columbia after a three-hour drive from Seattle, she sees that some growers are harvesting grapes close to the river, mainly Syrah. The fields are cluttered with workers guiding shaking machines along rows of fruit and moving the grapes to trucks, to separating machines, and on to crushers. The big cottonwoods are holding their gold. She walks among the pickers and samples the grapes. The Syrah is pungent, with purple skin the color of a swollen eye, but the winemaker’s daughter does not trust her palate. Angelo has the gift. She can see him walking through the vineyards in early fall, putting grapes into his mouth, crunching the seeds, spitting them out with a shake of his head: “Troppo giovane, troppo giovane.” And when the day comes that he rushes back to alert his pickers that the grapes are ripe and must be picked at once, the flavor has to be captured right now, then he will not stop for days, even to sleep, until all the fruit is in the crushing shed.
Beyond the Syrah vineyard, at the river’s edge, three Indians scamper atop a primitive wood platform hanging over the Columbia. Brunella grew up with this image as well, the daredevil boys from the tribe engaged in the oldest human activity along the river, trying to net big fall chinook, the last salmon to come up the river, as much a part of autumn as high school football and Halloween displays. She wanders over to the platform. The Indians are not fishing this morning; their long dip-net poles are on the bank. They appear to be pacing, watching the river as if waiting for a train to arrive.
“Tozzie!” she yells out. “Tozzie, how are you?”
“Hiya,” says Tozzie Cresthawk, and turns back quickly to stare at the water from his platform above the river. They search the slow-moving Columbia, oblivious to the grape harvest, trying to find something deep in the river.
“Any chinook?” she asks. “I heard there’s a decent run this year of upriver brights.”
“Nothing yet.”
“So you’ve taken over the Flax homestead?”
“Not me. It’s a tribal thing.”
“Well, whatever. We’re neighbors, then. I’m helping my father with the harvest this year. You interested in earning some extra money?”
“Do I look like a wet to you?”
“We’re paying twelve bucks an hour.”
“I don’t pick fruit,” Tozzie Cresthawk says, “and I don’t prune trees. I fight fires and I race horses in the Stampede and I fish.”
“You still ought to come by. Visit for a while.”
“Yeah,” Tozzie says, turning to his friends. “Come by. Look it over. Look it all over. The big land, grapes and apples from ridgetop to ridgetop. One day my dad took me up one of them ridges you got all fancied up in that coulee there. Said, ‘Take a look, son.’ I looked out. ‘Take a long look, son.’ Yep. Says, ‘One day, none of this will be yours.’ ”
The Indians laugh and slap hands. Brunella forces a half smile. “Why won’t you talk to Leon Treadtoofar? Help him with the investigation?”
“I don’t remember nothing, so I can’t say nothing.”
“Storm’s coming on.”
“I hope it does,” Tozzie says. “Hope it rains hard for days on end. Just a piss pour. That’s what the fish need. Sends a signal. They start to move upstream.”
“I know the fish need it. But the timing is bad for grapes.”
“I don’t give a shit about grapes. Rain is good for fish.”
Angelo has moved into Niccolo’s room. He spends most of the day there and sleeps in his son’s bed at night. He has been touring Niccolo’s life, rummaging through books, the Boy Scout emblems, the miniature go-cart they carved from a block of spruce, the radio he made by wrapping copper coil around a toilet-paper holder, the baseball signed by Edgar Martinez, the slingshot he used to hit birds, notes from girlfriends, high school pictures, a shot of Niccolo in midair diving from a cliff at Lake Chelan. When Brunella arrives, Angelo is holding Niccolo’s mitt, listening to a one-game play-off between Texas and Seattle for the American League West title; they have finished the season in a tie. He is pale, the eyes that once had so much color moist and gray. Brunella sits on the bed next to him and strokes his back, following the game with him, unable to shake the feeling that Angelo has become a very old man in a very short time. Baseball gives them a shared hope, a three-hour drama into which they have invested the fantasy that their way of life will triumph over the excesses of a bigger, more bulked-up and monied team from a place with different values. The Mariners build an early lead on a walk and three back-to-back singles, but that’s it for their offense. In the ninth, Texas loads the bases and brings the American League home-run king to the plate. Brunella can’t stand it; she turns the radio off.
“Wait,” Angelo says. “Leave it on.” The Mariner closer gets the power hitter to ground into a double play for the game; Seattle wins by a run, advancing to the American League play-offs.
“They’re better without Griffey and A-Rod,” says Angelo. “Niccolo doesn’t think so. I told him that when Griffey left years ago. I said, You watch, they will be better. And then A-Rod left, and I said, You just watch, you just wait. They didn’t need those guys.”
“I’m going to cook something for you tonight, Babbo. Costoletta di vitelo, like you used to do it.”
“Did you bring any of the big clams over—those goo-ducks?”
“Gooey ducks. I didn’t.”
“Those clams are something. I love the vongole grande. ”
“Babbo, have you ever thought of remodeling this room? You might want to push a dormer out, just to keep with the farmhouse theme.”
“Theme? I didn’t know I’d been living a theme all these years. You think this old house needs a new look, Miss Bigshot?”
“No, I didn’t mean that. But you could open the north side as well, let a little more light in during the winter. Something passive.”
“You go cook your costoletta and leave the old house alone.”
In the kitchen, she sips from a Chianti Classico and sings along with Chrissie Hynde, “Gonna use my sidestep, gonna use my fingers, gon’ use my, my, my imagination. . . .” She chops onions, tomatoes, throws in hazelnuts and basil leaves, squeezes lemon over it, and sets it aside, all while pleading with her father.
“We have to pick the grapes, Babbo. Miguel can’t keep the crew much longer. But I don’t know what to do. There’s a storm coming.”
She pounds the veal cutlets on each side, softening the meat, dips them in an egg batter, and covers them with bread crumbs and garlic.
“Should we pick tomorrow? If we wait, we might lose everything.”
“They’re better without Griffey and A-Rod. I told Niccolo that, and he didn’t believe me.”
“Babbo, listen! We have to make a decision! I feel like this whole harvest thing is a giant game of chicken.”
“Your pan needs to be hotter,” he says. “You only need to fry the meat a few minutes on each side. But it won’t be costoletta alla Milanese unless your pan is hot. And you forgot something.”
“What’s that?”
He sniffs. “Smell it.”
“I don’t have your palate, Babbo.”
“Oregano. Use the little flower tops of the herb instead of the leaves. When you pinch and rub it with your fingers, the flavors will be released. People always forget to pinch ’em.”
Miguel eats with them. He says he loves the veal cutlets topped with onions and tomato mix. “Like pork.” Angelo pokes at the meat, picks it apart, but does not take a single bite. The phone rings, and Brunella answers: a call from France.
“Are you sure? . . . Yes . . . oh, my God! That’s wonderful.” She scribbles a note down on a sheet of paper. “Uh-huh . . . yes . . . uh-huh. Thank you.” She puts down the phone and rushes back to the table.
“You’re not going to believe this, Babbo: Your Nebbiolo won a gold medal at VinFaire!”
“Ah.” Angelo removes his plate from the table.
“Babbo, do you realize what this means? Yours was the only American red wine to get a gold medal. That’s fantastic! It means you have made one of the finest wines in the world from this vineyard of yours. You . . . you have made history.”
“I don’t want anything to do with it.”
“They said—here, I wrote something down real quick, from the critics—‘subtle and fascinating, with focused shoe leather on the nose.’ ”
“What’s that, shoe leather on the nose? I don’t understand. I want nothing to do with shoes on the nose. I don’t make such a thing. I make a vino rosso to enjoy, to last, to have a story. Nothing else. The French can have all the shoe leather on the nose.”
He retreats outside, where he keeps one old hen in a shed near the pond. Brunella, strolling the grounds, can hear her father talking to the hen, with nothing in return. She goes back inside and sits alone at the big table as the vineyards go dark and the wind kicks at the shutters.
She knows the storm has arrived when the wind goes into a gallop, racing through the coulee and straining the big pines at the edge of their house. The trees groan as their trunks bend, and rain batters the windows in rolling waves. She goes downstairs in the darkness and makes tea. Rainwater squeezes in beneath a windowsill. She sits in the kitchen, sipping the tea, shivering, overcome by a sense of doom with a force like gravity. First the fire, now the storm. How quickly the coulee has gone from an irrigated Eden, bathing in late-summer luminescence, to a battleground for the bullies of nature. The big walls of the scoured-out land no longer seem like shelter. The front door blows open. Brunella jumps back, knocking her tea over, afraid that somebody has invaded the house. She cowers behind the stove, the old Great Western that Angelo purchased for five dollars from a retreating homesteader who didn’t believe the government would ever deliver water to the coulee country.
“Go away! Go away!”
She feels again as if she’s trapped in the tiny ditch she saw from the plane at age seventeen, the fly-over country, the isolated slit in the earth. She is locked in while the world is out there, beyond the coulee, beyond the storm, a hive of lives, dinner parties at full throttle, the great jostle of ideas, laughter, and drama of the city. After a few minutes, she looks back at the door and sees nobody. For an instant, she feels her mother’s presence; the walls are damp and cold with the death chill, the very thing that has kept her away from this house for three years. She creeps forward, bare feet numb in a puddle of rain that has leaked onto the scuffed fir floor. She slams the door shut. Now it is her prison. Back upstairs, in bed, she wants another body next to hers and wonders what Teddy would feel like now.
For most of the day, the rain comes in horizontal sheets, plastering the coulee. She frets as she waits, calling around to her father’s friends. Many of the growers have already harvested, and they feel blessed—Brunella detects some smugness—in getting the fruit in before the rain. Again, she asks Angelo for guidance, but he will not leave Niccolo’s room; it is his shelter. In late afternoon, she wraps herself in rain pants and shell and goes for a walk. The dahlias, which were erect and full-flowered just twenty-four hours ago, have all been knocked to the ground; some are uprooted and black-spotted. The oranges in their big terra-cotta containers will have to be moved inside to the limonaia, or they will lose them. The vineyards are muddy; rivulets of brown water are coursing down the gullies between rows. Many grapes have been slapped to the ground; she can’t help thinking of them as roadkill, smudged and squished against the mud. They are going to lose it all, she senses: an entire vintage. She walks to the crest, to the small stone chapel built by her father, stands in the rain just outside the chapel door, and feels the backhand of God—a hard slap. Bring it on. Hit me.
A pickup truck roars into the coulee. Alden Kosbleau steps from the new truck, wearing shorts and a windbreaker. He looks at Brunella, wet and blank-faced, and takes in the battlefield of still-hanging grapes.
“Jesus efffing Christ, Brunella, when the hell are you people going to pick?”
“Alden, thank God. Talk to Babbo.”
“Look at these grapes. You wait any longer you’re gonna have nothing but raisins. Pick! For God’s sake, get the fruit in.”
“Talk to Babbo. He’s the only one who can give the go-ahead.”
A call from Emma—Meet me in town for a drink at the Windmill—is Brunella’s chance to get away for a night. At dusk the town seems to have closed up, wet and abandoned: a superstore, some minimarts, two drivethroughs peddling food hatched in a chemist’s lab in the Midwest, a cop working the same speed trap he worked when Brunella was in high school, and that’s it. Except for the Windmill, the special-occasion restaurant, where wedding receptions take place, and the first real date. The closer Brunella gets to the Windmill, the tighter her throat gets. Again, that feeling—she is trapped. In a town without a stoplight, she feels claustrophobic. She pulls her car into the Windmill parking lot but cannot get out. The walls of the town are pressing in on her, and she cannot bear it. Don’t bury me here! She drives away, racing back to the coulee. Emma calls, furious and drunk. You stood me up.
In the morning on the second day of the storm, Brunella is in the highest part of the coulee when the clouds start to break. She has been wandering for hours and finds herself at the edge of the fire, where Gregory Gorton has put in grapes and a big ornamental garden, forming a line of geometric green against the ashen border of the ghost forest.
Brunella runs her hands through the gray coals of the deadened land. It smells of a sour campfire that has hissed into submission, and it looks odd; there are water bubbles throughout. The rain cannot penetrate the seared soil. She wonders if this ground will ever hold life again. She tiptoes through the spectral forest, remembering all the sage grouse this time of year with their puffed-up white chests, and her father’s line that sage grouse were frisky and beautiful to watch, but they were even better grilled. She angles back to the high point of the coulee. From this summit, she sees more dead land in the distance. She recognizes it by the big boulders at the edge of the ridge. This is where the jumpers died; she saw it from the air. She tries to descend but cannot bring herself to move downward.
On the way back home, near the border where the ghost forest meets the 206ers’ property, she hears a sound like that of a stream, a gurgling. She follows the sound to the edge of the new plantings, to a talus field, and then beyond, where she tracks it to the source: a small geyser of water, bursting out of the ground, like a spring that will form a river. To the touch, the water is glacier-cold. The water cascades into a holding tank that leads to a large underground pipe, and then it disappears. Brunella has never seen such a thing: a gusher of freshwater from somewhere in the earth that is quickly corralled and directed right back into the ground.
“Hey!” A man’s voice, directed at her. She can’t see where it’s coming from. “You there! What are you doing?”
She ducks behind the talus field. . . .
Back at the house, she rushes in to tell Angelo about her discovery, but he is not in Niccolo’s room. Miguel has not seen him either. The door to the old wine cellar is open and the light is on. She hurries down the creaky stairs.
“Babbo?”
A cabinet door is open, with a light on above it. She finds a thick homemade book—Angelo’s water charts. There are pencil notations indicating the volume of water used every year on his grapes. Last year, she notices, is a huge upward spike. On the table, she sees his gun, a Luger that he got in a trade with one of the climbers from the Last Man’s Club: a case of Nebbiolo for the German pistol.
She fingers the gun; it is still warm, and half the chamber has been emptied. She glances around the cellar, skittish, calling weakly for her father. Miguel appears at the top of the stairs.
“You better come, Brunella,” he says, out of breath, “to the new cellar.”
