The Winemaker's Daughter, page 2
“I’m soft-sentiment-impaired,” he says. “Don’t let that stop you.”
She pinches a sprig of rosemary and hurries up the steps. Opening the screen door, she calls out for her father.
“Babbo-oh!”
Nothing.
She calls out again, using the Tuscan word for father favored by her long-dead nonna. She walks to the edge of the stairway but goes no farther. Since the death of her own mother three years ago, Brunella has been afraid to see the little landmarks of the house, the nooks and corners where her mother used to read or sing, the window seat where she looked off to the east, faraway east, a three-thousand-mile stare. These places will never be neutral. And she cannot imagine her father roaming the two-story five-bedroom farmhouse without becoming a haunt who speaks to himself as he shambles past the rooms given life by thirty-seven years of marriage.
She leads Ethan back outside through the rose garden. Every few steps, a new wisp of floral perfume envelops them. Hummingbirds buzz in the last angled light of the day. A small fountain circulates water from a big earthen pond. She skips ahead, uphill, following the sound of a baseball game coming from a paint-splattered radio in the back rows of the vineyard. She spots her father from a distance, a Mariners cap on his head, wielding a pair of pruning shears like a conductor’s baton.
“Babbo!”
Angelo Cartolano is in cutoff jeans and high-top baseball cleats; he has winged eyebrows and a face of untrained honesty, wearing the years with a proper fit. He stares down the hill, squinting in the last sunlight. They hug and twirl around. She kisses his nose, spins the cap backward, and holds him tight. The sweat runs through his shirt, and his hair is moist and askew. She resembles her father in one striking way: They have the same green eyes, though most of the color has gone out of Angelo’s.
“You need some sun,” he says.
“I have three full days here to catch up, and then we’re going hiking in the Methow. Babbo, you look healthy. Let me feel your muscle.” He makes a fist with his good hand and bends his arm the way he used to do when Brunella was a little girl and he was Popeye.
“Strong man. How’s the fruit?”
“The grapes are stressed, Nella.” He cups a bunch of velvet-colored fruit. “You know how this Nebbiolo likes to cluster. This year it’s different. Everything is different. I’m not sure what kind of wine I can make with these conditions.” Brunella notices his quivering left hand. “Every day, hot, hot, hot all the time, tutti giorni. Everybody’s complaining about the water, and I must tell you I am very afraid.”
“It can’t be that bad. You still made wine last year.”
“That was last year. I had—you can say—some help.”
“How so?”
“Nothing. But this year, fourth year of the drought, and guess what? They are giving us less water than any time since the Grand Coulee Dam was finished. Thank God I have my pond. But listen, I still have so much hope, Nella—we’re less than two months from October, and the Mariners are three games ahead of Texas.”
“They have no immortals, Babbo, since A-Rod and Griffey left.”
“But they have magic again this year. And look at you—you’ve been away too long. You smell like the city.” He points to Ethan, who is finally making his way up to the vineyard, a panting willow of a man with a pallor like milky tea.
“That’s our guest from Seattle, Ethan Winthrop. I’m working for him on my latest project. He wanted to see the other side of the state.”
“He’s your boss?”
“Sort of.”
Angelo grins. “Fare l’amore?”
“With him?” She giggles. “No! I mean, look at him, he can hardly walk. I’m fascinated by his mind but I think he’s asexual. Neutered or something. I’ve never felt any—I mean I’ve never asked him. And he’s never said.”
“Un castrato?”
“Not that. He’s just not a physical man. He pocketed more than seventy million dollars on a dot-com that he sold two years before it went out of business.”
“What did they make?”
“Some kind of virtual thing that nobody needed. Now obsolete. Imagine being forty years old and not knowing what to do with the rest of your life. He’s helping this billionaire remake the old Ballard section of Seattle. Ethan is the conceptual brain behind the project. But first they have to pass a hurdle that won’t allow you to knock down a city block if there might be something worth holding on to. That’s where I come in. They hired me to do the cultural impact statement, freeing up the space. How many are you expecting for the party tomorrow?”
“A big crowd this year. I think they love the wine more than me. Va bene. Niccolo will try to make it by tonight, but I’ve heard nothing from your other brother.”
“Did you expect to?”
“No. And I should thank you for coming before I start complaining. Some days, I think you look down on the little place where you grew up; you’re such a big shot now you can’t come home—”
“Stop it, Babbo. It’s not that at all. Who else?”
“Some of your friends from growing up. Everyone from the Last Man’s Club has promised to show. We’re down to five of us, you know.”
“The Last Men could almost fit in one tent.”
“And there’d be one big symphony of farting, wheezing, snoring, and belching. From the coulee, the Flax family.”
“I saw their orchard today. It’s in horrible shape.”
“They had to give up most of their water for the fish. Solvan Flax could not take it. He got drunk one night and shot up the construction hut that the Indians are operating out of, down by the river. Solvan says the Indians are behind all the water take-aways. Says they put it in the government’s head to take back our water and—if they get their way— maybe even tear down one of the dams.”
“But the Indians . . . my God, a more broken band of people does not exist in this county. How could that ragged little cluster of welfare cases have anything to do with it?”
“They’ve got a treaty promising them salmon for all time. If there’s no water, there’s no salmon. They use the treaty to get the water, you see. Thank God nobody was inside when Solvan went crazy with a twelve-gauge, but it’s terrible. I tell you something, Nella: I no longer recognize my oldest neighbor. The man is sick with hatred.”
“Who else?”
“Some two-oh-sixers may come down from on high to join us,” he says, using the nickname for people from the Seattle area code who maintain homes in the coulee. “Look at Stuart right now.”
They turn to the west. The summit of Mount Stuart is in plum-colored silhouette against a burning sky, gold trim on the edges, nearly ten thousand feet high.
“You must promise me, Nella, that when you plant me in the ground here it will be high enough in the vineyard so that on Judgment Day the first thing I see will be Mount Stuart.”
“I will, Babbo, I will. You have my promise. But you have another twenty years left in you, so shush.”
In the kitchen, Angelo Cartolano is ready to cook. He has picked zucchini flowers, filled a basket with three kinds of tomatoes, and brought wine up from the cellar. The cutthroat trout are cleaned and iced. Lamb shanks are marinating in Zinfandel, rosemary, brown sugar, garlic, and lemon. He pours wine and offers a simple toast.
“Beviam, beviam, beviam!”
Brunella holds the wine in her mouth before taking a longer sip. Ethan sets his glass to the side. “Wonderful,” she says. “It tastes like . . . heaven without a dress code.”
“Very good,” says Angelo. “Truth is, it tastes like 1989. A mild winter. Early spring. Rain at just the right time after the bud. Then around Memorial Day—poof!—I never saw a cloud for the entire summer. Cooled off enough in August to keep the acid up in the grapes. The harvest was flawless. Stems and skins loved each other. Oh, God, what a blend! A vino rosso for all time. Strong tannins gave it enough backbone, and now it’s starting to smooth out. I’m worried about this year, though. It’s been too goddamn hot.”
“Global warming, Mr. Cartolano?” Ethan asks. “Or do you distrust the science?”
“No one alive has ever seen such a time in this coulee. Up in the meadow, the ground is like bread crust from last month. The trees are spooked, no life left inside ’em. Nature answers only to its own rules, so we’ll see what follows, yes? Try the wine, please.”
“He doesn’t drink, Babbo.”
“I’m . . . so sorry,” Angelo says in a hushed tone, funereal. To the Cartolano family, the only thing worse than someone who does not drink wine with food is the person who cannot laugh.
Angelo retreats down a hallway to a side pantry, where he keeps drawers full of flour and dried herbs, the ceiling draped in twined garlic and strips of oregano hanging overhead.
“What do you think of my father?” Brunella says, when he is out of earshot.
“Rustic,” says Ethan. “I can see where you get your passion. Is there anything you two do not get excited about?”
“Is that so bad?”
Angelo returns, white flour dust trailing behind him. He mixes the flour with eggs and water in a bowl and adds olive oil. He takes moist balls of mozzarella and cuts them into one-inch sections, and dries the anchovies on a paper towel. His left hand is badly gnarled and knotted, and it shakes uncontrollably, making it hard for him to finish. Brunella folds her hand around his; it feels like a bag of marbles. She helps him open the petals of each flower and pinch out the filaments. They fill the insides with mozzarella and anchovies, add a dollop of honey, and press the petals until they are closed up again. The zucchini blossoms are dipped in the batter and pan-fried until golden brown.
“Alora—fiori di zucchini fritti,” he says, with a jack-o’-lantern smile, turning to Ethan, sweat dripping from his brow. “My uncle used to make these in the camp in Missoula. The highlight of the summer. The guards thought we were crazy—look at the stupid dagos eating flowers. Hah! You do eat, don’t you, Mr. Winthrop?”
They are just sitting down to dinner—grilled lamb and trout, potatoes quartered and roasted above the coals, a salad of Cartolano tomatoes with basil—when a car pulls up and Niccolo Cartolano bounds into the house. He has a deep mahogany tan, short hair dyed blond on top, broad shoulders, and Jason Giambi arms. This summer he has added a branded mark of a grape above his elbow. He is wearing shorts, sandals, and a UC Davis T-shirt. Angelo is ecstatic; his younger son is his favorite, something he has given up trying to hide. Niccolo sets his backpack down and pours himself a glass of wine in a single motion. He kisses his sister, shakes hands with Ethan, and winks at Brunella as he raises the glass.
“Pancia mia, fatti capanna.”
Brunella translates for Ethan the old ritual blessing before a big meal: “O belly of mine, make a storehouse of yourself.”
Niccolo has finished his third year of college and is in his fourth summer as a smoke jumper for the Forest Service, which has a regional headquarters not too far from the Cartolano family home.
“This fire in Colorado: We dug breaks to the south, breaks to the north, backburned on another flank—no go. Finally, all we could do was spit on it and walk away. Some people were bitching ’cause we couldn’t save all the trophy homes. Like, Hello? Jesus H. You’re living in a fire zone. These are people who hate government and want us to save ’em. I’m in the Methow for the month, if I’m lucky. You did the trout just right, Dad. Haven’t lost the touch. But the lamb needs something.”
He helps himself to a second mound of food, pours another glass of wine from a different bottle, gulps it halfway down, then fills it to the brim. He pops the potato quarters into his mouth, five in a row. Watching the spectacle of three thousand calories vanish in a few minutes, Ethan is mesmerized.
“I’m not sure, but I think the ’89 is better,” Niccolo says. “This is the ’89, isn’t it?”
His father beams. “Niccolo, you have the nose of the Cartolano family, eight centuries in the making.”
“And what am I,” Brunella says, “a truffle pig?”
Niccolo always said he wanted to be a winemaker. He talked of Sonoma and Napa, as did nearly every aspiring vintner at UC Davis, but the frontier had long ago left those valleys and they were off-limits to anyone who had not amassed a fortune during the late gilded age.
“Moisture content in the Rockies is under ten percent,” Niccolo says now. “They’re starving for rain. Those pinyons were opening like popcorn. Parts of the Cascades aren’t much better off. The Okanogan is one big bundle of upright kindling right now. You gonna eat all that?” When three seconds pass without a response, he scoops up Ethan’s well-trimmed lamb. “So I’m here for the Last Men bash and whoever else straggles in for the party tomorrow. Maybe get a day of fishing in with the master here before another round of ground pounding and extra H-pay.”
He separates the backbone from the trout and swallows the entire fish.
When everyone is asleep, Brunella throws on a nightshirt that just covers her underpants and strolls outside to feel the warm breeze against her body and the grass under her toes. Overhead, stars undimmed by city light and the high eroded walls of the other side of the coulee make her feel alone in a big place. The fragrance is stronger at night, or at least more distinct: sage and honeysuckle. She wants to stretch the moment and tries to remember why she turned away from her desert home.
CHAPTER TWO
ON SATURDAY MORNING, Brunella rises early and goes for a run in the hills where she used to play, up among the cheat grass that flames red in June and then fades to beige in the desert summer. She follows a faint road that passes by the second-oldest house in the coulee. There once was a 1952 pickup truck out front, left to die on the spot where the owner abandoned it in defiance of the Arab oil embargo thirty years earlier; now the car has vanished. She passes a small reservoir, full to the brim in the midst of the drought. She runs along the ditch that delivers water from the distant lake created by Grand Coulee Dam. She can see where bulldozers are moving rock and earth for a project down below, about five miles away. She remembers the abandoned mining village hidden nearby, a clot of cinnamon-colored cabins slowly vaporizing in the basin winds. Inside one of the cabins was a 1915 Marvel stove, walls covered by painted oilcloth, a heavily lacquered wood sink. It smelled of mice turds and dry rot, but it told a story frozen in its tracks, as if all life had been petrified on a single day. She used to spend afternoons inside the shack, reading books from a dust-covered shelf, and brought friends into this lost world, one at time, making them take an oath to keep the secret. On the day the village disappeared, knocked down in an afternoon, Brunella discovered how quickly this part of the world can erase itself.
Running back toward the vineyard, pleasantly numb on her fourth mile, her mind drifts, floating above the land. At seventeen, flying home from a school soccer competition in Denver, she looked down and saw the coulee from the air for the first time. She was horrified. It looked so lost and inconsequential, a trench in the ground removed from everything, the world passing it by. She knew then she would flee, she had no choice; maybe she was her mother’s child.
Back at the house now she swims in her pond, a familiar embrace. Drying off, she rushes inside to kiss her father. “I’m glad to be home. Really, Babbo. I love you. Don’t ever doubt that.”
She picks flowers for the party. The Cartolanos put linen and wine on each of the tables, position a keg of beer in a garbage can of ice. By the brick oven outside, cherry- and apple-wood branches from winter pruning are stacked for fuel. Miguel brings mescal and little clay tequila cups that his daughter has made. Each cup bears the chiseled name of one of the five old men who climbed Mount Stuart more than sixty years earlier.
“You’re home.”
She turns to face Teddy Flax. The curious boy of her youth has filled out in his shoulders and arms, and his face is lean, with a soul patch of facial hair on his chin. When he smiles his eyes lead the rest of his face in a welcoming accordion. She is stirred and surprised by her reaction. As she walks toward him, he holds out his hand. “Oh, screw it,” she says, and wraps her arms around him. His body is warm from the walk up the coulee.
“I heard you were teaching,” she says.
“English—sophomores and seniors. Coaching baseball too. We play our first games in snow squalls and the play-offs in hundred-degree heat. That’s why I moved to the Flathead Valley. No end to the drama. And you can nearly make a living. You can put gas in a beater car. You can house-sit, because there’s no shortage of big empty log mansions. And then, like they say, you get this other paycheck: big rainbows rising to a mayfly hatch just a few steps from where you live, that sort of thing.”
“It sounds wonderful.”
“The winters are long. Lotta people can’t take that.”
“What are your kids reading, Teddy?”
“Stegner. They liked Angle of Repose, once they gave it a chance, the little shits. My seniors will start Sometimes a Great Notion next year, after a fight with the curriculum committee. Somebody in Iowa doesn’t think it’s literature.”
“I’m sorry about your father.”
He fills a plastic cup with beer. “I’m chasing fires close to home this week. With OT and hazard pay, I can make almost half my teacher’s salary in two months as a smoke jumper.”
“With Niccolo?”
“I wish. Got posted to Murkowski’s crew. Guy’s an idiot with ambition— dangerous.”
“I can get you on Niccolo’s crew. It’s not a problem.”
“You went away. What, New York? Someplace in California? Or was it Europe?”
“The wandering architect’s tour. In Manhattan I designed shoe closets for Martha Stewart acolytes. In California, it was strip malls that were supposed to look like quaint little villages in Vermont. And Europe . . . I went there to feel to inferior, and it worked. So I’m home.”
“Which is where?”
