The Winemaker's Daughter, page 26
“We have that right,” she says. “Under the Constitution, all power rests with the people.”
As she finishes, a chant is taken up, accompanied by a drumbeat on overturned five-gallon plastic buckets. “Give our water back! Give our water back! Give our water back!”
When Brunella tries to talk to Mrs. Flax after the last speech, she is brushed aside.
“I got nothing to say to a Cartolano,” Mrs. Flax says. “Nothing.”
“But I saw Teddy, Mrs. Flax. He’s had surgery.”
“We don’t speak no more. He’s on his own.”
“You should have given him something—some financial help after you sold the property. He’s going to have medical bills for years.”
“Government should take care of that. I did my share bringing him up: eighteen years of charity. Don’t be telling me what I have to do.”
“You can’t just cut him off.”
“Listen, you: He ain’t mine.”
“You’re talking nonsense, Mrs. Flax.”
“We raised him, sure. But he’s the bastard son of Melvin Gutswag and a little hussy he poked behind the storage shed about thirty years ago. You knew that, didn’t ya? Smart girl like you. Teddy knows it. We told him when he was ten years old that he didn’t belong to us but we’d try to raise him good as we could. From that day on he turned on us; I think he hated us for telling him. So be it. It’s better off if he finds his way with a family of his own. There’s some who believe what happened to that boy’s face last summer is God’s retribution for Melvin Gutswag’s sin.”
“Surely you don’t believe that?”
“Some days I do, some days I don’t. Now make yourself useful or get out of the way. We got a new frontier to build here.”
The Cartolano vineyard looks healthy at its full-canopied peak, clusters of pellet-sized grapes catching sun on the high south-facing flanks of the coulee. Two cars that Brunella doesn’t recognize are parked next to the pond. A surveyor and an assistant line up sites on the ground as Brunella walks toward the porch. When she asks for an explanation, the surveyor says, “You’ll have to talk to the man inside. He’s the boss.”
She walks in to find Roberto going over plans and property documents at the dining room table. He does not rise to greet her. The frown lines around her brother’s mouth and nose are more prominent since the last time Brunella saw him, nearly a year ago. She remembers what her mother said about people getting the face they deserve over time.
“I tried to call you,” he says. “Don’t you ever answer your phone? These men are helping me close on the property.”
“The property. What did you do, Roberto? You didn’t sell our home.”
He rises, making a move to connect with Brunella. He’s wearing a pressed shirt, monogrammed on the breast pocket. “We got a good fair price, considering.”
She backs away. “Get out,” she says to the two strangers.
“Brunella, don’t act like an inferior. We need to do something for Father. I told you all along I was taking over his affairs. This place—with the original house, the vineyard and orchard, the two cellars, the stainless-steel tanks— Actually, I got a terrific price, considering the water crisis.”
“Babbo will never sell. He’s said that a million times. You take away this land, you take away his breath.”
“It’s done. Sold. A lawyer from San Francisco who wants a different life and says the Columbia basin is the new Napa. He’s come up with some nifty legal move to clear the title of liens. I gave him a price reduction for that. Father will have everything he needs.”
“You sold this place to a lawyer?”
“He’s a lawyer now, but he wants to make premium wine. What changed everything was that one wine Father tried to destroy. After we won at VinFaire, this property became a trophy vineyard. All of a sudden, we’re sitting on a gold mine, thanks to one vintage. And I’ll tell you something that really shocked me, Brunella: Father doesn’t even recognize how good that wine was. Miguel says he tried to destroy it! He’s lost it, Brunella, can’t you see? He finally makes a world-class wine and what does he do? Takes an ax to it.”
“You don’t have a clue about this place, do you?”
“I’ve got several million clues, on the way. So I’ve had a couple of broad discussions about what the new owner wants to do. With new French oak, he can boost the Nebbiolo rating from Parker and the Spectator, get it up in the mid-nineties. Then you tear out half the vineyard and make less wine. A thousand cases—no more. It’s a formula for cult-wine status, two hundred fifty dollars a bottle and up, and it makes sense. We keep ten percent for the first five years.”
“Did you tell Babbo? He would never go for this scheme.”
“Legally—in my view—Father is incompetent. The evidence is all around, but for starters you’ve got that incomprehensible act of rage against a world-class wine. Under emergency provisions of the law, I’m acting as his guardian. As such, I don’t need his acquiescence. But it’s important to understand he will have everything he needs when this deal is closed.”
“You sold his dream, everything he created, and you didn’t even talk to him?”
“It wouldn’t make any difference. You know him, he’s sentimental. Not a good thing when you’ve got this kind of coin on the table.”
“I hate you,” Brunella says.
“I’m going to let that last remark slide, because that’s a very hurtful thing to say.”
“Then let me say it again in a way that won’t slide: You’re an asshole. You were born an asshole. You were an asshole as a kid. You were an asshole as an older brother. You were an asshole in college. You became just another asshole from Texas. You’ve spent your whole life trying to find new ways to be an asshole. No way will you ever sell this place, as long as I am Angelo Cartolano’s daughter.”
“It’s done, I told you. I sold it. We have a deal.”
“You can’t sell it because I’m the owner.”
Roberto sneers, his face falling into the groove of the frown lines, followed by a mirthless laugh. “You’re getting like Father. Deluded.”
“Well, delude this,” she says, throwing the will and property transfer on the table.
“Babbo-o-o.” She searches through the shaggy vines at day’s end, going up and down the rows of Nebbiolo grapes. “Babbo-o-o . . .”
Above the stone chapel, in the last three rows, she hears pursed breathing and the clank of metal on rock. There she finds her father, with ice ax in one hand, nylon webbing and carabiners wrapped around his chest, his legs scratched, his teal Mariner cap chalky white from dried sweat. He is hiking with slow deliberate kick steps up the hill, forcing his breath out, locking the knees, then repeating the process. Between breaths, he’s talking to the vines, this one and that: “You be sure to hold your leaves in when the sun gets too hot, and you there, with the two clusters of grapes, you have to go a little slower or you’re going to end up as raisins.”
Brunella catches up to him, breathless herself.
“Almost there,” he says.
He plants his baseball cleats and kicks another few steps until he reaches the top and falls on his butt. He rests his chin on his knees, removes the cap, and wipes sweat from his face. His crooked-fingered left hand looks like the thin branch of a dead tree.
“I still got it,” he says. “I learned that step from an Australian climber who was trying to do all the volcanoes in the Cascades. Ah . . . but my knees are not the same.”
“Who were you talking to?”
“The grapes.”
She sits next to him, looking out as twilight color floods a flat-bottomed cloud well above Mount Stuart. She realizes her father has been serious all along; he needs to reclaim the summit. He tells her his climb is set for the weekend; he’s going to start with the same approach the Yakima boys took long ago but will veer off and take the easier main ascent rather than go up the route he helped to pioneer, the north ridge.
“I’m going with an old friend, an experienced climber,” he says. “I will go slow. I won’t do anything stupid. And you will say a prayer for me. God willing, I will stand on top of Mount Stuart one more time.”
Are all men sentimental about sports and physical challenge, Brunella wonders, or is it something that comes with age, when knees wobble and bellies spill over belt buckles and erections sag instead of salute? Better to climb Mount Stuart at eighty than swap early-bird coupons at the therapy pool.
“I love you, Babbo,” she says, wiping sweat from his nose with the sleeve of her shirt. “I wish we had our family together. I feel like it’s down to you and me.”
“It is down to you and me. And you will give me a grandchild someday—soon, perhaps? I promise you something: I will make a better nonno than a babbo.”
“You were a fine babbo.”
“I failed with Roberto. How can somebody who came from my flesh and soul be such a stranger? I look at him in the dining room and I think somebody has broken into my house, a burglar with my last name. It makes me feel terrible to think such a thought, but that’s how I feel. I cannot lie to you. And Niccolo . . . you may never forgive me for what I did to Niccolo.”
“What did you do, Babbo?”
“I thought I could play God. I was scared.”
“Yes, you’ve told me that. You were scared for the grapes when everything started to dry up.”
“Alden Kosbleau came to me, and he said he had extra water.”
“Where?”
“Don’t you know by now, Nella? Doesn’t the Indian know?”
“I think I understand, but Leon is still in the dark about the big picture. I don’t . . . I can’t tell him without losing you and the land. Leon believes . . . that there was some manipulation of the aquifer, that Kosbleau and the tribe did something.”
“And what about me? È colpa mia.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Yes. Listen. The sad place where our Niccolo died, Nella—in the forest—there are some empty mine shafts in there. I don’t know how he did it, but Alden tapped into some water and he flooded the mine shafts, just below the forest. It was his reserve water, for when things got really bad. For a time, for me, things got really bad. He came to me. He said I could use that water, take a good long drink for the grapes, but we must not tell anyone. Alden said there was plenty of water—enough for the grapes, enough for the forest, enough for fish. That turned out to be the bad vintage, the one everybody wants, the one I destroyed. I should have listened to the earth. And when the fire came . . . ahhhh . . .” He buries his head in his hands, digs one cleated shoe in the ground.
Brunella rubs his back as the coulee slips under the long shadow of the Cascades.
“È colpa mia.”
“What happened on the day the fire blew up?”
“Niccolo called me. We talked, two times. I just wanted him to be safe. Those jumpers. They ordered some pumps, and Niccolo asked me about water. I told him . . . I told him yes! Yes! There’s plenty of water in there.”
“How did you know that, Babbo?”
“Because I had taken some of it myself, like I said.”
“But you didn’t own it?”
“Hear me, Nella. Ascolta! When the drought was so bad it took away my sleep, I was very afraid. I didn’t question Alden. He said take the water, and I did. Then I got greedy. I wanted more. I wanted security. I went back to him, and he said I could tap into his big reserve, take all I wanted. He said there was plenty. There was a place in the forest where it seeped up above the ground, up from the mine shafts. Listen, you have to hear all of this, Brunella.”
“Go on.”
“In the cellar where I keep the Last Man’s bottle, next to that is a key. Alden gave me one, and he kept one. You need both keys to make it work. That’s how we took the water for the bad vintage. I told Niccolo, ‘Non c’è problema, there’s so much water in that basin. Save yourself.’ ”
“But there wasn’t enough water in there to save him. There was nothing; Teddy told me. We tested it with pumps. It was dry. Empty. What happened?”
“Gone! Somehow, I don’t know how, it disappeared. Those hot days that never wanted to end, maybe there was no surplus to begin with. È colpa mia.”
They sit in silence on the crest of the coulee, each in a corner of their own thoughts. Brunella stands and faces her father, extending her hand. She helps him up, takes him by one hand, while he holds the ice ax with the other. She leads him downhill, through the vineyards, past the stone chapel. Mount Stuart is a black silhouette against the purple sky, barely visible.
“And what about the pipe, Babbo?”
“That came later. After the fire blew up, Alden said we have to do something or they would try to take away everything I own. Alden redirected what was left—deep in the mine shafts, as it turned out—to the Indians. He was trying to cover it up, to make it look like the Indians took the water from the forest. Once they got it, he said we would still be able to get it back because Indians never win. We could go to the senator.”
“He did all of this . . . when?”
“After the fire.”
“No, he didn’t, Babbo. I don’t think that’s what happened.”
“Yes, that is what happened.”
“I saw the records. Alden was selling water to the tribe at least four months before the fire. Think about it: That’s probably why the basin was dry at the time Niccolo ordered the pumps.”
“I’m confused.”
“Kosbleau was using you to cover his theft. He was using you to steal that water for him. That explains the two keys. You took just a small bit of it, but he was selling big allotments to the Indians. And if anybody traced it back, you’d be on the hook. He didn’t do you a favor; you were the pass-through point.”
“I am trying never to think about it. It makes it hard to keep living. How does it matter what he did with it? I was a thief! That’s what I have to face. I cheated. We thought we could do anything with the water, and it would be okay. We could draw it down, move it around. We could be like our own Grand Coulee Dam in there. We could do anything.”
“Tinker with one thing, and you alter the flow of everything.”
“What’s that you say?”
“Leopold. A good gardener. Who else knows about this?”
“Nobody. Only Alden. And now you. Are you going to tell the big Indian?”
“That makes you responsible for water theft, maybe manslaughter, a conspiracy to withhold information in a federal investigation. How can I tell Leon? You’ll go to jail, and we will lose the land—everything.”
“That will never happen because you are the owner. You start free and clear, with no sin. I’m just a boy from Alba trying to climb a mountain.”
“And what should I do with the land?”
“Make vino rosso, Nella. Make vino rosso with a story.”
With Duff Almvik swallowed by the currents of Deception Pass, with Cindy and Nolanne relocated to Ohio, with Svenson’s closed and the old man dispatched with his lefse recipes to Arizona, with the old ferry dragged out to a landfill, and with the purple door of the Purple Door Tavern held in custody, Brunella has nothing left to keep a new carpet from being rolled over the community that was Salmon Bay. She is walking through the rain, a solstice drizzle, worried about her babbo on Mount Stuart and whether Leon will ever look at her again if she tells him the truth about the water. As she climbs the slippery stairs to the second floor, she notices that the door to her office is ajar. She pauses, pushing the door back slowly.
“Ethan.” He sits at the desk, the second S book of the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica open in front of him. He’s dressed in tight biking togs, with gloves and cleated shoes as well, his skin the color of Sheetrock against the glare of advertisements on his shirt.
“God, you’ve lost weight, Ethan, if that’s possible. And I see you’re still wearing a prophylactic whenever you go outside.”
“It has a sun protection factor of sixty. Sixty! Isn’t that terrific?”
“But it’s raining today.”
“Yes, and most people don’t know that up to thirty percent of UV rays still get through a cloud cover. I came down to see how your fishing community is coming along.”
“They’re gone. One dead, two moved away. You already knew that. You came down here to gloat.”
“You played brilliantly.”
“With nothing to show for it. This neighborhood will be completely gone in a few weeks.”
“With no significant impact on the lasting culture of the city.”
“If only I could believe that.”
“I can show you. It says so on the final permit from the city.” He looks down at the encyclopedia. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re not, really.”
“Actually, I’m only sorry for you, Brunella. Your enthusiasms are contagious. That’s your best quality—these consuming passions. In some ways, I’m envious. It’s something I’ll never have, not for lack of trying. With me, it just seems sentimental and false. But you ought to learn how to finish what you start, a much more difficult task. Had you just done what you were paid to do and not meddled, we’d still have ended up with the same finding of No Significant Impact and you would have a much brighter future. But no, I’m not sorry for the imminent loss of this huddle of firetraps and dry rot you insist on elevating to the level of cultural heritage.”
“Then you’re trespassing.”
“Technically, I’m not. I’ve been paying for the office space.”
“Bullshit.”
“You remember that ‘really large check’ from the anonymous donor, the one that got your little citizen’s action started?”
“You?”
“It was Mr. Kornflint’s account. He’s a very generous benefactor, if that isn’t a redundancy. And a wonderful evening in Belltown, the fund-raiser with all the dilettantes. Remember the check that came in at the end—”
“You!”
“Mr. Kornflint, through me, through an acquaintance. We were your biggest boosters.” He winces as he tries to rise from the chair and back away, his motions robotic. “And you were our best asset. I’m sorry that check never went through. But Mr. Kornflint had second thoughts. He felt your citizen’s group had done everything it set out to do. You found your fishermen, and then you found that delightful mother and her daughter—a truant, I believe. And we found them shortly thereafter. Nothing like success.”
