The Winemaker's Daughter, page 27
“Get out!”
“And just to make sure we had all our bases covered, you showed me the little salmon stream near your father’s vineyard. Had we not been able to correct the circumstances here, we would have had to take action on the other end. Your friend Alden Kosbleau was most helpful, drawing down the water table so that your fisherman’s run of fish would have nowhere to breed. You were right. We are all connected by water, or something to that effect.”
“You’re evil.”
“I’m neutral. I’m apolitical. I’m asexual. I have no convictions. I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in love. I couldn’t give a damn what happens to the Seattle Mariners, or if any particular bottle of wine has a good life or not. I care about what is intellectually and logically correct. There are two sides to every story, correct and incorrect. A right way and a wrong way, if you want a moral tone to it.”
“Your cynicism is breathtaking.”
“Cynicism? Wrong word, Brunella. I’m not cynical. Precision in language is a lost art. I’m agnostic—as open-minded as a man can be. Can you back away a little bit, please? You’re standing too close.”
“You used me to destroy this neighborhood.”
“And you used me to try to save it. There, we’re even.”
“Get out!”
“Cities have chronological lives, Brunella, just like people. Some are middle-aged and dysfunctional; Cincinnati comes to mind. Some are old and dying; think of Liverpool, one of the premier seaports of the British empire at its peak. And what is it now? A Beatles museum with a surfeit of nursing homes. Your beloved Florence, once the third biggest city in Europe, the fount of new expression in art, poetry, architecture, and politics? Now a renaissance theme park. By contrast, our city is young, still taking shape, without a tether to misplaced and artificial nostalgia. You believe in narrative as it applies to people’s lives, maybe even cities. Fine. Well, then the story will always change because the story has to change— by definition!”
“And what if the change is for the worse? What if what you do here makes city life more sterile and ugly, makes it harder to live as—”
“So be it. Forty, fifty years from now, one person’s city blight will be another’s preservation fight. It’s a ridiculous cycle of bogus sentimentality. I don’t need any Jane Jacobs homilies to know that. Before long, we’ll be making national historic districts out of trailer parks in this country, if we aren’t doing it already. I was just looking through your excellent reference book here, the Encyclopedia Britannica, a superb antique of considerable value in the mint condition you’ve kept it. And look here; the entry under Seattle—”
“Close the book and get out.”
“Let me finish. Here, right after the entry on Sir John Colborne Seaton, a first baron who took part in Sir Ralph Abercromby’s expedition to Egypt in 1801. All these knights. Don’t you think peerage has been inflated? I mean, from first barons who whipped Napoleon to Elton John in his funny little beige toupee?”
“Out!”
“Let me finish. Here. I was just reading this—see—Seattle, a city of eighty thousand six hundred seventy-one people after the 1900 census. Two Swedish daily newspapers. Two Japanese dailies as well. How many are there now? If you guess zero, you are correct. Now listen to this: Half the people living here then had foreign-born parentage, and another twenty-five percent were foreign-born themselves. Do you know what that means, Brunella? The city was a stew pot of mongrels from another shore. Tell me about cultural heritage. What happened to the Swedish dailies? They died a natural death as the Swedes became Seattle burghers. What happened to the county almshouse, listed here as one of the principal buildings of architectural distinction? Gone—folded into the American tomorrow.”
“I actually thought you were a friend, in your own oddball detached way.”
“Don’t get personal on me, Brunella. Why can’t women stay with the substance of an argument? It’s always personal with women. Now recall our so-called Western heritage: cowboys and miners and the like. Do you think anyone in modern times would really like to spend a day in a genuine nineteenth-century frontier town? With the whores and wranglers; the toothless syphylitic wonders, every one of them armed and drunk; the open sewage running through town; the isolation—particularly for women. Of course not. But plenty of people will pay to pan for gold or put on a cowboy hat in a gussied-up version of a Western town. By the same measure, nobody will come to Salmon Bay as long as there are fish guts and what-have-you all over the place. But wait till you see the crowds that will flock to the new neighborhood that will rise here as we re-create the better parts of France. People won’t care if the clams come from the East Coast and the salmon are raised on a farm in Chile and the boats are built by cheap labor in China. What’s important is that they will feel as if they are in France, with the boulangeries turning out fresh bread, the bistros alive with people, and an exquisite little gallery with a courtyard. We’ll get some kids from the Lakeside School who speak fluent French to greet diners in the summer. There’s nothing wrong with any of that. We Americans take the authentic and smooth it, sand off the rough edges, and re-create its essence better than anyone, so why fight it? As I said—as Mr. Kornflint said, quoting that winemaker from the Piedmont—nature answers to its own rules. We’re following the natural rules of this city, rather than trying to fight it.”
“That was you at the pier ceremony? The laser image?”
“My words, aided by some technical wizardry—vetted by Mr. Kornflint, of course.”
“Where is that stick of plaid?”
“Mr. Kornflint? I wouldn’t know. He . . . I have never met him.”
“What?”
“I speak for him. I mean, he speaks, and I help him translate. He has a problem with verbs—declarative sentences are a particular burden. Our meetings are all virtual, which is okay by me, no exchange of facial gestures or other messy interactions.”
“Maybe he doesn’t even exist.”
“That’s entirely possible. Somebody signs the checks. You cashed them. In that sense you’ve been working for Mr. Kornflint as much as I have. Colleague.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
AT DAWN the tribe gathers for a prayer to Tozzie Cresthawk on a treeless bluff at the edge of the reservation, high above the river. He is still in a coma, paralyzed from the hips down. They meet at a site reserved for the Dreamers, cryptic ground to all but those who shared the philosophy of Smohalla. They talk as if Tozzie were dead, recalling his life as a horse racer and firefighter, how fishing for chinook sustained his pride. Leon Treadtoofar stands off to the side, just outside the circle. He is not wearing his Forest Service uniform. After the ritual is complete and most of the family and friends have walked away, Leon lingers, his eyes transfixed on the little pocket above the Columbia. Danny Red Thunder, his forehead bandaged, his right eye swollen and closed, stays behind as well. He asks Leon what he is going to do about the other Tozzie Cresthawks who stare blankly into a river that won’t move, the people who had hoped the tribe could do something restorative with the water but now wonder if they are doomed by historic reflex.
“You have to choose,” says Danny Red Thunder. “You are a man who has to choose. Are you with us?”
Leon crouches down and lights a small bundle of sage and sweet grass. As it starts to catch fire, he tosses it atop the ground. “Why?” says Leon, staring into the curl of smoke. “Why do I have to choose?”
“Because you are in a position to save Indian lives. And you have been hiding from your people.”
“You think I can make that mob go away? You think I can make the river move again? You think I can free up your water? I’m a GS-Fourteen with the Forest Service. I have a job working with people I respect. I believe in the truth.”
Danny Red Thunder laughs at the last word. “We all got a little white blood in us.” He turns his back to Leon. “Or maybe that’s the Wanapum in you talking. Wanapums eat dog food. I’ll tell you about truth: Truth is water that has sustained Indian people for all of time, water that belongs to us as sure as our blood flows from our hearts, water that was taken away when my grandfather was a young man. And just as we are now trying to get some of the water back, we are accused of terrible things. These things are lies. These things are slanders against Indian people. These lies are being used to hold us back.”
“Okay, Red Thunder, I will take you at your word, for Tozzie’s sake. But tell me how I am supposed to explain how you got all that water?”
“We bought it.”
“You bought it from Alden Kosbleau, early last year?”
“Most of it.”
“Then I’m going to request that you be arrested and charged—”
“Arrested?”
“You and Kosbleau. That water was not Kosbleau’s to sell or yours to buy. It was from National Forest land. The public owns that water. Now, maybe Kosbleau set you up. Maybe he misrepresented ownership, and you were an innocent buyer. That’s for the courts to unravel. I answer to the Forest Service, and to the memory of dead smoke jumpers. Four of them, in case you forgot, were Indian boys—Sherman, Joseph, Wes, and Noflight.”
“You want to arrest me? For trying to build a future? You’re a traitor.”
“I’ll give you a day to get your things together. A marshal will come by in plain clothes. Make it easy on yourself. I don’t want publicity and I don’t want the FBI involved. I hate the FBI. A good lawyer can plead the whole thing away with fines.”
“You arrest me?” Red Thunder moves within inches of Leon’s face.
“I’m not your Indian brother,” Leon says. “And I’m not a traitor.”
“Why aren’t you wearing your uniform?”
The mob at the pit starts to stir as word of Danny Red Thunder’s arrest spreads. For weeks, the irrigators have been living on a diet of stale suspicion and innuendo. What they knew for sure was that a formidable amount of water had been transferred from their control to the Indians’. But that transfer, by itself, was not a crime that would hold up in court or even make for sustained grandstanding at a staged hearing by the senator from Idaho. They needed something else, something irrefutable, if they were going to get the water back in time for the government buyouts. Now here is what they have been looking for in Red Thunder’s arrest— and what’s more, it was another Indian who fingered him. It is enough to spark hope that all the water sales to the tribe can be nullified.
“We got ’em in our sights,” Mrs. Flax says, doing a live radio broadcast from under her blue tarp on the hot pavement next to the pit, two cats in her lap. “We want to make sure everyone out there understands: This is nothing against Indians. We irrigators are a lot like the Indians—we’ve been pushed aside, forgotten. This is about getting back what’s rightfully ours.”
During a break, a man in a cowboy scarf and straw hat moves up close to Mrs. Flax. The scarf covers most of his lower face, and the hat is drawn down over his forehead.
“What can I do you for, stranger?” Mrs. Flax says.
“Mom . . .”
“Come closer, boy.”
“It’s me, Mom.”
“Show me your face, boy. You’re hiding something there.”
“It still hurts, Mom. The skin’s raw.”
“Come closer, Ted. Let me get a look at ya.”
She pulls down the scarf and narrows her eyes, staring at the skin grafts patched over Teddy’s face. A cat screeches and backs away, tail up, hair on end.
“It’s okay, kitty. Come back to Mommy, kitty, kitty. Looks like they made ya a new one, huh.”
“They tried. Listen—”
“Where you been hiding?”
“Mom, I gotta talk to you about this campaign against the Indians. It’s . . . there’s something you don’t know.”
“There’s lots I don’t know. But what I know for sure is that we’re in the fight of our lives. Put that scarf back up, wouldja?”
The interviewer motions for Mrs. Flax to return to the microphone. She coos for her frightened cat to return to her lap. “Come to Mommy.” Teddy removes the scarf, baring his face. He walks away slowly, staring into the crowd, looking at Marvin Heinbeck from East Wenatchee and Lester Thurlock from Brewster and Luanne Lodefest from Electric City. He looks at them all, friends and neighbors once, searches their faces for his place among them, searches their eyes for contact. They see only Teddy’s scars, missing the eyes, missing the man, and he knows he is an exile.
The coulee is empty. Not a car anywhere near the house. Brunella walks up the hill, through the vineyard, on a day when the winds are asleep. She expects to hear her father’s radio tuned to the baseball game or some sign of his labors. But the air holds none of the familiar groans and wheezes of the Cartolano vineyard—no drip, drip, drip of water on vines, no sprinklers spitting onto the orchards, no motorbikes of the kind that Miguel and his crew use to race from chore to chore. The pond is flat, the shallow water greenish with algae. Uphill, through the vines, Brunella zigs and zags. When she stops to get her breath and her heart calms, she is frightened by the stillness. Here is the onset of death in this coulee, a hint of what would happen if the Cartolanos leave. She flings open the doors of the stone chapel, letting the sunlight in on the wall, her father’s frescoes of an idealized Northwest. He saw this image the moment he first entered the coulee, and then he shaped it by sheer force of will and might to fit the art in his mind’s eye. Torn from the Piemonte by war and exiled to the edge of the American continent, Angelo cast his dreams into this little slash in the planet and shaped it, day by day, season by season, year by year, until the coulee was the fresco. Now she inherits the dream, but where does she take it? Does she continue making the Nebbiolo of her father? Does she give up a life of the mind to leather her hands, scar her legs, sun-scathe her face, and curl her back until she looks like a walking question mark, like the nonne of Italy, humpbacked and dressed in black? Does she do it alone, becoming an eccentric in wooden clogs and straw hat, cursing flies, talking to herself, a Katharine Hepburn of the vine? Does she finally concede that she will never make anything close to Morris Graves’s creation on the lake, or even the genius of her father’s Nebbiolo? And what about this stone chapel, this cloister of space, transplanting the Catholicism of superstitious Italy to a land of desert salmon and Coyote myths? In darkest confusion, in spiritual dissonance, do you still look for God in this box of homage?
One way out is to tell Leon everything and be done with it. But she cannot see past the confession. He will feel betrayed and probably not even be surprised. How could she be so predictable: Promise and betrayal, what else would an Indian expect from a white woman? Is there no way to explain what happened and still protect Angelo? Tell him, then. But . . . tell him and the Cartolano print on this land will disappear. And even if they could hold on after telling Leon everything, she would have to endure stares of widows and siblings, fathers and mothers, who will always think that in some part of the Cartolano cellar is blood wine of their loved ones, no matter that Angelo destroyed it all. Maybe she does not belong here after all. Maybe the Cartolanos never belonged here. Maybe Angelo’s life work no more fits this place than Waddy Kornflint’s slice of transplanted France belongs on Salmon Bay. Maybe everything Angelo created is an aberration—he stumbled into this audacious experiment, the biggest river of the West shackled to create the Planned Promised Land, and now he must live with the protracted shutdown, the failure. If God wanted great wine to come from the desert of the Columbia basin, would he not have given this land more than a whisper of rain? She looks away to the high eroded wall on the other side of the chasm, to the scraped-away rock from the Greatest Flood of All Time, the monument to water rushing from high ground to the sea without regard for anything a human being could do.
She runs downhill, flying past the vines, running for speed and release. She reaches the house and dashes up to the porch, this old place, a brittle frame of crowded moments. What is this? A padlock. She bangs against the ancient fir entrance. What the hell is this? She looks in the window, races to the back, and finds another padlock on the rear door, which was never locked. She climbs the maple tree on the side, shimmies up high enough to jump on the roof, and then crawls over to her window. This window, she knows, has no lock. It pushes open, and she falls on her bed. The impulse is to sleep, escape to a dream on a summer afternoon, and wake with her family intact. The house is forever stained with memory, the walls coated with Cartolano struggle and laughter. How dare Roberto think anyone else could live here? The house is worn and shaped to the Cartolanos as a pair of old boots are molded to a person’s feet. It slouches. It is scarred. It bends one way to the prevailing winds and creaks another way in a freeze. Walking downstairs, she passes pictures on the wall: the family in a snowbound coulee, Niccolo at high school graduation, a young Angelo and Rita, toddlers on their laps. There on the kitchen table is the wooden globe, showing the latitudinal line drawn from Piemonte to the Columbia. She enters Niccolo’s room, the one Angelo has taken over with Mount Stuart fetishes: The climbing gear is gone. The backpack, gone. The ropes and pitons, slings and crampons, helmet, gaiters, and parka, and the wall map, on which he’d plotted his return to the big thumb of exposed granite, taken to their destiny.
She calls Roberto on his cell phone.
“This is Bob. . . . Yes. . . . Yes. . . . Slow down, you’re slurring your words. . . . Mmmm-hmm . . . mmmm-hmm . . . I don’t have anything to say, really. You can talk to the new owners.”
“You locked me out of my home.”
“Your home?”
“You locked me out!”
