The Winemaker's Daughter, page 3
“I’m not sure.”
“But you got a job in Seattle?”
“Consulting.”
“Is that the same as working?”
“Of course not.” She laughs. “They pay you to be their conscience. You’d be surprised how big the market is for such a thing. I’m on contract with Waddy Kornflint’s group.”
“The zillionaire?”
“A mere multibillionaire. And another guy—Ethan Winthrop. I’ll introduce you to him today. We’re doing a thing at Salmon Bay in Seattle. It used to be its own little city, full of Norskis peddling lutefisk and that sailor’s drink that tastes like paint thinner, you know. . . .”
“Aquavit?”
“That’s it, the drink that has to cross the equator in oak barrels in a ship’s hold before they can release it. How weird is that? But all the old Sons of Knute are gone. The place is a pit, nothing to look at. It could use a face-lift. Thank God Kornflint has some taste and a sense of history.”
“And your job is—what?—making sure nothing’s lost in the makeover?”
“The legal term is a finding that the new project would have ‘no significant impact’ on the culture. Without an NSI seal, you can’t move forward with the development. Six years in the school of architecture, followed by a decade of shoe closet designs, faux villages, and Euro-treks have led me to this: I’m the NSI ace of the West Coast.”
“Can you fit that on a business card?”
“The way I look at it is that I’m ensuring nothing of real value is lost. I would never sign off on an NSI if something really cool were at risk. Never.”
She moves closer to him, curls her hand around one of his fingers.
“Are you free tomorrow?”
“As in unattached?”
“I didn’t mean it that way, but if you want to volunteer.” She tightens her grip.
“I came this close to marrying a girl from the city—this babe—looking for something in Montana. You meet a fair amount of people like that in Kalispell, always in the summer. Good combo: sense of humor, way smarter’n me, pretty hot. Hey, you talk about authenticity and trying to hold on to the past, get this: Her breasts were real.”
“The rarest American woman, and there are more than two of us. So what was the problem?”
“Money. She had it, I didn’t. And I don’t care how much we had in common, I could not be her equal. You know how some people have these personal trainers to show ’em how to do sit-ups and keep their shoes tied? I woulda been her designated book reader–slash–river rat.” He laughs at the thought. “Not a bad job, being that it came with gymnastic sex and an open account at Barnes and Noble. But then what? Waiting on her moods with white gloves? God, this beer tastes good today. It’s hotter’n snot out here. I’m sorry; I dodged your question.”
“No, you answered it.”
“I have an itch to hit baseballs tomorrow afternoon. Friend of mine in Chelan has a pitching machine. You set it at ninety-plus mph and you’re up against Pedro Martinez. A guy has about one third of a second to make up his mind whether to swing or not when that machine’s throwing heat. Where’s Angelo? I bet he could still hit the fastball.”
She points to the deck. Teddy walks away, stopping to drain his beer, his back to Brunella. “Some guy from Omak wants to buy our orchard. I think what he’s really after are the water rights.”
“The water’s worth more than the land now?”
“Yep.”
“And you’re going to sell?”
“I don’t know what to tell the folks. They don’t listen to me anyway. The orchard’s almost dead. Nobody wants to buy a Red Delicious apple anymore. Has no taste and the skin’s too hard. These irrigators—shit— they bred themselves out of business, even if they hadn’t been side-whacked by four years of little water and high heat. So maybe it’s time to fold the tent and stuff their pockets while they can. The old man’s eligible for market-loss relief money, even after shooting up the Indian shack. And from what I hear, there’s more on the way.”
“A big bailout?”
“Something’s brewing, Brunella, otherwise people wouldn’t be so stirred up. You grew up here: You ever seen people clawing one another’s eyes out over water, like they’re doing now?”
“I guess you’re right. I haven’t been paying that much attention.”
“Look at what happened with all those farms in the Midwest. There’s big money to be made doing nothing, long as it’s the right kind of nothing.”
“I can’t see Solvan Flax taking a check from the government for the rest of his life.”
“I know you’ve been away for a while, Brunella, but outside of your old man and couple of hobbyists up on the bench, everybody in this coulee is going under. For that matter, the whole Columbia basin is on edge. If my folks sell, I’ll get a piece of it, and that’ll give me a cushion in Montana. Might even buy a house. My mother’s here, if you want to talk to her.”
“I do.”
“Just don’t set her off.”
“Teddy, I’ve known her all my life.”
“You think you have. Think again. Have you talked to her lately?”
“No, but—”
“Her boiling point’s gotten pretty low.” . . .
The bristled edge of Louis Armstrong plays over the voices of old friends gathering on the big cedar deck of the Cartolano family home. The air is still and hot. Brunella and Niccolo mix it up with the old men from the climbing club, who poke each other in the ribs. They are all robust drinkers. One of the men, Alden Kosbleau, cannot stop talking about a climb he recently made in the Sierra.
“Brunella, I lost twenty years on that peak,” he says.
She treats Alden like a favorite uncle. His family was the third to settle in the coulee and the first to move out. Alden Kosbleau always looks ten years down the road and he has yet to miscalculate. While other irrigators were still trying to create the ideal apple, Alden tore out his Red Delicious trees and planted Rainier cherries. He made a fortune in the Japanese market, where a single piece of fruit could sell for three dollars. When the ditches were complete and Grand Coulee reclamation water was in such great supply that the biggest problem farmers had was trying to drain off the excess before it saturated the ground, Alden proceeded to buy up more, using surrogates to get around the rules designed to give water only to small-acreage family farmers. When he left the coulee for a mansion on a hill above Lake Chelan, he owned enough water rights to determine the fate of a midsize city.
“So you’re one of the pioneers?” Ethan asks.
“Yes, sir, it was just me, Flax, and the dago. You’ve seen the picture inside the house of what this dustbowl used to look like?”
“The transformation is remarkable.”
“Remarkable? It’s a goddamn miracle, what we’ve done here. Just look around, get the sweep of this place, for Chrissakes. We showed everyone we could bring life to a dead land. And if these goddamn Indians would back off, we could do a thing or two even more amazing. I come from a generation with no limits—me, Flax, and the dago, same deal.”
He takes a long sip of his drink.
“What’s left for me now,” says Alden Kosbleau, “is the blue rose. You don’t look horticulturally inclined, but I will tell you something about the blue rose: It’s the unobtainable hybrid, the rarest of rose colors.” He waits for a reaction.
“And why would you want to grow a blue rose?” Brunella says.
“To show I can do it.”
“Hubris.”
“What’s that, a ten-dollar word for dreamin’ big? Isn’t that what your old man is all about?”
Angelo Cartolano had left Alba at the age of ten, a boy with not enough of a waist to hold up his pants, brown curly hair, and front teeth that looked like they belonged in a much bigger head. All his possessions fit into one rectangular suitcase, and he wore three sweaters as he boarded the ship out of Genoa. Sewn inside one of the sweaters was a pouch containing tomato seeds from the family farm in the Piemonte. Angelo’s mother, a feisty Tuscan who insisted that the true Italian dialect of Dante be spoken at home, died in the flu epidemic. Angelo’s father lost two of his brothers in the first year of the Great War, 1915, when more than 60,000 Italians died fighting in the mountains on the northeast border with Austria. They were killed in the Dolomites: One was shot in the head; the other died of gangrene from a shrapnel wound.
Twenty years later, when Mussolini upped the price of buying draft deferments for all but the best-connected sons of the north, the elder Cartolano could see there was no future in Italy for his family. Angelo was sent to America to live with an uncle in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. He slept on a cot by the dining table of a third-floor apartment with a single window, facing north. His uncle was a sometime merchant marine, whose ambition ebbed during afternoons of grappa-laced espresso. While his uncle drank his espresso corretto and read Il Progresso, Angelo learned to play baseball in the tiny park just off Knickerbocker Avenue, two blocks from the café, becoming a catcher. He broke three fingers in his left hand before his thirteenth birthday.
Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler kept Angelo’s father from coming to Brooklyn and in a curious twist was responsible for the boy’s introduction to the American West. More than ten thousand Italians were classified by the FBI as enemy aliens, rounded up for questioning, and detained for an indefinite period. The authorities swept through Bushwick, seizing radios, guns, cameras, flashlights—anything that could aid the Italian war effort. In the spring of 1941, twenty-nine Italian ships were impounded in American ports. Angelo’s uncle was on a list of sailors assigned to one of them, and they traced him to the tiny apartment in Brooklyn. His English was poor and he could not prove that he was nothing more than a loafer in Bushwick. He and young Angelo were sent away to Montana, joining fifteen hundred other Italians interned at Camp Missoula, an old army base at a bend on the Bitterroot River. For Angelo, internment was his best break in America. He loved Bella Vista, the nickname given the big-timbered lodge and barracks in Montana, with wildflowers rolling to the high snowfields, herons and osprey diving for trout on the river, teno’clock sunsets on summer nights.
It was at Camp Missoula that Angelo learned to cook. He played a game with the Italian chefs, who were astonished by his instinctive but undeveloped palate. By smell alone, he could tell whether a ragu was short of even a single ingredient or if a pecorino had come from inferior sheep. The only trouble at Camp Missoula came when the cooks were presented one day with beef fat for frying instead of the olive oil that usually came on the train from California. Infuriated, a chef smacked the supplier over the head with a large steel pan. Guards were called, a smoke grenade was accidentally set off, and in the burst of excitement a watch-tower sentry shot himself in the foot.
The talk of Missoula was all about the biggest public works project in the country, the Grand Coulee Dam, just a half day’s drive to the west. Even before the war, Angelo had heard President Roosevelt sketch his dream of the Planned Promised Land in the sunbaked midsection of Washington State, where the river carried to the sea enough water to put all of Italy under nearly two feet. Roosevelt’s design was to back up the Columbia and bring nearly a million acres of leathered ground to agricultural life. The dam, often compared to the pharaohs’ pyramids or China’s Great Wall, was called the Eighth Wonder of the World. Young men just out of college and drifters one step from starvation flocked to the sage and dust of the Columbia basin to build the largest concrete structure ever known, a noble cause, they all said.
The internees were released from Camp Missoula just before the Allied invasion of Sicily. Angelo had barely turned sixteen and was too young for service, but he decided to stay in the West. He had seen enough of the men in the smoky café near Knickerbocker and heard enough of their vaporous dreams. Grand Coulee was a cement palace of magic and industry. Angelo hired on to a cleanup unit, making eighty cents an hour. Later, he was assigned to a crew whose job was to dig up Indian graves in land that would soon be buried under more than a hundred feet of expanded reservoir water from the just finished dam. He found this work distasteful, scraping away hardpan at the edge of the swift river, looking for skeletons of people who had lived prosperous lives on the bounty of big chinook salmon that returned to the desert every year. Angelo knew nothing of salmon and very little of the Indians clustered in bands along the Columbia, except he was told that they went mad when they drank alcohol. Every day at the riverbank old men in braided ponytails stared wordlessly at the government gravediggers; their shadow seemed to lengthen day by day.
On his days off, Angelo discovered the North Cascades, which reminded him of home and gave him an escape from the haunted eyes of the Indians. He would follow the Methow River until it flanked into Early Winters Creek and hike to the high country of glaciers, pink-heathered meadows, and granite flanks polished by retreating ice. Roaming the south side of Silver Star Mountain, he was footloose again in the Valle d’Aosta. He joined an alpine club based in Yakima, mostly teenage boys too young for the draft, too inexperienced to have a proper fear of the nubs of rock and ice that had scared off the adults. Angelo and his friends told a reporter from Yakima that they were going to take Mount Stuart’s north ridge, which had never been climbed. The mountain looked like Grand Teton; on the rare days when the wind did not kick up the dust in the Columbia Basin, it was visible from a hundred miles to the east. Stuart is the greatest mass of exposed granite in the United States; the north ridge is sheer vertical in parts. It was a terra incognita of fear and legend. The reporter prepared to write a dozen obituaries. But on the first day of August, the Yakima climbing club put ten people on the summit. Afterward, at their base at Ingalls Lake, the young climbers made a pact. They took a vow that no matter what happened the rest of their lives, they would come together once a year to commemorate the ascent of Mount Stuart. Angelo had hauled up a liter of wine that an Italian home vintner who worked with him at the dam had given him, a full-bodied red made from grapes near Walla Walla. He removed the wine from a sweater wrap inside the tent and held it above the fire.
“To the last man alive shall go this bottle,” he said, and the boys all agreed. To seal the pact, each climber cut himself with the serrated edge of an ice ax and let droplets of blood fall onto the top of the cork and a primitive label.
After the war, Angelo took classes at Gonzaga University in Spokane. He struggled at the Jesuit college, and if he had not been the leading hitter on the Bulldog baseball team—his average was .421 and he was the best catcher on a team of wild pitchers—he probably would have dropped out after a semester. Each year he was on the team, he broke another finger, playing one season alone with a mummified left thumb that was fractured multiple times. After his junior year, he left school for good, taking a job on another dam construction project on the Columbia.
While working on this dam, the Chief Joseph, Angelo found the coulee that he would try to remake into a swath of the Italian Piemonte. There were a few old mine shafts up beyond the ridge left over from the random pokings of pioneer prospectors, and a couple of petroglyphs scratched on the walls of the coulee, but otherwise no evidence that human beings had spent time there. Once, he found a big bone in the dry soil, the ball joint of a mastodon. Angelo loved the high walls on one side of the coulee, a kind of antiquity he seldom saw in America. And he felt sheltered, felt he belonged, felt he could let the rest of the world spin on a nervous nuclear voyage while he hunkered down and started his own American story.
Angelo bought six hundred acres for $5,000, virtually his entire savings. There was no water in the coulee. It had coyotes and quail, mule deer in the spring and red hawks circling for field mice in the summer. A yellow wildflower, balsamwort, sprang from little holds in April, but then the coulee went brown and crusted as it baked through the long days. Just below the rock portal into the coulee, a perennial spring-fed stream that flowed into the Columbia served as home to a small run of spring chinook, a salmon that traveled nearly to Siberia before returning to its birthing waters in the inland desert.
The first thing Angelo did was dig a deep broad hole at the steep edge of the coulee. It rained just seven inches a year, but that was enough to fill the hole after running downhill, providing Angelo with a pond and his own primitive irrigation system. It was a simple trick of making the contour of the land and what water fell from the sky work for you, as Italians had done for centuries with their catch-basin ponds. Angelo used the pond to grow his first vines. Then, when Grand Coulee irrigation water came, he was told he would no longer have to look to the sky for life, nor would he need his little pond. The weather could be random and stingy with its moisture and the farmers in the Planned Promised Land should not care; they had arrived at a new point in history—they controlled creation. The effort to siphon water more than three hundred feet up from the Columbia’s channel and send it through a tangle of ditches, reservoirs, and canals brought the equivalent of forty inches a year, and it was almost free for the asking. But Angelo never drained his pond, even as he accepted the irrigation water.
The orchards thrived. The apples looked like Christmas tree ornaments, the apricots wore the soft fuzz of a baby’s head, and the figs could match the taste of old-country fruits. But his pride was wrapped up in his grapes, for winemaking was a master art. In the late nineteenth century, Calabrese immigrants put Vitis vinifera in the ground at Walla Walla before their homes even had roofs overhead; they knew, in hard times, wine was much more than pleasure—it was caloric sustenance. They had been forced by the powers of Walla Walla to settle at the edge of town, out of sight near the sweet onion fields, and it proved to be a fortuitous snub, for the land was perfect for wine grapes.
In the 1950s, Angelo tried something that had never been done, planting noble grapes from the heart of Piemonte, the Nebbiolo used in making some of Italy’s greatest wines: the delicate Barbaresco, the peppery Gattinara, and the muscular but tricky Barolo—known in Europe as the King of Wines and the Wine of Kings. Everybody said a deep freeze would kill the vines to the ground; the slopes he hoped to cultivate with the most storied of grapes were too far north, the soil too volcanic, the precipitation too sparse.
