The Winemaker's Daughter, page 9
CHAPTER SIX
THEY ARE STILL pretty boys. Look at them: the Indians, Sherman and Wes and Joseph and Noflight; the Neds, Dennis and Mack and Wag. Pretty boys at rest. Forever young. The lashless eyes closed. Same with the Pendleton women, the sweet faces of Suzanne and Laura. When they died inside the foil shields, the heat cooked them, like hot dogs in a microwave, but their features are intact. Niccolo’s cheeks have a mortician’s blush. What a big kid, Brunella thinks. God, he’s grown. Niccolo, Niccolo: How did it feel, those last seconds? Dying only one time, yes, not two or three? At least you didn’t burn to death, like the Old Man; he died in midstride after the wind took his shelter. What they found of the Old Man was a half-melted wedding ring. His body fat had burned like fuel; his eyes had been sucked out, the cartilage in his nose and ears peeled back, the bones and teeth consumed like dried hardwood. Such details were in the preliminary report. No judgments, no editorializing. Time of death. Cause of death. Condition of the bodies. Identification. An explanation that the melting point for gold is 1,945 degrees, and no documented fire in the Northwest has reached that level since the Big Burn of 1910.
Brunella is done with tears. She is trying to imagine Niccolo’s last breaths as a way to bring herself closer to him. Go, sweet brother, to the other side, but leave the burden with me. She does not see the backhand of God swatting down a good man at the start of his life. She has long since given up anthropomorphizing God. The earth shudders. The American prince John F. Kennedy, Jr., falls into the ocean. A kid eats a bad hamburger and dies a few hours after the picnic. There is no order to such events. Randomness is part of nature. Nature is God. The same place where Niccolo took his last breath was under a sheet of ice ten thousand years ago, and fossilized at the edge of the ice was a middle-aged Pleistocene man who stumbled over his own spear point and died from infection. Random.
The church is so full of light this morning it chases away the Gothic gloom. The pews are packed with Forest Service brass in pressed olive green, an honor guard row of people in yellow fire shirts, smoke jumpers, past and present, everyone a Fire God at some point. Brunella is with the other families in the front; most of them snub her. She feels their eyes, the stares of accusation: It was your brother who led them to their deaths. How could the government send those jumpers into a furnace? Most of them were just kids. And what did they die for? To save some orchards and summer homes.
The Interior Secretary starts his eulogy. He is the rarest of politicians, a man who admits to ambiguity. He was a jumper himself once, a Fire God. These dead boys, these young women from Pendleton, the Old Man—these smoke jumpers—they will outlive us all, the Interior Secretary says. They will join the heroes who did not make it into the mine shaft in the Bitterroots during the 1910 fire, the young men torched on a flank of Mann Gulch in 1949, the Hotshots who could not outrun a change of the wind in the South Canyon fire of 1994. They are selfless people in a selfish age. We will grow old, crippled, and diseased, cursing the drudgery of waking up. These jumpers will not. They belong to the young American West, he says, to free-flowing rivers and chutes of powder snow, to Butch Cassidy and Picabo Street.
They say it is like drowning. So Brunella tries to imagine suffocation: no oxygen, a blackness, no sound, then a painless final exit. The burning of his skin, the seared outer edges—that had to come after Niccolo was gone. But he must have tried something elemental, some last burst of action in his final seconds; Niccolo would not die with his face in the dirt. He had to kick the firestorm, punch the flames, spit in its face. She wants her father to understand that Niccolo’s pain was brief. But Angelo is empty. He never cried when he heard the news. He does not cry now. He was still on the roof with his garden hose, protecting his creation, the three-dimensional glory that he produced from the barren coulee, when word came that the boy was dead. He stayed there, clutching the hose like a sentry, staring upslope, through the vineyards to the smoke. He stayed on the roof through most of a hot night, and only came down when Miguel and two men from the government forced him. Your boy was a hero. He did everything he could. But we have some questions.
Angelo’s older son, Roberto, is little comfort. Roberto lives in Houston in a tower where the blinds are always closed, the windows never opened. He is the kind of man who seems to have been born with a scowl on his face, a man whose mirth-smothering personality has long bewildered family friends, a man who never looked more at home than at a funeral. He is research director of a mutual fund, married to his third wife, and has no children. He and Brunella have not seen each other since their mother’s funeral, three years earlier. They fought over whether to bury their mother in the coulee or back east, in Baltimore, where she grew up. Roberto threatened to sue if the body was not taken to Baltimore; he won. Since he moved to Houston, he prefers to be known as Bob.
She looks for Teddy. He is one of the living, one of only two. He must know what happened. He must know the details of Niccolo’s last moments. She needs him. Teddy Flax was airlifted to the Harborview Burn Center in Seattle. Most of his face was too badly scorched for skin grafts. He was supposed to stay for an indefinite time, but he has disappeared. He walked out, wrapped in his bandages, mummified. A boy saw him unveil his face in the parking lot, and it scared the child so much he could not summon the image without crying. The Flax family is here: Solvan, released from jail for this funeral, Mrs. Flax, three of her sisters. The other survivor, Tozzie Cresthawk, his arm in a sling, is seated up front next to a big Indian man with a brush cut and pressed Forest Service uniform. The big Indian has been put in charge of the investigation, and already the knives of the cynics are in his back. He’s a sop, a Forest Service lifer; of course he won’t find the true cause of this tragedy.
When Niccolo gave the order for everyone to retreat to their foil shelters, Tozzie did not move. He survived by starting a fire with his fusee and then curling up on the fresh-burned ground, creating a hole in the fire. The Johnny Blackjack sniffed at his patch of blackened earth and jumped right over him. When Brunella tried to talk to him today before the service started, he said it was bad from the start, a string of shit luck going back to the Suicide Race, when he was forced to shoot his horse. He should have called it quits after he snagged himself in the tree, insisting to Niccolo that they were doomed. He says he remembers nothing else.
“You know what miracles have sprouted from the land watered by the big river,” the priest says. “When you see the grapes, the apples, the cherries, the great bounty that God has given us in the Columbia Basin, you know these men and women did not die in vain. They died to protect us all, for we share in that bounty. They died for the Cartolano family. For the Flax family. For the Pickenses and the Hendersons, for the Lopez family, the Castanadas, for all that is good that comes from the irrigated land.”
What the priest does not say is that the firestorm was an act of God. To the insurance industry, act of God is a legal term used in American tort law as a way to keep companies from paying for disasters. It means nobody is to blame; nothing could prevent it; it just happened, although there is an implied deliberateness. But in a church, at a funeral, God cannot be seen as acting in such a way.
Brunella knows now that Angelo has lost his faith, that he is hollow inside. Why take Niccolo just as he was ready to bring so much joy to the last stage of Angelo’s life? Brunella has no answer, but she struggled with a similar question when her mother died three years ago, killed by a kid in a fortified car. Again, it’s the anthropomorphizing that gets people in trouble. Francis saw God in everything around Assisi, most famously in that archetype of animal-kingdom evil, the wolf. She prefers to see good and bad—a forest meadow in full flower and a hillside so charred it is sterile— as one and the same, product neither of blessing nor of curse.
As the priest finishes, she is having trouble breathing. Her lungs are fine, she has never had asthma or allergies, but now she feels like she cannot draw a breath. The air is thin, sparse, and then it’s gone, and she feels underwater, panicky. She forces a cough but can’t breathe unless she does so very slowly, a mechanical in and out. So maybe this is what she wanted: Niccolo’s final moments, choking on the unbearable breath of the Johnny Blackjack, the suffocation; she knows why Francis the nobleman’s son, pale and shriveled with open sores, dying in his forty-fourth year, felt such ecstasy when the stigmata finally came. In this struggle to draw a breath, she sees the ghost forest above the coulee as it was on the day she arrived at the family house ten days ago, sees it clearly with Niccolo’s pain. She remembers the branches looking arthritic and bony, and the smell, and the sound as the wind pushed through, the clatter of dried limbs—all of it out of place.
After the service, she holds her father’s arm tight, accepting the condolences of the Interior Secretary, of other smoke jumpers, of Forest Service brass as they exit the church. Mrs. Flax approaches them, waits for her turn to face Angelo. She moves up close to him and spits in his face; then she stands, without flinching, trying to take in Angelo’s humiliation. Solvan escorts his wife away but he does not apologize. Brunella wipes the spit off her father’s nose. In the parking lot, Brunella seats her father in the car, gets inside, and starts the engine. Roberto and his third wife are in a separate car. Just as Brunella is leaving, the big Indian from the Forest Service walks up to her window.
The big Indian is about forty years old, with features from distant Asia and the Athabascan north, the nose of a French-Canadian voyageur. He looks Nez Perce, or what Brunella has always envisioned of the Nez Perce, the most handsome people of the West, the Americans whose image seemed to come from the land itself. He cannot be coastal Salish; he is too tall, the nose too prominent, the eyes too deeply set; there is a hint of the face from the Edward Curtis portrait of Chief Joseph. Yes, he is a Columbia Plateau native, she decides. Perhaps Yakama or Umatilla. His eyes hold her face for a moment, and then he leaves her with a note and the only smile she has seen in days.
Two days later, they fly over the skeleton of the Johnny Blackjack fire in the same Sherpa that dropped the jumpers. There are nearly two dozen of them now, mostly family members, pressing the weight limit of the plane. Brunella holds a canister with Niccolo’s ashes inside. Angelo does not look out the window. Roberto has stayed behind; he has no desire to see where Niccolo died. Angelo looks straight ahead. You do it, he tells Brunella. Do it and get it over with. They circle the blue ice tops of the big peaks, mounts Fernow and Maude, Glacier Peak and Bonanza, the Sawtooths above Lake Chelan. Out a right-side window is the granite summit of Mount Stuart, site of her father’s triumph, but Angelo will not even look at the mountain where he made his Last Man’s Club vow. His past has no meaning; it is all gray dissolving to fog.
The Johnny Blackjack has remade the land. Everything is monochrome, even the north sides of boulders, their lichen burned. The plane drops into a valley and crosses a scorched ridge close to where the jumpers died. The fire took every tree. Usually, a burned forest is left charred but upright. This is a horizontal graveyard, with seeps of smoke and smoldering stumps, and only a few standing trees, their thick limbs curled and black. It does not look as if a natural burn, a cleansing periodic sweep of weak trees and dry brush, came through. It looks like the forest was knocked down by a storm of hurricane-force winds or a nuclear blast. From the air, it is clear that the Johnny Blackjack burned right to the edge of the coulee. It did not take out any of the plantings of the 206ers, nor did it touch Cartolano land. The greenest, most fecund center of the coulee is intact, grapes and apples growing as before, an island of sculpted life surrounded by a mass of scarred land.
“Touch him, Babbo,” Brunella says. She takes his leathered hand and sets it atop the canister. “Touch him for the last time.” The shake in his hand is worse than ever; it looks like a tarantula with Parkinson’s disease. She whispers a prayer as she stands, holds a bar for balance, and tosses the ashes out. The winds pick up what is left of Niccolo and scatter him.
At the Cartolano home, the old cherry-wood kitchen table groans under all the food. Lasagna, three-bean salads, blackberry cobbler, cookies, tomatoes and mozzarella, roasted chickens. Flowers fill the main sitting room. One bouquet is from the governor, with a personal note from his young wife. Angelo will not touch the food. Visitors come and go all day. Brunella is the face of the family, explaining why Angelo cannot see anyone. She is relieved to see her friend Emma, a woman with long redwood-colored hair and a raspy voice. They stroll outside.
“You gonna move home?” she asks Brunella.
“I can’t.”
“You never were one for State B basketball and the apple blossom parade.”
“I like being anonymous. You can only do that in the city. How are you, Emma?”
“Fighting with my ex-husband, the creep. Getting the kids back to school. Drindy’s sick and the stupid-ass HMO wants a hundred bucks just to take her temperature. I’m broke. I feel trapped in my job at the paper. Every day I call up the coroner and get one of these summaries of somebody’s life and write it up in three hundred words or less. You never do them justice. I’m sorry. You don’t need to hear any of this.”
“Did you know Teddy Flax very well?”
“Same as you, I guess. He was always different.”
“He was. You’re right, Emma. I mean, he is different, still. He seems to have this thing you don’t find in a lot of men. He’s . . . self-aware, you know what I mean? I’m desperate to see him. His mother thinks it’s our fault. What do you think?”
“I think it’s going to get worse.”
“It can’t get worse, Emma. Not for me.”
“Listen to me. Some of these people—and this is just scuttlebutt, Brunella—they may end up suing you.”
“Suing us? The family? For what?”
“For whatever happened up there under Niccolo’s command. They’ll sue the government, of course. And then they’ll sue you.”
“These people—you mean the folks who lost somebody in the fire?”
“Yes. And I hear that some of the Two-oh-sixers are talking about getting in on it.”
“But those homes were all saved.”
“Believe me, Brunella, if they think they can take something from Angelo without causing them a hiccup, they’ll do it. They’re jealous; you know that. They resent him for his success.”
“I don’t think anything will happen, Emma. This fire was a freak. These are good people who live in this coulee.”
“You want to get a drink?”
“No. I want to ask you something, though: You were raised in a conventional Mormon family—”
“I’d call it a prison. We were true believers, the ones who never got over the revelation that threw out polygamy, which means the graybeards have their pick of teenage brides and your job is to shut up and breed.”
“But . . . aside from that . . . you had faith once, didn’t you, Emma? You believed.”
“I still believe. I just don’t have faith anymore.”
In the evening, Brunella takes the radio to her father’s room. The Mariners have lost six in a row, giving up their lead to Texas in the West. Three innings go by without a word from Angelo. When the Ms load the bases, he leaves the room and wanders outside in the dark, up into the vineyards. He does not respond to calls. Brunella and Miguel find him outside the next morning, disheveled and shivering, his eyes swollen.
“Have you lost all common sense, Babbo?” says Brunella. She shakes him, but it is no use. “What’s wrong?”
“Niente.”
She is talking to a child; soon it will be diapers and shaving him in the morning.
She tends the grapes with Miguel and his crew. They will start harvesting the small lot of white grapes in a few weeks, the Pinot Grigio, the Sauvignon Blanc, some of the fruit used for blending. The Nebbiolo needs at least another month on the vine, maybe six weeks. She has a thousand questions about the harvest, but Angelo waves her off. Wine is immortality, she reminds him, the living link to Niccolo: his words. Doesn’t that mean something?
“Non vale la pena.”
How many heat units do the grapes need? How do you test the sugar level, the acidity, the tannins? How hard should the skins be? How do you make sure the grapes aren’t crushed in the bins? Or is that okay? How much powdery mildew should be left on the grapes? What happens if it rains, do you rush the harvest?
“Non vale la pena.”
All week, she sees the big Indian investigator around the coulee, peripatetic with official purpose. Every time she drives past the Flax farm, the big Indian’s Forest Service Suburban is there. She spots the Suburban up on the bench, where the 206ers live, next to the main irrigation ditch. At night, the Suburban is outside the Flax home.
Roberto is ready to return to Houston. He sits at the table, tapping his fingers, answering cell phone calls. “This is Bob . . . mmm-hmm . . . mmm-hmm . . . mmmm . . . That’s a keeper.”
He settles the family in for an announcement, a frown embedded in a face showing the early stages of a second chin. “I think we should sell the place,” he says. “Sell it now, at harvest, when it looks its best.”
“Are you crazy?” Brunella says
“I’ve been moving some numbers around, talked to a couple of brokers. This is the premier Nebbiolo vineyard on the West Coast. Mind you, it’s not Romanée-Conti or Grand Cru by anyone’s standard, but Dad has established a nice little niche up here. In Napa, they’re getting a quarter million dollars an acre for a vineyard of this quality. The French are moving into Walla Walla now, buying up everything. We sell the place this month, before the market goes south.”
“You just said the vineyard has never been more valuable. Wouldn’t it be wise to wait?”
“Who knows how much water is left in the pipeline.”
“What do you mean?”
