Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  4

  The first flush of springlike weather washed over Carson Valley later that month. A run of warm, dry, balmy days had the sap rising in every vineyard. Growers spread the word that their grapes were moving, pushing toward the light. Even the wine stored in barrels and tanks sloshed restlessly about in cellars, tugged at by the same natural forces. The brief period before budbreak was an optimistic and vaguely lazy time for most farmers. Some men couldn’t tolerate the boredom at all and started on projects that they would never complete or instead took up a hobby they were certain to abandon once the grand cycle of growth was underway. The sight of Pepper Harris buying a mountain bike in town was frequently mentioned as a case in point, and so was Fred Vescio’s sudden itch to learn a foreign language when, it was said behind his back, he had enough trouble speaking English.

  Claire Torelli was especially grateful for the burst of heat. It helped to ease the aching in her bones. On most days, she was strong enough to sit in her bedside chair, at least for an hour or two, and read magazines, watch TV, or merely gaze out the window at a world that was gradually slipping away from her. She had started writing letters to friends she hadn’t seen in years, prompted by a powerful recollection of one sort or another that seemed almost to emanate from the very person she was thinking about, a vibration echoing in space. The letters were a way of saying good-bye, she supposed, but they still gave her such satisfaction. She would not go to her grave with any reserves of unspoken affection weighing on her heart. What was left unsaid did not exist, Claire believed.

  After months of denial, she had come to accept the fact that her illness was probably terminal. That had given her some peace and led her to discover a pleasure that was new to her, the pleasure of doing absolutely nothing. She was frankly astonished at how much nothing a hardworking, floor-scrubbing, churchgoing person like her could do. Hour after hour she simply meditated on things, roaming around in her head and exploring. She had an odd sensation, too, that her mind was expanding as her body diminished. Her mind had a vastness that she had never suspected before—it was jammed with dreams and visions she couldn’t account for having, and she drew from this a suggestion that the universe itself must be infinitely vast and intriguing and wondered why she had always been taught to narrow rather than broaden her focus. Where was the threat? Now in the fading tick of time, she wished that she had been braver and opened every door.

  Anna still came to the house every afternoon, as prompt and dutiful as ever. Sometimes she brought flowers with her, sometimes a pile of new magazines. She changed the bedding, did the ironing, cooked dinner for her father, and made sure that her mother was comfortable. There were hampers of laundry to be washed, cupboards to be stocked, and rugs to be vacuumed, a hundred little details that combined to form the substance of a household. Claire was very thankful for all the help, but she felt that Anna was sacrificing too much, making a martyr of herself, and neglecting her own young life, so she was pleased when her daughter broached the subject of taking a break and spending some time alone in San Francisco.

  “I wish you would,” Claire told her. “There’s no reason for you not to. I’ll be fine with Victor. He can get me to the doctor on Wednesday.”

  “It would only be for a little while, Mother. I need to recharge my batteries.”

  “Don’t make excuses. I understand, dear.”

  Anna smiled. “You always did understand, didn’t you?”

  “You’re putting me up way too high,” Claire said, waving a hand to protest. “I had no idea what you were doing half the time. You had me totally baffled.”

  “But you let me make my mistakes, didn’t you? And then you forgave me. I owe you so much for that.”

  “There’s no credit in being forgiving. What else was I supposed to do?” She thought about San Francisco, where she had only been a few times herself. “Where will you go in the city, Anna? Are you excited? Tell me what you’ll do.”

  “Your vineyard manager ordered me to have a ‘wild old time.’”

  “Somehow that comes as no surprise,” Claire said dryly. “Will you follow his orders?”

  “We’ll see. He told me to eat at Fisherman’s Wharf and ride a boat to Alcatraz. That’s my assignment.”

  “It doesn’t sound so wild to me.”

  “Mr. Atwater was pulling his punches, I think.” Anna kissed her mother on the forehead. “I’ll phone you every day.”

  “You don’t have to do that. Just go, Anna. Go, dear.”

  Claire was happy about her daughter’s decision. The last thing she wanted was to be a burden to her family. She was the only child of second-generation Swedes herself, Bible-thumping moralists who had farmed walnuts and pears in the valley, and she knew how controlling a parent could be with just a few well-chosen words. She had tried never to be overbearing with her own children, partly to compensate for her husband’s gruff manner. Victor loved both kids, but he could be distant, shut off from any close emotional contact. He was in his forties when they came along and already rigidly set in his ways. She had fought with him about his aloofness early in their marriage, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t change, and eventually she had dropped the matter. It had fallen to her, at any rate, to nurture Roger and Anna, a task that she quickened to, for which she was ideally suited.

  Some of her fondest memories were of the evenings that she and Anna had spent together in the kitchen after supper, doing the dishes and trading confidences. Anna was in her teens then, a lovely but challenging girl who liked to show off by telling her mother stories from the library books that she was gobbling up, six or seven at a time. Anna raved on about famous writers and composers, she recited poems and spoke in wonder about a strange painter who had cut off his ear with a razor and another man who had ridden a camel across the Arabian desert. She was describing a world that she was attracted to and hoped to join someday, although Claire didn’t recognize it at the time. It still puzzled her that her son should be so at ease with himself from the very start, while her daughter had always struggled to forge an identity. So much must be established at birth, she thought, in sheer innocence, in the random choosing of a name.

  Claire kept her doctor’s appointment later that week. She had not told Victor about the new pain in her legs or the lump near her spine, but she confided in Ed Sawyer, her gynecologist for many years, and he dispatched her to Carson Valley Hospital for some testing. The tests weren’t strenuous, but they sapped so much of Claire’s precious energy that she was kept overnight. Sawyer dropped by the next morning with a staff oncologist, while Victor was in attendance. The news they delivered was devastating. The cancer had metastasized and spread from Claire’s ovaries to her lymphatic system. She was being ravaged from within, attacked, used up. Worse still, nothing could be done about it. She had lost too much weight to tolerate another round of chemotherapy, and radiation would serve no beneficial purpose. All they could do was to send her home.

  “Ah, for Christ’s sake!” Victor was hunched in his chair, his elbows on his knees and his hands buried in his hair. “She’s only sixty-eight years old.”

  “We don’t have to tell anyone yet, do we?” Claire asked him, a note of pleading in her voice. It would only interrupt Anna’s holiday and disturb Roger at work.

  “Not if you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t.”

  Claire had to comfort Victor the following day. He looked depleted. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his hands shook so badly that he could barely hang onto the cup of tea he’d brought her. It was another gorgeous morning, with sunlight pouring into the bedroom, and she had an impulse to pay a last visit to the farm, just the two of them together, while the weather was still so fine. She didn’t say “last visit” when she put the request to Victor, of course, but he was skeptical about it anyway, concerned that it would be too taxing for her. Her resolve gave her courage, though, and she pressed him until he relented. With his help, she managed to get into a cotton dress that hung loosely on her rav
aged body and wore a sweater and an overcoat on top of it. The drive out to the farm was the first trip she had made anywhere in months, and she relished it and took in the familiar landscape with appreciative eyes, alive to every sparkle.

  On Carson Valley Road, she rolled down her window and sniffed at the air.

  “Smell that, Victor,” she said, her nostrils flaring.

  He sniffed and frowned. “What is it?”

  “Spring.”

  The willows and cottonwoods along every creek were in bud, all supple and showery green. The plum, pear, and apple trees had blossomed, too, in delicate pinks and whites. There were daffodils and narcissuses sprinkled in the meadows and a solitary California poppy, intensely orange, glowing in the weeds of a farmhouse yard. Claire watched some barn swallows flitting about and building nests under a bridge, tiny cups of mud lined with feathers. The swallows sailed and dived and flashed their spotted tails, and she thought that she had never seen any creatures so spirited. The sky was blue and endless.

  She leaned forward in anticipation as they turned into the farm, smiling to herself as she recalled her first ride down the old dirt road and how her boyfriend of the moment, one Victor Torelli, had picked her up at the Ben Franklin Store in town, where she had a job as a check-out clerk, to bring her home and introduce her to his family. Nervous to the soles of her best patent leather pumps—and not at all certain what the visit might mean—Claire almost bolted when she saw how many Torellis showed up for dinner. It was like that famous circus act where all the midgets emerge from a single car. Torellis clomped down from the upstairs bedrooms, dashed up from the basement, materialized out of closets and bathrooms, and even jumped in through an open window—that was Victor’s brother, Rudy—all of them huge and big-boned and amazingly loud and uninhibited, grabbing beers from the fridge or splashing wine into glasses, nudging one another and scratching themselves in private places, the women along with the men.

  Claire was accustomed to the tormented mealtime silence of Swedes, but these Italians all talked at once! They argued and harangued on various subjects, exchanging hugs and pinches. They laughed and yelled and even blew their noses in the sink. Their rowdiness intimidated her at first, but she got used to it over time and gradually learned to give as good as she got, although she never did adjust fully to Giovanni Torelli, the cranky paterfamilias, who was in the habit of recounting his bowel movements in excruciating detail. In his collarless shirts and an aged vest that he favored, with particles of food always clinging to his mustache, Giovanni was hardly the picture of intelligence—he played at being dim-witted, in fact, when it worked to his advantage—yet it was his cunning that had established the Torellis’ fortune. Fresh off the boat from Genoa, at the tail end of a lengthy migration to California, he had headed for Carson Valley on a tip from a dockside hustler and began buying up the cheap benchland that local fruit and nut growers considered worthless, aware that certain wine grapes performed well in similarly stingy soil in his native Tuscany.

  Victor drove on. The vineyard loomed ahead of them, dramatic now with clumps of brilliant yellow mustard flowers between the rows. Pruning was almost over for the year, but two field hands were working in a block of Cabernet Sauvignon by the house, and the old man braked to greet them.

  “Hello, Antonio,” he said, gesturing at Lopez’s companion, a forlorn-looking fellow who avoided any eye contact. “Who’s that you got there with you?”

  “Eloy Hidalgo,” Lopez told him, wiping sweat from his brow with a bandanna.

  “He isn’t much of a talker, is he?”

  “No, he’s better at being quiet. He likes to count. He counts up the lugs when we’re picking.”

  “How’s Atwater been behaving himself?”

  Lopez brightened. “He’s been real good, Victor. He hooked a steelhead after we quit yesterday. Eight pounds, he says.”

  “What do you say?”

  “Maybe seven.”

  Atwater was down by the river on his tractor, dragging a brush chopper between some vineyard rows to chop up the pruned canes where they lay. The brush would be plowed under later with a disc harrow, along with the mustard and any weeds. Claire watched him as he maneuvered, admiring the skill with which he handled the tractor on soggy terrain while he pulled some twenty feet of clattering metal behind him. He had no room for error, either, because the rows were only about eight feet apart. A black-shouldered kite, high up, its wings flapping, trailed him on his route and feasted on the field mice that were escaping from the rodent villages destroyed by the chopper’s churning teeth.

  Claire got out of the truck without too much difficulty. She leaned on her husband for support and approached the house on brittle and faltering legs, settling gratefully into a wicker chair on the porch, her coat drawn close around her. She felt as though she had walked a mile through the mud and was unable to speak for a minute or two, gasping until she caught her breath.

  “There’s no need to go inside,” she said, when Victor reached for the doorknob, knowing that the dust and disorder would upset her and knowing, too, that the house itself had already toppled into the past and belonged to no one now. “We’ll be warmer here in the sun.”

  “All right.” He carried over a chair and sat next to her, his feet up on the balustrade as he loftily surveyed his domain. “So how does the old place look to you, Claire?”

  “The same as ever,” she said, with contentment.

  “Right about now, we’d be cutting twigs from the willows and planting them along the creek. Erosion control, you called it. You remember that?”

  “I do.”

  He turned toward her and gave her a fond pat on the arm. “You were good at it. Better than me.”

  “That’s not much of a talent, is it? Can’t you think of a nicer compliment to pay me?”

  “You kept the farm from washing away.”

  “Hardly.”

  “I should have let you do more around here, really,” said the old man. “Probably I should have let you run the whole goddam show.”

  “Ha!” Claire exploded. “Fat chance of that, Victor! You wouldn’t have been able to stand it.”

  “Well, I never did take to farming all the way, did I?” He stroked his chin moodily. “Not like my father did, anyhow. He was glued to the fields. They had to send me out to drag him in for supper. Come the harvest, he’d take me down to Frisco, and we’d sell our grapes over there in North Beach, where the Italians lived. Those paesanos all made their own wine. That was the most goddam fun. I never saw such a ruckus in my life.”

  “What would you have been instead of a farmer?” Claire asked him, although she couldn’t picture him as anything else, try as she might. “If you could start over.”

  “A movie actor? Joe DiMaggio?”

  “No, really, Victor.”

  “If I had it to do all over again,” he said, his tone philosophical, “I might go to college.”

  “And study what?”

  “Biology. How nature works.”

  She looked at him doubtfully. “That might have made you happier, I guess. But you would have found something to complain about sooner or later.”

  The old man took umbrage. “That’s a hell of a thing to say, Claire.”

  “Well, it’s the truth,” she told him, with a coarse laugh. “I’m the one who’s had to listen to you bellyache for the last forty-two years.”

  “Was it really so awful?” He had the look of a boy in need of reassurance.

  “Only at first. I got so I didn’t notice it anymore. It was like the noise of an airplane flying by.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “As if I didn’t.”

  She saw that she had offended him and took his hand in hers to appease him. Her feelings toward him had fluctuated in exactly this way down all the years, forever altering, waxing and waning like the moon. The love she had for him at the start of their courtship was one-dimensional and centered in the flesh, quick to ignite and just as
quick to gutter out, a sharply sexual flame that left her thrilled but also with a disconcerting sense that he had carried her up to a mountaintop and abandoned her there. She could sense him pulling away from her afterward, flowing back into himself and re-establishing his boundaries, until after they were married. Then her original love for him began to deepen. She was more trusting as she learned what she could and could not expect from him. Victor never surprised her in bed, for instance. For all his physical prowess, he was too timid for her. She wanted him to be rougher, more experimental and free, but she never dared to tell him that. Once, after too much wine at supper, he did some things to her that she had always craved, but he seemed ashamed of himself in the morning and never repeated them despite her reinforcing praise.

  Next came the love that streamed into them both when their children were born, an enriching love whose source appeared to be planetary and universal. It made certain difficult aspects of Claire’s life more tolerable and others less important. The children granted her some perspective and changed her relationship to passing time, slowing everything down. It was best when they were little kids, splashing around in the pond, chasing after the ducks, and bumping about in the big green paradise that was the farm. She had loved Victor as her dearest friend then, her partner and coconspirator, somebody who understood her every reference, with whom she could battle and debate and yet stand firmly beside when she was confronted with the treachery of the swirling world outside. She could not have imagined a further ripening, but as his brothers grew older and died off one by one, she felt a new and different love between them that was rooted in sadness, the love of comrades united in grief, bound together by their losses, by all that they had witnessed.