by Bill Barich
He thought he would walk out and have a peek at the farm. He hadn’t seen it since the holidays. His decision pleased him and discharged another little thrill into his system. He knew exactly how far he had to go, if the odometer in his truck could be trusted—8.2 miles. That would be a challenge, but he felt up to it. The day was just perfect for a hike, too—balmy, springlike, and dappled with sunlight. The first vineyard Torelli went by was almost ready to pop, shimmery with delicate green shoots that were only a couple of weeks away from bursting into bud. He listened to Daisy’s happy panting and leaned down to pluck a sticker from her fur, passing cows and pasture fences and the notorious spot where a giant redwood had once crashed down and crushed an automobile.
Torelli had never been much of a singer, but he started singing after he’d gone about three miles. It was as if all the extra oxygen pumping into his lungs had demanded a release. He sang “O, Susannah,” “My Darlin’ Clementine,” and “The Impossible Dream,” a song Claire had played so often on the hi-fi that he had learned to hate it, along with the actor who performed it on Broadway. He crooned through a few more unlikely tunes until Charlie Grimes’s spread appeared on the horizon. He simply couldn’t resist a visit and the chance to brag about himself. Sweat poured off him as he unlatched a gate that led to a dirt road much like his own. His face was already raw and sunburned, and he wished that he had dodged his vanity and worn a hat. He walked about a hundred yards and rounded a corner, and there was Grimes by his pure white barn in a stomping fluster, hanging onto the reins of a horse he hadn’t owned before and trying desperately to lead it somewhere.
“Old Charlie Grimes!” Torelli yelled.
Grimes stared at him bug-eyed, as if he were a phantom. “I didn’t hear you pull up, Victor. Where’d you park at?”
“I didn’t park anywhere. I walked out.”
“The hell you say.”
Torelli pointed to his Reeboks. “I’m a walking fool, Charlie.”
“You’re some kind of fool, anyhow,” Grimes allowed.
“Is that a horse you’ve got there?”
“Yes, sir.” He stroked the animal’s flank. “And she’s a nice little horse, too.”
The mare was a chestnut of indeterminate age, with a white blaze on her forehead. The old man used his knuckles to rub her gently, while Daisy sniffed around her legs. “She have a name?”
“Diablo Fury, she’s called. She’s an honest-to-god Thoroughbred. She ran over at the county fair last summer.”
“Did she win?’
“No, but she finished.”
Torelli did some counting. “She’s got all her legs, anyway. How’d you get her?”
Grimes scratched his butt and grunted. “Willie Tyler, his niece is marrying some fancy dan of a chiropractor, so Willie come by and asked me to make him a price on five cases of sparkling wine for the reception. I made him a price, and Willie asked me if I’d be interested in trading for a horse instead. Seems his niece used to stable this here mare in town, but she won’t be riding anymore on account of moving away, so I took the mare and now I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do with her.”
“Diablo Fury.”
“There you go. Diablo Fury.”
They sat in the shade of Grimes’s veranda for a while, drinking Cokes and chatting. It was past noon, and the sun had climbed high up in the sky.
“Looks like budbreak’s about to come on,” Torelli said, chugging at his soda to soothe his parched throat.
“I give it ten days,” said Grimes. “You figure Atwater’ll get home in time?”
“He had better.”
“He still down there in Mexico with Anna, is he?”
“Yes, sir. They’ve got a couple more days of vacation left. They’re way down there in the Yucatán, where those Mayans used to live. I got a postcard from ’em in the mail yesterday.”
“Was the picture pretty?” Grimes asked eagerly, sitting forward.
“Goddam beautiful, Charlie. It showed the Gulf of Mexico and a whole bunch of pink flamingos.”
“Did it make you want to go there?”
“It did.”
Grimes farted a few times and scratched himself some more. “Then it must be a pretty picture, all right. You figure those two will ever get married?”
Torelli debated the question privately. “I wouldn’t put my money on it,” he said.
“How come?”
“Well, I asked Anna the same thing once, and all she said was that her life was in transition.”
“That’s a helluva answer,” Grimes grumbled. “Why would anybody talk like that?
“Probably it’s from those books she reads,” Torelli said, although he wasn’t really certain. “She still hasn’t sold her half of the store yet, plus she’s living mostly down in that apartment she rented in San Francisco.”
Grimes reacted strongly to the information. “You let Atwater stay in your house by himself?”
“Anna’s with him some of the time. She’s there about every weekend. In the summer, she’ll be there more, she says.”
“I can’t make hide nor hair of the situation,” Grimes confessed with some frustration. “Either you love somebody or you don’t. This in-between business, I don’t hold with it at all.”
“There’re different kinds of love,” Torelli told him. “There isn’t but just the one kind.”
“Do you believe it to be so?”
“I do.”
Grimes spat. “Goddam that Lucy Carpenter.”
Together they walked up to the gate. Grimes loaned his friend a baseball cap and pressed a bag of M&Ms on him for a quick energy boost. With a grin and a salute, Torelli departed. He was a bit worn out and had stiffened up during his rest, but he felt some limberness return by the time he reached the main road. He passed the boundary of Grimes’s property and walked along the fenced perimeter of the next vineyard in line, where clumps of yellow mustard flowers had sprouted in profusion. The stumpy rootstock looked naked in the midst of so much raging vegetation. He could see the knobs, scars, and whorls on each trunk, a record of sorts carved into the wood. Sparrows were kicking about in the pruned canes, searching for seeds and busting them open with their beaks.
Torelli didn’t know who owned this particular vineyard anymore. That troubled him and caused him to recite in defense the names of all the families whose farms he still could identify, not only such intimates as the Vescios and Dick Rhodes but also those valley clans that were like foreigners to him, the Van Dusens, say, or the Schmidts. He marched forward along the curve of his remembering and covered another mile before he ran out of people to count. He paused then to eat the M&Ms and politely rejected two friendly drivers who slowed down to offer him a ride. Ahead lay the Poplingers’ estate, and he passed it at a steady clip and noticed a golf ball tucked into the roadside weeds. It spoke to him of mysteries. If the weeds could hide a golf ball, they must be hiding other things, too, so he rooted through every straggly patch after that and was rewarded with a marble, a plastic soldier, and the bladeless handle of a grape knife while he covered another mile.
It was late in the afternoon before the hills that framed his own home place came into view. Torelli shifted into high gear and walked toward his farm in a spirit of exhilarating triumph. His legs ached now, and he had a knotted muscle in one thigh, but he ignored the minor discomforts and crossed a bridge that spanned Wappo Creek, watching a torrent of muddy water pulse down to the river through some drenched willows. Then he swung to the right as if yanked in that direction by a magnet and started along the old dirt road that would lead him to his destination. He had been traveling it for as long as he could recall, from before the time when his grandfather had bulldozed and graded it to accommodate cars, back when the only paved streets anywhere around were the four that converged on a single stoplight in the center of town.
The oaks, madronas, and bay laurels opened onto the vineyard. The sun was dipping behind the hills, and deep shadows fell across the f
arm to pool up in inky swales that stood out against the emerald-green grass of the meadow. Torelli could feel the sweat drying on his skin as he took in the scene before him. There as ever stood the great house that had sheltered his family, its windows dark for now and its rooms emptied of voices and curiously without consequence. He had expected to be moved by the sight of it, but the house was nothing to him, really, just bricks and nails and boards. What mattered in the end were the blood ties, he thought—the press of flesh and the human community. Three field hands were busy hoeing in a block of Chardonnay, and he didn’t recognize any of them except as echoes of all the other men who had worked for him, their collective labors somehow of a piece.
“Gallego around?” he shouted, and one fellow raised an arm and gestured toward the bunkhouse trailer.
The old man headed for it. He was very tired now and a little chilly, his feet swollen and cramped despite the nurturing Reeboks. He hammered on the trailer door until Salazar Gallego unlocked it. Gallego wore no shirt and had apparently been treating the upper half of his body to a scrubbing at the kitchen sink.
“Salazar,” Torelli said with a courtly bow.
Gallego seemed puzzled about how his boss could have materialized on his doorstep without making a stitch of noise. “Hello, señor.”
“Could I trouble you for a drink of water?”
“Please.” Gallego stepped aside. “Come in, Victor.”
Torelli found himself in a living room that was even more threadbare and sparsely furnished than it had been during the tenure of its previous occupant. When Gallego handed him a glass of ice-cold water, he sipped it daintily so as not to shock his system and thought about Atwater and his daughter down there in Mexico. What a thing that was! Celestun was the village pictured on the postcard, and Anna wrote about how they had eaten shrimp fresh from the gulf and how an hombre in a skiff had poled them out to get a good close look at the flamingos, hundreds of birds in shades that ranged from pale coral to bright red. The old man imagined Anna stretched out on a beach towel on the whitest sand and wished only that Arthur would love her as hard as he could for as long as he could, and that she would do the same. He wished for their hearts to hold in the bad times. He wished them peace.
You’re full of goddam wishes today, aren’t you? he asked himself.
“Salazar, I need a favor.” Torelli had some difficulty getting to his feet, so stiff had he become. “I got it into my head to walk out here, but I never thought about getting back. Did Arthur leave you his keys?”
“Yes, Victor.”
“Could you drive me and Daisy into town?”
Gallego was an immensely cautious driver. He clutched the wheel tightly, kept his eyes straight ahead, and didn’t dare to speak. The valley was dark now but for the firefly blinking of farmhouses set back from the road.
“You got a girlfriend, Salazar?” Torelli asked him.
Gallego grinned from ear to ear. “Sí, señor,” he said. “In Mazatlán.”
“What’s her name?”
“Gloria.”
“She send you letters, does she?”
“Sometimes.”
“You send her letters back?”
“Sometimes.”
Torelli was so exhausted when he arrived home that he didn’t even bother with supper. He drank some more water and a single can of beer, soaked his feet in a tub of hot water, stripped off his clothes, fell into bed, and slept straight through until morning. He expected to be sore from his hike, but he felt refreshed instead and decided to violate his health and fitness program by cooking up the kind of country breakfast his mother used to serve at the farmhouse, eggs basted in butter, rashers of bacon, slabs of ham, and hash brown potatoes. Lot of everything in those days! He doused it all in Tabasco sauce and washed it down with a pot of coffee as thick as molasses, then laced up his Reeboks and went for his usual morning constitutional.
It was a Sunday. The town was very still and sleepy. The only sounds Torelli heard were the cooing of doves in the ornamental palm trees and the taped bells ringing over at St. Brigid’s, where a Mass was going on. He continued on down to the river and heard something else there, the yapping bark of a German shepherd tethered behind the chain-link fence at George’s Firewood. He was glad that the dog had been spared. There were real dog shooters around—the old man knew it for certain—but he didn’t number himself among them and didn’t honestly believe that the wood man was a dog shooter, either. The poor wood man was just down on his luck and saddled with too many goddam kids and a one-armed partner. Things would change for him as they changed for everybody sooner or later, Torelli thought, tacking another wish onto his list, this one for a world where every dog would be redeemed.
He walked from the river uphill to the cemetery at St. Brigid’s and stood among the headstones of his beloved dead, while the many tangled lives that made up a place called Carson Valley reposed in the hollow below him. There were invisible connections in the air, sights seen but not acknowledged, ghosts in the forest, and spirits in the deep. The old man felt comfortable where he was and grateful for the many gifts that had been given to him in his long years on earth, although he missed terribly what had been taken away, all the inevitable losses. Father, mother, brothers, one sister, such treasured friends as Thomas Atwater, his three hundred pounds no more sturdy than a thistle at the last—they were buried in the ground. Torelli stopped at Claire’s grave and spoke her name out loud. Soon he would be following her. All would follow soon.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Although I lived for years in vineyard country, I had only a passing acquaintance with the fine points of growing wine grapes and furthered my education by consulting various helpful sources during the writing of this book. The classic text is still General Viticulture by A. J. Winkler (University of California Press), but I also found some useful information in Joy Sterling’s A Cultivated Life (Villard) and Jack W. Florence, Sr.’s A Noble Heritage, published by the author. Of particular importance was A Vineyard Year (Chronicle Books) by Joseph Novitski, an elegantly written, grower’s-eye view of farming wine grapes that captures the joys and sorrows of the fields and also suggested to me that Arthur Atwater ought to keep a vineyard log. The book of Japanese poetry alluded to is Only Companion (Shambhala Centaur Editions), carefully translated by Sam Hamill.
I would like to thank the Marin Arts Council for its support, and I owe a special thanks as well to Ed and Donna Seghesio of Seghesio Winery in Healdsburg, who fed me a wonderful lunch, graciously spent an afternoon answering my questions, and sent me home with a complimentary bottle of their superb 1994 Old Vine Zinfandel. We should all be so lucky. Such errors as remain are mine, of course, though I should add that in a couple of instances I altered the facts slightly for the purposes of fiction.