“You are amused, Monsieur?” Xavier said.
“Oh. Not really amused. Actually, I could see something almost tragic in all this.”
Xavier thought for a second that either his French or Bayly’s had miscommunicated something here. “Tragique?”
Bayly turned to him. His features were fine, maybe a little delicate—perhaps that’s what Marceline was reacting to—but the nose was good: a vigneron needed a good nose. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was thinking about the years my father and my wife’s father stood side by side discussing the harvest, the same words, the same guessing. All they did was worry, and in the end, it didn’t turn out well for them.”
Xavier had understood this much in June, something of this history—with fruit, peaches, if he remembered correctly.
“I can’t imagine what my father would think about what I am doing,” Bayly continued. “Whether it would make him proud or whether he’d decide that I am mad. What happened in the blight destroyed him.”
“As for so many here,” Xavier answered. “But my papa never lost hope. He lived long enough to see that the grafting was going to work, even though the first few American roots didn’t take to our chalk.” He kicked the ground fondly. In retrospect, he liked the fact that not just any old American rootstock could come here and take over; there had to be some compromise in all this, some concession.
“My father would have liked that—‘didn’t take to our chalk.’ He’d wonder why. He was a scientist more than a grower.”
“Hmmm,” said Xavier, meaning some respect—after all, the scientists at Montpellier, Planchon and Riley, had saved them—but also some skepticism.
“But you survived,” Bayly concluded. “Me too, I guess. And for all that, our reward is to stand here and worry about hail, disease, frost. It never ends. We could be having this conversation in a thousand different languages about crops you and I have never heard of. Not tragique. Rather”—he paused—“as you say, amusing.” Amusant, this endless cycle of lives.
Xavier had expected nothing like this from Bayly, and somehow they seemed to have ended up exactly where the whole conversation began. But it was not so far from the way Xavier thought of this life: a vigneron needed to have the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. Before oidium and phylloxera, the land of Oc had been a place of laughter, of fêtes and Carnaval—Carnaval es arribat, le brave, le brave!—of long stories and twisted reasoning, of the humor of the gallows but also the drollness of the marketplace. One needed some lightness, one needed the carnival of life, and perhaps that had been missing at St. Adelelmus. “Amusant, then,” he answered. “What we do is amusant.”
That evening he related this to Marceline. She started to protest—the person we work for now is fou—but as he talked, she softened and began to see the appeal in all this. The illogic. Marceline was the daughter of a bookish schoolteacher, and though she was from a much-lesser family than Xavier, she was well educated in the glories of French thought. There was, she allowed, something of Rabelais in what Bayly said.
* * *
Beal wasn’t thinking about much of anything that day, especially not about grapes and farming and the ironies of the choices Thomas had made. She allowed herself to be led by the Señora from one end of the house to the other, and it seemed that she was pointing out the most positive features of each room, though she was hard to understand. Beal assumed that if she simply listened, before too long she’d gain some access to this private tongue, and besides, after almost everything she said, the Señora burst into laughter, which made none of it seem very grave. To the south was the tidy farmyard, where Beal could see the gentlest view of all, sheep and cows and two enormous pigs, and hay: the things of home. To the north there were no windows at all. The Señora made note of this and then fluttered her arms and hands wildly and made a puffing sound through her lips. “Because of the winds during the winter,” Gabriella translated, though Beal had already figured that out.
During that harvest Beal mostly stayed around the house, though several times she went up to the vineyards and watched the men as they worked down the vines, tossing bunches of grapes over their shoulders into the conical baskets on their backs. They never missed. When the baskets were full, the men clambered up onto the back of a cart and tipped their loads, almost somersaulting into the bed of fruit.
Beal didn’t remember when, but somewhere along the line of her spotty schooling back in Tuckertown she had come upon a picture of men and women tromping on grapes with their bare feet. She had never said this to Thomas, but it was one of the reasons she thought wine was unclean, one of the reasons she still found it unappetizing to see Thomas drink it with food. But here she discovered that no one did that anymore, hadn’t really done it for many years. Instead, the grapes went through rollers to break the skins, and then the whole smashed and gooey mess—grapes, skins, pits—got poured into vats. Which was bad enough, for Beal. She watched this with M. Murat, who fretted and talked to himself the whole time. Sulfur, yeast, temperature, oxygen; too much of one, too little of the other, or vice versa, it didn’t really matter. She liked this about him; he reminded her of Abel, her own father, which is what Thomas had told her to expect. Looking down into the vats, which after a day or two began to bubble and spit and then to expel a solid cap of smashed grape skins, stems, and seeds, she realized that the whole thing was simply being left to rot. One day she emerged groggy from the gases.
She kept an eye out for Thomas but mostly tried to let him work. She was proud of him because he knew how to stay out of the way, but still, she knew he was learning and, at the same time, leading. At night she would ask him about the day, content to let him go on and on. It was a relief not to be talking about themselves, the move, the way it had all ended in Paris, about anything that had come before this. It was as if she wanted life to simply begin anew, and it would have been possible—she thought Thomas would be disposed to do this—if the new life growing inside her hadn’t begun back there, back in what now seemed to be weeks and weeks of confusion and despair. It hadn’t seemed like that at the time, but it did now.
One day as she was waking up—these days it was Thomas who was up first, long gone before she ambled downstairs to the kitchen—she realized that it had been exactly three weeks since she had woken up in Paris. It seemed months ago, and the sugary ease of this mountaintop farm made the whole idea of city life seem slightly implausible, somewhere out there, là-bas. She thought of Arthur in his studio, the dear girls Monique and Gilberte being woken and washed and dressed for school, the Richards commencing another day, checking guests out, anticipating the arrival of newcomers in the evening. She wondered if that man who had stumbled into their farewell dinner, Malone, was still at the hotel, whether he’d found a flat, whether he was working on his French with Céleste. It made her a little homesick to think of others doing all this without her. She pictured their apartment, now empty, and for a few moments she amused herself by imagining a stroll past the markets on the rue Cler, picturing the crush at each of them, wondering if those merchants had thought of her once or twice since she left. But for all that, she couldn’t place herself in the middle of any of it, and she supposed that their time there really was a dream, an experience out of time. But then, once again, it was the child within her that brought her back.
A few weeks after she arrived, she happened to be standing outside the front door when a sporty gig pulled up in a cloud of dust. When it came to a stop and the horse had let out a good snort to clear his nostrils, a young woman wrapped the reins around the brake handle and stepped down; she had her brown hair in a red kerchief, but her shirt and skirt were the indistinguishable gray that all the women here seemed to wear. Beal would have figured out who this was even without seeing immediately that she was very pregnant, a funny sight, really, with such a birdlike frame. “You’re Mme Milhaud,” she said in her French. “My husband has told me about you.”
Léonie smiled back, speaking in
her English. That’s how these first conversations went, darting back and forth between two languages not that well mastered, but the meaning was clear. She answered, “In the Midi we do not often pay calls, and never at harvest time, but I wanted to see how you were doing.”
Beal invited her in, asked Gabriella to bring some tea, and settled at the stone table under the figs.
“It’s so lovely here,” said Léonie. “A real farm. Not some fake château built by a banker from Béziers. But that may be St. Adelelmus’s misfortune, that it is too pretty for its own good.”
“Is that a problem?”
“It means that people have bought it for the wrong reasons. My father-in-law did not make that mistake with La Fontaine. The name makes it sound much grander than it is. But don’t worry. St. Adelelmus is excellent terrain. I just mean it makes what we do seem too easy.”
Beal wasn’t sure what she meant. “Thomas is working very hard. He is already very deep into this plan of his.”
Léonie blushed. “Oh. I didn’t mean to suggest anything. I am sorry. I was just thinking about this lovely vineyard and how much it deserves you. I don’t mean to sound negative.”
“I understand. I know what we are doing seems…” She couldn’t find the word, in French or in English.
“Improbable?” offered Léonie.
“Yes. Improbable.”
“As you Americans say, so what?” She said the last words in English, and they both laughed. “But how are you?”
“I think I am doing all right. It’s all so new.” Gabriella brought the tea, and Léonie and she had a brief conversation about la Señora, how she was doing after “last week.”
“A lovely girl,” Léonie said when Gabriella left them. “Her mother is a great favorite. You’ll see when you go to the market with her. It’s quite comical. She’s a sort of queen. The crowd parts for her.”
“Because she is so tall?”
“Yes, but also because they don’t know her well, and she is, as maybe you have noticed, a little odd. She prowls about at night, sometimes several kilometers away. Sometimes in the morning we find her and bring her in and wait for her husband or the girl to come looking for her.” Léonie took a sip of tea. “I’m sorry. Perhaps that wasn’t very useful. I keep saying the wrong thing. I don’t want to scare you about her. She’s always very cheerful.”
Beal shook her head. “At home there are always one or two people who get jittery at evening times or at night. We call them”—she didn’t try to translate—“walkers.”
“Les gens qui marchent?”
“Yes. My Mama said that it was slavery that did it to them—they’re always trying to find things that were lost. Maybe la Señora is looking for something like that.”
Léonie listened to this with a bit of surprise on her face, which softened into a sort of sympathetic wonderment, and they drank their tea and listened to the sounds of the harvest for a few moments. “Your French is actually very good,” she said finally. “You’ve made an impressive start. Some people here will not understand you, but mostly because of your Parisian accent.”
“Thomas says my French is better than my English. More proper, he means.” Beal didn’t know why, but it felt good to open up to this stranger. “We speak a little different at home. My parents always corrected us kids, but when they talk to each other, they always speak the way that comes natural for them. A couple more years away, and I might not even understand them.”
Léonie put her hand on Beal’s. “This must be hard for you. To be so far from home. I can’t imagine.”
At some later time, Beal supposed, if they really became friends, she would tell this woman more—she would say yes, it is so hard for me, I never think about it at all. From the day I got on a boat to come here, I put my home and my Mama and Daddy in a box, and I won’t let them out until I can bear it. I can’t even write them a decent letter. But here she said, “Yes, but Thomas and I really had no choice.”
“Still,” said Léonie. They drank their tea, and Léonie told Beal the essentials about life here, about the markets, and about the people who would be friendly to them and the people who would not. She finished with what Beal thought was a truly kind offer to help her in any way she could, and then, as they stood up, Léonie looked at her with a sort of double take and a quizzical smile. “Are you pregnant?” she asked.
That this woman was the first person to guess this, that she would be the first person Beal told, seemed strangely right. Strangely the very best thing. “Yes,” she said. Her ears coppered. “But I haven’t told anyone. I think Thomas just thinks I’m getting fat on the Señora’s cooking.”
“When will you be due?”
“I’m not really sure. I think it happened in the middle of June.”
“Yes. We never really know these things. And besides, you’re smart to wait. I lost my first one.” When she said this, she caressed her stomach, as if reassuring the child waiting inside that all would be well. And it was: two weeks after this meeting, Léonie delivered her third child, her second son, whom they named Gustav.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Beal, and her hand went to her own stomach. She realized that this was a gesture she had begun to make often, sensing the slight roundness in the cup of her palm. It came to her then that Léonie could not possibly be the only woman who had suspected something; Gabriella had seen her emerging from the bath, and who knew what the girl might have noticed.
“It was very early,” Léonie answered. “It was fine. If I hadn’t told Theo right away, I wouldn’t have had to pay it much notice at all, which I would have preferred. But you seem well beyond that. It’s probably time for you to tell him.”
“Yes. I suppose there is no reason to delay anymore.”
“Is there some other reason? Are you frightened? You can be.”
Beal heard this with some alarm; it now seeming impossible to conceal anything from this person, even the things she would die trying to keep secret. She wasn’t sure how she felt about this. “No,” she answered. “No reason. It’s just not something I’ve ever done before, to tell someone I am expecting. I didn’t tell anyone in Paris, though I tried to tell one person.”
Léonie might have followed up on that obscure “one person,” but she departed without any comment, and Beal stood awhile, her hand on her stomach, following the gig as it raced away down the hill, past the barns, and into the chestnuts before reappearing one last time at the bottom of the ravine. With an empty feeling, Beal watched Léonie go. How long had it been since she really had a friend? The women in Paris, Hilary and Colleen, she was grateful for all their kindness, but she wasn’t sure they were friends. She didn’t understand why her pregnancy made her feel so lonely; maybe that was the real reason she hadn’t told Thomas—though there were others—because she was afraid this loneliness would come in the door along with the child. It seemed completely wrong, but that was the way she’d felt from the moment she realized what had happened, from the moment—again, she wished these memories would forever go away—she collapsed onto Diallo Touré’s empty bed. She hoped she could hold off, at least until the end of the harvest.
Beal had supposed that once the grapes finished rotting in the fermentation vats, they would draw off or press out—who knew—the juice, and that would be that, but over the next few weeks she heard all manner of things about fining and filtering, all sorts of ailments being guarded against, from Thomas and from M. Murat, and by the time the wine ended up in the casks, she almost felt sorry for it. “Why not just let it be?” she asked Thomas one night.
“The natural destiny of wine is to become vinegar, and bad vinegar at that.”
“Listen to you. ‘Destiny.’ Is this a religion or something like that?”
They ate their meals in a small room just off the kitchen that had only a slit of window at the top of the high stone wall; in the evening a shaft of light came down from it like a blessing. To Beal, it felt as if they ate in a church, one of those s
mall antechapels in Notre-Dame or Saint-Sulpice.
“For them, it is religion,” said Thomas. “St. Martin’s Day, St. Vincent’s Day. Big days on the vignerons’ calendar.” He laughed. “Most of the time when I ask M. Murat a question he tells me the answer is a mystery that only the vine understands.”
“Do you think that is his way of ignoring you?”
“Yes, but it is also the way he thinks. There’s a logic to surrendering to mystery. Just ask Mother Lucy.”
Beal looked at him; he was radiant, as if after years of doubt, he had given himself fully to faith. His face was ever browner from the sun; maybe, just as there was white blood in Beal’s body, there might be black blood in his. She had never seen him so glad at heart, almost triumphal. “But people do have some idea,” she said. “Some people make bad wine. Some people make good wine.”
“Yes. They do. That’s what I want to do.”
“You will. You will succeed at this because your whole heart is in it. You will be famous before you are done.” Beal did not know exactly where or why this thought came to her; it had simply come out from nowhere, an idea placed on her tongue, but as soon as she said it, she felt she had seen into the future, far into the future, which was a safe place for her.
He looked up, startled, caught off guard, his private ambitions spoken aloud. He may not have been seeking fame, but he was seeking something that marked its own spot in history, something oddly permanent; a good wine, a vin supérieur, could just as well be it. “We will,” he said, taking her hand. “We will be famous.”
The harvest was over by the first week of October. The wine was in casks in the cellar, and the slow season began. On St. Martin’s Day, in November—Beal had been hearing about it for weeks, some sort of big holiday—they sampled the new wine; everyone got drunk and then they slaughtered one of the pigs, a sacrifice as if from the Bible. They’d be pruning the vines all winter, and in the chais they’d be turning the casks, but everything was doing what it was supposed to do, which was to sleep and to age. The air would be seeping through the pores of the wood, which Beal began to understand was key. Then she discovered that early the following year, in some fancy places like Bordeaux, the opposite strategy would be taken, which was to put the wine into bottles, where it was protected from the air! What a lot of work, but maybe that’s what it would take to be famous.
Thomas and Beal in the Midi Page 26