Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel

by Jannifer Chiaverini

  “Rosa,” Carlos murmured, hesitating before he embraced her. He nodded to John, and a flicker of a smile appeared on his face as his gaze lingered upon his nieces and nephew, whom he had never met. Before Rosa could speak, their father came upon them. Distracted by sorrow, he did not immediately recognize her, but when he did, his eyes widened and he stared in wonder at his four grandchildren.

  “Papá,” Rosa greeted him tremulously, pained to see him muddled by grief and loss, aged beyond his years. “This is Pedro,” she said, nodding to the baby in her arms. “John’s holding Maria, and here we have Ana and Marta, my eldest.”

  He gazed at each of his grandchildren as she named them, his watery, red-rimmed eyes filling with tears. Then he patted Marta on the head, cupped Ana’s cheek with his hand, and reached forward to offer Pedro a finger to grasp. Suddenly his arms were around Rosa, and he bent to rest his head upon hers. Motionless from astonishment, she felt his tears falling upon her hair as he held her, swaying slightly as he shifted his weight from foot to foot. She drew in a breath, and as her lungs filled with her father’s familiar smell of wool and tobacco and cedar, she felt the strange sensation of the weight of years of unhappiness falling aside. “Papá,” she said, resting her cheek upon his shoulder and closing her eyes. “I’ve missed you so.”

  Just as suddenly as he had embraced her, he let her go. “You broke her heart,” he choked out. “You broke her heart and now she’s gone.”

  “Papá—”

  “Don’t. Don’t speak to me.” He shook his head and pushed past her. Carlos went after him, throwing her an impassioned look over his shoulder, a warning not to follow. Shocked into silence, Rosa stared after them as they disappeared into the crowd of mourners, her father’s words of rebuke and condemnation ringing in her ears.

  John saw her swaying and managed to steady her before she collapsed. He handed Pedro to Marta and helped her to the car. “He blames me,” she murmured. “He thinks she took her own life, and he blames me.”

  “It was an accident,” John said, “but let’s face facts—she wouldn’t have been on the mesa that day if not for you.”

  Rosa felt as if a cold wind had swept her last hopes away. Her teeth chattered violently and she clutched her arms to her chest, shivering. She thought she might never be warm again.

  She had no safe refuge anymore. Her mother was dead and her father had rejected her.

  She wept for her mother—and for herself. She could not leave John now.

  More than five years had passed since that desperate hour, but Rosa had finally left him.

  The train sped north, carrying Rosa and her children and Lars away from John, away from the adobe, and for Rosa and the children at least, away from the only lives they had ever known. Her gaze went to the luggage racks above their seats where the two precious quilts Elizabeth had rescued—one a cherished family heirloom, the other the last gift from her beloved mother—sat neatly folded among their few belongings.

  Somewhere, in some faraway town Rosa had never seen, in a home she could as yet only vaguely imagine, she would spread the quilts upon warm, snug beds and her children would sleep peacefully beneath them, safe and sound at last. Rosa would have her brave and loyal friend Elizabeth to thank for whatever happiness they found there.

  With each passing mile, as city blocks and streetcars gave way to rolling hills and farmers’ fields, Rosa felt John’s stranglehold upon her imagination loosening. He was in prison and likely to remain there for a very long time. The police believed that she and the children were dead; perhaps John believed it too, if jealous suspicion had not prompted him to conflate Lars’s disappearance and her own.

  If there were any justice in the world, John would be convicted of her mother’s murder as well as Henry Nelson’s shooting, but it was not to be.

  When a sudden surge of anger swept through her, Rosa turned her face to the window so the girls, enjoying a game of backgammon with Lars while Miguel dozed on her lap, would not notice. John had pressured her to blame herself for her mother’s death, when he knew Isabel had perished at his own hands. Rosa felt a spiky, cold shiver down her spine when she remembered the aftermath of her mother’s accident. Nothing in John’s manner, not his words or his deeds or even the slightest, betraying flicker of emotion in his expression had implicated him. She was shocked and bewildered enough to think that he had taken her mother’s life; that he showed not a wisp of regret or remorse terrified her.

  She recalled a day not long after her mother’s death when John had come home from an errand pale, clammy, and trembling. Alarmed, she had questioned him, but he rebuffed her until she threatened to summon the doctor. He wasn’t having a heart attack, he had insisted roughly, he had just taken a fright. On his way home he had crossed the mesa, and for a moment he had thought he had seen Isabel walking along the edge of the Salto Canyon. “She stopped in her tracks and stared right at me,” he had said, shaking as he paced the length of the front room, clenching and unclenching his fists.

  “It must have been someone else,” Rosa had replied, refusing to believe even for a moment that her mother’s unquiet spirit haunted the mesa. “Or perhaps it was a tree blowing in the wind. The sunlight streaming through the mists can play tricks on the eyes.”

  “That was no tree,” John had retorted. “Trees bend or break, but they don’t walk. Someone was out there.”

  “Whoever it was, it wasn’t my mother,” Rosa had said sharply, and John set his jaw and never spoke of it again. Now Rosa looked back on the bizarre exchange with new insight: Her mother’s ghost had been a figment conjured up by his own guilty conscience. To Rosa, his fearful avoidance of the mesa thereafter was as good as a confession.

  They disembarked in Santa Rosa, and as Lars and Rosa stood on the platform in the midst of the bustling crowd making sure that all children and luggage were accounted for, a young, dark-haired man worked his way through the throng toward them. “Mr. and Mrs. Ottesen?” he asked. He looked to be about sixteen years old, and wore his tie loosened and his gray flannel hat set at a jaunty angle.

  “Yes,” Lars replied, shaking his hand. “I’m Nils and this is Rose. You must be Vincenzo Cacchione.”

  “Please call me Vince,” he said, smiling as he tugged on the brim of his hat and nodded to Rosa. “Ma’am.”

  Lupita scowled. “She’s not Rose.”

  Marta nudged her, too late to do any good.

  Vince feigned astonishment. “She’s not? Then who is she?”

  “She’s Mamá, of course,” said Lupita indignantly.

  Vince burst into laughter, and nervously Rosa joined in. “Thank you so much for coming to meet us, Vince,” she said.

  “My pleasure.” Vince seized the handles of Lars’s suitcase and one of the valises. “The wagon’s over this way if you’ll come with me.”

  Quickly they snatched up the rest of their luggage and followed Vince from the platform, through the station, and outside to a wagon hitched to a pair of sturdy brown draft horses with black manes and tails. Rosa rode beside Vince on the wagon seat holding Miguel on her lap, while Lars piled in back with the older children and their belongings.

  “Ma said to take you to the pickers’ cabin to unload your things before bringing you up to the house,” Vince explained with a grin as he took the reins and chirruped to the horses. “She’s going to put you to work right away.”

  “That’s fine,” said Lars. “We can settle in later.”

  For Rosa, Vince’s words immediately evoked memories of the dilapidated cabin on the Jorgensen ranch, and she wondered with some trepidation what the pickers’ cabin would be like. She also wondered what sort of work Mrs. Cacchione had in mind for their first day. Rosa would prefer to work in a garden or in the vineyard, although she knew nothing about tending grapevines. She and the children had been too long sitting indoors and strolling paved sidewalks. Fresh air, sunshine, and the rich, earthy smell of overturned soil would do them all good.

  As they passe
d through Santa Rosa, Vince asked the children their names and pointed out important places along the way—the bank, the post office, the pharmacy with the best soda fountain for miles. “Everyone’s looking forward to meeting you,” he said, glancing over his shoulder to grin at the children. He reeled off the names of his seven brothers and sisters too quickly for Rosa to remember them all, but she gathered that he was the third eldest, with an older brother and sister and several younger siblings around the same ages as Ana and Marta. Rosa hoped they would become fast friends. They would be far less apprehensive on their first day at their new, unfamiliar school if they had already befriended a few of their classmates.

  They left the streets of the small town behind and traveled south along a wide dirt road over gently rolling terrain. The hills framing the valley in the distance reminded Rosa of home, although deep green pines and leafy redwoods covered the peaks rather than soft green scrub and sage. The sun shone in a clear, blue sky, as if it had burned away all the damp chill of the fog-shrouded city they had departed that morning. The breeze was warm and fragrant and carried an unfamiliar fruity, woodsy perfume; Rosa inhaled deeply, savoring the enticing scent. They passed farms with fields of overturned earth giving evidence of the recent harvest, orchards busy with pickers climbing ladders and filling buckets with apples and plums, and vineyards with low, neat trellises covered in grapevines, the leaves awash in the changing colors of the season—green, gold, and scarlet.

  “Is the grape harvest over for the season?” asked Lars. Only then did Rosa grasp what he had immediately observed, that no pickers moved among the vineyard rows, and the autumn tints of the grape leaves heralded their demise.

  Vince nodded. “You missed the crush too.”

  “The crush?” asked Marta.

  Vince threw her a grin over his shoulder. “Sure. You know that wine comes from grapes, don’t you? Well, we have to crush the grapes to get the juice that turns into wine.” His searching gaze traveled the vineyard rows and settled for a moment upon a white Victorian house on a distant hill. Rosa wondered who lived there. “The crush used to be the busiest, most important few weeks in the Sonoma Valley. When I was a kid, at this time of year, these roads were filled with wagons and trucks bringing in the crops or hauling grapes from vineyards to wineries. Everyone was in a hurry to get the work done. The crushers rumbled and growled as ripe grapes were dumped into them by the basketful, and men shouted to be heard over the din—calling out orders and sizing each other up and querying one another about who’d already finished their crush and who was still picking and which lazy souls had yet to get started. The air was so heavy with the sweet smell of grape juices that you’d have thought you could drink it. But nowadays—” Vince shrugged, making a rueful face. “You’d hardly know the crush was happening at all.”

  “But the crush doesn’t happen at your vineyard anymore, isn’t that so?” asked Rosa. “Dr. Reynolds said that you grow and sell wine grapes now rather than making wine.”

  “I didn’t say we were crushing,” said Vince quickly. “That would be illegal.”

  As Vince fell silent for the first time since they had left the station, Rosa glanced over her shoulder at Lars, raising her eyebrows. Lars, bemused, gave her a small shrug in return.

  About five miles south of Santa Rosa, Vince slowed the horses as they approached another lush vineyard basking in the sun. “This is home,” he announced proudly. “Sixty acres of the most beautiful, fertile land in God’s creation.”

  “It’s so pretty,” breathed Ana.

  Rosa couldn’t have agreed more. She shaded her eyes with her hand and admired the hundreds of orderly rows of low, sturdy trellises etching the level earth with green and gold. In the distance, a grand two-story redwood residence commanded the view from the heights near a grove of walnut trees. Through the foliage, Rosa glimpsed the golden tan of another redwood building some distance beyond the house, which she supposed could be the winery. She wondered if it had been abandoned since Prohibition had begun or if it had been put to another purpose.

  Lars squinted in the sunlight as his gaze came to rest on the far hills. “What are you growing in that orchard?” he asked. “Pears?”

  “Prunes,” Vince replied.

  “Don’t you mean plums?” asked Rosa, smiling. “You harvest plums. It’s only after drying that they become prunes. Isn’t that so?”

  Vince smiled back. “I suppose that’s so, if you’re a stickler for accuracy. We call ’em prunes whether they’re dried or still green on the trees.”

  Rosa resolved to do the same, even though the idea of harvesting prunes conjured up images of fruit left on the trees far too long. To do otherwise would mark them as outsiders.

  A road broad enough for two wagons to pass easily wound up the gradual slope toward the residence, but instead of taking it, Vince shook the reins and ordered the horses onward until they reached a second, narrower lane, with well-worn wheel ruts along the edges and a wide thatch of tough grass growing down the center. Vince slowed the horses to a walk as the wagon swayed and pitched along. Rosa clutched Miguel tightly upon her lap with one arm and grasped the seat with her free hand to brace herself. “It won’t be much farther,” Vince assured them, and at that moment the redwood shakes of a roof came into sight, and as the wagon rumbled over a low rise, the rest of the cabin appeared in a hollow shaded by oak and walnut trees. It was larger than Rosa had expected, with solid walls of redwood logs, a broad front porch, glass windows, and a chimney of smooth, round river stones. The breeze carried to her the burbling of an unseen creek and the sweetness of grapes. Captivated, Rosa held her breath, half fearing that Vince would steer the wagon past the cabin and take them farther on down the road to an as yet unseen, dilapidated shack reminiscent of the one on the Jorgensen ranch, but he pulled the horses to a halt and offered to help them unload.

  Delighted, the girls scrambled down from the wagon, which prompted Miguel to wriggle and squirm on Rosa’s lap, eager to follow. “Marta, would you please take your brother?” she called out, struggling to keep hold of him. Marta hurried back and reached up as Rosa handed him down from the wagon seat. With Miguel clutching Marta’s hand, the children ran to the cabin, bounded up the three low steps, and knocked on the door. Laughing, Vince called out that they should just go on in, since it was their place now and no one was there to answer their knock anyway.

  As Rosa, Lars, and Vince carried their luggage to the cabin, Rosa heard the girls squealing with joy over whatever it was they had discovered within. Suddenly Ana appeared in the doorway, breathless. “There’s an attic, Mamá,” she exclaimed. “With six beds. Six!” Just as quickly, she darted off again.

  “They’ve grown accustomed to sharing beds,” Rosa explained to Vince as she followed him across the threshold, a valise in one hand and her other arm wrapped around the sewing basket with the precious quilts folded on top.

  “The previous tenants did too,” Vince replied, setting the other satchel and Lars’s suitcase on a braided rag rug just inside the front door. “They had ten children, all boys.”

  “My goodness, what a handful,” Rosa replied, smiling to conceal an unexpected pang of grief. She should have eight children running through the cabin, eight children, not four, calling out to one another as they explored its every nook—five girls and three boys, each of them brown-eyed, dark-haired, and beloved.

  She felt Lars’s hand on her shoulder, his gentle, sympathetic squeeze, and she knew he had read her thoughts. “Why don’t you take a look around while we unload?” Lars said quietly, and when she nodded, he headed back out to the wagon with Vince.

  Quickly Rosa walked through the cabin, taking in as many details as she could. Their luggage sat on the smooth redwood planks of a front room that seemed spacious and charming after a week spent in the boardinghouse bedroom. A large stone fireplace occupied one wall, with comfortably worn chairs drawn up in front of it. Sunshine streamed through the windows, the rays illuminating dust motes as th
ey fell upon a faded sofa set against the back wall. A doorway on the right led to a kitchen, where Rosa noted a deep double sink, an older but tidy stove, and a rectangular wooden table with two chairs on the ends and long benches along the sides—plenty of room for all. There was no icebox, but a door on the far wall revealed stairs leading down into a dark root cellar, and the air that wafted from it was so chilly that goose bumps prickled her arms. Another door revealed an ample pantry, but the shelves were bare except for a broom propped up in the corner, a dusty can of peaches, and a tin of sardines. Glancing around at the cupboards, Rosa hoped they were better stocked, with pots and pans and dishes and cutlery.

  Returning to the front room, Rosa glanced warily upward at the sound of the children’s footsteps pounding overhead as they sprinted from one end of the attic to the other. “Seems sturdy enough,” she murmured when the ceiling didn’t cave in. She pushed open a door that stood ajar near the foot of the staircase. White eyelet curtains were drawn over the two windows, but enough sunlight peeked through for Rosa to make out a double bed with sheets and blankets folded in a pile at the foot, a tall wardrobe, a shorter bureau with a chipped china pitcher and dish set upon it, and a redwood rocking chair, a jumble of straight lines and level planes. The air was stale and still, so Rosa drew back the curtains and opened the windows, welcoming the freshening breeze inside.

  Leaving the room, she climbed the stairs to the attic and found the children bounding from one twin bed to another, talking and laughing and flinging themselves upon the mattresses experimentally to find the softest and most comfortable. The ceiling sloped so that she had to stoop unless she stood where the sides came to a peak in the middle. Someone had made up the small beds with sheets and pillows, but although Rosa looked around for blankets or quilts, she found none. Perhaps she would find some in the bedroom below, tucked away in the bureau or the wardrobe.