Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel

by Jannifer Chiaverini

  “I think time will tell, but in the meantime we should be careful.”

  “We need to be careful anyway,” Rosa reminded him. “We’re the ones who aren’t being perfectly honest with our new acquaintances, Nils.”

  Lars snorted dryly and quickened his pace to catch up with the girls, and Rosa fell into step beside him.

  Before long they reached the cabin, a snug and welcome haven in a night that had grown cooler since they left the barn. Marta and Ana climbed the attic steps wearily, and Rosa followed close behind, Miguel in her arms. Lars carried Lupita upstairs, placed her still sleeping upon one of the beds, and returned downstairs for the children’s belongings before bidding the girls good night and leaving the attic. After tucking in the children, Rosa returned downstairs to check the master bedroom for extra blankets and found Lars peering through the doorway and eyeing the bed. He looked up at the sound of her footsteps. “I’ll take the sofa.”

  She nodded and brushed past him, feeling a flush rise in her cheeks as she searched the bureau and wardrobe for extra blankets. Finding none, she made up her bed with the folded sheets but carried the blanket to the front room, where her mother’s quilts still rested on top of her sewing basket. She gave Lars the blanket as well as the quilt Elizabeth had called the Arboles Valley Star, and took the Road to Triumph Ranch quilt for herself. Then she wished Lars good night, went off to the bedroom, and shut the door.

  She wondered if he would notice the intertwined initials her mother had embroidered upon the quilt and puzzle over their significance.

  As she drifted off to sleep to the gentle music of the brook, the wind in the oak boughs, and the soft, occasional creak of bedsprings overhead, she drew her great-grandmother’s wedding quilt up to her chin and hoped the children would be warm and comfortable in the attic. As autumn waned, the nights would likely grow colder, and the children would need quilts for their new beds. Closing her eyes, Rosa envisioned herself sitting by the fireside piecing scraps into cozy quilts, one for each of her beloved children. For Miguel she would stitch a quilt using the Railroad Crossing pattern, in hopes that he would sleep as peacefully beneath it as he had in her arms on their journey north, lulled by the music and motion of the train. For Lupita she would make a Happy Home quilt, a symbol of her wistful prayers that her little girl would be content wherever their journey led them, and not miss too much the unhappy, broken home they had left behind. Ana, her little scholar, would cherish a Schoolhouse quilt, and as for Marta, the Loyal Daughter block suited her so perfectly it could have been named for her.

  She hoped that as long as they resided within the cabin, and wherever they dwelt thereafter, quilts sewn with love would offer her children warmth, comfort, and a sense of home.

  Chapter Five

  The next morning, Rosa woke to the sounds of the children’s footsteps overhead and muffled laughter. Pulling a robe on over her nightgown, she padded down the hall to the bathroom to wash up before returning to her bedroom to dress for the day, her thoughts already running through the many tasks awaiting her. The first, of course, was breakfast. The children would be hungry, and although Mrs. Phillips had packed them an ample lunch for the train the previous day, little remained left over to portion out among six people. Rosa would have to ask the Cacchiones for a ride to the market later that day, or else borrow staples from their pantry until a more convenient time arose. Rosa disliked depending upon someone else for transportation and was reluctant to put herself in debt to their new employers on their first full day of work, but there was no way around it. They had to eat, and it was absolutely essential that they replenish their stock of bananas.

  She heard the children scrambling down the attic stairs, and when she joined them in the front room, she found them gathered around Lars, peering into a large picnic basket in his hands. “Someone left this on the front porch,” he said, smiling a welcome. She returned his smile, and her gaze fell upon the blanket and quilt neatly folded on the sofa. She hoped he had slept well there. With a pang of embarrassment, she realized she should have taken a bed in the attic with the children and given him the bedroom. She would suggest the change to him that evening, although she suspected he would insist she keep the most comfortable room for herself.

  “What’s inside?” she asked, bidding her children good morning with fond hugs and kisses.

  “Breakfast, I gather,” Lars replied, handing her the basket. “Strawberries, cream, a bottle of milk, and a loaf of bread.”

  “Didn’t I say the Cacchiones were good people?” she teased.

  “I never said they weren’t,” he protested mildly.

  She laughed and carried the basket into the kitchen. When she unpacked it, she also found a paper sack of prunes, a jug of olive oil, sugar, polenta left over from the party, and a note addressed to Rose. “I hope your first night in the cabin passed well,” Giuditta had written. “Polenta makes a delicious breakfast. Cut slices, fry them up in hot oil, and serve with cream and sugar. Come up to the house whenever you’re ready. Bring the children, of course! They can all play together while we show you and Nils around.”

  Delighted, Rosa searched the cupboards for a frying pan and soon had breakfast underway. In the meantime, Marta found plates, cups, and cutlery on the shelves, rinsed and dried them, and set the table. They chatted as they worked, slicing strawberries and pouring milk, and although Rosa felt somewhat awkward moving about the unfamiliar kitchen as if it were her own, the customary rituals of tending to her family reassured her, as if nurturing those she loved performed a transformative magic upon her surroundings, changing any setting, however strange and new or unanticipated, into a home.

  The polenta was as delicious as Giuditta had promised, the strawberries fresh and sweet. The children ate heartily, chattering about what the day might bring, well rested and cheerful despite staying up so late the previous night. Occasionally, Rosa and Lars exchanged amused glances from opposite ends of the table, and at certain moments it almost felt as if they were a family, complete and contented in a home of their own. Wistfully Rosa realized that it was only an illusion, and like all illusions it could not last, but that did not mean she would not take what consolation from it she could.

  After breakfast, Marta washed the dishes while Ana dried and Rosa swept the floor, and soon they were ready to follow the sunlit path through the vineyard up to the Cacchiones’ grand redwood residence. When they arrived, they found Vince and his older brother, Dominic, in the yard between the garage and the barn, peering beneath the hood of a Mack AC delivery truck with “Cacchione Vineyards” painted in large, white script letters on both sides of the covered bed. The impression Rosa had formed of the Cacchiones’ eldest son when they met at the party was that he was as serious as Vince was merry, although according to Francesca, the brothers were equally hardworking and responsible. Though Dominic was only twenty-two, he had been married for more than a year to Mabel, a vintner’s daughter from Healdsburg, and the happy couple had made their home within the Cacchione residence and were expecting their first child. The younger Cacchiones were playing tag nearby in a clearing framed by walnut trees, and after promising to look after Miguel, Rosa’s girls ran off to join them. Miguel trotted off happily, holding one of Marta’s hands and one of Ana’s, sometimes lifting his stout little legs so they would swing him in the air between them.

  Dominic told Rosa and Lars that his parents were in the kitchen lingering over breakfast and that they should go on inside. They found their new employers seated at the corner of a large wooden trestle table, papers spread out before them, forgotten cups of coffee pushed aside and growing cold. The snatches of conversation Rosa overheard from the doorway seemed hushed and earnest, and when they broke off at the sound of the door closing behind Rosa and Lars, the strain on their faces was evident. Even so, Giuditta’s smile was genuine and warm as she rose to greet them and offer them coffee. They gladly accepted, and as Giuditta took two cups from the drying rack beside the sink and filled them w
ith a dark, strong brew, Dante gathered up the papers with a sigh and tapped them into a neat pile.

  “Bills,” Giuditta said, handing the steaming cups to Lars and Rosa and gesturing to the cream and sugar on the table. She emptied her and her husband’s cups into the sink and refilled them.

  “You may have come in the nick of time,” Dante said, thanking his wife with a smile as she handed him his refreshed cup. “I’m considering ripping out our vines and planting apricot trees in their place.”

  “Surely not all of them,” protested Rosa. The long, level plains would seem barren and desolate in the wake of the destruction of so much beauty, no matter what was planted in its place.

  “No, not all,” he admitted with a rueful grimace. “I exaggerate the need. These vines have flourished here since before I was born. My grandfather planted them, and it would be like tearing out my own heart to uproot them. But if we’re going to keep this land in the family for generations to come, we’ll need to find another source of revenue.” He nodded appreciatively to Lars. “That’s why, when Dr. Reynolds mentioned your experience growing apricots in Oxnard, I jumped at the chance to take you on. This morning I’d like you to walk the fields with me. I’ve picked out a few places where I might establish an apricot orchard, and I’d like your opinion on which is the best.”

  “I’d be glad to help,” said Lars, taking a sip of coffee. “But I’m not confident apricots would thrive in this climate.”

  “We won’t know unless we try,” Dante replied. “It’s an experiment, and one that might fail, but if it succeeds, eventually it’ll pay for itself and then some.”

  Rosa glanced from Dante to Giuditta as she stirred cream and sugar into her cup. “I gather that growing wine grapes isn’t as profitable as winemaking once was.”

  “It was, at first,” Giuditta said. “In the early days of Prohibition the demand for wine grapes was so overwhelming that some of our neighbors enjoyed their most profitable seasons ever.”

  “As did we,” said Dante. “But our success encouraged many other growers to jump in, not only in the Sonoma and Napa valleys but elsewhere in California and in Europe as well. Overproduction led to a glut in the market, and prices plummeted.”

  Giuditta shook her head, frowning. “Grapes have been left to rot on the vine because it would cost more to hire pickers to harvest them than a grower could sell them for.”

  “Not here, though,” Lars remarked. “Your vines look exceptionally well tended to me.”

  “They are. I couldn’t mistreat my vines any more than I could hurt one of my own children.” Dante took a deep drink of coffee, set his cup on the table, and fixed it with a distant, brooding stare. “My grandfather came to this country in the middle of the last century, beckoned, like so many others, by the promise of gold in the California hills. But he was clever, and he soon realized that most of the ambitious young men who toiled in the mountains and streams would have nothing to show for their adventures later in life except for entertaining stories, debts, and regret. He chose a more reliable, though less romantic, path to earning his fortune.”

  “Making wine?” Rosa guessed.

  Dante grinned and shook his head. “Not yet. Instead of buying picks and pans and surefire maps to secret mother lodes, he bought a few acres of arable land and grew fresh vegetables to sell to the miners.”

  Eventually, Dante told them, his grandfather saved enough money to buy thirty of the acres the family cultivated to that day. He cleared the land, cutting down enormous redwood trees and tall oaks. He wrestled stubborn stumps from the ground with chains and horses, and he carved furrows in the soil with a plow borrowed from a sympathetic countryman who had settled in the Sonoma Valley a decade earlier. His parents had grown Zinfandel and had made their own wines in their small village in the hills above Rome, and when Dante’s grandfather observed how well grapes thrived in the soil and climate of Sonoma County, he built trellises, bought cuttings from the Franciscan priests at the Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma, and cultivated more than a thousand grapevines. In the years that followed, he planted more vines, built himself a sturdy redwood cabin in a picturesque walnut grove by a cool, fresh creek, married the kindest and wisest daughter of his generous neighbor, and created wines of such magnificent flavor and depth that they were coveted by the finest hotels and restaurants in the growing metropolis of San Francisco, sixty miles to the south.

  “When my grandfather was ready to retire, my father took over the vineyard. In time he added twenty acres to the property and built this house.” Dante gestured appreciatively to the four walls around them and ceiling above. “Our vineyard thrived, but not without toil and hardship. The worst trial struck in 1892.”

  “A plague of phylloxera,” said Giuditta with a shudder, crossing herself as if to ward off another such disaster.

  “A voracious, relentless pest,” said Dante with distaste. “A louse that feeds on the sap of grapevine roots, poisoning them with every bite so they cannot heal. Starved of nourishment, the vines become stunted and deformed and prone to fungal infection. My grandfather—and most of the other winemakers throughout the valley—were forced to tear out their vines and replant resistant stock, at an enormous cost.”

  “Not only in money but also in time,” Giuditta added, crossing the kitchen to stand beside her husband’s chair. “Grapevines need at least three, perhaps as many as five, years to establish themselves and come to full bearing. In all that time, there could be no harvest, no crush, no winemaking. As you can imagine, it was quite a setback, but the Cacchione family endured it.”

  Dante inhaled deeply, his mouth twisting into a bitter, angry frown. “To think my father and grandfather saw our winery through that hardship, only for me to lose it now, all because of a stroke of a Washington bureaucrat’s pen.”

  “You haven’t lost it yet,” Giuditta reminded him earnestly, placing a hand on his shoulder. “And we won’t.”

  Dante patted her hand. “From your lips to God’s ears, cara mia.” To Lars and Rosa, he added, “You have to understand, even when the debate grew heated, none of us thought Prohibition would come to pass. It was all politics, just so much noise and chatter, the Wets and the Drys and their ceaseless arguments.”

  “Early on, the Drys insisted that Prohibition was necessary due to the wartime emergency,” Giuditta said, sitting down beside her husband. She gestured for Rosa and Lars, still standing by the counter, to join them at the table. “To conserve grain for the soldiers.”

  “Apparently no one told them grapes are not grain,” said Dante in disgust.

  “When the Great War ended, we thought that would be the end of it,” Giuditta continued. “No war, no wartime emergency, no need to conserve grain—or grapes. We couldn’t have been more wrong.”

  “As for the temperance movement, we didn’t consider ourselves the target of their complaints. They condemned saloons and all the vices they spawned, not—” Dante gestured to his own kitchen table, his dark eyebrows drawing together. “Not what we do here, providing a family with a good glass of wine to enjoy with their supper. How could our livelihood, our tradition, our craft, go from being a time-honored profession to a criminal act in a single day?”

  Giuditta patted his hand and regarded him with affectionate sympathy. “When the law passed,” she explained to Rosa and Lars, “we were taken aback, but we assumed Prohibition might last a few months, perhaps a year at most, and then lawmakers would see the folly of it and everything would return to normal.”

  “That was where you went wrong,” said Lars dryly. “I try never to assume too much common sense on the part of lawmakers.”

  Dante let out a dry laugh. “That wasn’t the only place we went wrong. Our customers, though, they knew better. In the weeks leading up to the moment the act would become law—” He shook his head, still amazed by the memory. “People desperate to buy wine came at us like—like ants on a watermelon at a picnic. Like bees on a honeycomb.”

  “T
hey wanted to go into Prohibition with fully stocked wine cellars,” said Giuditta. “Local folks bought all they could afford, or as much as they could carry off in their cars and wagons.”

  “The roads between the Sonoma and Napa valleys and San Francisco were choked with delivery trucks,” Dante added. “They sped off to hotels and restaurants and homes of the wealthy with full loads and returned empty. It was a mad dash just to keep up, and the whole time we kept one eye on the calendar. We sold as much wine as we could as the deadline approached.”

  “And all the while,” Giuditta said, shaking her head at their folly, “we hoped and prayed that something would happen at the last minute to spare us—the wartime emergency would be declared over, or common sense would prevail, something.”

  Rosa knew well that deliverance had not come. She thought back to the beginning of Prohibition—January 17, 1920—and remembered wondering if Lars, whom she had not seen in six and a half years, would at last find the sobriety that had eluded him when they were young and in love. Later, on the rare occasions when she had considered the new law, she had felt relief for the families who would be spared the tragic consequences of alcoholism and wistful regret for herself and Lars, for whom Prohibition had come too late. But by that time she had already lost John Junior and Angela, gentle Maria was approaching her first birthday, and she was six months pregnant with Pedro. John had turned bitterly cruel, and she and her mother and the children had been reduced to furtive visits on the mesa. She could be forgiven, she hoped, for not sparing much worry for the unfortunate winemakers whose lives had been overturned by Prohibition.

  “What about the wine you couldn’t sell before the law went into effect?” asked Lars, with a note of irony Rosa suspected the Cacchiones did not know him well enough to detect. “What happened to it? Did you have to break open the casks and pour the wine out onto the ground?”

  Even as she observed Dante wince at the very thought, Rosa remembered the barrel of wine at the harvest dance and knew that Lars was well aware that the Cacchiones had not destroyed all of their wine. Dante and Giuditta exchanged a look, and after a long moment, Giuditta nodded, agreeing to an unspoken question from her husband. “Come,” Dante said, abruptly rising. “I’ll show you.”