Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel

by Jannifer Chiaverini

  “This isn’t how we want to live,” Dante said. “Who would live this way if he had any other choice? We know we risk arrest, imprisonment, and ruinous fines. We could be raided and be forced to watch agents break open our barrels and casks with axes and spill the wine out upon the ground. But what else can we do? We can choose the risk of losing all we own in a federal raid or the certainty of losing our home and property. Nearly every winemaker in Sonoma County has made the same choice. What would you do?” He looked from Lars to Rosa and back, raising his chin in defiant challenge. “You have four children. What would you risk to keep a roof over their heads? What would you do to keep them fed and clothed and safe?”

  The kitchen rang with expectant silence as Dante waited for an answer.

  “You’re breaking the law,” said Lars, “but as I said before, we’re not going to turn you in. You’ve given us work and a place to stay, and we’re in your debt.”

  “Your secrets are safe with us,” promised Rosa. Giuditta’s eyes filled with tears.

  Someday, Rosa suspected, she might need Giuditta to preserve their secrets in return.

  For a long time afterward, Dante’s words lingered in Rosa’s thoughts. What would she do to ensure her children’s happiness and safety? What sacrifices would she demand of Lars for their sakes?

  What had she already done, and what had she failed to do?

  In January 1921, the Santa Ana winds had brought summer out of season to the Arboles Valley. Strong, warm gusts from the eastern deserts flew across fields and hammered upon farmhouses, sending tumbleweeds bounding across roads, rattling windows, snatching laundry down from the clotheslines, and filling eyes, hair, mouth, and nostrils with dust. Everyone who visited the post office grumbled about the weather and hoped for a return of winter rains to fill the Salto Creek and cover the mountaintops with snow that would melt in spring and assure plentiful water come summer. Rosa too yearned for a change in the weather. The hot, relentless winds left her breathless and dizzy and disoriented, nauseous and tired. Then the winds shifted. Clear skies and bright sunshine and ocean mists and pleasantly cool breezes once again blessed the valley, but Rosa felt no better. It did not take her long to figure out why.

  At first she said nothing to anyone. The loose dresses she wore around the house concealed her condition for the first two months, but she had borne many children and she knew it would not be long before she began to show. Before her body gave away her secret, she told John. As she had expected, he sighed heavily and told her that perhaps this time God would bless them with a healthy child. “I hope so,” she told him tightly, forcing a smile to conceal a surge of anger. God might bless them with a cure for the beloved, imperfect children she had already borne if John would allow them to travel beyond the valley for treatment. John had responded the same way with each pregnancy after John Junior died, as if the children they had buried and those yet living within their home had profoundly disappointed him. She should be used to it, but his reaction had not lost the power to wound her.

  She dreaded telling Lars and deferred the inevitable as long as she could, past the point when postal customers started giving her midsection surreptitious, curious looks and a few bolder neighbors had inquired whether she was “in a family way.” She avoided the subject for so long that Lars brought it up. “You’re looking well,” he remarked one Monday afternoon as she refilled his coffee cup and topped off her own. “You were getting a bit thin, if you don’t mind my saying so, but it looks like you’ve put on some weight.”

  “I have.” She returned the coffeepot to the stovetop and settled back into her chair, cupping her suddenly icy hands around her cup for warmth. “I’m expecting a baby.”

  Lars watched her in perfect stillness for a brief moment that to Rosa seemed to stretch out for an eternity. “Congratulations,” he finally said. He didn’t look surprised. “When?”

  “September.”

  He drew in a slow, deep breath, and she knew he was counting the months backward. “Then the child could be mine.”

  She nodded.

  “Do you know for sure?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He reached across the table and took her hands. “Rosa, think carefully. How likely is it that the child is mine?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, pronouncing each word distinctly.

  “If this baby is mine—”

  She slipped her hands from his grasp and knotted her fingers together in her lap. “Either way, John will be his father, or her father, just as he has been Marta’s. It’s the only way.”

  “It’s not the only way,” said Lars, incredulous. “It’s not even the best way. You love me. I love you. That’s never going to change. John mistreats you, and it’s not good for the children to see that. You can’t expect me to let him raise my child, not this time, not when I’m sober and perfectly capable of—”

  “It’s equally likely that it’s John’s baby,” she countered, lowering her voice and glancing toward the front room where Ana was reading Maria a story. All morning Maria had rested listlessly on the sofa, weak and exhausted after a difficult bout of illness that had begun before dawn. “What would you have me do? Tell my husband that the child I’m carrying may be yours, but just in case it’s his, he shouldn’t throw me out of the house?”

  “If he threw you out of the house, you’d be better off.”

  “Not without my children, I wouldn’t be.” He didn’t seem to grasp that leaving John meant abandoning her children. She had committed adultery. In the eyes of God, the law, and the community, she was an unfit mother. She knew how a judge and jury would see matters. John would be cast as a wronged husband, a devoted father even to the offspring of his wife’s premarital adultery, a landowner and a good provider. If Rosa left John, no judge would grant her custody of the children, not if John fought for them, and he would, if only to spite her. What would become of them without their mother? What tales would John invent to explain why she did not come home, why she had not taken them with her? How long would it take before he taught them to despise her? And what of Ana and Maria, chronically ill and in the care of a man who had given up searching for a cure? What of sweet baby Pedro, if he too became sick someday?

  Lars pushed back his chair and stood, shaking his head slowly in disbelief. “I can’t go along with this. I just can’t.”

  “Please, Lars,” Rosa implored, tears of anguish and remorse welling up and spilling over before she could hold them back. “The child may be John’s, in which case none of this—nothing that we’re arguing about right now—none of it will matter.”

  “It all matters, Rosa.”

  Wordlessly she shook her head. Nothing she said would make him understand. Lars had known John longer, but Rosa knew him better. Staying with John and concealing her tryst with Lars was the only way to keep her children. It was the only way.

  Lars paced the width of the kitchen. “You’re thinking only of how to get through the next few months and not of what might happen years down the road. Let’s say the baby is mine and you don’t tell him. What do you think will happen when John figures it out on his own?”

  “He never has to know,” said Rosa. “He’ll never know unless we tell him.”

  Lars halted and regarded her, his face drawn in compassion and frustration. “Rosa, he’ll know. Forgive me, but if the baby turns out like Marta, if this child doesn’t get sick, he’ll know.”

  Her heart plummeted as the truth of his words sank in. Suddenly she heard the familiar rumble of John’s truck coming up the gravel drive. With a gasp, she snatched up the coffee cups and dropped them into the sink, where lukewarm dishwater and soapsuds concealed them. By the time John opened the front door, Rosa and Lars were in the front room with Ana and Maria, and Rosa was handing Lars his mail bundle and offering her best regards to his family.

  John watched them from the doorway for a moment, his hand on the doorknob, the gray U.S. Mail bag slung over his shoulder. Then he came inside,
but he left the door open, and he strode past them to set the heavy bag on the floor beside his desk with a dull thud.

  Rosa was too upset to speak.

  “Hello, John,” Lars greeted him easily.

  “I heard you were back in town.” John glanced at the bundle in Lars’s arms. “You came too early. If you’d come a couple of hours later, you’d have this week’s mail in your bundle as well. I don’t have time to sort it now, so you’ll have to wait until tomorrow at the earliest.”

  “I don’t mind making another trip.” Lars put on his hat, nodded to Rosa, and headed toward the door.

  John’s gaze shifted to Rosa, and she quickly fought to compose herself, hiding her distress beneath a placid mask. “You know,” John mused, addressing Lars but keeping his eyes on Rosa, “this is the first time I’ve seen you pick up the mail since you came back. Now that I think about it, I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen anyone from your place around here, and yet your family’s bundle is picked up once a week like clockwork.”

  Lars halted at the door and turned around, his face expressionless.

  “Most people pick up their bundle on Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning,” John continued, his voice thoughtful with a thread of anger running through it. “They know I fetch the mail from the train station on Mondays and sort it on Tuesday mornings. But you—” John’s steely gaze shifted to Lars. “You knew my schedule too, didn’t you? And you planned accordingly.”

  Lars fixed him with the same easy, self-assured grin that used to charm Rosa into forgetting all his faults. “Well, John, if I’d known how much you missed me, I would have come on Tuesday afternoons.”

  “John, please,” Rosa murmured, mindful of Ana watching silent and wide-eyed from the sofa, the book forgotten on her lap, her sleeping sister’s little hand curled in hers.

  John’s eyes narrowed as he looked from Lars to Rosa and back. “I think you’ve upset my wife.”

  “I’m fine,” said Rosa, but her voice shook. “Lars was just leaving.”

  As Lars put his hand on the doorknob, John barked, “Don’t come back. Send your brother or one of the ranch hands for the mail from now on, but don’t you come back around here. Don’t you ever set foot on my land when you know I’m away and my wife is home alone.”

  “She’s in no danger from me,” Lars said, his grin disappearing like the sun slipping behind a thundercloud. “It’s you she’s afraid of.”

  John clenched his fists and took a step toward him. “Come near her again and you’ll be sorry.”

  “Hit her again and you’ll be sorry.”

  “John, Lars,” Rosa broke in. “Please stop it. Not in front of the children. Lars, please just go.”

  “I will,” he said, glaring at John. “I’ll go away and I’ll stay away, Rosa, if that’s what you want. Is that what you want?”

  “Yes,” she cried. “Yes, that’s what I want. Please go away and don’t come back. Please. It’s for the best.”

  Lars took a step backward as if her words had struck him in the chest. For a moment he looked as if he might argue, but just then Ana gasped and he looked her way as if he had forgotten she was there. He offered her a rueful smile and a shrug that managed to make the whole scene appear harmless and comical, a misunderstanding between grown-ups, easily settled and forgotten. He left without another word, without a parting glance at Rosa.

  “Let’s hope that’s the last we see of him,” John said as they heard the car start up and drive away.

  Lars did as she asked. Others from the Jorgensen ranch came each week to pick up the family’s mail, and although at first Rosa hoped someone would pass along a message from Lars, no one ever did.

  The months went by. Ana, usually the most reasonable of the children, began refusing the wholesome diet of white bread and milk the doctor had recommended and stubbornly insisted upon eating rice, beans, and corn tortillas or nothing at all. Rosa found a certain logic in her finicky habits; if she were going to be sick anyway, why shouldn’t she eat her favorite foods? John, who hated waste and required the children to clean their plates at mealtimes, objected whenever he caught Rosa indulging a picky eater. “You’re only going to spoil her,” he warned when he found Rosa putting beans in to soak for the fifth night in a row.

  “I’m going to make pot roast, potatoes, and bread for the rest of the family, so it shouldn’t bother you that Ana wants something different,” Rosa pointed out. “I don’t mind the extra effort, nothing will go to waste, and she’ll clean her plate, so what’s the harm?”

  “Children need to be obedient and eat what’s set in front of them,” John argued. “She’s going to grow up to think she’s always going to get her own way.”

  “As long as she grows up,” Rosa replied quietly, putting the lid on the pot of beans.

  Privately Rosa worried about the consequences of disregarding the doctor’s orders, but as the summer passed, Ana’s symptoms lessened, and it seemed to Rosa that her limbs fleshed out a bit and her bloated abdomen receded somewhat. Perplexingly, Maria followed the doctor’s prescribed diet to the letter but grew progressively weaker. Rosa was tempted to put her on Ana’s adopted diet too, but she was reluctant to ignore the most up-to-date medical advice she had been given. She wished one of the many doctors she had written to had replied with something else to try, but she suspected none of them wanted to overrule a local physician who had actually examined the children.

  In late September Lupita was born, and when Rosa held her for the first time, she thought she imagined a striking resemblance to Marta, but she quashed the faint stirrings of anxiety their similarities evoked. She saw more of herself in their dark eyes and hair and skin than either John or Lars. No one would doubt Lupita was John’s child—no one but Lars and Rosa herself. But she could not help brooding over the inescapable flaw in her plan Lars had detected: If, as the years passed, Lupita remained as vigorous and healthy as her eldest sister, John would realize that Rosa had betrayed him.

  He had forgiven her once before because he loved her and wanted her for his wife. He would not forgive her a second time, and Rosa could not blame him.

  She buried her guilty secret deep in her heart and resolved to forget that Lars had ever returned to the Arboles Valley. For her family’s sake, it had to be as if he were still hundreds of miles away.

  A year passed. Lupita took her first steps. Ana started school, and never before had Rosa seen a child more eager to learn. She devoured books and spent hours scribbling stories of her own on scrap paper while most of her classmates were still mastering the alphabet. Rosa exhausted every likely contact in the last of her city business directories, but came no closer to a remedy for the children since John forbade her to hazard a trip beyond the Arboles Valley. John, mercurial as ever, was kind to her one week and indifferent the next, but even the worst of his indifference was preferable to his rage. In all that time Rosa saw Lars only once, from a distance, when he rode by on horseback one summer afternoon while she played on the mesa with the children. She didn’t know if he even saw them, and if he did, whether he recognized them.

  Winter came, with long stretches of clear, cool, sunny weather occasionally interrupted by billowing gray clouds and chilly rains. On such a gloomy day in February, an unexpected visitor knocked on the adobe door—her brother, Carlos, haggard and grim. She had not seen him since their mother’s funeral and knew immediately that he would not have sought her out at home if their father were still living.

  He had died the night before of a heart attack, Carlos told her, glancing around the adobe uncomfortably as if worried that even this necessary errand was a betrayal of his father’s wishes that he disown his sister. The funeral mass would be in two days, and if Rosa and her family attended, Carlos wanted them to sit in the front pew beside him. Rosa thanked him and told him they would come, and after he left, she wondered if his small gesture were the overture to their eventual reconciliation. Carlos had not embraced her, he had declined her offer of
coffee, and he had remained standing throughout his brief visit, but she decided to interpret his invitation to sit in the family pew as the extending of an olive branch. Time would tell.

  Her father’s funeral was less upsetting and grueling than her mother’s had been, since Isabel had died so unexpectedly and under such suspicious circumstances. And yet it was sadder in its way, for with her father’s passing, Rosa was forced to abandon her long-held hopes that he might someday forgive her. As she mourned for her father, she silently lamented the years he had wasted in estrangement and the potential for love and joy he had needlessly squandered in refusing to acknowledge his grandchildren. She felt sorry for her children that they would never know their grandfather, but she felt sorrier still for him.

  Five weeks after the funeral, Rosa gave birth to a son. Moved by compassion and sorrow, inspired by fond memories of much happier days long ago, she named her newborn Miguel after his late grandfather. It was a tribute to the memory of the Papá she had known as a child, the man who had loved and cherished her.

  Less than six months after Miguel was born, Maria died.

  All summer long Maria had grown weaker and weaker until she had spent most of her waking hours lying prostrate on the sofa, clutching her stuffed bunny. After her precious girl was gone, Rosa descended into a black pit of despair deeper and more impenetrable than any she had fallen into before. It was all she could do to force herself out of bed every morning to fix breakfast for her family and change Miguel’s diapers and see Marta and Ana off to school. She washed the dishes and did the laundry mechanically, as if her spirit had fled and some unseen, relentless puppeteer mercilessly pulled the strings that kept her in motion. Soon thereafter, Pedro—her happy, chubby, mischievous Pedro—showed his first symptoms of the terrible affliction that had taken his brother and sisters.