Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel

by Jannifer Chiaverini

  Epilogue

  Amonth after Dwight Crowell’s mysterious disappearance, Alegra Del Bene and Gino came home to Santa Rosa. Rosa sat beside her and held her hand as Alegra tearfully told Paulo how the corrupt agent had intimidated and coerced her. Paulo wept and embraced his wife, declaring that whoever had killed Crowell had done a great service to the community and had spared Paulo the trouble and sin of killing him with his own hands.

  Later, Rosa repeated his words to Lars. “I don’t disagree,” said Lars, gently and with an undercurrent of sorrow, “but I still wish you hadn’t struck the match that lit that fire.” Then he held her and kissed her to show he understood why she had done it, and that he had forgiven her.

  It took much longer for her to forgive herself.

  In July, Alegra was there to hold Rosa’s hand when she gave birth to a beautiful baby boy.

  In the months leading up to the baby’s arrival, Lars had asked Rosa if she preferred a Spanish name, like those she had given her other children. Dredging up a painful memory from the first year of her marriage, Rosa told Lars that throughout her first pregnancy, John had insisted upon the name John Junior if they had a boy, and Mildred, after his grandmother, if they had a girl. When Rosa gave birth two months earlier than John had expected and he realized the child was not his, he had immediately changed his mind. “Call her anything else,” he had said, handing the baby back to Rosa. “Call her whatever you like.”

  On her own, Rosa had chosen the name Marta after her father’s mother.

  When their first son was born, John, certain the child was his, named him after himself. But John Junior died, and after that, John no longer cared what the children were named. They were more Rosa’s children than his, he seemed to think, and so they might as well bear Spanish names, like hers. They would die young anyway. It would be a waste to bestow an important Barclay family name upon any one of them.

  In suggesting they choose a Spanish name for their child, Lars had only meant to honor Rosa’s heritage. He didn’t know, and it pained him to recall how Rosa had suffered throughout her marriage to John, a marriage she never would have made except for his own failure to be the man she needed all those years ago. After Rosa finished her story, Lars understood that the best way to honor her and their child was to give the baby a name from his side of the family. And so they named their son Mathias, after Lars’s father.

  Shortly after Mathias’s first birthday, Dante Cacchione was released from prison. He returned home haggard and thin, but with a fierce gleam in his eye that hinted at a newly kindled fire. Throughout his imprisonment, rather than give in to despair and loneliness and boredom, he had devoted his time to the study of the law, poring over an incomplete collection of dated, worn law books kept in the small prison library until he had committed it to memory. He wrote eloquent, compelling letters to the editor of every newspaper in Sonoma County and throughout the Bay Area, shedding light on the lives of his fellow prisoners, how they were treated, how poverty and lack of opportunity had led more men to prison than greed or cruelty or any other oft-cited cause.

  When Dante was finally permitted to return home to his family, he became known as a socialist firebrand, and whenever the downtrodden needed an advocate, he could be counted on to speak up for them. He also passionately argued the case for the repeal of Prohibition to any public official who would listen to him—and many more who wished he would give up and go away. But he wouldn’t go away, nor would he be silenced. He wove together statistics and anecdotes to prove how the so-called Great Experiment had achieved none of its lofty goals and had created more crime and economic hardship than its framers could have possibly imagined. The more he spoke out, the more other people agreed with him.

  But in spite of Dante’s withering condemnation of Prohibition, the Cacchione family abandoned bootlegging after selling off the vintages stored in the old wine cellar. If not for their prunes and walnuts, they wouldn’t have been able to afford to pay their property taxes, but there was little money left over for other necessities. After a few years of poor grape harvests and dismal wine grape sales, the Cacchiones were forced to sell off acres of their beloved vineyard. Through it all, they firmly held on to Dante’s beloved old Zinfandel vines, refusing to give up all hope that one day they would be allowed to resume the honored traditions of winemaking that their family had followed for generations.

  Young Mathias Ottesen was two years old when Rosa and Lars were blessed with another son, whom they named Oscar, after Lars’s brother. Baby Oscar was only six weeks old when Rosa learned of John’s early release from prison from a newspaper clipping Mrs. Phillips sent her from San Francisco.

  The same article also provided a terse account of John’s death.

  John had served two years of his five-year sentence on federal racketeering charges and had been granted parole on account of good behavior. Three weeks after his release, a hiker had discovered his broken body at the bottom of Salto Canyon, and after a thorough investigation, the coroner had concluded that he had jumped to his death.

  What the newspaper did not record, and what Rosa never learned, was that in the aftermath of John’s suicide, rumors swept through the Arboles Valley like summer fire through chaparral. Some people thought he had killed himself out of prolonged grief for his drowned wife and children. Others, more cynical, noted that with his postmaster job gone and his ties to organized crime severed, John had realized he would actually have to work for a living again, and he had preferred to die. A few people whispered that he had not intended to take his own life but that he had fallen to his death after fleeing in terror from the ghost of Isabel Rodriguez Diaz, whose spirit was known to haunt the mesa.

  Rosa found no satisfaction in the news of John’s death. Someday, when the children were old enough to understand, it would fall to her to tell them that he had taken his own life. She didn’t know how she would explain to them something she could not understand.

  When he was three months old, Oscar Ottesen made his first trip to San Francisco to attend the wedding of his parents, Nils Ottesen and Rosa Diaz. When they applied for the marriage license, Rosa was able to produce her birth certificate, but Nils Ottesen, a native of Stavanger, California, had nothing to show except his driver’s license and voter registration card. But the five older children confirmed his identity—he was Nils Ottesen, their pa—so the city clerk shrugged, accepted their fee in cash, and signed the necessary documents.

  The newlyweds and their six children spent the weekend enjoying the sights of the city and the hospitality of Mrs. Phillips’s boardinghouse. Each morning they breakfasted upon waffles with strawberries and whipped cream—except for Ana and Miguel, who had corn cakes with their strawberries and whipped cream instead. Although they still had to follow Dr. Haas’s banana diet, they were so healthy and vigorous that Mrs. Phillips declared she hardly recognized them as the poor dears who had crossed her threshold four years before.

  Rosa hardly recognized herself as the same haunted, despondent mother who had brought them there.

  In October 1929, the stock market crashed and the nation reeled.

  The following February, the House Judiciary Committee surprised the nation by announcing that it would open debate on measures that could possibly lead to the modification or even repeal of Prohibition.

  The news did little to lift the spirits of weary grape growers and winemakers in Sonoma County, who knew that congressional hearings and debates could drone on endlessly but lead nowhere, and that bills could stall in committee. In the meantime, fear and force bound Prohibition enforcement agents, gangsters, vintners, and ordinary citizens together in a barbed-wire net of violence.

  Federal inquiries discovered that the Prohibition bureau was rife with corruption—something Rosa could have told them years before, sparing them the trouble and expense of a lengthy investigation. In the aftermath of the report’s release, hundreds of enforcement officers around the country were fired for falsification of official
records, extortion, bribery, theft, forgery, perjury, conspiracy, and a host of other crimes, but the bureaucratic housecleaning seemed to make no difference. Crime syndicates remained as firmly entrenched as ever, and the newly hired replacement Prohibition agents enforced the laws no better than those who had been dismissed.

  The harvest of 1930 was expected to be one of the most bountiful in years, but the combined blows of an enormous surplus of grapes and devastatingly low prices brought on by the Great Depression threatened the California grape industry with total collapse. More grape growers uprooted their vines and planted other crops. More wineries closed.

  Rosa and Lars hung on. With every change of season they told themselves that Prohibition was inching toward its inevitable demise. If they endured and economized, they could keep Sonoma Rose Vineyards and Orchard afloat until Rosa and Daniel could sell their young wines and make more than two hundred gallons apiece. In the meantime, Rosa would learn and perfect her craft. So many gifted winemakers had been forced from the profession. Much knowledge and skill had been lost, but Daniel was an excellent teacher, and he knew many retirees who were more than willing to nostalgically reminisce about the golden age of California winemaking with Rosa, who served them lunch, strolled with them through her grapevines, and remembered the details and nuances of every story they told.

  Rosa and Lars knew they were much better off than most other families those days. They had the farm, so even in that time of widespread poverty and hunger, their children had plenty to eat. They would tighten their belts and count their blessings and hang on.

  In 1931, Sonoma County suffered through blistering heat waves, drought, and terrible insect infestations. But even though grape growers sent the smallest crop of grapes to market in ten years, the ongoing economic crisis meant abysmal sales and negligible profits. The usual rules of supply and demand didn’t apply when no one had money to spend.

  The poor and the desperate from across the country flooded California seeking work—not looking for a handout, but a job, a place to sleep, and the means to feed their families. Rosa and Lars hired as many men as they could, sheltered as many as the dormitory and the barn hayloft would hold. It was never enough. Sometimes Rosa went off alone and wept when she had to turn away men in threadbare clothes and shoes held together with twine because Lars had no more work for them and they could not afford to take on anyone else. But Rosa never turned away women with children. Somehow they all managed to make do with a little less to help one more mother and child.

  In 1932, Herbert Hoover asked the American people to elect him to a second term. “Why not?” asked Lars sardonically. “He did so well with the first one.”

  Rosa had never been happier that women had won the right to vote as she was on Election Day that November. She was among the first in line at her polling place, and after she pulled the lever for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, she murmured a prayer that the New Deal he proposed would bring a new era of pulling together for the common good to a nation in dire need of change. Throughout his campaign, Roosevelt had promised to correct the great national mistake that was Prohibition, and Rosa fervently hoped he would prevail. Change was in the air, and soon, she hoped, a refreshing wind would blow justice and common sense their way.

  Roosevelt was elected in a landslide. On the same day, nine states, including California, held referenda on Prohibition, and the voters overwhelmingly called for repeal. Prohibition had been dealt a fatal blow, but it was not dead yet. It remained the law of the land.

  Sonoma Rose Vineyards and Orchard flourished. In any other era the family would have prospered, but the Depression meant that they barely managed to get by. Even as Rosa struggled to make ends meet, she never forgot to thank God for her children’s health and to count her blessings, nor did she forget the loyal friend who had spurred her to flee the adobe after John beat her and went off to murder Lars. If Elizabeth Nelson had not been with her that day, Rosa would have picked herself up off the floor, calmed the children, washed her face, and paced through the house while she waited for John to return with blood on his hands and news of Lars’s death on his lips. If she had not fled that night, she would still be living in the adobe, a widow struggling to raise her two remaining children. Rosa knew this as irrefutable fact because everything that had happened to her from that day forward turned on the pivot of her decision to heed Elizabeth’s warnings.

  If Rosa and the children had not taken flight that day and sought refuge in the canyon, Lars would not have found them there, rescued them from the flood, and driven them to the safe obscurity of Oxnard. While it was true that Lars had come to the adobe looking for her after he returned to the Jorgensen ranch and discovered what John had done, by then the police searching the Barclay farm had found the contraband in the hayloft. They would not have let Rosa leave with Lars. She wouldn’t have gone to Oxnard or taken Ana and Miguel to see Dr. Russell at the hospital, so he would have been unable to refer her to Dr. Reynolds. Without Dr. Reynolds, she never would have learned the cause of her children’s mysterious illness. Ana and Miguel would be dead; Mathias and Oscar never would have been born.

  Every good thing in Rosa’s life since leaving the Arboles Valley depended upon Elizabeth Nelson, the catalyst of her escape.

  Despite the crushing restrictions of Prohibition and the hardships of the Great Depression, Rosa and Lars were getting by in Sonoma County. They did not need a rye farm in Southern California that they could never visit. And Rosa owed Elizabeth a debt of gratitude she could never fully repay.

  Even so, Rosa and Lars resolved to try.

  They hired a San Francisco lawyer and arranged for him to travel to the Arboles Valley to offer the Barclay farm to Elizabeth and Henry for five dollars an acre. Mindful that the Nelsons might not be able to afford even that nominal amount, they authorized the lawyer to offer them other terms: In exchange for farming the land, maintaining the property, and paying the property taxes, the Ottesens would pay the Nelsons a modest salary and let them keep any profits they earned from whatever crops they decided to raise. The Nelsons would pay the Ottesens quarterly payments of fifty dollars, which would be put toward the five-hundred-dollar purchase price. In five years, the title would be transferred to the Nelsons and the farm would be theirs, free and clear. The lawyer informed the astonished couple that the Ottesens hoped the Nelsons would rename the farm Triumph Ranch. “Mrs. Nelson, especially, loved the name you suggested,” Mr. Tomilson reported to Rosa and Lars after he returned from the Arboles Valley with all the necessary papers signed and notarized. He shook his head and smiled sheepishly. He had thought the name an odd request and had expected the Nelsons to decline, even though Rosa had assured him they wouldn’t.

  Eight years before, Henry and Elizabeth had come to the Arboles Valley full of hope and ambition, believing they held the deed to a thriving ranch, confident that they would prosper on fertile acres beneath sunny California skies. The swindler who had cheated them out of their life savings had shattered their dreams, but they had endured the blow with grace and had resolved to rebuild their lives, undaunted. In the midst of her disappointment, Elizabeth had looked beyond her own heartache and had reached out to a grieving woman and a lonely man. Rosa and Lars owed her everything. And now the Nelsons’ dream of Triumph Ranch could finally come true.

  In anticipation of President-elect Roosevelt’s inauguration on March 4, 1933, Congress passed a resolution to end Prohibition if a majority vote of state conventions from thirty-six of the forty-eight states ratified a Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution nullifying the Eighteenth.

  In the months that followed, one state after another voted for repeal—including, on July 24, 1933, California. Although the magic number of thirty-six had not yet been reached, the outcome already seemed inevitable, so the federal government closed down the Prohibition bureau. Six days after California voted for repeal, all Prohibition agents in Sonoma County were to be relieved of duty. They did not go quietly. A few hours before midn
ight, by which time they were expected to have closed out their files and turned in their weapons, agents raided a popular Sonoma watering hole, confiscated a small amount of alcohol, and, since the proprietor wasn’t in at the time, arrested the chef. The unfortunate man was hauled off to the county jail in Santa Rosa, where he was photographed, fingerprinted, and arraigned on charges of liquor possession. Whether he paid his $750 bail before or after the agents who arrested him became obsolete was the subject of some debate among the disgusted citizens who read about the arrest in the paper the next morning. To Rosa the eleventh-hour raid seemed spiteful, pointless, and all too reminiscent of something Dwight Crowell would have organized and taken part in with malicious glee.

  All that summer, states held conventions to vote on the Twenty-first Amendment, Sonoma County grape growers predicted a modest harvest, and vintners prepared to make wine. Everyone kept busy, watching and waiting.

  It wasn’t until November 9 that Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Utah voted to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment, bringing the total to thirty-six states. The Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution had passed.

  Prohibition was finished.

  • • •

  For months, like grape growers and winemakers throughout California wine country, the vintners at Sonoma Rose Vineyards and Orchard had been working almost without rest in anticipation of the day in early December when the repeal of Prohibition would officially go into effect.

  On December 5, 1933, winemakers and brewers, bottlers and coopers, grape growers and hops ranchers across the nation welcomed the end of Prohibition with joyful celebrations—or, for many others, with sober contemplation of their sacrifices and the long road they had yet to travel before they could rebuild all they had lost. Rosa, Lars, their children, and their friends quietly rejoiced, thankful and relieved and mindful of the work that lay ahead. But their mood was jubilant. After many long, hard years, promise was in the air and prosperity seemed within their grasp.