The Last Chance Olive Ranch

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Texas Department of Agriculture

  The skies were gray and lightning flickered around the rim of the low, dark clouds. But the rain held off long enough for Chet to take me on a walk through his Last Chance Vineyard, some thirty acres planted with several different kinds of grapes—Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Dolcetto, and Sangiovese. As far as I could see, the vineyard was a lovely, lively patchwork of shimmering greens, moving with the wind: Kelly green, emerald green, mint green, pine and pistachio and shamrock green. All green, every green, many greens, everywhere I looked. The amazing variety of shades of green made up a little, or so it seemed to me, for the regularity of the rows.

  Chet parked his Jeep beside the field, and we got out and walked between the trellised vines. The rows were oriented north to south, Chet told me, for the best solar exposure. The vines were only four years old and just beginning to bear, the small green berries half-hidden by the canopy of leaves. Harvest, Chet said, was some seven or eight weeks away, depending on the weather.

  “We’re irrigating, of course.” He pointed to the plastic drip-irrigation tubes that ran along the rows. “Grapes are drought-tolerant, but it’s too risky to depend on rainfall. Anyway, we would never get enough rain in the summer, when the grapes are really heat-stressed. And the soil here isn’t right for dryland grape growing. We’ve put in our own wells—three of them.”

  “Your wells are on the Edwards Aquifer?” I asked. The Edwards is the aquifer that supplies our water back home in Pecan Springs. With that came the thought of McQuaid, and I glanced at my watch. It was nearly six. I knew he’d had an afternoon appointment with a law firm in Austin, but he should be home by now, feeding Winchester and Mr. P and checking on Caitie’s chickens. Or maybe he would stop at Beans’ for supper and a quick game of pool with the guys. I thought of his scheme to bait Mantel, and then just as quickly made myself stop thinking about it. That was tomorrow. Whatever he was doing tonight, he was safe.

  “Not the Edwards,” Chet was saying. “We’re on the Trinity here. Unfortunately, the water level in the aquifer is dropping because of the drought, and it’s likely to get worse because of climate change. I saw a computer model the other day that said that at the current rate of use, the water level in parts of the aquifer will drop by as much as a hundred feet in the next couple of years. If that happens, we’ll have to put in deeper wells. In fact, they’re saying the aquifer could be entirely depleted in another fifteen or twenty years.” He reached out to touch a green leaf. “It sounds pessimistic, but it turns out that the Last Chance Vineyard may be just that. The last chance to build a producing vineyard in this county.”

  “Depleted?” I whistled softly. “Gosh, Chet. If that happens, what will you do?” I glanced across the river, in the direction of the olive groves. “What will Maddie do?” Assuming that the trees still belonged to Maddie, of course. “And all the other farmers and ranchers?”

  Another shake of his head, very serious. “I don’t know, China. Everybody is worried—worried enough to get serious about conservation, which is a good thing, of course. Maddie’s olives will likely be okay, since they’re fairly well established, and since quite a few of Eliza’s plantings are dryland olives. They’re sustainable. But for Jason and me, the other vineyard owners, and the market farmers, it’s a big question mark. What we need are three or four back-to-back really wet El Niño years to replenish the aquifer—and give the grapes enough time to get established. But I’m afraid that’s only part of the picture. There are other problems.”

  I fingered the velvety leaves of a nearby vine, thinking how glad I was to be growing herbs. They’re a lot more cooperative—and tolerant. “Other problems? Like what?”

  “Like late frosts, for example. April a year ago was one of the coldest on record in the Hill Country, and the vines were hit by the worst late spring freeze in a century. Bud break typically occurs here in the last week of March or the first couple of weeks of April, and a late spring freeze can stunt the new growth. In some cases, it can kill the entire vine.”

  “Bud break?”

  He grinned crookedly. “You’ll be sorry you asked.”

  “Maybe so.” I returned his grin. “But I’m a gardener, remember? And I’m curious.”

  He reached for one of the vines and pulled back the leaves. “The grape starts its annual growth cycle in the spring with bud break. The buds appear between the vine and the leaf stalk. Right here.” He pointed. “Every bud is already pre-packed with everything it needs to produce grapes: the shoots, leaves, tendrils, even the berries. By mid-April, the buds are pushing out shoots at the rate of an inch a day. Then the leaves start unfolding.”

  “And then the temperature drops below freezing,” I said, remembering my own garden disasters and misadventures. “Always at the worst time.”

  “Exactly. It’s harder on some varieties than others. The Chardonnay, for example, likes to bud early. So if we get a few warm days in February, the Chardonnay gets the urge to surge and the buds start coming out. Which means that by late March or early April—when other varieties are just beginning to think about budding—the Chardonnay has already put out lots of green shoots and leaves, maybe even a few flowers.” He gestured at the vines around us. “But almost all grapes are susceptible. If there’s a freeze warning in early spring, you’ll see us rushing out to the vineyard to set up heaters or fires or even fans, anything to keep the cold air from settling on the vines.”

  I frowned. “You know, I don’t remember ever seeing a grape flower. What do they look like?”

  “They’re tiny,” he said. “And wind-pollinated. Each flower has both male and female parts.” He cocked a suggestive eyebrow at me, and I laughed.

  “Yes. Very convenient,” I said. “Saves dating, making arrangements with the local bees, that sort of thing.”

  He nodded. “Once they’re fertilized, they get down to business and start setting fruit. Voila! Grapes. Unless, of course, there’s a bad set, which can happen if the weather is rainy or you get a hailstorm or powdery mildew. And then there are the bird problems—” He lifted and lowered his shoulders in a shrug. “It’s always something.”

  “Birds?”

  “You bet. Here, mockingbirds and grackles are the worst, especially around harvest time. Some growers put up balloons with colored eyes, hoping the birds will think they’re predators. Or they run an audio system that broadcasts bird distress calls.”

  We had turned around now and were headed back to the Jeep. “Sounds terribly dicey, Chet.” I gave him a sympathetic look. “Are you having second thoughts? Do you ever wish you’d stayed in law school? Become a lawyer, found a cushy job in a nice quiet law firm in Houston or Dallas?”

  “Law school?” He laughed. “Oh, hell, no. Leaving when I did was right for me. And getting hooked up with Jason and this place—that was right, too. But sometimes things sort of seem to gang up on you.” He hunched his shoulders. “Between the extended drought and the late freeze, some of the local growers took a really bad hit last year, and a couple of them gave up. Small growers are always operating on the margin, financially. A tough year can break us.”

  “That’s true for most small businesses,” I reminded him, although I had to admit that growers and farmers are in an even more precarious place than the rest of us. We rely on the local economy for our livelihoods. They have to rely on the weather, as well.

  “I guess you’re right.” He turned to look out over the sea of green vines. “Life is a learning curve, you know. And the way things happen, well, it’s always pretty random. Take this vineyard, for instance. Boyd needed money and had to sell off some of his ranch property. Jason and Andrea—they’ve both always wanted to work on the land—found out about it and told me. I was looking for a place to grow grapes, and put down my own roots at the same time. And I gotta say that life here has been good for me, especially after Maddie and I—”

  He sto
pped and gave me a long look. “You know about us?”

  “Ruby told me that you’ve been seeing each other.” Thunder rumbled not far away. “Between your grapes and her olives, you obviously share some common interests.”

  He nodded. “She came back here to the ranch after she finished college. That was when Jason and Andrea and I had just bought the land, and we were trying to figure out how to make the vineyard happen. I knew plenty about making wine, and a lot about growing grapes, but next to nothing about growing grapes here in the Hill Country, which is a whole other thing. Maddie understood about that, and she was willing to share her experience. So she began helping us out, and I gave her a hand with the trees, whenever I could. It was a good arrangement, practically speaking. And before long . . .” His voice trailed off.

  I made an encouraging noise. But I could sense that Chet didn’t need any encouragement. He wanted to talk, and I was an old friend, convenient and safe. He remembered our good times together. He knew he could trust me.

  He took a breath. “And before long, things between us were pretty comfortable. We were spending days together at work, on our side of the river or on hers. And in the evening, she’d come over here or I’d go over there and we’d read or watch TV or play Scrabble. You know, fun stuff.”

  I slid him a questioning look. “Just Scrabble and TV? No huggy face kissy poo?”

  He ducked his head. “Well, some of that, I guess. We’re both over twenty-one, aren’t we?”

  “I was remembering the summer we worked in the AG’s office together,” I said with a teasing laugh. “If you’ll recall, we didn’t play a lot of Scrabble or watch TV after work. We danced at the Depot. We drank wine. We did . . . other things.”

  “Right.” He gave me a boyish grin. “Yeah, well, Maddie and I did a few other things, too. More than a few, I guess. We’re good together, that way—or at least, I thought we were. And we began to talk about getting married, in general terms, sort of. I was pretty happy with the status quo, though, and I thought she was, too. And to tell the truth, I was . . . well, I was kinda scared that if I asked her and she said no, it would mean the end of what we had, which was pretty comfortable.”

  I can read between the lines. What he meant was that he’d been afraid that if she said no, there wouldn’t be any more huggy face kissy poo. I frowned. “So you didn’t actually ask her?”

  “Not in so many words, no.” His look was puzzled, maybe a little hurt. “What are you getting at, China?”

  I lifted my shoulders, let them fall. “Just trying to see where things are.” Actually, I was thinking that his relationship with Maddie was so much like the Chet I had known in the old days. A sweet and laid-back Chet who sort of drifted along with life as it happened, partly because he was more or less content with the status quo but also because he was uncertain and . . . well, not the kind of guy who seized life by the throat, shook it a couple of times, and made it do what he wanted.

  “Uh-huh.” He sighed. “But you’re right. I thought it was sort of understood that we’d be getting married, but I didn’t come right out and ask her. Then Eliza died and Maddie’s legal troubles began, and I thought maybe I ought to wait until she had a better idea of how . . . well, how it was all going to end up.” He pulled his brows together. “Which made it pretty uncomfortable for me, either way it went.”

  “Uncomfortable? I don’t think I understand.”

  And then I did. He meant that if Maddie ended up with the ranch, it might look to her like he was marrying her for her land, for financial reasons. And if she didn’t—

  He gave me a straight look. “I don’t really have a lot to offer Maddie. I mean, I’ve gotta be honest about this, China. I’m no big, wonderful bargain. I’ve been married before and it didn’t work out—mostly my fault. I don’t know how to do much else in this world except make wine. I’m part owner of a vineyard that may or may not survive—and if it doesn’t, Jason and Andrea and I are going to owe the bank a big bundle of money, without any easy way to pay it off. I don’t even have a place to live—a real house, I mean. I’m bunking in a little room at the back of the barn where we make our wine.” He scratched his ear. “I love Maddie—I love her a lot, actually—but my prospects aren’t very damn good. If the winery fails and she loses her olives, we’d be stranded. We wouldn’t have much of anything to live on.”

  “I see,” I said, but actually I didn’t. If the two of them really loved each other, they’d be willing to take a risk, wouldn’t they? Lovers took risks all the time.

  “In the end, though,” he added, “I have to admit that I waited too long. I should have spoken up before—” He stopped.

  I prompted, “Before Boyd beat you to it?”

  “Right. Before Boyd jumped in and screwed everything all to hell.” He sounded disgusted with himself. “That guy is a damn snake. But to be honest, this situation is my fault, too. I shouldn’t have been so slow on the trigger.”

  I certainly agreed with that, but I wasn’t going to tell him so. “I don’t want to mess with your love life,” I said. “But do you think that’s what Maddie wants? To marry Boyd?”

  He gave a helpless shrug. “I really don’t know, China. Like everything else, it’s complicated. She told me that when she was a kid, she had a major crush on him, but he acted like she didn’t exist. Jason has known Boyd since high school and he says the guy has a record of hanging out with cheerleaders. You know, popular girls, bimbo blondes, with—” He made a curving shape with his hands. “Maddie is smart as a whip. Competent in everything she does, loves her trees, knows how to manage her business. But she’s not a bimbo blonde and she’s not—” Another curvy gesture. “She’s always been terribly self-conscious about that scar, too. She thinks people are peering at it, wondering what happened to her. They aren’t, but she doesn’t know that.” He threw up his hands, let them drop. “And now Boyd gives her this big song and dance about loving her all along. And she thinks marrying him might solve her problems with the land.” He gave me a lost-kid look. “He’s holding all the cards. There’s no way I can compete with the guy.”

  I was insistent. “But does she want to marry him?”

  He bent over and pulled a weed, then straightened up again, giving the question some serious thought. “You know, I don’t think she does. But there’s a lot on the line, so she figures she has to take his offer seriously—like it’s a kind of business decision, which I guess maybe it is. And while she’s thinking about it, she says she doesn’t want to see me.” He twirled the weed in his fingers. “She says it’s too confusing.”

  I chuckled wryly. “Well, if I were you, I’d take that as a promising sign.”

  “Promising?” He was puzzled. “What are you talking about?”

  Really. Guys can be so dense. “If Maddie wanted to marry Boyd,” I said patiently, “she would tell him yes. If she’s confused, maybe it’s because her head is telling her that marriage might make a certain business sense, but her heart is telling her something else. Have you stopped to think that she might love you? That she might prefer to marry you—if you’d ask her?”

  He gave me a look that was part hopeful, part already defeated. After he thought about it for a moment, though, defeat won. “Maybe. But what am I supposed to do, China? Jump up and down and yell? Bang some sense into her? Beat up on Boyd? If that’s what it takes, forget it.” His shoulders slumped. “You know I’ve never been any good at confrontation. That was one of the reasons I didn’t do so well at law school. I don’t like to push people, one way or another.”

  That was certainly true. I had never seen Chet go mano a mano with anybody. But if he was going to get somewhere with Maddie, he needed to take a different approach. “I don’t think it’s a matter of confrontation, Chet. If I were Maddie, I’d simply want to understand all the options open to me. I wouldn’t want to guess.”

  He frowned. “So what are you saying?�
��

  “I’m saying don’t push her. Just tell her how you feel. Let her know you love her, you’re standing behind her all the way, you want to marry her, if she decides that’s what she wants to do. Be clear, be straight. She may be confused about a lot of things, but don’t let her be confused about that.”

  As if to endorse my recommendation, a bolt of lightning launched from one cloud to another, almost overhead. There was a sharp clap of thunder and a sudden shower of chilly rain came pelting down. We yelped and dashed for the Jeep.

  In the car, Chet turned to me. “One of the things I admired about you in law school, China, was your ability to get down to the nuts and bolts of an argument. You did it back then and you’re still doing it. Thanks, Counselor.”

  “Don’t bother to thank me,” I said firmly. “Just do what the hell I say.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” He gave a discouraged sigh and turned the key in the ignition. “I’ll give it some thought.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  • • •

  JASON and Andrea lived in a nearly new three-bedroom double-wide about fifty yards from the very large barn where the wine was made. Andrea was expecting us for dinner, Chet said, so he suggested that we postpone our tour of the winery until after we ate. We pulled up behind a big red Dodge RAM truck parked in front of the house. Like most ranch trucks, this one was a working vehicle, a heavy pickup with dual wheels in the rear. The truck bed was filled with fencing tools, a thick roll of barbed wire and some rusty metal fence poles, and a crate holding five or six large bottles with olive oil labels. The labels had been X’d out with a heavy black marker.