The Garden of the World

8. Monster

< 78 = e i g h t # Monster When Sophia learned that Gill had come back to the Valley, and that her husband was going to bring him home, she thought that her prayers had been answered. Sophia understood more of the vineyard’s financial situation than her husband thought she did, and she was sure that Gill’s return was providential. She remembered the year before the great quake, when her mother had gotten the tb and entered the Belmont Sanatorium for Working Women. Sophia once ran away from home to see her at the sanatorium, and she’d tried to persuade her mother to come home with her. She had only been able to talk to her through a screen door and was not allowed to touch her. When her mother died the following year, she believed that if she had only been able to bring her home, her mother would have lived. She still believed that. Two years later, when Paul Tourneau offered to marry her, she saw it as a way to restore and repair his broken family, and her own. And Mary had said yes, after all. Now she prayed her husband would succeed in gathering Gill, the wandering son, back into the fold. She prayed that the vineyard would thrive, and that all at last would be gathered in. @ She was in the kitchen when she heard Tourneau arrive, and she knew instantly that he had come alone. There was a false brightness in his voice, a large relieved note indicating that he had done his duty and it was now behind him. She heard him hang up his hat and coat with vigorous satisfaction, then stride across the Great Room. “What time is dinner?” he asked jovially, pushing open the double-hinged door and leaning into the kitchen. < 79 = Sophia looked at the meal spread out on the kitchen counters, a feast for no one. She had made pan-crisped chicken, pollo a due tempi, because it could be made and reheated at the last minute. Fresh green beans from the garden, fixed Bolognese style with mortadella. A pasta dish with prosciutto, tomatoes, peas. Fresh-baked bread. Rice pudding. “Let’s wait for Louis,” she said. “Good! I’ll get your father. We can all eat together.” Louis came from practice with the town’s baseball team half an hour later. Sophia heard the truck that dropped him off, and she walked to the verandah and saw him sprinting up the stairs. She knew he was hoping for a grand reunion. When he saw her, she shook her head and told him to wash up. At dinner, Augusto asked Tourneau directly if he’d found Gill. Tourneau leaned back in his chair and described exactly what had happened, his own fairness and generosity of spirit, and Gill’s pigheaded replies. Augusto probed with skeptical questions, but didn’t shake Tourneau’s story that he had done all that was just and right. Afterward, Tourneau insisted that they leave the chandelier lit and the house glowing, as though for a celebration, and move out onto the verandah . There, he planned aloud for what he would do someday on the string of hills that stretched north from his vineyard, the chaine d’or. They could be cleared and planted with vines, one by one. And the profit from each would pay for the development of the next. The string of hills would all someday be part of the Beau Pays. Gill’s name wasn’t again mentioned. Tourneau spoke only of how Louis would have control of a part of the expansion, and have to build his own winery and cellars at some point. After he had graduated from Davis, and after the damned Prohibition was ended. Sophia could see her son’s disappointment in the short answers he made to his father’s speeches, given more out of duty than enthusiasm. She left them on the verandah and cleared the table and dumped the stripped bones into the trash can and stacked the empty plates beside the sink. She washed and dried each dish to a shine, and then she held each one up to the light, saw her face reflected in the white porcelain glaze. She saw herself pale and translucent, smoothed of age and pain. Her better self. Her spirit self. She thought that she could be the one to bring Gilbert home, though she’d failed with her mother. This homecoming feast was fruitless, but another feast would come, surely it would. She would find the hurt in Gill that Tourneau hadn’t reached, and soften him, and offer comfort. < 80 = As she was finishing, Louis came into the kitchen and picked up a stack of dried plates and carried them to the glassed cupboard. Such a good boy, always helpful. He picked up a wineglass and began to polish it dry, wiping thoughtfully around the stem and base and inside the globe. “This isn’t right,” he said in a low voice. Sophia nodded. “I hope he’s still at New Chicago,” she said. “God willing, I’m going to bring him home with me.” Louis smiled. “You can do it, Mama.” “If I do, it won’t be just my doing,” she said. She washed one more plate, and dried it, and studied her image in the shine. @ Gill looked for orchard work after he walked off Jacobsen’s ranch, but he found only blank faces and closed gates. Jacobsen had called all his neighbors and told them not to hire him, told them he was trouble. The only work he found was harvesting truck crops for farmers who were selling at the wholesale market in San Jose, a few days’ work picking lettuce or rooting out onions. The wages were low, lower than for picking fruit. When he wasn’t working, he helped Ana with the camp chores at New Chicago. He hauled water, collected firewood, aired the bedding daily, drove with her to buy supplies. In those days together, they found that talk came easily for them. Stories gave rise to other stories, and jokes, and observations , and their talk was abundant and effortless and never tedious to them. Ana didn’t ask Gill how he had been wounded, for which he was unconsciously grateful—he didn’t think about his scarred face while he was with her—and he found himself offering other stories about the war to her that he had never told anyone. He’d seen the faces of dead men, many of them. But he was never sure if he himself had killed anyone. The flesh of troops was so massed and anonymous, the rifle fire so general and random, that he never knew for certain what he’d done when he’d gone over the top. When Ana spoke, she told him about their years in the Imperial Valley, when they first left Mexico. They lived in a shack along an irrigation ditch, the walls pieced together out of cardboard boxes and the wooden roof taken from broken lettuce crates. They added a lean-to on one side using arrowwood from the ditch banks. The floor was dirt, which was not a problem except during lettuce season, in January and February, when dampness rose through the ground. Then, after two years, the fields played out, growing whitish with alkali, and they moved to a different part of the valley. But the < 81 = house they had was always the same kind, put together out of the leavings from farmwork and vegetable packing. She often spoke about Milagro Park, and the streetlamp where you were never lonely. The city had placed only one streetlamp in the neighborhood, but some of the young men had discovered a way to hook up a jukebox to its electricity, so people gathered there in the evenings when the weather was good to listen to music and dance and talk. She told about the families who kept goats, and who had to walk into the hills every morning and drive the long iron stake into the ground with a sledgehammer so that the goat could graze chained to it. And the Corpus Christi processions, when little altars were set up outside of houses and people would walk from house to house to pray and admire the santos. And the weddings that took place where everybody was invited, and a band would play boleros and cumbias, and they would spread sawdust and powder on the rough floors so that people could slide their feet while they danced. Gill thought about Ana, wearing widow’s black in the midst of all the life she described. He thought about how other men might see her—caring for two children who were nearly grown, a part of her life over with, the black dress marking her as untouchable. He asked her once if she always had to wear black, and she replied that she was a widow, as though that ended the discussion. He found another chance, when they were laughing about the past, to ask her how old she had been when she came to California. “Twenty-three,” she said. “So that would mean now you would be . . .” “Thirty-two.” She smiled, and her cheeks rounded. “Could you never get married again?” “Oh, I don’t think of that.” @ Sophia wasn’t able to find an excuse to drive into town for more than a week, until she needed to buy honey at Huntington’s Apiary. Beau Pays didn’t keep bees, as many orchards did, since bees weren’t as necessary for pollinating a vineyard as they were for plum or apricot, and bees could be very destructive to the grapes when they sweetened up just before harvest. And even if the vineyard had bees, Sophia would still have loved the fields of sweet clover Mrs. Huntington grew around her hives, and the wholesome taste it gave honey for baking. After lunch, she gathered the cleaned and emptied mason jars into a slant-sided harvesting box and placed them in the back of the truck. Then < 82 = she went to the bedroom and changed into a clean dress, a flower print dress with a white collar, not so fancy that it would make her husband wonder, but nicer than her plain blue housedress. She smoothed the dress down over her hips, and she turned to look sideways at herself in the large oval mirror that stood in an oak frame in one corner of the room. Then she leaned her face close to the mirror. There were some shallow lines etched on either side of her mouth, but they were visible only if looked at from very close. And other lines at the corners of her eyes and thinning across her forehead. A map of years across her face, but still blurred into youthfulness at a distance. After coming into town, she turned southeast for the apiary first. She didn’t want to drive straight to New Chicago, past Joey’s gas station and the drugstore. People would be sitting, watching from the windows, wondering where she was going. She could drive to New Chicago afterward, by a route that avoided San Natoma. Mrs. Huntington was always called a witch by the children of the grammar school, because she was gray-haired, and lived alone, and kept cats, and had women who visited her, older women like herself. But the prune and cherry growers who lived nearby loved her, because their trees were always well pollinated by her honeybees. Her husband had left thirty years earlier, because, he said, they couldn’t have children. He left her with an orchard that she didn’t think she’d be able to keep up herself, and she already knew she would never marry again. So she had the orchard plowed under, except for a few cherry trees near the house, and dedicated herself to beekeeping. Mrs. Huntington had never seemed to change in the years Sophia had known her. She was straight and tall and lean and in perfect health. Her hair was shortish and gray, and she always wore comfortable men’s pants and long-sleeved blouses and a kerchief around her neck. Sophia took the box of empty honey jars to her front porch, and she exchanged them for jars newly filled, each carrying a handwritten label specifying the date collected and the predominant flavor, usually clover but sometimes fruit blossom. Sophia paid Mrs. Huntington with a bank check. She also took a bottle of wine out of her handbag for her, the steely dry white wine in a long green bottle that she knew Mrs. Huntington favored. Mrs. Huntington held up the bottle and admired it. “Thank you, Sophia. And give my thanks to Paul.” She looked at Sophia. “You’re dressed pretty,” she said. “Too pretty just for me.” “I’m going to see somebody I haven’t seen for a long, long time.” < 83 = “Thought so.” Mrs. Huntington didn’t smile. “You be careful, Sophia. I’d hate to see you get hurt. You already have a lot of regrets in this life.” “I’ll be careful,” Sophia said. “Good,” she said. “I have regrets too,” she said, “but not as many as I’d have had if my husband had stayed.” Sophia drove back northwest, staying to roads that cut through orchards and onion fields. When she turned onto the dirt road that led to New Chicago , she began to smell the tidal flats, and she slowed down. There were the tilting houses, a pot hanging over a fire, a woman in black tending it. Then she saw a man pouring a bucket of water into a large barrel. He was shirtless and olive-skinned, his chest smooth and hairless. As he moved, his body seemed spare and thrifty, without any waste or excess. She parked and took a jar of honey from the box in the back of the truck. When she walked toward him, she noticed how he held his face straight, so that she could see the whole scarred cheek, the way the smashed bone made his left eye look in a little. She told herself to not let her reaction to his face show, and she walked right up to him and placed a hand on one arm and kissed his right cheek, the smooth one. “It’s good to see you, Gill,” she said. “Is it?” he asked. “Good to see me?” She stepped back, held up the jar of honey. “I brought this. For the camp.” He took the jar from her and handed it to Ana. “A gift from my stepmother ,” he said. “Mi madrina.” Ana lifted up the jar. “Gracias.” Sophia ignored Ana. “I’ve thought about you a lot over the years, Gill. I always prayed you’d come back.” “I’m not back anywhere,” Gill said. “I’m in New Chicago.” “But you won’t be always.” “You don’t think so?” “You’re near the end of a great pilgrimage, Gill. I want to take you the rest of the way home.” Ana had turned away and busied herself with the fire. Sophia was speaking as though she weren’t present, and she bowed her head and began to poke at the small branches under the pot to liven up the flames. Gill looked at Ana, then turned back to Sophia. “Why don’t you grab a bucket?” He picked up two buckets and pointed to a third. “I’ve still got to finish filling up that barrel. For Ana. We can talk over there.” They walked a path worn through a field of dried and yellowed grasses < 84 = toward the green strip that marked the course of Cherry Creek. The creek, which fell into the bay near New Chicago, was sluggish and dull, greened with algae. Its water had been diverted into irrigation channels a dozen times before it reached the bay, run through orchards and strawberry patches and truck farms. From each field, the runoff was diverted back into the creek, thick with salts, fertilizers, pesticides. By the time it reached New Chicago, the creek was a series of still, silty pools, with insects skittering across the opaque surface, and trickles of water muttering between them through short rocky stretches and bending green grass. Gill kept a little ahead of Sophia, and she had to stumble after. They stopped at an oblong pool overhung by a sickly willow tree, and Gill straddled the water at the upstream end of the pool, where there was a little current . He dipped one of the buckets carefully, trying to fill it without disturbing any of the sediment. Sophia handed him another bucket, and he took it without looking at her. “Is this what you drink?” she asked. “Drink, cook with, wash in,” Gill said. “We pour it in one of the barrels, and then wait for an hour or two. It settles out clear, as long as you just dip water out from the top. We’re downstream from everything here in New Chicago.” He half smiled at Sophia, took the third bucket, and held it down into the slow-moving water. “So you can’t want to stay here,” Sophia said. “Why not?” “It’s awful here.” “It’s nice enough for Ana.” Gill set the third bucket on the soft ground beside the other two. “It’s nice enough for her family.” “That’s different.” “Why?” Gill asked. “They’re good people. They’ve been as kind to me as anyone in the past ten years.” “I’m glad,” Sophia said. “Why wouldn’t I want to stay with people who are good to me?” “They have no place better waiting for them.” “They don’t?” “And you do. You have Beau Pays. Your father would welcome you back.” “So he told me.” “But he didn’t tell you he needed you.” Gill laughed. “He’ll never admit he needs anyone but himself.” < 85 = “But he does.” Sophia’s eyes were bright as she spoke. “I’m here to do you good, and to do him good. He needs you more than he knows, and more than he’ll ever let on. And the vineyard needs you.” “He doesn’t need me,” Gill said. “He needs a dog to follow him around and make him feel grand, to work for little pay and no credit, and to get scraps to eat and a rug to sleep on.” “It wouldn’t be like that,” Sophia said. “No? Isn’t that a little of what Augusto does?” “He has his home,” she said. “He’s not a wanderer on the earth.” “I want something different than that.” “You can find what you want there, Gill. In his heart, your father needs you. And in your heart, you need him. And it would do me good as well, to see you home again.” “Of course,” Gill said. “I’d be somebody else for you to nurse. Another lame bird on the windowsill. Another way for you to practice charity. You might not know what to do if someone didn’t need you.” “I’m trying to bring you peace, Gill.” She reached out, put a hand on his bare chest. Her fingers spread like tree roots over his flesh. “Feel that,” she said. Gill took her hand in his, warmly for a moment, then yanked it up to the left side of his face, the side layered with scar tissue. He forced her hand against his broken cheek. She flinched at the touch and pulled back. He let her hand go. “Not so easy, is it?” he said. “I look like a monster, haven’t you noticed?” “You don’t look like a monster.” She massaged the palm of her hand. “And you’re beautiful. You haven’t changed a bit.” “Yes I have.” “Not a damned bit. Still beautiful. And I’m a monster. I’m what he left in his wake when he built his vineyard. So if I ever do come back, that’s how it will be. I’ll come as the vineyard’s monster.” “You’re not a monster,” Sophia said. “I don’t believe that.” “How would you know?” Gill stooped down and picked up a bucket of water in each hand. “Pick up the bucket,” he said. Sophia rubbed her hand once more, then stooped down and grasped the metal bail. They trudged back together toward the house. “Tell me about Louis,” Gill said. “How old is he now?” < 86 = “Sixteen. He just turned sixteen. He’s a wonderful young man.” “Is he running track?” “No. But he plays baseball. He’s on the town team.” “Yeah? He must be good.” Gill smiled, as though proud of his half brother. “Going to play in the big Fourth of July game, then.” “Of course. He plays center field.” “Maybe I’ll go watch him play,” Gill said. “Does he remember me?” “He thinks about you. Your father told him you might be dead, but he never believed it.” Sophia saw Ana, dressed in black, watching them carry water along the worn path. She decided then that she wouldn’t tell Tourneau what she’d tried to do. Gill led her to the two water barrels, and she watched him empty a bucket of water into one. She was about to empty hers into the other when Gill shook his head. “That barrel has already settled. Dump it into this one.” “Gill,” Sophia asked, “what are you going to do?” “For now, finish hauling water.” “Whatever you do,” she said, “it wasn’t just by chance that you came back now. Somehow, your return was meant to be. As a brother, and a son. Not a monster.” He hoisted his other bucket, and they emptied them together into the barrel . The water boiled up, brown and grainy. After Sophia left in the truck, Gill sat by the fire and Ana stood behind him and rubbed her fingers gently into his temples with warm circular motions. ...