The Garden of the World

12. The Crush

< 149 = t w e l v e # The Crush The wind shift came in late August that year, a shift to the north that was chill at first, but heralded the ripening Indian summer weather. The Pacific High, a pool of still, warm air, edged eastward toward the continent , and the winds spilling clockwise around it would first blow away the coastal fogs. Then, as the high pressure lapped over the coast, temperatures would rise in all the inland valleys. Under a steady heating sun, the fully formed grapes could fill rapidly with sugar and arrive at their peak in days. Winegrowers call harvest time the crush. As the days of still, hot air arrived, Tourneau and Louis checked sugar and acid every day, and Tourneau had some tents set up for pickers on a flat piece of land half a mile from the winery, and spread a canopy over a large outdoor grill and oven. Since the ’teens, as more transients than locals came to pick grapes, Tourneau had found that providing a place to sleep on the grounds kept workers on through the end of the crush. When they accepted a place to stay and the food and light worker’s wine he provided, they accepted a bond, an obligation to the vineyard. He sent Louis out to gather a picking crew, now that prunes were ending, saying it was one of the jobs of a harvest manager. “You’ll be doing more and more here, every year,” he said. “Your grandfather will be doing less. And it will give you a chance to practice your Spanish.” Louis hadn’t seen Gill after that last moment, when he was carving his initials into the tree. He had looked for him the day after, calling his name in the wood as he had done when a young boy, but there was no answer. He went by the Cash Store, and also went by the orchard where the Familia Pulido was working, spying out the window for a short white man working with a group of Mexicans. Once, he drove back to New Chicago during the < 150 = day and parked at a distance. He saw one woman, dressed in black, working around the fire pit. He stayed for a time, as though he could conjure up his brother through watching, but the woman remained alone. He hadn’t seen Nancy after that night either. She’d been silent during the drive down the hill after Gill disappeared, and when he had asked her when they were going to see each other again, she’d said, “When you grow some brains” and then ran into her house. She hadn’t been home anytime he’d called during the past three weeks, and he figured she had her mother answering the phone for her. He knew she had her mother wrapped around her little finger. @ Louis turned the truck off toward New Chicago while assembling a crew and drove through the warm, still air. The dirt track to the tilting and sinking houses was clear now, compacted by the Pulido truck, and the weeds grew high and yellow alongside. But the Pulidos would be moving on soon, back to Southern California after the seasons of harvest, abandoning once again the already abandoned city. And the track would grow green and empty with winter. Louis left the truck in the same place he had parked two weeks earlier, with Nancy. He saw Miguel stand up near the fire circle, and Francisco and Javier, but he didn’t see the two women, Ana and Rosarita, and he didn’t see Gill. “I know why you have come,” Miguel said. He was wearing a clean linen shirt tucked into his jeans, and his hair was slicked back, and his face shiny and pleased. “Yeah?” Louis looked past him and scanned the camp, looking for some sign that Gill was still there. “You want us to pick your grapes, no?” “That’s right,” Louis said. “Like we spoke about.” “We just finished prunes,” Miguel said. He hooked his thumbs inside his belt and rocked back and forth on his heels. “The owner there, Jacobsen, gave us a big bonus for staying through the whole harvest. You giving a bonus?” “We give a bonus, if you stay through.” “What kind of grapes, don Luis? Mataro? Alicante?” Louis shook his head. “We grow better grapes than that. Pinot, Cabernet, Chardonnay. We’ll be picking the Pinot first.” “Better for you,” Miguel smiled. “Not better for us. Alicante grows four, < 151 = five tons an acre. Easy to fill up boxes. Make money fast. Pinot, one ton an acre. Slow.” Louis looked over to one of the old houses. At a window on the second floor, he saw Ana, dressed in black. She was looking down at him. “What if I told you that an Alicante vineyard wanted us?” “We pay a nickel more a box than other vineyards, so long as the fruit is perfect.” “We just got a big bonus.” Miguel turned and walked back into the circle , and Louis followed him. “We are going to a dance tonight, at the Palm Gardens Ballroom in San Jose. They have a Mexican dance every couple of weeks.” “That’s good,” Louis said. “You’ll have a good time.” “You think so?” Miguel stood by Francisco and clapped him on the shoulder . “Last time we went to a dance, this one was dancing with a woman who was almost black from working under the sun, who had hands rough as bricks from picking fruit off the ground. And he asked her what she did, and she said she worked in an office. And she asked him what he did, and you know what he said?” Francisco looked down and wiped some dirt from his shoes. Louis waited, silent. “He said he was going to start college next year.” Miguel paused for a moment, then laughed. “Yes, they have a good time, lying to each other. Maybe this time he’ll say he is a baseball player.” Francisco looked at his father resentfully. “Okay, don Luis,” Miguel said. “We will be at your vineyard Monday, before sunrise.” “All of you?” Louis said. “All of us. Me, Francisco, Javier, Rosarita, Ana. All of us.” Javier moaned and stood up suddenly, and Miguel took his arm. “It’s all right,” he said. “You better go now, don Luis. We’ll see you on Monday.” “Okay.” Louis turned and saw Ana, still framed by the window, raise her black-sleeved arm and wave at him slowly. He walked back to the truck through the blanketing heat of a late, false summer, the September heat that marked summer’s end. @ Gladys Finney liked to think of herself as the happy angel of her daughters’ lives, hovering over their shoulders, shepherding them < 152 = safely through the dating years as their confidante and advisor, and finally seeing them safely into the arms of a man who would take care of them. She had done this successfully with her first two daughters, and she planned to do the same with her third daughter, even though her husband spoiled her some and claimed that she was different. Glad had seen her daughters stop dating certain boys, of course, and she thought that what had happened with Nancy was no different. For the past three weeks, she had answered the phone, and if it was Louis Tourneau, she told him that Nancy wasn’t in. Glad was a little worried that Nancy had stayed home on Friday and Saturday nights, being more of a bookworm than she normally was, holing up and reading things her father gave her. But she thought it would pass. This Friday, Nancy was going to the movies with just a couple of her girlfriends from school, and Glad was comforted to see her again in front of her round mirror in her bedroom, putting rouge on her cheeks. She walked into the room and looked over Nancy’s shoulder at her face in the mirror. “You look nice,” she told Nancy. “You’ve been so pale lately.” Nancy made a face at herself. “I don’t think I look nice. I think I’m just covering things up.” “Oh, no. Makeup just enhances your natural beauty.” “If I had any to enhance.” She stretched her mouth tall into an elongated O and applied some lipstick. Then she blotted her lips several times on tissue paper. “I’m just hiding what I really look like.” “Did he make you feel like that?” Glad sat down on the edge of the bed near Nancy. “What did he say to you?” “Nothing, Mother.” Glad didn’t believe her daughter. “Yes he did. What did he say to make you feel ugly?” “Nothing. It’s just the way I am.” “Now listen here. When boys want to make girls feel cheap, they tell them that they’re not pretty. And then they try to take advantage of them. Did he try to take advantage of you?” “No.” “Hmm.” She looked at Nancy, who turned away to the mirror. “If he did . . . I’m not doubting your word, but if he did, then you’re much better off without him. That only means he doesn’t really care for you as a person.” “He didn’t do that, Mom.” “I always thought of him as a nice boy.” “He is nice. He’s the nicest boy in the world.” < 153 = “Then why don’t you want to see him?” Nancy looked back at the mirror and pressed her lips together, then opened them with a puffing sound. “I just don’t,” she said. “Someday, you’ll meet someone really nice. And you’ll know he’s the right one, because he makes you feel just as nice. I know. I saw everything your big sisters went through.” Glad patted her daughter briskly on the shoulder. “What movie are you going to see?” “Lillian Gish. The Wind.” @ Later that evening, Bill Finney was working with slugs of finished type, assembling them onto the big galley plates of the offset press. Birthdays, weddings, family reunions, obituaries, ads from the stores, the real estate agents, the bank. The life of the town, laid down in comprehensible lines, in the definitive snap of the Hoe press. Or half the life of the town, he told himself. The half that would be welcomed by his readers, by his advertisers. When he heard the door open, he thought it might be Nancy, home early from the movies. But from the sound of the first footstep on the pouredconcrete floor, he knew it was someone else. He knew precisely the sound of Nancy’s movements. He peered around the large plates of the Hoe and saw Louis Tourneau, standing uncertainly at the doorway, one hand still on the door handle. “Come on in, Lou.” He stood up, and the young man walked diffidently forward. “Nancy’s not here,” Finney said. “If that’s what you’re thinking.” “I didn’t expect she would be,” Louis said. “But you were hoping.” “Maybe a little.” Finney sat down at the keyboard of the Linotype. “Tell me something about the crush, Lou. I’ll put you in the paper.” Louis walked to his side. “We’ll probably start picking on Monday, Tuesday the latest. My father said he knew it would come on fast once the wind shifted.” “Grapes are sugaring right up?” “Yeah.” Louis looked away. “Did you know that a bunch of red wine grapes doesn’t change color all at once?” < 154 = Finney looked up at him, interested. “No, I didn’t know that.” “They start turning from green to red from the stem end of the bunch, like the color is bleeding down into the grapes from the mother vine, seeping down and changing them one by one. It’s slow at first, when the weather is cool and foggy. Then, when it gets warmer, it speeds up, and they turn from green, to reddish, to almost black. Right down to the last berry at the very apex of the bunch. Then you know that crush isn’t too far away.” “Hmmm.” Finney was typing slowly and thoughtfully as Louis spoke. “And that’s what happened this year.” “Yeah.” “Thanks, Lou. I’ll put that in.” “Okay.” Louis stood silently, watching Finney type, not making any motion to leave. When the bell above the keyboard dinged at the end of a line, Finney turned his chair to face him. “I am sorry that Nancy doesn’t want to see you now, Lou. She tells me she’s going to get straight A’s this year, so she can go to college. And she doesn’t want to just go to San Jose Teachers, she wants to go to Cal. Maybe it’s just that. Summer’s over, she wants to concentrate on school.” “Maybe.” Louis frowned, looked away. “Mr. Finney, have you heard anything about where Gill might be?” Finney shook his head. “He stopped showing up at the Cash Store about three weeks ago. Nobody in town has seen him. Pat McCarty’s upset about it. He thinks he did something wrong.” “I went to New Chicago. He wasn’t there either. Nancy hasn’t heard anything , has she?” “He was gone for ten years, Lou. Maybe he’s gone back to wherever he was.” “I just can’t believe that.” “I wish I could help.” Louis shrugged. “Sorry to have bothered you.” “No bother.” Finney stood up. “If you ever want to talk again, stop on by.” “Okay. Thanks.” “After the crush, maybe.” When the door shut behind Louis, Finney went back to the press, but he did not immediately begin to fix the slugs of type. He thought that Louis wanted the sweet and well-ordered world, the kind world he described in his paper week by week. Louis wanted the world in accord with his wishes for it. Everybody did. Gill did too, probably, wherever he was. < 155 = @ Marco and Carlo ran out from between the rows of vines and onto the plat where the harvesters’ tents had been set up. It was late in the dusty and yellow Sunday afternoon, and already smoke rose from the large outdoor kitchen, and men and women were walking about, anxious for the following morning when they could begin making money again. The two boys paused and searched through the people. Each boy had half a dozen dead birds hanging from a string on his belt. The string ran through the throat of the birds and out their mouthing beaks, and a little dried blood stuck to the throat feathers, and their eyes were open and flat black. They had some grackles on the strings, with black iridescent head feathers, and brownish cowbirds, and spotted starlings with dark beaks, all stiffening at their sides. Then Marco spotted Paul Tourneau, wearing his broad straw hat and swinging the spade he carried like a walking stick. He punched his brother in the arm. “There he is,” he whooped. They ran to where Tourneau stood with Louis, fumbling their strings of birds loose from their belts. “Look, Mr. Tourneau,” they said together. Tourneau smiled down at them, running his hand through his tangled black beard. “How did you get them?” “Slingshots!” “Good.” He pointed at the dead birds with a thick, blunt finger. “Now you won’t be eating my grapes.” As the boys watched, he dipped his hand into a pocket and brought out two nickels and gave them each one. “Now hang these birds from the fence posts around the southeast block, where we’re starting tomorrow. A good warning for the other birds, eh?” He patted them each on the shoulder. “Allez, les braves hommes.” They watched the two boys scurry away. The birds would be strung to fence posts by their necks, facing outward like dead sentinels. They would hang through autumn, growing light and dry as straw, until the twine finally wore through and they fell, severed, at the edge of the vineyard. “You never would kill birds for me,” Tourneau said to Louis. “I never liked to,” Louis said. “No rabbits either. A nickel for every rabbit, and you would never kill a one for me.” < 156 = “I never liked to see them dead once I’d seen them alive.” “They want to eat the same grapes that keep all of us,” Tourneau said. “You, your mother, me, all these pickers for the next few weeks. I’d see them all dead if it meant that I’d make the finest wine in California.” He looked over the vineyard and began talking about which blocks of grapes they would be picking, and on which days, if the weather held. A few white clouds hovered over the Santa Clara Valley, and Tourneau drew his blunt squarish hands over the eastern sky, as though tracing a map of the vineyard onto the scattered clouds. In three weeks, he thought, they could get the berries off, each block picked as its sugar was peaking, and the fruit crushed and into the fermenters. “You did well assembling a picking crew, Louis,” he said. “You worked hard.” Louis looked south in the direction of the tree where he had last seen Gill. A dead cowbird would now be hanging on a fence post opposite that tree. “Thanks, Papa,” he said. Tourneau paused. “You’re not seeing that Nancy anymore, the daughter of the newspaperman.” “No,” Louis said. “I’m not.” “Tell you what,” Tourneau said. “After the crush, we’ll go down to Goosetown together. How does that sound?” “I don’t know, Papa.” “This is your harvest as much as mine,” Tourneau said. “You’ll deserve some reward. And in Goosetown, you’ll forget all about that little girl. Even a sensitive boy who won’t kill rabbits can forget things in Goosetown.” “Okay, Papa,” Louis said. “We’ll go.” He looked at the sky, saw the lines traced across it by his father’s hands. @ The hills to the east were black and featureless, but the crests of the hills were etched clearly against a pale, predawn yellow. Tourneau stood tall in the back of one of the tray wagons, and the picking crew waited on the ground at the edge of the southeast block. They were edgy and jumpy, ready to start. There were some young people from Italian families who would start school late, and a few fruit tramps who had no fixed address and who would be heading south once walnuts were in. More than half were Mexican families like the Pulidos, who had been living in the States since war broke out in Mexico the previous decade. The pickers all carried the < 157 = serpette, a harvesting knife with a short wooden handle and a sharp, crescent -shaped blade. Some pickers swiped their serpettes against small whetstones as they waited, and others looped a string from the knife’s handle around their wrists, so that it would stay handy while they were parting the leafy branches with both hands. Although it was cool in the dawn, most of the picking crew wore broad straw hats against the hot sun that was coming, and many wore neckerchiefs above their collars to keep their necks from sunburn. They wore overalls or double-kneed jeans, since some of the picking would be kneeling work, and they wore long-sleeved plaid or denim shirts, sleeves rolled up over the elbow. When it grew light enough to see, Tourneau held up two clusters of grapes. “This one,” he held up his right hand, “is the way the grapes should look. If you see any grapes that have raisined up, or have been sucked dry by bees, knock them off.” He demonstrated by using his thumb to push off a grape with a slightly puckered skin. “If you see a cluster like this, don’t pick it.” He held up his left hand and showed a cluster with some graying blotches of bunch rot, a cluster that the sulfur had missed on some wet morning during the summer. There were harvest boxes waiting at the head of each row, and Louis had already assigned rows to the various groups. The upper limb of the sun had not yet broken over the ridge, but it was growing light enough to tell good clusters of grapes from bad ones. “Try not to let the skin of the grapes break when they drop into the box,” Tourneau said. “All right. Allez. Bonne vendange.” The pickers all took off at a quick trot, chattering and clapping their hands together to get feeling in them, and within seconds they were rustling aside leaves and slicing through grape stems. The clusters began to fall softly into boxes scraped close to the trunks of the grapevines, guided down gently by each picker’s cradling left hand. Up and down the rows of vines, the same rustle and muffled kiss of grapes falling on other swelling grapes was heard. Louis handled the reins of Queenie, hauling one of the tray wagons, while Augusto Corvo drove the other behind Prince. They kept the wagons moving slowly up and down the allées, and pickers trotted out with full boxes, placed them on the still moving wagons, and picked up an empty box from the head of the row. The whole section of the vineyard seemed to be in motion, leaves brushed up and away, grapes falling into boxes, pickers moving the harvest boxes into place under the vines and chattering across < 158 = the rows to each other, teasing anyone who fell behind as they worked their way across. Just after sunrise, Louis’s wagon was filled with boxes mounded with black grapes, and he turned the wagon toward the cellar. Angelo, one of the full-time men, stopped picking and climbed up beside him. Louis gave the reins a short snap over Queenie’s hindquarters, and she picked up her pace, knowing the way. The unloading area, behind the third level of the winery building, was flat and sheltered by oak trees. Paul Tourneau began taking the boxes from the wagon bed even before the wagon came to a complete halt. Louis and Angelo jumped down to help, and together they stacked the boxes where the oak trees would shade them, so the grapes would not cook in the sun before they were crushed. Then Louis and Angelo climbed back behind the horse and headed down the hill to the section being picked. Louis looked back to see his father plucking stray leaves out of the boxes and lifting clusters to inspect them. In the section, the initial chatter and banter had slowed down, the pickers saving their breath for work, and a spirit of quiet earnestness had settled in over the vines. The sun was up now, and the air at ground level was heating steadily. Francisco and Miguel were working down adjacent rows, both picking grapes into buckets they then emptied into boxes chalked with a large P. There were spiderwebs crossing the dark insides of the leafy vines, and they had to brush them aside with their arms and the serpette to reach the clusters hanging there. Once, as Francisco was bringing out a cluster, a gob of web clung to his arm and spun itself up across his nose and mouth, and he dropped the grapes and began spitting and slapping at himself. Miguel laughed. “The spiders want the grapes too. And the bees.” Miguel was one of those who always worked with his sleeves rolled down, no matter how hot it was, to lessen the chance for bee stings and spider bites. Francisco spit once more, then picked up the cluster he had dropped. “Should I put it in the bucket?” “Knock off any that have broken skin,” Miguel said. “They are paying us well for prime fruit.” As Louis drove Queenie along at a walking pace, Francisco picked up a full box and trotted out to the wagon. The box weighed over fifty pounds, and carrying it made the veins on his arms stand out. Louis smiled when < 159 = he heaved it onto the wagon bed and snatched two empty boxes off the end. “Good job, Frank,” he said, while keeping the wagon rolling slowly ahead. Francisco trotted back down the row to the vine he had been working on and dropped the boxes nearby. Miguel looked up. “What did your friend say to you?” he asked. “That I was doing a good job.” “Ha ha. His job is easier.” They both looked up and saw Augusto and Louis standing in the wagons that were passing up and down the allées, seeming to float upon an unbroken layer of grape leaves, like barges on a river. As the day warmed toward noon, the vineyard began to hum with bees, grown accustomed to sucking the sweet grape juice from the fruit pecked open by birds. The pickers simply tried to pick around them without bothering them, though some said that every picker owed the harvest at least one sting. Francisco, when he grew hungry, ate from a cluster of grapes, though they still tasted a little sour to him. He made a face at his father. “Are they sure these grapes are ripe?” “These are for champagne. That’s why they get picked early. Champagne that you and I will never taste. So eat now.” Francisco ate some more grapes, not picking them off one by one but holding the whole bunch up to his mouth and biting down, and chewing, and spitting out the pips and the rubbery skins. As he took another bite, he watched his father crouch down and reach to the center of some canes with both hands, the left spreading the leaves apart and reaching in to the fruit, the right holding the knife. Then Miguel jerked back. “Chingada madre,” he cursed. He held up both his hands, open like claws near his chest. From his right hand dangled the serpette, and the hand was sticky with grape juice, and a fresh bee sting reddened at the base of this thumb. His left hand was bleeding , gashed in the palm by the jerking serpette. He grimaced at his left hand. The blood was bright and shocking. It oozed out along the length of the cut and dripped down his wrist. Francisco looked for a second, then turned and ran to the end of the row. “Don Luis!” he called “¡Patrón!” Louis reined in Queenie where she was and saw Francisco jumping and < 160 = shouting. He grabbed the small first-aid kit, war surplus in a green metal box, and ran to where Francisco pointed. Miguel was standing, waiting for him, his arm held out like a torch, and he had broken out in a sudden sweat. “It doesn’t hurt,” he said furiously. “Do you need a doctor?” Louis was down on one knee, flipping open the metal clasps on the kit and looking up at the angry, bleeding man standing straight and braced. “No,” Miguel shouted. “It doesn’t hurt. No doctor.” Louis squeezed some ointment from a metal tube onto a gauze pad and pressed it onto the cut to stop the bleeding, holding Miguel’s hand flat between both of his own. Francisco stood by watching, his long thin arms dangling by his sides, and Miguel turned to him. “What are you waiting for? Are you making any money standing there?” “No,” Francisco said. “Then get back to work.” Francisco looked at Louis, who was reaching down into the kit for a roll of gauze. “Now,” Miguel said. “Ándale.” Louis wrapped gauze around the pad to hold it in place, figure-eighting it around the thumb and across the palm. “Are you sure you don’t need a doctor ?” he asked. Miguel jerked his hand away and looked at it closely, thin-lipped and frowning. “It’s pretty deep,” Louis said. “It’s just my left hand,” Miguel said. “Go back to your wagon. Let me get back to work.” Other pickers were calling for the wagon, calling for more boxes, and Louis closed up the first-aid kit and trotted back to where Queenie stood with her head down. Francisco, back at his vine, was cutting grape stems but also glancing secretly at his father to judge how he really was. Miguel flexed his hand, and his mouth tightened. “It will be stiff tomorrow ,” he said to himself. Then he picked up the cluster of grapes he had dropped, knocked off a few grapes that had shattered, and laid it in the bucket. < 161 = @ In the early afternoon, enough grapes had been picked for the first crush. Any grapes picked later would come to the winery sunwarmed and add too much heat to the fermentation. They would be left in boxes to cool overnight, and crushed the next morning. Paul Tourneau gathered some of the full-time men to help, and Monsignor Roig i Verdaguer had come to give a blessing. They stood in a large semicircle under the oak tree shade behind the third floor of the winery. Louis and Angelo held wooden paddles and waited by the crusher, a large bin draped with a wire mesh screen. At the bottom of the bin, two grooved hardwood rollers would turn against each other, rotating at different rates to crush the thick-skinned grapes but leave the bitter pips whole. An opening at the lower end of the bin allowed the juice, along with the pulp and skins—the must—to drain down into the winery itself. Tourneau picked up a box of grapes, and then lifted it easily above his head while the men and women laughed and applauded. “When I am too weak to lift the first box of grapes,” he said, “then Louis will be master here.” “Not for many years,” someone shouted. The monsignor cleared his throat, and Tourneau put down the box. “Where is Sophia?” he asked. “Here I am.” She came into the semicircle dressed in blue and holding a silver platter with a bottle of wine and two glasses, which she placed on a table near the crusher. Tourneau pulled the cork on the bottle and poured two glasses half full. The monsignor lifted one glass up, the crystal globe filled with a dark red wine, dense and heavy. And he smiled while those gathered lowered their heads. “I always begin with a poem,” he said. Back of the wine is the Vintner, And back through the years, his Skill— And back of it all are the Vines in the Sun And the Rain And the Master’s Will. “This is a happy time.” He spoke in a deep and resonant voice. “When the grape begins its journey to become wine. A journey mysterious in some ways, like our life’s journey. But one which ends in a great change, for some < 162 = of these grapes will become the holy wine of sacrament. Like our own lives will end in knowing and loving God. “May God’s blessings be upon this harvest, upon the toilers in the field and the workers in the winery, and upon Paul Tourneau and his family, who through the years use their skill to bring the mysterious liquid, the blood of our Lord, to life again. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.” The gathered people murmured “Amen,” and then they lifted their heads. Paul Tourneau picked up the other glass and touched it to the monsignor’s glass, and they drank. Then he put down the glass and raised the first box of grapes high over his head and crashed the fruit into the crusher. Some of the fruit split and sprayed grape juice sparkling into the air. Louis and Angelo attacked the grapes on the mesh with their wooden paddles, mashing and spreading them against the mesh until the individual berries dropped from the stems and fell into the rollers below. Another man turned a hand crank that moved the rollers, splitting the skins of those grapes that had not been split by being pushed through the sieve. Another box was emptied onto the wire, and then another, crashing down and dropping some fruit directly down into the trough, while Louis and Angelo kept their long-handled tools scraping the grapes free from their stems and breaking most of them into skin and juice and pulp. When the screen grew crowded with stems, Louis called for a halt and shoveled the brown and twisted stems onto a large canvas tarpaulin laid out to the side. They would be plowed back into the vineyard during the winter. Louis kept track in his head while he worked. Forty boxes equaled about a ton, and a ton of grapes would fill a one-hundred-and-seventy-gallon puncheon . Flies buzzed around the mesh and in Louis’s eyes, attracted by the fruit sugar and the sweat that fell from his face, and small, bothersome yellow jackets hovered above the grapes. “You ready for a break?” Johnny, one of the men carting over boxes, offered to take his paddle. Inside the winery building, it was dark and cool and fragrant, as the fresh juice and bluish skins and pulp spilled down from the crusher outside. It all fell from a wooden chute into a basket press, a tall cylinder of wooden slats with a thick disk that could be ratcheted down onto the must as needed. One man stood on a ladder and directed the must around the porcelain-covered base of the press, distributing it evenly with a long wooden stick. Free-run juice, the most delicate and flavorful juice obtained without pressing, was < 163 = already seeping between the slats and pouring out through a spout at the bottom of the press and into a puncheon. Tourneau stood by the spout and dipped a small beaker into the spill now and then and held it to the light. The juice was coming out almost clear, with a faint tinge of salmon color to it. Then the crushed grapes stopped flowing down the chute, and the man on the ladder scraped the last bits of pulp. “Ha,” Tourneau said. “The first day’s crush is over.” The free-run juice was still pouring, but more slowly. “Should I begin pressing?” The man on the ladder had stepped down and was fitting the long oaken handle into the ratchet at the top of the basket press. The handle curved down so that it could be grasped at shoulder level. “Wait for Louis.” Tourneau looked up and saw the upper door let in some slanted sunshine. He blinked, and then saw his son coming down the stairs. Louis joined Tourneau at the base of the basket press and took a sip of the free-run juice in the beaker. He swirled it around in his mouth. Berries, cherries, violets, and a tang that came from the fruit picked before the sugars had peaked, before the acids had fallen. He nodded at his father. “That’s what we want for the sparkling wine.” “Just a light pressing now.” Tourneau smiled at his son. “To make it the color of a partridge’s eye.” Louis joined the other worker at the press handle, and they walked it back and forth. In one direction, it moved the wooden disk down the long central screw. In the other, it clacked back on its ratchet, loudly marking their steps. As the disk pressed down onto the mass of pulp and skin, juice began to flow again out the spout, and it grew harder to work the long handle. After every turn, Louis looked at his father, waiting for the signal to stop. Tourneau held the beaker against a candle, not tasting now. The salmon tinge had deepened slightly. “Almost perfect, now. Give it five more turns.” They clacked the handle back, and put their weight into moving it forward . The fresh grape juice spilled out. They clacked the handle back again. Louis suddenly saw the entire vineyard in motion, all at the same time; pickers on their knees in the fields, cutting clusters into buckets and pouring the buckets into boxes. His grandfather, standing with the reins in his hands while Prince walked serenely up and down the allées and boxes were slapped onto the wagon bed. John and Angelo, emptying box after box onto the wire mesh above the crusher, himself using the paddle to separate the < 164 = berries from their stems, and the juice and must falling in the gravity-flow design down into the basket press. For this moment, changing the living fruit into living wine. “Good!” Tourneau said. He held the beaker up to the light. “Louis. Come taste and see.” Louis jumped down from the basket press. And somewhere, his brother stood apart, exiled, and Louis felt him watching them all with his halfscarred face. The spill from the spout had slowed, and once it stopped the grapes would be pressed into a different puncheon for some other, less-fine wine. Louis took the beaker from his father, saw the candle turn roseate through the glass, and tasted. “It’s good,” Tourneau said. “It’s good.” ...