The Garden of the World

14. Epilogue

< 194 = f o u r t e e n # Epilogue In the fall of 1928, that splendid year on the edge of the Great Depression , Louis never returned to school. Tourneau was laid up in bed with his wounded leg and arm, and Louis had to see the new wine through fermentation , dosed with sulfur, into aging barrels. He trekked between the winery and the house and told his father everything that was going on with the wine, then listened to a long list of orders and instructions. Whenever he came in to see his father, he found him sitting up, with his broad back against the headboard, tense and alert. It was as though Tourneau didn’t exist until Louis was with him, talking about the winery. At times, he held Louis with him, talking about unrelated matters, even after he had just given him an urgent task. He complained about his doctors, how long they had told him to stay in bed, a numbness at the fingertips of his left hand, the graveyard stew and other thin food for sick people that Sophia made for him. Louis answered with short, discouraging sentences, and when his father finally trailed off, he trudged back to the winery. It was Sophia who told Louis that he should not think about returning to school that year. Soon after the robbery, she announced that she was going to have a baby, and she spoke of her pregnancy as though it were a miracle, as though the coming child would repair all damage. She grew lively and animated, nursing her husband. She wore white and spoke excitedly of the times they were living in, and the time to come. Once, when Louis left his father, she drew him into the kitchen. A pot of chicken soup was on the range, and a bed tray was readied with buttered bread and a glass of milk. “We’ll all have to sacrifice,” she said. “All of us. But you’ll see. It will make us magnificent. We will stay up here on this hillside, and live on water and air if we have to.” < 195 = Louis looked at her, his eyes flat and tired. “Doesn’t he want me to go to college anymore?” “Of course he does.” Sophia took her son’s face in her hands and kissed his cheek. “He would never ask this of you.” She kissed his forehead. “Tell him it was your idea. Your idea to skip school this year. Your idea to sacrifice. Tell him.” She put her arms around him and hugged him to her, then she kissed his cheek again. “It will mean more to him if he knows it was your idea,” she said. “It will restore him. He’ll eat the food I bring him. He’ll sleep well, tonight and every night. Tell him. Go back and tell him now, and see how it makes you feel.” She hugged Louis once more and released him, and he walked slowly back to the room where his father lay. He already felt this new child as a burden. @ On that morning when his brother left for the last time, Louis had driven the wagon past the green town square and McCarty’s Cash Store, where a couple of boys with bicycles were waiting to pick up their bundles of the weekly newspaper to deliver. The boys stared from under their broad, short-brimmed caps at the strange wagon clipping briskly by, the shawled woman kneeling in the wagon bed and singing a hymn, the driver wearing just an undershirt, the dull moaning sound. Louis looked back at the two boys, lowered his head and hid his face. He snapped the reins to ask the horses to step up. Dr. Appleton’s office was in a small white house on Lumber Street, formerly a private home, and Louis had to run next door to the doctor’s twostory Victorian to wake him. The doctor took one look at Augusto Corvo and shook his head, and he and Louis walked Tourneau into the examining room, followed by Sophia. They laid him down on a flat, white-sheeted hospital bed, and the doctor began cutting through the clothing to expose the bullet wounds. “Lay out your grandfather in the next room,” Doctor Appleton said. “I’ll have to make out a death certificate for him.” Louis picked up his grandfather from the back of the wagon and carried him in, holding him in his flexed arms before him like a lover would. He < 196 = placed him on a hospital bed in the next room, arranged his hands peacefully over his chest, made sure his eyes were closed. He peeked in to where his father lay and saw his mother hovering near the doctor, speaking in a low, insistent voice. Outside, Louis was passed by a boy on a bicycle, carrying the San Natoma Star rubber-banded into tight rolls in a big canvas bag that hung over his shoulders and had pouches front and back. He walked to the Cash Store, where Bill Finney had just finished handing out the news to all his delivery boys, and told him he had a story for the paper. Finney took a pencil from behind his ear and a pad of paper from his hip pocket. “What’s up?” Louis looked up and down the quiet, empty street. “Can we go to your print shop and talk?” “Sure.” Finney put away the pencil and paper. “Need a ride?” “I’ll take the wagon.” Finney drove at a slow pace and allowed Louis to follow him closely. He pulled up outside the converted barn and they walked together through the print shop to the back office. Finney sat down in one of the comfortable leather chairs and motioned for Louis to sit in the other one, but Louis first threw the dead bolt on the door. “So we don’t get disturbed,” he said. “Okay,” Finney said. Louis paced back and forth, then sat on the very edge of his chair. He breathed deeply. “Mr. Finney, can you tell me how Gilbert’s mother died?” Finney stood up and took a pipe from a pipe stand on his desk. He filled it with tobacco from a large tin and tamped it down. “How much do you know?” he asked. “Nothing,” Louis said. “I know nothing.” “Okay.” Finney sat down and lit his pipe. He told Louis everything he had learned over the years, and the ways he had learned it. He repeated the old gossip about why Tourneau had married Pascale, without love and simply to gain the land, and the rumors of his neglect of her afterward. He discussed the tales he had heard, that he thought came from some of the migrant laborers: that she had appeared to them as an angel both before and after her death, that she had died and then her body had risen, that she had flown in a white glow the night that she died. Some claimed that they had heard her put a curse on the vineyard. It seemed clear that she had died in a tree and was found gazing toward the < 197 = vineyard when it was being cleared during the phylloxera outbreak. He’d heard that from enough people that it didn’t seem made up. It also seemed pretty clear that Paul Tourneau hadn’t stopped work even one day because of her death, and in fact had a big fiesta two days later to celebrate clearing the field of diseased roots. “If Paul thought he was at fault at all in Pascale’s death, he never admitted it. He’s always had a certain ruthlessness, and that let him do what he needed to do for that vineyard. But I think Gill always blamed him. Gill was damaged, long before he was injured in the war. And every time Paul looked at Gill, he saw something from the past he’d just as soon forget. He probably didn’t mind letting him go off to war and away from Beau Pays.” “I remember cake,” Louis said. “And shaking hands with him.” “You tell me,” Finney said, “what Gill might not have forgiven or forgotten , even after so many years.” Louis sat with his head in his hands, looking straight before him. There was a tapping on the door, and Nancy’s voice came through it. “Papa? Is Louis in there? I saw the wagon.” Louis didn’t move at the sound of her voice. She rattled the door. “Papa, I can smell your pipe. What’s wrong?” Finney looked a question at Louis, but he didn’t move. The door stopped rattling. A few seconds later, there was a tapping at the side window. “Louis.” Nancy’s face appeared between her cupped hands, pressed at the window. “What happened? What’s wrong?” “What’s wrong, Louis?” Finney asked. Louis looked up. The tapping at the window continued. @ Later that day, Miguel and Ana were seated in the cab of the Hudson , driving southeast. In the back of the truck, they had piled high the mattresses, and pillows, and sheets, and canvas bags of clothes that they had lived with for the past four months. Francisco and Rosarita lay back against the mattresses, watching the blue sky unfurl behind them as the truck tires whined down the road, and Javier stood up in the truck bed, holding one of the stakes to support himself. They had seen the signs of the robbery when they and the other pickers had broken camp—the open door of the winery, the truck shot up, the stone silence of the house—but it gave them no reason to wait. They had been paid for their labor, and there were no more paydays coming from Beau Pays. All the families and young single men were packing and making ready to chase < 198 = the next harvest, the next payday, in apples or walnuts or almonds. And there were some grapes still to be picked, it was said, farther north in Napa and Sonoma. The Hudson headed in the opposite direction, away from the unfinished harvests. Ana had finally convinced Miguel that this year, the children should not start school a month and a half late and then never catch up. They should have a chance, in high school, to see if they could finish, maybe learn to type, maybe really be able to work in an office. And Miguel gave in. He would hacerle la lucha while they went to school, look for work laying pipe, or in the brickyards or paper mills. If nothing else, he could probably catch on in the sanatorium. He stated with bitter certainty that the children would grow up to think they were better than their parents, but Ana told him no, that they would think him the best of fathers. They drove through San Jose, stopping once for gas at Pirelli’s Associated Gas Station, and then continued south toward Coyote, and Morgan Hill, and Gilroy. They passed through cherry and pear and prunes, orchards that they or their friends had worked in over the years, now looking ragged and ready for pruning. “How much money did we make?” Miguel asked. “I haven’t counted,” Ana said. “A lot, if you can keep the truck from breaking down.” “I’ll keep the truck from breaking down,” Miguel said. He smiled as he kept his hands on the wheel. “Are we going to come again next year, to New Chicago?” Ana asked. “Do you have a better idea?” “No,” Ana said. “I just hope something will change someday.” South of Gilroy, in the shadow of a locust tree, they saw a small man stand up and put his thumb out. “Stop for him,” she said. “Stop for that one.” “That bolillo?” “He looks sad,” Ana said. “Forlorn.” “Everyone is forlorn.” “If we don’t pick him up, who will?” Without reply, Miguel downshifted the Hudson, stopped to carry one more with them on the road home. < 199 = @ In the spring of 1929, Tourneau was forced to graft over half the vineyard to pagadebito grapes, the debt-payers, Alicante Bouschet and Mataro. They both yielded four times as much per acre as Pinot, and home winemakers liked them for the color and abundance of their juice. With Hoover’s election, Prohibition was likely to continue another four years. Tourneau couldn’t sell enough fine still wines to the Church to pay the mortgages, and much of the champagne that he could have sold as medicinal had been stolen. Although he had always sworn not to graft over his vines, the bank refused to roll over his debt unless he increased his yield. Albert Jackson, of the Bank of Italy, had lines of credit out to many grape growers in the Valley, and he knew what others were doing to stay in business . Tourneau had no choice, and hoped only that grape prices would rebound just as the grafts began to bear. Tourneau could do little of the work himself. He needed a cane to walk, and his left hand was not strong. But every morning around ten, he walked carefully down to see the grafting continue, to watch his son carry on the work, carry out his vision. Louis grew used to his father’s daily visits. He watched him struggle over the turned, uneven dirt of the allées, hopping and cursing and planting his cane as he advanced. At first Louis had run to assist him, but his father had shaken him off and told him to get back to work. Louis chewed Copenhagen while grafting. He liked to hold the new scion, a tapered cutting with two buds, in his mouth while making the cuts, and the chewing tobacco kept his mouth moist. He studied the vine before him, planted in the year his father’s first wife died, and chose a section of smooth, straight grain. He sawed at the top of the straight section, toppling off the six living spurs, and then with a splitting tool and a hammer, split the trunk straight across the pith to a depth of a little over an inch. He used the wedge on the edge of the splitting tool to keep the cut open, and inserted the scion at one edge of the trunk. He needed the cambium of the scion, the thin living layer of wood just under the bark, to be in contact with the cambium of the trunk. He cut another scion, placed it in his mouth, and inserted it at the other edge of the cut. Then he withdrew the wedge and tied raffia around the top of the trunk. Whichever of the two scions proved more vigorous would be trained up, and the other cut off. When he looked up, Tourneau was standing crookedly over him, leaning on his cane. < 200 = “Every time we cut off a vine, it’s like we’re cutting off one of my own limbs,” Tourneau said. Louis nodded, scooted down to the next vine, and studied it for a place to cut. The straighter the grain, the easier it was to fit in the scion. “Pagadebito,” Tourneau continued, “pagadebito. But whose debts are we paying? Think, every cut you make, Gilbert’s hand is behind it.” Louis placed the curving saw blade where he had chosen and began to work it back and forth. At the end of the day, Louis went up to the edge of the redwoods, above the cleared land, as he had done when he was young and Gill was missing. In San Natoma, the prune orchards were blossoming. The town would be holding its annual Blossom Festival that weekend, with fireworks, dances, concerts, to celebrate the return of springtime, the promise of harvest held in the cup of each flower. In the past, Louis had enjoyed this time of year, the seemingly eternal sense of freshness and renewal in the stainless white crowns of flowers that were everywhere in the valley. He had enjoyed the prayers and songs giving thanks, to God, for living in a blessed place. Now, he wondered how many of those orchards concealed old and bitter debts beneath the entirely human dreams that had given shape to them. He looked up at the somber redwoods that had never answered his questions . Looked down at the thousands of acres of fruit trees, whitened with blossoms above the sketchy black trunks, that unfolded across the valley floor like the pages of a book. “They’re not my debts,” he said. “They’re not my debts.” In the valley below, the town prepared a celebration. ...