The Brotherhood of the Grape

by John Fante

  Mrs. Ramponi was loquacious, eager to talk, a workhorse who loved to chatter about her tasks, for she did everything around there: registering guests, carrying luggage, cleaning the rooms, doing the laundry, keeping the books, managing the whole setup. She said Sam never lifted a finger to help her.

  “Why not?”

  “He works in Reno.”

  “Reno?”

  “He deals blackjack at the Blue Nugget.”

  I savored the excellent steak and thought of last night’s poker game at that very table—Sam Ramponi, a cold sober, professional card dealer matching his skill against three old friends drunk out of their skulls. Sam must have wiped them out of what their wallets held, which wasn’t very much.

  Mrs. Ramponi watched me put away the last of the steak. “There’s more,” she coaxed, lifting a sizzling piece from the griddle and ladling it to my plate.

  “You’re a hell of a cook, Mrs. Ramponi.”

  She tossed her head in a pixie way.

  “I’m a hell of anything I choose to be,” she laughed. “You may think I’m just a maid around here, Sam Ramponi’s old woman, but believe me, I’m not!”

  Her eyes zoomed in on me steadily, searchingly, and I felt the gentle strum of my libido. It startled me. Was this sweet, blue-eyed old lady making a pass? Impossible. Women never made passes at me anymore, not even my wife. Of late, the only action coming my way was from some reveries on paper, hot off my typewriter.

  I evaded her scrutiny and kept busy cutting my steak.

  “Tell me, Mrs. Ramponi, why the smokehouse?”

  “Why, to smoke meat, of course. Venison.”

  “Sam hunts deer?”

  “I do the hunting in this family,” she said proudly.

  She was so small, so prim and genteel, I found it hard to believe. “You don’t look the type.”

  “What type?”

  “The hunter type, stalking deer.”

  “I don’t stalk them. I shoot them from my back porch. Just sprinkle a little grain over the snow and they follow it to the door. Then I let ’em have it.” She gave her elbow a jerk, as if firing a rifle.

  “That’s entrapment. It’s against the law.”

  “Not if they trample your crops.”

  I had to smile. “What crops, Mrs. Ramponi?”

  She folded her arms.

  “I grow lots of things up here. Besides, I don’t hear you complaining about the steaks you wolfed down. That was entrapment too. Got him from ten feet. Right between the eyes.”

  I controlled myself. I couldn’t say anything. My plate was empty. The meat was inside of me. Where had that angelic old lady come by her killer instinct? Maybe she was killing Sam Ramponi vicariously.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said, rising. “You’re simply not the kind of a person who’d shoot down a hungry deer. It’s not your nature. I know! You’re much too fine a human being.”

  She frowned, mulling it over as I turned and walked out. She hurried after me. “Be quick about that smokehouse!” she demanded. “I’ll be needing it any day now, quick as it snows.”

  I found old Nick seated on a rock, sharpening wooden stakes with a hatchet. “Hey,” I said. “How’d you do in that poker game?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I have a particular reason for wanting to know.”

  “You win some, you lose some.” He nodded toward the pile of sand. “Screen some sand.”

  “You know Sam Ramponi is a pro, that he runs a game in Reno?”

  “So what else is new?”

  “He took you guys, didn’t he?”

  “He got eight dollars offa me.”

  “How about Lou and Zarlingo?”

  He pointed. “See that shovel? Use it.”

  The sun jumped out from behind the mist; the clouds scattered, driven off, and the warmth poured down. We were in an enchanting spot, an island in the forest, the land cleared to the border of giant trees. No wonder there were deer. A little stream bisected the property, giggling over stones in the shallow water. The Ramponi cabin was only fifty yards away, the kitchen window overlooking a view of the clearing. And there I was, screening sand to make the mortar to hold the stones in the walls that formed the slaughterhouse to smoke the deer that Mrs. Ramponi shot by luring them to her window. I screened sand and thought, oh, shit, what am I doing here?

  The old man began to move around, going from corner to corner of the slab, driving stakes and securing a plumb line to them. It was a simple operation, but it left him puffing, and he returned to the stone and sat down. He took off his battered brown hat and sweat seeped out of his hair.

  “Go get the jug,” he said.

  I looked at my left palm and saw my first blister.

  “It’s too early in the day,” I said.

  It stung him and he put his thumb in his mouth and snapped it toward me, a scurrilous Italian gesture the meaning of which I never found out, though he had done it three or four times a day throughout his life. My guess was that it meant: up your ass. Then he clumped off sullenly toward the cabins.

  I stood sucking my blister and examining the pile of stones. They were chunks of rough-hewn granite, gray and misshapen. I bent down to heft one of the smaller stones. Not that it was heavy, it was preposterously, unbelievably heavy, at least a hundred pounds, and no bigger than a basketball. The others were like it or heavier. I could help him lift the smaller stones to the wall, but it was going to be a killer job for a man of seventy-six with soft hands and soft muscles who had done no physical labor in five years. He could sprain his back, or pop a hernia, or break a blood vessel. I had observed the flaming veins of his eyes. The wine had been thorough and the damage had been done. It was madness to challenge the danger, but my old man was mad, the burden of his uselessness was madness, and the sense of his entire life coming to an end in a struggle with stones was the maddest part of it all.

  Why was he doing this job? A smokehouse for the curing of deer meat! Chances were that twenty years ago he would have turned the job down as too remote from his home, too insignificant for his pride.

  He could of course go another route in his final days, getting smashed daily at the Café Roma. Or slouched in the parlor watching television, enduring the cackle of his wife hovering over him with plates of pasta as she speculated on the joys and sorrows of widowhood. Or he could sit on the front porch overlooking Pleasant Street, watching the exciting spectacle of an occasional dog or human being passing by. Or cultivate tomatoes and green peppers in the backyard. Not Nick Molise. He wanted a wall to build—that was it. He didn’t care what wall it was, but let it be a wall that brought respect from his friends who knew he was abroad in the world, a workingman, a builder.

  He returned from the cabin swinging the jug and looking better, looking pleased. He offered me a drink and I took a mouthful.

  “Keep it cool in the creek,” he said, and I lowered the jug into the chill water and let it sink to the shallow bottom.

  We mixed the mortar and I carried a bucketful to the mortarboard at the corner of the slab. He stirred it with his trowel, sloshed and slurped it around to get it to the right consistency. Then he pointed to one of the smaller stones.

  “That one.”

  I hefted it to the slab. He troweled a bed of mortar and took the stone from my grasp, his hands about it. That was the moment of truth. His face purpled and his eyes wanted to explode as he let go the stone and dropped to his knees. He tried again. This time he was able to imbed the stone into the mortar, but he was cursing in Italian, cursing the stone, the world, himself. I watched and he did not like it, and he cursed me too.

  Trying to soothe him, I said, “Don’t worry, you’re a little out of shape, that’s all.”

  “Shut up.” He pointed with the trowel. “That one.”

  It was another hundred-pounder. I gathered it up.

  “Tell you what, Papa. You spread the mortar and I’ll lay the stone.”

  “Shut up.”

&nb
sp; He unfurled the mortar and took the stone from my arms, fighting it bitterly, overwhelmed by it, even though he got it properly positioned.

  After two hours we had used up the small stones and he tried to stand erect, but his lower back was unhinged and he could not make it. Bent like an ape, he shambled to the creek bank and lifted out the jug. He eased himself to his belly on the ground and pulled at the cold wine. His face sagged mournfully, his eyes sunk in disappointment. The forest looked down and comprehended his plight. The trees sighed. Birds gossiped in alarm. The sky stared in compassionate blue. My father, my poor old man! He was beaten and he knew it, but he would not admit it. He had built his share of things with stone, churches and schools and at least one library, but now he was having a hell of a time putting up a ten-foot smokehouse with no windows and only one door.

  Let defeat sink in, I thought, let him face the fact that it is beyond his strength and his years, let him throw in the trowel so that he can get the hell off this mountain and go home. God bless the deer!

  Flopping down beside him, I took the jug. That wine! It renewed my mouth, my flesh, my skin, my heart and soul, and I thanked God for Angelo Musso’s hills. We sprawled in silence, listening to the birds, passing the jug.

  I asked what he had in mind.

  “We have to bust the rocks, make little ones out of big ones.”

  Mrs. Ramponi appeared, carrying sandwiches and a bowl of fresh strawberries on a tray.

  “Lunchtime,” she said.

  My father ripped a bite from his sandwich without so much as a glance at it. “Good,” he said, putting it aside and going for the jug again.

  I opened my sandwich suspiciously. It was ham and mayonnaise. Mrs. Ramponi watched in annoyance. “What’d you think it was, deer meat?”

  No matter what it was, I could not eat it.

  She turned to my father. “Nick, you look tired. Why don’t you go back to the cabin and sleep a while? No use killing yourself on the first day.”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  She turned and walked back to the motel. I pulled off my shoes and dipped my feet into the creek. There was only one way to sabotage the Ramponi smokehouse and that was not to build it. I looked at my father. He was asleep, with a sandwich dangling from his fingers. I shook him.

  “Go take a nap for a while.”

  He rose painfully and walked on unsure legs toward the motel. I sat with my feet in the creek, eating the strawberries. Then I dozed off, and when I wakened the old man had not returned. I put on my shoes and socks and started for our cabin. He wasn’t there. But I spotted him through the kitchen window. He was coming stealthily from the back door of Cabin 6. Mrs. Ramponi followed. He moved toward the smokehouse and she went off toward the motel office. I waited for the old man to move out of sight in the trees and then I ran to the office. I didn’t know what had happened between them in Cabin 6, probably nothing, but she was not good for my father and I hated her anyway. I rang the bell in the office and she appeared from the kitchen.

  “Leave my father alone,” I said.

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  I was unreasonable but I didn’t care. “Just keep your hands off my father.”

  Her mouth curled in scorn.

  “If you were half the man your father is, you wouldn’t dare talk to me like that. Get out, you creep.”

  I backed out, ashamed, sick at myself, wondering what the hell was happening to me. I blamed the altitude, 7,000 feet of it. Bizarre creatures were seen in these uncanny forests, gnomes, the ghosts of old prospectors, lost survivors of the Donner party, even the tracks of Big Foot. It was getting to me.

  Back at the smokehouse my father seemed invigorated, and the kink in his back was gone as he selected a long-handled sledgehammer and positioned himself before a craggy chunk of granite four feet square. He was about to make little ones out of big ones. I stood aside and watched him swing the sledge powerfully, half a dozen blows until the stone began to break, not in clean sheaths, but twisted, jagged chunks and splinters.

  “Fine,” he pronounced, breathing hard, “just fine. Bring them to the wall.”

  I hauled them and he laid them, the big ones and the little ones, the chunks and the splinters. I crushed the rock and he did the wall. We did fine. When tired, he called for wine. He could not straighten up, so he stood like an ape as he drank. When he began to sweat the blotches on his back and under his arms were rose-colored. I thought, what the hell, it’s nutritious, it’s grape sugar, energy, and drank with him every time. We were doing fine, fine. We were tired and dazed, and I thought I saw a gnome with a red hat in the forest as the sun went over the trees and the smokehouse wall sprouted toward the sky.

  We stopped work as darkness fell. We could have worked by moonlight, but that would have been the edge of madness. Sam Ramponi might drive home from Reno and laugh at us. Motel guests would wonder what was going on. We called it a day. We had drunk two gallons. We had pissed three or four. We were spinning. We were spooked. Old Nick laughed to himself. He fell on his face as we went for our supper. I laughed and pulled him to his feet. Ramponi wasn’t home. Mrs. Ramponi filled our plates. Maybe it was deer meat. What did I care?

  My father fell asleep at the table. I dragged him to the cabin and heaped him into bed. I slept. Suddenly it was morning. No need to dress; I had slept in my clothes. My mouth was full of Mrs. Ramponi’s old tennis shoes and dog hair. I cleansed it with a gargle of wine and we went back to work.

  We hurried now. We had to get out of there. I busted the big stones and the old man popped them into the wall. We were at sea, on a raft, hurrying, setting a record. Have a drink, son. It was a race. Have a drink, Papa. No starting line, no finish. But fast. He tossed aside the plumb line. He stopped using the mason’s level. He worked by instinct. Sometimes he lowered his head down to the line of the wall and squinted, keeping it plumb. The wall went up and the wine went down. Once I looked up at the sky and asked, “What time is it?” He answered, “There ain’t no time,” and I laughed. God, he was profound. When the wine was gone Ramponi brought more from Reno. Just in time. In the last moment of the last drop from the last jug. Good wine, from Angelo Musso.

  19

  THEN A peculiar thing happened. My father died. We were working away, swirling in mortar and stone, and all of a sudden I sensed that he had left the world. I sought his face and it was written there. His eyes were open, his hands moved, he splashed mortar, but he was dead, and in death he had nothing to say. Sometimes he drifted off like a specter into the trees to take a piss. How could he be dead, I wondered, and still walk off and pee? A ghost he was, a goner, a stiff. I wanted to ask him if he was well, if by chance he was still alive, but I was too tired and too busy dying myself, and too tired of making phrases. I could see the question on paper, typewritten, with quotation marks, but it was too heavy to verbalize. Besides, what difference did it make? We all had to die someday.

  On the fourth day, between large draughts of Angelo Musso, we built the scaffold and had two feet to go. Nick, who was dead, could feel no pain as he strung out the stone. He was not neat anymore, not the fussy, fastidious stonemason of the past, and the wall was splattered and the mortar oozed and made big pies at the base. There below, still alive, I broke slabs and packed them on my shoulder and lifted them to the scaffold, and then one day, I know not which day, I died too.

  I must have died bravely and quietly, for I did not remember lamentation and tears. First there was this splintering pain in my lumbar region from swinging the sledge and then it was gone, it seemed to drift off into the forest, as did the other pains—my aching feet, my blistered palms, the throb in my kidneys—one by one they all vanished, and I felt the cessation of the nervous system. When I die again, I thought, and undoubtedly for the last time, I must remember to face it as I did that day in the mountains, succumbing to death as if she were my beloved, smiling as I took her into my arms.

  The other deceased person, my friend, my
old man, greeted me across the threshold of life with eyes vacant as windowpanes as I hoisted him a massive stone and he wrestled it into a nest of mortar.

  Then an ironic thing occurred. Turning from the scaffold, I stepped upon the sharp edge of a hoe and it sprang at me with its handle, a brutal clout between the eyes. I felt no pain at all. The blow knocked me down, but I was beyond pain.

  We did not see much of Sam Ramponi except in the morning as he drove off to Reno, sometimes waving, sometimes not. Toward evening on the fifth day he strolled up without a sound and stood close to the construction, his arms folded, staring at my father on the scaffold. No greeting, no sign of recognition from either man. My father returned Ramponi’s concerned frown with mournful but defiant eyes. Ramponi could not have known of our demise, but he sensed a change in us, an immateriality, spectral and disembodied. He waved me an uneasy glance and hurried away toward the motel, turning once to look over his shoulder at us, like someone repelled.

  Mrs. Ramponi was puzzled and disturbed too. Whereas at first she brought our lunches to the job, she now placed the tray on a tree stump fifty feet from where we worked, and then scurried back to the motel. At breakfast she shrank from serving us, showing a fearsome respect. We usually left by the kitchen door, which she promptly bolted shut as we walked out.

  Sunday afternoon, six days from the start, my father laid the final stone and the smokehouse was finished. We were bearded and gray, we were drunk and we stank, for we had worked and slept in the same clothes.

  Kneeling beside the creek, we pulled on the jug and gazed with sunken eyes at what we had wrought—a chunky little structure that resembled an Arab bunker in the Sinai. It was crude and it was crooked. The stones appeared to have been thrown into the wall rather than set. The walls waved crazily, convex and concave, bellied in and bellied out, and they were very thick, much thicker than Papa had agreed upon. Mortar oozed from the joints, soiling the walls. Whatever its aesthetic flaws, the building looked indestructible. All that remained for completion were the roof and the placement of the single door, tasks for a carpenter. Molise and son were finished.