by Bill Barich
“I’m Arthur Atwater,” he said politely. His breath came in clouds. “I got your message.”
Anna gripped the hand that he offered. His fingers were icy and blistered, scored with nicks and abrasions. “Won’t you come in?”
Atwater didn’t budge. He appeared to be wrestling with a knotty problem, studying it from every angle before he made a move. “One of my dogs is with me,” he said, finally. “Can I bring her in, too? She’d keep to the foyer.”
“Of course. This house has seen generations of pets.”
He whistled and yelled, “Here, Rosie,” and a golden retriever bounded to his side. Anna knelt to stroke her luxuriant fur. “Isn’t she a pretty girl?”
“Yes, she is,” Atwater agreed.
She gave him a sarcastic look. “Rosie’s lucky to be alive, I understand.”
“It takes a cruel man to shoot a dog,” Atwater told her, glancing away.
“Have you ever tried?”
He ignored her. “Could you show me to the furnace, please?”
They descended into the basement behind the beam of a flashlight that Anna held. A wooden rack against one wall was stocked with bottles of wine that the Torellis had been given by their neighbors. Each bottle was neatly labeled by hand—Pepper Harris Merlot 1994, Fred Vescio Zinfandel 1990, Charlie Grimes Premium White. A robust odor bubbled up from a dilapidated grape press and some ancient oak barrels stained with the lees of vintages past. The furnace, a forced-air model, was a relic from the 1940s. Atwater removed a panel at the base of it and jiggled a thermal coil. “I smell gas,” he said, squatting down. “Did you check the pilot light?”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
Anna braced herself for a clever retort, but he paid her no mind and stretched out on the concrete floor, stomach down, to conduct a search. The task could not be called complicated, but Atwater addressed it with the intensity of an astrophysicist confronted by a perplexing equation. She admired the look of him in jeans and had a fleeting recollection of the many high school boys in Levi’s who had pursued her in her prime, boys she had disdained because they were already rooted in the valley and could never take her anywhere. More missed opportunities, experiences swept away by the wind.
“Here it is,” he said. Atwater sounded pleased with himself. “Have you got a match?”
She fetched him a box of kitchen matches. He flicked one against a thumbnail, and there was a little explosion of sulfur. He stuck an arm into the furnace, touched the match to a gas jet, and drew back quickly when it erupted in a burst of blue flame. Whisking the dirt from his shirt, he raced up the stairs ahead of her and adjusted the thermostat. Anna heard a muffled pop of ignition, and soon warm air was pouring through the floor vents. She stood over one with her head thrown back like a sunbather. “That feels so good,” she said, hugging herself. “Thank you, Mr. Atwater.”
“You should be okay now.” He was making ready to go. “I’ll have Antonio bring in a load of firewood later.”
“Can I offer you a cup of coffee?” His company was a welcome distraction.
“I prefer tea.”
“Tea it is, then. I won’t be keeping you from your work?”
“They’ll get along fine without me,” he said. “Antonio can prune circles around me, if you want to know the truth. Nobody listens to a vine better than he does.”
“You don’t really believe that mumbo jumbo, do you?” Anna asked him. An old valley superstition had it that the grapevines talked to attentive and solicitous pruners and gave them helpful suggestions.
Atwater regarded her soberly, as if under oath. “Yes, I do.”
Rummaging through the ravaged cupboards, she saw that her stash of tea was limited. The mice had demolished the Earl Grey and the Irish Breakfast, so Atwater was consigned to a bag of Morning Thunder. Anna sat across from him at the table and inspected him more closely. He was about forty, she guessed, and more than a little battle-scarred, his face creased heavily from working outdoors. His graying hair was misleading, though. Every other aspect of him seemed youthful and vigorous. She thought that he might be the most tightly wound man she had ever met.
“How long have you been living out here now?” she asked, aware that a silence was gathering around him once more.
“Since November.”
“It must be satisfying work. Growing grapes, I mean. The physical side of it, anyway.”
“It can be. But I expect you already know that.”
She shook her head. “They didn’t let girls into the vineyard on this farm. Not when I was a kid. My father practically stood guard. He could be a tyrant about it.”
“Victor’s been real good to me,” Atwater said stoutly, his voice rising. “I won’t let him down again.”
His passionate declaration startled Anna. “He didn’t tell me exactly what happened between you two. Why don’t you fill me in?”
“I’d rather not.”
“Come on, don’t be shy,” she insisted, smiling at him over the rim of her cup to encourage him. “I can keep a secret.”
Atwater sighed and waved a hand distractedly. “Well, I got some bad news in the mail, and I went a little crazy.”
“That isn’t much of a story.”
“I’m not trying to sell it to the movies, am I?”
“No, really, Mr. Atwater.” She saw something dark and difficult in him then, a side of himself he didn’t want to reveal, and it intrigued her all the more. “I deserve to be told. Honestly, I do.”
He stared at her hard, his eyes bright with mockery. “All right,” he said evenly, knitting together his blistered fingers as he leaned toward her, as if in challenge. “The story is that when I got the bad news, I ran away. I stopped at every bar I could find and bought some cocaine and did so many other stupid things I can’t even remember them all. Nobody was taking care of the vineyard while I was gone, either. Most growers would have canned my ass, but your father didn’t. He saved my dogs and gave me another chance when I came back. It’s my third. That’s two more than anybody ought to have. Third chances, they don’t grow on trees, do they?”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah.” Atwater permitted himself a toothy grin. “Victor said he couldn’t see the point in punishing somebody who was already doing such a good job of it on his own.”
Anna decided that he wasn’t trying to be funny. She was not at all sure that he had it in him to be funny. “I know something about running away,” she told him, drawing her legs up under her. “I ran away from here as soon as I could. I married the very first man who asked me.”
He seemed uncomfortable with her confession, even moved by it. “That’s awfully sad,” he said, brooding over his tea.
“I suppose it is. There are sadder things, though. And we get over them, don’t we?”
“Some do and some don’t.” He whisked more dirt from his shirt. “But maybe it’s for the best. Maybe you’re back for good now.”
“I don’t think so,” Anna said. “I’m just here for my mother’s sake. I am ready for a change, though. I’d like to explore San Francisco on this trip.”
“Cities make me squirrely.” Atwater looked at the floor. “Too many people.”
“You know what’s been bothering me this morning?” Anna went on, ignoring his comment. “I can’t identify a single tree or plant on this farm. It was just a beautiful blur to me when I was growing up.” She watched some chattery little birds flutter around a shrub outside. “Can you tell the birds apart, Mr. Atwater?”
“Arthur,” he corrected her firmly. “Yes, I can. Those are vireos.”
“I should learn something about wine grapes while I’m here.” She had never before given much thought to the fact that the farm would belong to her and Roger someday. “If I have any questions, could I ask you about them?”
“Yes, you could.” Atwater pushed aside his empty cup and rose abruptly from the table. “But I should be going now. This is a small valley, and people talk.”
“What do they talk about?” Anna asked coyly, entertained by his stiff and armored stance.
“They talk about how much time a man spends with a woman when she’s home alone.” Without another word, he went striding into the foyer, where Rosie was napping under a bench, and bent to whisper in her ear. Rosie stuck out her front paws, arched her back, and yawned, and together they walked off into the vineyard.
Noon came with a shower of sun that burned off the last traces of frost. The light fell on a rickety barn where Charlie Grimes had painted his folksy mural of Dumbo and Goofy stomping on purple grapes as big as cannonballs, on the field hands hanging around outside Roy’s Market, the only general store in vineyard country proper, and on the imposing hillside estate that the Poplingers, a wealthy Bay Area couple, had lately constructed for their weekend retreat. Anna passed all those landmarks on her drive to town in the Taurus and passed, too, her father’s truck parked by the Bullshot Saloon just off the square. She pictured him inside with the cigar smoke curling around his head and the ache in his heart ever expanding, and she felt tired now, tired and apprehensive. Her long night was catching up with her, and she hoped that she could summon the energy and strength to deal with what lay ahead.
How could it be that croissants, pâté, coffee beans from Madagascar, and lingerie from Victoria’s Secret were now available in the shops of Carson Valley? Anna could hardly keep up with the pace of change. She stopped at Safeway for some groceries to take back to the farm and at the post office for some stamps before continuing on to Quail Court, a typical subdivision of starter homes. The house where her mother lay waiting was a dull brown box nearly identical to the houses next to it in a horseshoe cul-de-sac. How miserable it must be for a sick old woman to live out her days in a neighborhood so devoted to expectancy, Anna thought. She was angry with her father for not renting something better. He must have been pretending that the arrangement was temporary, but wasn’t everything on earth, every human pact, temporary in the end?
Claire Torelli was in a bedroom at the back of the house, all alone, a blanket pulled up to her chin and her withered arms draped over it. She had lost at least fifty pounds during her first round of chemotherapy, and her face had a skeletal look. She appeared to be dozing, yet her eyes were half-open and seemed to have grown larger, more fluid and expressive. Her hair, pure white and so thin that her scalp showed through it in reddish patches, boiled up around her head in unruly strands and created an otherworldly impression. She could have been floating among the galaxies, on her way to a destination far beyond her daughter’s reach.
From the depths of her being, Anna felt the tears well up. She fought against them, but they came anyway, along with another surge of anger toward her father for preparing her so poorly. She had depended on him to keep her informed about her mother’s condition, but he had let her down. He had hidden the ugly details from her. There would be no remission and no cure—Anna knew it in an instant. As gently as she could, she lowered herself to a bedside chair and reached for the bony fingers on the blanket, imagining herself as a kind of ballast that would keep her poor mother from vanishing into the clouds. So soon, she thought. Too soon.
“Anna?” Claire asked hoarsely. “Is that you, dear?”
She bent to kiss a sunken cheek and felt the skin like parchment on her lips. “Yes, it is.”
“I must look horrible to you. It’s a shock, isn’t it? The way I look?”
“You look fine, Mother.”
Claire offered a weak smile. “You were never much of a liar, Anna. Oh, I feel so guilty about dragging you to California!”
“I want to be here. It was my choice.”
“Well, then.” Her mother faltered for a second, then plunged on. “It’s a relief to me, really. Your father gets so depressed. He can’t stand to see me in pain.”
“Does he leave you alone very often?”
“Hardly ever. But he has to get out of the house to clear his head. Have you got everything you need at the farm?”
“Everything. It’s perfect.”
“With Victor on the job? I rather doubt it, dear.”
There was a TV on top of a bureau, tuned to a talk show with the volume down low. Anna stared dumbly at the screen while she collected herself. The worst of it was over for her now, but she understood that something in her had been altered forever. A sense of the broadness of existence, a certain quickening in the presence of possibility, a promise of deliverance in the air—all were gone in a few brief seconds. Overwhelmed, she masked her distress by acting cheerful and upbeat, chatting with her mother about her work, her life, and even her brief errands in town, as though such things could truly be counted as adventures.
“You’ll never guess who I bumped into at Safeway,” she said, nervously babbling. “Betty Chambers from my high school class. We’re going to have lunch next week. Do you remember her?”
“I believe I do. Wasn’t she a cheerleader?”
“Yes, she was. But then she married an accountant, and now she’s an ex-cheerleader with five kids.”
“Goodness! Some women don’t know when to quit,” Claire said. “How about you, Anna? What happened to that nice man you were seeing in New York?”
“He stayed nice, Mother. Plus he started talking about marriage.”
“Couldn’t you just live with him for a while and try him out?”
Anna blinked. Could this be the same woman who had once scolded her for kissing a boy good night? “That would be living in sin, I believe.”
“Sin doesn’t seem to matter very much anymore, dear.” Claire fluffed the pillows behind her head. “Did your father tell you that Roger has a new girlfriend? He’s very happy with her.”
“Roger is always happy, Mother. Roger was born happy.”
“Don’t be unkind, Anna.”
“Is he still working at the same restaurant?”
Claire nodded with effort. “He makes the soup,” she said, laughing, and the laugh became a racking cough. “It’s a mystery to me how my children turned out the way they did.”
When the news came on at five, Anna left her mother and dragged herself into the kitchen to fix a simple supper. She found some spaghetti, a jar of marinara sauce, and enough lettuce for a salad. While she was filling a big pot with water to cook the pasta, Victor Torelli rolled into the house, his wanderings apparently completed for the day. He greeted her with a grunt and a wheeze of whiskey and tossed a video on the table, the John Ford version of Stagecoach, but he didn’t speak for a minute or two. Anna could feel him watching her. She swore that she could feel him thinking.
“How’s your mother?” the old man asked at last.
“She’s taking a nap.”
He asked next, “What’s for supper?”
“Spaghetti.”
“Excellent.” He stood up clumsily and brought down a cribbage board and a deck of cards from a shelf. “How about a game, Anna? Nickel a point, same as ever.”
“I’m in the middle of making dinner here, Dad.” She was exasperated with him. He was always the intruder, always invading her space.
“Just one little game while the water boils.”
Anna lacked the will to argue and sank into a chair. Her father cackled wickedly at her, shuffled the deck, and dealt out the cards. He had taught her to play cribbage on a camping trip to the Sierra Nevada when she was about ten, and she still had a vivid memory of those craggy mountain peaks, the resinous pine trees, and the perfect disc of a moon mirrored on a stream. They had hung their Coleman lantern on the limb of a tree and used a boulder for their table, and though she had trouble mastering the game, he never let up on her or gave her a break. If she failed to count all her points, he claimed the ones that she had missed and pegged them on his side of the board. He would do that even now, she knew. She thought that she must love him and hate him in equal measure.
“Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and a pair is six,” he said, as he moved his peg. “You shouldn’t have
tossed me that ace, lady.”
“Don’t be so cocky.”
“Did those pruners get started early this morning?” the old man asked her.
“They were already working when I got up. The furnace broke down, by the way.” Anna gave him a chance to reply, but he remained silent, refusing the bait. “Your vineyard manager fixed it for me. He’s a strange character, isn’t he?”
“He comes by it honest enough.” Torelli peeked at his cards. “His grandfather used to run some sheep in the valley. Old Tom Atwater, he had a face like a goddam beagle.”
“How charming.”
“He still got all the girls.”
They were rounding the corner toward home, and Anna saw how her father’s fingers trembled with excitement as he reached for his peg. The trembling was hard for her to watch, another sign of his advancing age and all the terrors that accompanied it—yet she also felt her own blood beating faster. She wanted to win as badly as he did, in fact, and when he counted too quickly in his eagerness and missed a run of spades on his next turn, she was overjoyed to finally possess the edge she had always craved. She was ready to pounce on him and take the points for her own, even to gloat over his error and exact her pound of flesh—but something stopped her at the last instant, and she let him go on and peg out. It was a moment of triumph for her, really, although she didn’t know it at the time, a moment she would reflect back on years later and see as a bridge that she had unwittingly crossed to begin the other half of her life.
3
Pruning continued at the Torelli farm, on into February. Days drifted into days that were the same yet always different, defined by subtle judgments, each man deeply attentive as he adapted his individual rhythm to the rhythm of the crew. This was a good time of year in Carson Valley, steady with work. The pruners lived in the work as they might have in a piece of music, adjusting to its tonal variations, its arpeggios and minor chords. The big winter storms washed them out some mornings, and they would all pile into a car, turn on the heater, and listen to the radio while they waited for the rain to let up, but there were other mornings when the sun at dawn was fiery on the horizon and the air was crisp and clear. The men were immensely grateful then because they knew that by noon they would be stripped to their shirtsleeves and basking in weather as mild and warm as almost any in Mexico.
