Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  While he was awaiting M. Murat, Thomas went outside and stood in the sun. It was midafternoon, but the light was still white and strong and the buildings seemed to shimmer as the sun’s rays caught the facets of marble rubble in the walls; he heard the church bell—so much a part of this landscape that it was almost hard to believe it was a contrivance of man—chiming the hour in the distance. He caught the vague scent of ripe fruit and heard the buzzing of wasps. On the top of the rise, just below the bastide—yes, that was how he had taken to referring to their house, somewhere between a château and a mas—were the barns, the sheds and shops, the pressing rooms, vatting rooms, bottling rooms; most of the vignerons, the vine-dressers, lived in the domaine’s simple dwellings with their families. M. Esquivel, the cooper, and M. Cabrol, the blacksmith, also lived there with their families, but they seemed to own—in some arrangement Thomas did not quite understand—their houses and shops, and both of them did most of their business with customers outside the domaine. From where Thomas stood, all he saw was the mosaic of red clay roofs and then, radiating outward, the feathery green vines. The vines thrilled him; he was now under their sway. Any day now for the Grenache, M. Murat had said. Weeks earlier they had entered the véraison, the vine-ripening period, but Thomas had no idea what would finally tip the balance. It had seemed plain enough in the library in Paris: one harvests when the increase of sugar content and decrease of acidity stop, and before rot begins to set in. That is, the bad kind of rot, and not the pourriture noble, the noble rot you wanted if you were making a sweet white. Which they weren’t. How one would discern the most favorable intersections of all this was not something Thomas expected to understand for years. He recalled from his research that before the French Revolution the dates of les vendanges were fixed by the local worthies—an interference, so said the Revolution, in man’s right to live as he saw fit.

  When Thomas first stood here months ago, it seemed that this place had reached out to him, taken him into its grasp, awakened with biblical certainty some sort of calling. He still felt that, but he’d faced a bump or two since that small epiphany. He could only admit to himself that he felt daunted. Why not grapes? Eileen had said these months ago, and today there seemed no interval between that moment and now. It was as if the first time he reached for a book on viticulture, a wand had been waved and here he was, standing in the yard of a winery he now owned, an idle thought back then—Well, he had replied, I don’t know why not—becoming instantly real. It was as if he had tendered his vows for a priesthood with only the barest and dimmest idea of what he had gotten himself into. Maybe this wouldn’t work out. Maybe they’d go the way of the Belgians, with Beal running off with that African and Thomas limping back to the Retreat. That could happen. Maybe some new blight would wipe out these vines, so recently reestablished on their American roots. Maybe there would be seven years of drought and then seven years of rain, and the whole place would revert to the garrigue, these houses and barns just another set of ruins for visitors and tourists in centuries to come.

  He heard a thud behind him and turned, expecting to see the wiry and inscrutable M. Murat, but it was Beal. It was the breeze perhaps, the way it caught her skirt and her hair, or the smell of the ripe figs, or the slight murmur of workers’ voices from the barns, but for an instant Thomas flashed back to an image of her during harvest on the Retreat, when just the sight of her gliding through the peach trees was enough to cheer up and encourage the pickers. It was her beauty, but more than that, it was simply her way in the world—aura would not be too strong a word, as she did nothing to exert it—that diverted the spirits of those toiling laborers. Everyone on the Retreat knew it was a gift that in some way she was condemned to share, that she had to visit each family, whatever the language they spoke, each person, even if she didn’t want to. Come on over here, darlin’, they’d say, in the tone they’d use for a favorite dog. And here she was now, coming to him in his moment of doubt. Her Mediterranean skin radiated here in its native light. Something had gone on in the house among herself and the girl and the Señora, and she was giggling girlishly. What more would Thomas want to see than that? She came to his side and put her arm around him.

  “What is so funny?” he said.

  “Oh. The Señora is kind of crazy.”

  “Good crazy?”

  “Funny crazy, I think. Gabriella keeps a close eye on her. She reminds me a little of Aunt Zoe, without her hurts. Aunt Zoe before the day all our people was sold south.”

  Yes, thought Thomas, everyone changed that day, the day before the war, long before both of them were born, when his grandfather sold practically every enslaved Negro to a man from Virginia in a schooner, including a son of Zoe’s. Aunt Zoe was free, like Beal’s parents and all the other people in Tuckertown, but these were family and friends being sent away in chains. To hear the stories, Aunt Zoe had always been a little peculiar, but by the time Thomas was growing up, even he could tell that this was a woman being eaten alive by her rage.

  “People don’t like Basques around here, that’s what Gabriella told me. They think Basques can give evil eyes. But they like the Señora.”

  “And, well, they like Gabriella, I’d suppose. The men especially.”

  “Oh, now.”

  “She doesn’t remind you a little bit of yourself? At that age?”

  She gave him a little nudge, as if that was silly, but she didn’t deny it. She settled in beside him and followed his gaze over the barns and down the valley. How odd it was on these hilltops; it was as if they were camping out on the high ground, keeping a watchful eye on the deep gullies below. On the lower hills down the valley they could see four or five farms situated in just this way, like snow on mountain peaks. Off to the south they could just see the tip of the spire of the church in the village. Farther in the distance, on a very clear day, on the next set of ridges, someone with good eyes could see Cathar ruins. No one could dismiss the violent beauty of this place. It would take strong wills to survive here, and even if Thomas could grant to himself that the future was uncertain, could acknowledge all too easily that the odds against a young man from the Chesapeake becoming a vigneron in the Midi were a little stiff, he knew that Beal, if she wanted to, would prosper. She could succeed at anything; she had already conquered the greatest city in the world. She could become a writer, if that’s what she wanted. She could marry someone else and become a queen. If she wanted, she could take St. Adelelmus in hand and it would flourish. Thomas and the men and women of the farm would do the work, but she would make it bloom. Just as she had once darted through the orchards like a nymph, a fairy, she could do it here in the vines, and the vintages would fall in line. If that’s what she wanted to do.

  * * *

  From a crack in the wall on the parapet above the vats, which in a few weeks would be full of must, M. Xavier Murat caught sight of his new masters, the new owners, this American man and his Negro wife. What sort of disaster might this be? The Belgians had been fine, as they were hardly ever there and had plenty of money to invest; this M. Bayly seemed to have less money but more ideas, very much the short end of both sticks. They were standing in front of the maison de maître, a house that once had been his own, or should have been if two hundred years of family history meant anything. Xavier had grown up in that house with his four sisters—quatre filhas e la maire, cinq diables contra lo paire, went the old Occitan proverb—and his whole family, including his parents, had found it possible during that time to forget that St. Adelelmus was owned not by his father, but by his wayward uncle, François, who had gone off to dissipate his fortune. When François returned, no one slaughtered a fattened calf for him, for the woman who may or may not have been his wife, or for his miserable, sickly children. Xavier was sixteen that day in 1865, when he and his mother and father and sisters moved their things, their clothes, their mattresses, their pots and pans, their family papers and records, to the appartement de maître in the mas. His sisters were mostly whimpering the who
le time, and it broke Xavier’s heart. Each time he passed his father or mother going the other way, they told him this wouldn’t be for long, that François would be gone in six months, one harvest, a winter or two, and when they were restored to the bastide, all would pick up where they had left off and they would undo the damage—for surely there would be damage—their uncle had caused and the Murat name would continue at St. Adelelmus as before. But that was before the beast, the étisie, the phylloxera, took them all in its grasp.

  The Midi was where it first appeared, in 1863, unheralded, the leaves of a couple of vines in the center of a vineyard in Arles yellowing, the edges turning red and then dropping to the ground; in such trivial occurrences does disaster begin. People thought it must be a fungus, like oidium, but it took the great minds of MM. Bazille, Planchon, and Sahut—Xavier mouthed these names with reverence—not long to figure that it was something entirely different: aphids were sucking the roots dry. Later, Planchon deduced that the aphids came over from America sometime after 1858 on infested American grapes, though why anyone would want to import Vitis riparia or, worse, Vitis labrusca remained a mystery. The aphids came along with those dreadful plants, but the vines themselves were resistant and unaffected. Not so Vitis vinifera. No one much liked Bazille’s ingenious solution—grafting Vitis vinifera sativa scions onto the very American rootstock that had caused the problem in the first place; it doubled the indignity, but it worked. Now there was hardly a grapevine growing on its own roots anywhere in Languedoc, and soon enough the same would be true for Bordeaux, for the Haute-Marne and Alsace, even Burgundy, which had resisted American rootstock to the bitter end.

  Xavier himself had put in many hours in the grafting sheds, and there was plenty of trial and error in it, but after a while it seemed that St. Adelelmus might survive. By 1880 they had had enough healthy vines to resume production. Xavier’s uncle was nicely out of their hair, as he was occupying himself entirely with attempts to win the 300,000-franc Hérault Commission prize for a chemical cure. His submissions reached such a level of lunacy—a concoction of seawater mixed with the urine of menstruating women was one—that the commission would no longer accept them from him, and at that point he sold St. Adelelmus for practically nothing and disappeared. These Americans were the third owners since then.

  The young couple had engaged in a conversation and were now standing side by side looking at the view. Xavier found it a pleasant scene, but his wife, Marceline, had taken an immediate dislike to Thomas when she’d met him in June, which was unfortunately her way, not that she was always wrong. “This is a weak man,” she said after he left. “He lacks fermeté.” They were in their kitchen, Xavier in the chair where he smoked, did his paperwork, kept his accounts. After all these years they had grown comfortable in their apartment, which was big enough for them and their two sons and for Xavier’s mother, who had taken to her bed a few years earlier, and his youngest sister, Françoise. When the must was in the vats, the air in the whole complex became a little thick, but this was a small price for having survived phylloxera. Xavier had no interest in resuming life in the bastide, which Marceline dismissed as bourgeois anyway. They both preferred the apartment, which was, according to Marceline—her highest praise—fonctionnel et efficace.

  “M. Fauberge says he is a serious young man,” he had said. “His family are farmers.”

  “A serious farmer does not buy property halfway around the world. A serious young man does not leave his family’s land. Why didn’t he stay there, where he belongs?”

  “Because of his marriage to a Negro girl. It’s against the law in America.”

  She herself had recoiled at the idea of the new owner’s marriage, the idea of the mistress of the domaine being an African, but now she would give no quarter to Thomas just because he came from an insane land. “Oh, the Americans,” she answered. “They gave us oidium. They gave us the beast. And now they sell us their roots. It wasn’t their idea anyway.”

  Throughout the years, Xavier had kept well informed of the search for the cure, mostly to keep his sanity when his uncle François was expounding his wild theories. He knew that an American agronomist named Riley had been one of the heroes and that the growers in Bordeaux had recently awarded him a statuette in gratitude. But Xavier was never interested in tangling with Marceline when she got like this. “We will give him a chance, won’t we?”

  She had not answered that day, which didn’t surprise him, but as he stood peeking at them through his window on his world, he knew that his wife had simply given voice to what everybody was saying. He wished he had the luxury of finding fault with St. Adelelmus’s new owners. But one challenge led to another: Across the plain the growers who survived had planted thousands of hectares of Aramon, and the price of wine was already beginning to fall, which led to even more hectares of Aramon. Madness. His uncle François had jumped into that hole. Most of the growers in Languedoc were so giddy with relief for having survived the plague that they did not look forward and see an even more intractable crisis, a lake full of wine, lurking ahead. And this was saying nothing about the fake wines—raisin wine, sugar wine—and chaptalized Algerian wine!

  This young man standing in the wind—the wife had now left, gone back into the house—had stepped into a hornet’s nest. He had perhaps no better idea about any of this than anyone else, he knew nothing about wine, didn’t even enjoy it as far as Xavier could tell; but still, Xavier could not dismiss him. He knew his cultivars, for one thing—had learned from books, but he’d done well at it. And he understood what overproduction could mean, knew that the only way to keep out of a lake of wine was not to go swimming. He had these thoughts about moving up, filling some of the void as Bordeaux reeled, bottling their own cuvée, something bien meublée but aimable. Plant some Syrah to go along with the Grenache? They had a terroir that could do that—a terroir Xavier particularly loved—if anyone wanted to try.

  It was time to learn whether this American had the heart for it. Xavier left his comfortable spot—as his father before him and many forefathers before that, this was where he spent a good bit of time during the harvest and vinification—and walked down and up the dip between the barns and the house. M. Bayly waved as soon as Xavier appeared; Xavier had been told that Americans were always forcing themselves on you, always eager to lend a hand, to hold a door, to “here, let me get that,” but he wasn’t sure that this was the way M. Bayly behaved. Perhaps the wave had simply been a sign of recognition. Xavier was not sure that what his wife saw as lack of strength was really a more subtle reserve. He supposed that in the American manner, he ought to inquire after the trip, after Mme Bayly’s health and happiness, about the state of affairs upon arrival, but it would all be pointless: yes, they had arrived as scheduled, Mme Bayly had seemed just fine from across the farmyard, and if the Señora and Gabriella did not have the housekeeping well in hand, who in the world would have? So Xavier jumped directly to business without a greeting. “The Grenache is almost ready,” he said. Immediately he regretted behaving quite so cryptically, thought after he had done so that he might soften it with a few niceties, but to his surprise, Bayly had already turned and was heading up the path to the vines, leaving Xavier to follow.

  “A most demanding grape, Grenache,” yelled Xavier, catching up. “Some years, too much fruit. Other years, too much leaf.”

  Bayly turned his head slightly to acknowledge that he had heard, and he kept walking. It was a mild day; Xavier liked this, reckoned that this tiny spritz of warmth was just what was needed, and when they arrived up the hillside at the first of the vines, Xavier could feel that it was time. “A week or two,” he said to Bayly.

  “How do you know?”

  Xavier yanked a grappe from the nearest vine; the grapes were a rich purple color, just barely beginning to pucker. He squeezed a few between his thumb and forefinger and pressed some of the clear, sticky juice into Bayly’s palm. He encouraged Bayly to raise his hand to his nose, but he did not explain what
one hoped to smell—it was rather hard, after all, to describe any smell, especially one that indicated that sugar and acid were in perfect balance—and Bayly didn’t ask. This was not a lesson for this year, when the smell would have to be described in words, but for next year, when it could be remembered in the body.

  “The year has been good,” said Xavier. He reached down to wipe the juice off his fingers on a pile of white stones. His mind ran quickly over the annual high points: steady, fine weather, relatively dry but enough humidity in the soil in the spring. Not a “glorious” summer—this was the word the Belgian had used, as if such weather would guarantee good wine, which it did not, as grapes did not like anything as obvious as glory—but a decent summer. “It is the month of August that makes the harvest,” Xavier said. “This year was hot and wet. But now we must act quickly. Before the hail. Before the mildew.”

  This had all taken Xavier a few minutes to say; he was barely conscious that he was speaking out loud, since every word was merely the mental traffic that occupied his inner being from May to September. Bayly had not interrupted him, had not questioned him as the Belgian had, but rather, he seemed to be recording this information for later use. As much as Xavier approved of the man’s manner, he was beginning to find him a little impenetrable, the last thing he’d been led to expect of an American. In fact, he became aware of a slight smile on Bayly’s face, as if there were some humor in all this, which there was not.