Chardonnay block when he said, “I wonder who else was out here besides us last night.”
“Any ideas?” I asked. “Who do you think did it?”
He looked away. Then he said softly, “In a way I feel like I did. I should have made sure that stuff was put away. I’m sorry, Lucie, I really am.”
Apologies didn’t come easily to him. My anger melted. “It’s okay. It happened. There’s nothing we can do about it now. But I feel the same about being responsible. The only time we didn’t lock something in the chemical shed…”
“Dammit, after I finished talking to Chris when he showed up with the helicopter I should have gone back and moved those canisters. Instead I went home and crashed for a few hours because I knew it would be an all-nighter. I was beat.” He sounded beat now, too.
“Kit said whoever killed her would have found another way to do it,” I said. “This wasn’t an accident. Someone really went after her.”
“I didn’t like Georgia, but she didn’t deserve to die like that. I hope the cops nail whoever did it,” he said.
“Me, too.”
“Hey,” he said after a moment. “Look at this.” He shone a flashlight on one of the thermometers.
“Twenty-eight degrees,” I said. “Colder than last night.”
“I know. But look at the grapes.”
I looked. “Nothing’s frozen.”
He smiled tiredly for the first time all night, his teeth gleaming white against gritty black skin. “At least we got something right. I think we pulled it off.”
“Thank God. How much longer do we have to keep the fires going? That smell is revolting and we’re almost out of tires.”
“Probably another hour. Until around five.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “Come on. You’ve been limping the past hour. You need to get off that foot.”
“I have not been limping. I’m fine.”
I stumbled and his arm tightened around me. “Don’t argue, and get back in the car.”
I obeyed while he went to talk to Hector. He was right about my foot. The skin was scraped raw where the deformed bones had rubbed against my heavy mud boots.
As Quinn predicted, we stopped burning tires by five, meaning the small pyres died down well before the sun came up. By six the heavy smoke had become a grimy haze, and by seven-thirty the dirty-gauze filminess—the last vestiges of what we’d done—had evaporated completely. Only the piles of steel belts and a few smoldering ashes gave any clue to what had happened in the dark.
The windshields of Hector’s pickup and the dump truck César had borrowed were ice-coated, but inside the firewall perimeter nothing had frozen. Quinn paid Manolo, César, and Jesús double overtime from a thick envelope of cash in the El’s glove compartment and they left, tired but slapping-each-other-on-the-back happy.
“Go home and get some rest,” I said to Hector. “We’ll clean up from the fire tomorrow. I mean, today. I mean, later. God, I’m tired.”
“We also got to take the plastic tarps off those new fields,” he said. “Ought to be done today.”
“Get some sleep first,” I said. “You look exhausted. We’re all exhausted.”
He touched a sooty hand to his heart. “I am old,
“No one can take your place, Hector. Go on, now,” I said gently. “We’ll talk about it another time.”
Afterward I said to Quinn, “I can’t imagine who could possibly replace him. He’s the memory of the vineyard. Our living history.”
We were in the Mini again, heading over to the north block of Chardonnay, which was near my house. Along with a late-flowering block of Pinot Noir, these were the only other vines on that side of the farm. Last night we had agreed that we would concentrate our efforts on the southern vines.
“We really don’t have the manpower or the equipment to cover two locations this time around without the helicopter. Those vines need to be replaced, anyway,” Quinn had said. “They’re not producing much anymore. If we lose the fruit, then so be it. I know we killed ourselves to save it the night before, but what are you gonna do?”
I pulled off Sycamore Lane onto the north service road. In the distance, the vines glittered and sparkled. It would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been frost. I downshifted and stopped next to a row marker, cutting the engine.
For a long moment we stared silently out the window at the frost-covered posts and vines. “Hector’s right,” he said. “This is work for someone young. It’s backbreaking, you know that.”
“Maybe we can keep him on somehow—”
He cut me off harshly. “Oh, for God’s sake. What is it about you Virginia folks, anyway? You’re always living on your memories. Mosby…the damn Civil War…you talk about that stuff like it happened yesterday.”
“We do
He was in no mood to listen. “You do so. Hell, half the Romeos spend their weekends parading around in Civil War uniforms reenacting the battles on the same damned battlegrounds. I hate to break it to you, but you
Either his passion or our body heat was starting to steam up the car windows. He rubbed a small circle in his window with the side of his fist and said without looking at me, “Let Hector go, Lucie. You gotta write your own chapter. Everyone else had their day. Now it’s your turn. You changed your house after the fire. Now it’s time to change the vineyard. It doesn’t have to be preserved as a shrine to your mother.”
As speeches go, it was a long one for him, but clearly something that had been festering. With the clinical precision of a surgeon he had just cut open my life to expose my family’s proud heritage like it was dead tissue that needed removing. Unlike me, he’d come to Virginia to forget his past. I often thought he was trying to shed his memories as a snake sheds a skin. Mine made me who I was. Eli was right that we hadn’t always had an easy time of it after our mother’s death, dealing with Leland’s gambling habits and his errant ways. But I couldn’t stay on at the vineyard without finding a way to fuse the past and present together.
“What you don’t understand about me…about Virginia…the South,” I said, “is that we aren’t mourning the past, we’re honoring it. You make it sound like I’ve got cobwebs in my hair and roots growing from my feet. It’s not like that at all. If you’re a Southerner you’re not talking about geography. You’re talking about a way of life. We’re polite, we respect our elders, our families are important. We have values and traditions.”
“Yeah, well, I have those things, too,” he retorted. “But it doesn’t stop me from moving ahead. I want to do things differently. Break some rules. Experiment. I can’t do it if you’re going to stay mired in keeping everything as it was in your mother’s time.”
“Do we have to have this conversation now?” I asked. “I’m exhausted and filthy. I need a shower and my bed. Why don’t we continue it some other time, okay?”
He shrugged. “Sure. And no point getting out of the car, either. Look.” He pointed to grape clusters, lost to the freeze, that hung limp and shriveled on the vine.
“We saved what we could,” I said. “That has to be good enough.”
I dropped him back at the vineyard parking lot by his El Camino. “See you in the morning,” he said, then smiled faintly. “God, I’m beat. See you whenever.”
“Thanks for everything,” I said.
He reached out and swiped my sooty cheek with a sooty finger. “I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he said. “You look good in black. Suits you.”
“Very funny.”
I had almost fallen asleep when I realized that perhaps the remark about me wearing black had only been half joking. It was the color of funerals, of death, and of the past. The perfect color for someone who clung to old memories and couldn’t let go.
