Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel (21 page)

They disembarked in Santa Rosa, and as Lars and Rosa stood on the platform in the midst of the bustling crowd making sure that all children and luggage were accounted for, a young, dark-haired man worked his way through the throng toward them. “Mr. and Mrs. Ottesen?” he asked. He looked to be about sixteen
years old, and wore his tie loosened and his gray flannel hat set at a jaunty angle.

“Yes,” Lars replied, shaking his hand. “I’m Nils and this is Rose. You must be Vincenzo Cacchione.”

“Please call me Vince,” he said, smiling as he tugged on the brim of his hat and nodded to Rosa. “Ma’am.”

Lupita scowled. “She’s not
Rose
.”

Marta nudged her, too late to do any good.

Vince feigned astonishment. “She’s not? Then who is she?”

“She’s Mamá, of course,” said Lupita indignantly.

Vince burst into laughter, and nervously Rosa joined in. “Thank you so much for coming to meet us, Vince,” she said.

“My pleasure.” Vince seized the handles of Lars’s suitcase and one of the valises. “The wagon’s over this way if you’ll come with me.”

Quickly they snatched up the rest of their luggage and followed Vince from the platform, through the station, and outside to a wagon hitched to a pair of sturdy brown draft horses with black manes and tails. Rosa rode beside Vince on the wagon seat holding Miguel on her lap, while Lars piled in back with the older children and their belongings.

“Ma said to take you to the pickers’ cabin to unload your things before bringing you up to the house,” Vince explained with a grin as he took the reins and chirruped to the horses. “She’s going to put you to work right away.”

“That’s fine,” said Lars. “We can settle in later.”

For Rosa, Vince’s words immediately evoked memories of the dilapidated cabin on the Jorgensen ranch, and she wondered with some trepidation what the pickers’ cabin would be like. She also wondered what sort of work Mrs. Cacchione had in mind for their first day. Rosa would prefer to work in a garden
or in the vineyard, although she knew nothing about tending grapevines. She and the children had been too long sitting indoors and strolling paved sidewalks. Fresh air, sunshine, and the rich, earthy smell of overturned soil would do them all good.

As they passed through Santa Rosa, Vince asked the children their names and pointed out important places along the way—the bank, the post office, the pharmacy with the best soda fountain for miles. “Everyone’s looking forward to meeting you,” he said, glancing over his shoulder to grin at the children. He reeled off the names of his seven brothers and sisters too quickly for Rosa to remember them all, but she gathered that he was the third eldest, with an older brother and sister and several younger siblings around the same ages as Ana and Marta. Rosa hoped they would become fast friends. They would be far less apprehensive on their first day at their new, unfamiliar school if they had already befriended a few of their classmates.

They left the streets of the small town behind and traveled south along a wide dirt road over gently rolling terrain. The hills framing the valley in the distance reminded Rosa of home, although deep green pines and leafy redwoods covered the peaks rather than soft green scrub and sage. The sun shone in a clear, blue sky, as if it had burned away all the damp chill of the fog-shrouded city they had departed that morning. The breeze was warm and fragrant and carried an unfamiliar fruity, woodsy perfume; Rosa inhaled deeply, savoring the enticing scent. They passed farms with fields of overturned earth giving evidence of the recent harvest, orchards busy with pickers climbing ladders and filling buckets with apples and plums, and vineyards with low, neat trellises covered in grapevines, the leaves awash in the changing colors of the season—green, gold, and scarlet.

“Is the grape harvest over for the season?” asked Lars. Only then did Rosa grasp what he had immediately observed, that no pickers moved among the vineyard rows, and the autumn tints of the grape leaves heralded their demise.

Vince nodded. “You missed the crush too.”

“The crush?” asked Marta.

Vince threw her a grin over his shoulder. “Sure. You know that wine comes from grapes, don’t you? Well, we have to crush the grapes to get the juice that turns into wine.” His searching gaze traveled the vineyard rows and settled for a moment upon a white Victorian house on a distant hill. Rosa wondered who lived there. “The crush used to be the busiest, most important few weeks in the Sonoma Valley. When I was a kid, at this time of year, these roads were filled with wagons and trucks bringing in the crops or hauling grapes from vineyards to wineries. Everyone was in a hurry to get the work done. The crushers rumbled and growled as ripe grapes were dumped into them by the basketful, and men shouted to be heard over the din—calling out orders and sizing each other up and querying one another about who’d already finished their crush and who was still picking and which lazy souls had yet to get started. The air was so heavy with the sweet smell of grape juices that you’d have thought you could drink it. But nowadays—” Vince shrugged, making a rueful face. “You’d hardly know the crush was happening at all.”

“But the crush doesn’t happen at your vineyard anymore, isn’t that so?” asked Rosa. “Dr. Reynolds said that you grow and sell wine grapes now rather than making wine.”

“I didn’t say
we
were crushing,” said Vince quickly. “That would be illegal.”

As Vince fell silent for the first time since they had left the
station, Rosa glanced over her shoulder at Lars, raising her eyebrows. Lars, bemused, gave her a small shrug in return.

About five miles south of Santa Rosa, Vince slowed the horses as they approached another lush vineyard basking in the sun. “This is home,” he announced proudly. “Sixty acres of the most beautiful, fertile land in God’s creation.”

“It’s so pretty,” breathed Ana.

Rosa couldn’t have agreed more. She shaded her eyes with her hand and admired the hundreds of orderly rows of low, sturdy trellises etching the level earth with green and gold. In the distance, a grand two-story redwood residence commanded the view from the heights near a grove of walnut trees. Through the foliage, Rosa glimpsed the golden tan of another redwood building some distance beyond the house, which she supposed could be the winery. She wondered if it had been abandoned since Prohibition had begun or if it had been put to another purpose.

Lars squinted in the sunlight as his gaze came to rest on the far hills. “What are you growing in that orchard?” he asked. “Pears?”

“Prunes,” Vince replied.

“Don’t you mean plums?” asked Rosa, smiling. “You harvest plums. It’s only after drying that they become prunes. Isn’t that so?”

Vince smiled back. “I suppose that’s so, if you’re a stickler for accuracy. We call ’em prunes whether they’re dried or still green on the trees.”

Rosa resolved to do the same, even though the idea of harvesting prunes conjured up images of fruit left on the trees far too long. To do otherwise would mark them as outsiders.

A road broad enough for two wagons to pass easily wound
up the gradual slope toward the residence, but instead of taking it, Vince shook the reins and ordered the horses onward until they reached a second, narrower lane, with well-worn wheel ruts along the edges and a wide thatch of tough grass growing down the center. Vince slowed the horses to a walk as the wagon swayed and pitched along. Rosa clutched Miguel tightly upon her lap with one arm and grasped the seat with her free hand to brace herself. “It won’t be much farther,” Vince assured them, and at that moment the redwood shakes of a roof came into sight, and as the wagon rumbled over a low rise, the rest of the cabin appeared in a hollow shaded by oak and walnut trees. It was larger than Rosa had expected, with solid walls of redwood logs, a broad front porch, glass windows, and a chimney of smooth, round river stones. The breeze carried to her the burbling of an unseen creek and the sweetness of grapes. Captivated, Rosa held her breath, half fearing that Vince would steer the wagon past the cabin and take them farther on down the road to an as yet unseen, dilapidated shack reminiscent of the one on the Jorgensen ranch, but he pulled the horses to a halt and offered to help them unload.

Delighted, the girls scrambled down from the wagon, which prompted Miguel to wriggle and squirm on Rosa’s lap, eager to follow. “Marta, would you please take your brother?” she called out, struggling to keep hold of him. Marta hurried back and reached up as Rosa handed him down from the wagon seat. With Miguel clutching Marta’s hand, the children ran to the cabin, bounded up the three low steps, and knocked on the door. Laughing, Vince called out that they should just go on in, since it was their place now and no one was there to answer their knock anyway.

As Rosa, Lars, and Vince carried their luggage to the cabin,
Rosa heard the girls squealing with joy over whatever it was they had discovered within. Suddenly Ana appeared in the doorway, breathless. “There’s an attic, Mamá,” she exclaimed. “With six beds. Six!” Just as quickly, she darted off again.

“They’ve grown accustomed to sharing beds,” Rosa explained to Vince as she followed him across the threshold, a valise in one hand and her other arm wrapped around the sewing basket with the precious quilts folded on top.

“The previous tenants did too,” Vince replied, setting the other satchel and Lars’s suitcase on a braided rag rug just inside the front door. “They had ten children, all boys.”

“My goodness, what a handful,” Rosa replied, smiling to conceal an unexpected pang of grief. She should have eight children running through the cabin, eight children, not four, calling out to one another as they explored its every nook—five girls and three boys, each of them brown-eyed, dark-haired, and beloved.

She felt Lars’s hand on her shoulder, his gentle, sympathetic squeeze, and she knew he had read her thoughts. “Why don’t you take a look around while we unload?” Lars said quietly, and when she nodded, he headed back out to the wagon with Vince.

Quickly Rosa walked through the cabin, taking in as many details as she could. Their luggage sat on the smooth redwood planks of a front room that seemed spacious and charming after a week spent in the boardinghouse bedroom. A large stone fireplace occupied one wall, with comfortably worn chairs drawn up in front of it. Sunshine streamed through the windows, the rays illuminating dust motes as they fell upon a faded sofa set against the back wall. A doorway on the right led to a kitchen, where Rosa noted a deep double sink, an older but tidy stove,
and a rectangular wooden table with two chairs on the ends and long benches along the sides—plenty of room for all. There was no icebox, but a door on the far wall revealed stairs leading down into a dark root cellar, and the air that wafted from it was so chilly that goose bumps prickled her arms. Another door revealed an ample pantry, but the shelves were bare except for a broom propped up in the corner, a dusty can of peaches, and a tin of sardines. Glancing around at the cupboards, Rosa hoped they were better stocked, with pots and pans and dishes and cutlery.

Returning to the front room, Rosa glanced warily upward at the sound of the children’s footsteps pounding overhead as they sprinted from one end of the attic to the other. “Seems sturdy enough,” she murmured when the ceiling didn’t cave in. She pushed open a door that stood ajar near the foot of the staircase. White eyelet curtains were drawn over the two windows, but enough sunlight peeked through for Rosa to make out a double bed with sheets and blankets folded in a pile at the foot, a tall wardrobe, a shorter bureau with a chipped china pitcher and dish set upon it, and a redwood rocking chair, a jumble of straight lines and level planes. The air was stale and still, so Rosa drew back the curtains and opened the windows, welcoming the freshening breeze inside.

Leaving the room, she climbed the stairs to the attic and found the children bounding from one twin bed to another, talking and laughing and flinging themselves upon the mattresses experimentally to find the softest and most comfortable. The ceiling sloped so that she had to stoop unless she stood where the sides came to a peak in the middle. Someone had made up the small beds with sheets and pillows, but although Rosa looked around for blankets or quilts, she found none. Perhaps
she would find some in the bedroom below, tucked away in the bureau or the wardrobe.

Mindful of the time and the duties awaiting them at the big house, Rosa gathered the children and ushered them back downstairs and outside, where Lars and Vince waited in the wagon. “It’s lovely,” she murmured to Lars as Vince shook the reins to prompt the horses. “It’s more than I hoped for.”

“Seems mighty nice,” Lars admitted just as quietly. “I was expecting—”

“Something more like our old cabin,” Rosa interrupted, smiling at her fears. “So was I.” Her words hung in the air between them—
our old cabin
—and she felt a rush of heat and embarrassment. Mercifully, Lars merely nodded and turned his practiced farmer’s gaze upon the vineyard, as if he were more interested in assessing their fecundity than interpreting her brief, thoughtless lapse into misplaced nostalgia. Perhaps he truly was.

Retracing the wagon’s path, they soon came to the road leading up the gentle hill to the Cacchione residence. Lilies and jasmine bloomed in the front garden, and as they drew closer, Rosa heard voices, adults as well as children, joined in animated discussion punctuated by laughter. As they passed the house, several outbuildings came into view—a carriage house, a barn, and several others—and suddenly a group of boys and girls raced from the barn toward them, calling out Vince’s name. As he pulled the horses to a halt, they caught sight of Rosa’s children and stopped short, and the two groups of young people studied each other in bashful silence.

From the height of the wagon seat, Vince regarded his younger siblings with comic affront. “I bring you a wagonload of new friends, and you don’t even say thank you?”

“Thank you, Vince,” they chimed in unison, grinning at the newcomers, who smiled shyly back. Vince and Lars helped the girls down from the wagon, but Miguel buried his face on Rosa’s shoulder and held fast to her dress with his small fists. Patting him reassuringly, Rosa told the girls they could go without him, and the older children promptly ran back to the barn together. Vince drove the wagon into the carriage house, and as he unhitched the horses and led them off to the stable, he called over his shoulder that his parents were in the barn, and that Rosa and Lars were welcome to walk over and introduce themselves.