The Winemaker (22 page)

One morning Josep was going to the well for water when he met Angel Casals.

“So. What do
you
think about the church door?”

Josep rubbed his nose. In truth, he had given little consideration to the church door, but the thought of any unexpected drain on his meager cash alarmed him. People said that for years Angel had watched over a small village fund, never making public the
amount of money in the village treasury, never wanting to spend a centivo because no emergency was ever large enough for him to touch the fund.

“I wouldn’t care for a tax to raise the money, Alcalde.”

“There will be no tax to support the church!” Angel growled. “No one wishes to pay it. One may as well try to squeeze wine from a stone.”

“I don’t think we need the kind of door that graces a cathedral. We have a very nice country church. It needs a plain wooden door, stout and good-looking. If it were up to me I would spend some of the money for lumber. We should be able to fashion a suitable door and still leave the church a portion of its funds.”

The alcalde looked at him with interest. “You are right, Alvarez, you are right! Do you know where to buy proper lumber?”

“I believe I do,” Josep said. “At least I can make inquiries.”

“Then please do so, Josep,” Angel said with satisfaction.

Late the following afternoon, when the sun had moved low in the sky and Josep’s body was signaling that soon it would be good to end a long day of labor, he heard the dreaded noise.

He stopped the pruning at once and froze. He listened…

Listened, and the sound came to him again, an energetic snapping of vegetation that caused him to move at once to the house. The LeMat hadn’t been touched since he had placed it on the mantel. He took the revolver into the vineyard and moved down the rows as quietly as he was able, hearing the sound louder now. He held the revolver
pointed forward, ready to fire but telling himself not to shoot too quickly, lest the sound was being made by Francesc, or perhaps by Quim.

But in the next moment he saw the boar, larger than he would have thought from the glimpse he had had earlier.

The boar had thick black-brown fur, unlike any domestic pig. His body was bulky and dense, the head scarily huge in proportion, and the legs were short but wide and looked strong. The animal stared, seemingly fearless but wary, his eyes small and dark above the flatness of the black leather nose.

It’s just a pig, Josep told himself.

Tusks!

Josep saw the tusks clearly, two small ones pointing downward from the corners of the upper jaw, two longer ones rising from the corners of the lower jaw, perhaps twelve or fifteen centimeters long, curving to wicked points. The boar gave a coughing grunt and tossed his head up with a long thrust. Josep knew that was how it would fight, using the tusks to disembowel.

The boar lurched sideways to flee, and Josep was suddenly perfectly cold and cruel.

He led the animal only slightly, his arm rigid and controlled, and his finger barely caressed the trigger. The roar was loud. He saw the bullet punch into fur just behind the right shoulder, then the boar stopped and turned and took one running step toward Josep, who fired two more shots from the revolver, straight at him.

Three shots.

(Flat, barking reports. The man in the stalled carriage, doom already in his face, twisting and grimacing as the bullets found his body. Horses bucking, carriage thrashing. Enric screaming shrilly, like a woman. Running, everyone running.)

He had forgotten the puff of smoke that appeared with every shot, and the smell of something burning.

The wild pig veered off and ran straight into the only cover, a clump of brush at the foot of the ridge. Suddenly it was very quiet. Josep stood there, trembling and staring at the stand of tall growth into which the animal had disappeared.

Time passed slowly, perhaps half an hour spent with his eyes nervously fixed on the stand of brush, his gun at the ready. But the boar didn’t come out.

Presently Jaumet was there with his rifle.

“I heard the shots.” Jaumet studied the bright spilled blood that led into the brush stand. “Best we wait.”

Josep nodded, drawing great relief from his presence.

The two of them stood, watching.

They waited for perhaps an hour, but nothing happened.

“Together,” Jaumet whispered finally, gesturing with his rifle. Rifle and pistol pointed, the two of them walked to the thicket.

Josep’s heart was pounding. He pictured the boar about to charge out at them as Jaumet parted the foliage.

But nothing was there.

The trail of blood on the underbrush led to the base of the ridge, and they could see an opening under an overhang of rock and earth. Jaumet signaled a retreat.

“Some kind of den. He’s in there.”

“Do you think he’s alive?”

Jaumet shrugged.

“It will be dark in a couple of hours.” Josep was worried. If the wounded boar still lived and got away from them during the night, it could be very dangerous.

“We need a pole,” Jaumet said.

Josep went to the house and got the axe. He walked to the river and cut and trimmed a young tree.

Jaumet nodded when he saw the pole. He set his rifle against a vine and motioned Josep to follow him to the den.

“Be ready,” he said and squatted before the opening. He poked the pole into it, prodded and jumped back. Then he laughed and returned and pushed the pole again and again.

“Rascal is dead.”

“Are you certain?”

Jaumet reached into the opening and began to pull, grunting with the effort.

Josep held the LeMat pointed at the carcass as it began to emerge from the hole, first the hooved rear legs and the tail, then the bristly haunches.

They stared at the bloody wounds.

The boar was indisputably dead, but somehow he looked unconquered and fierce, and Josep still feared him. His teeth were green and appeared to be very sharp. One of
the lower tusks was cracked like the split in the church door, the break running from the sharp point all the way into the boar’s flesh.

“That tusk must have pained him,” Josep said.

Jaumet nodded. “Their meat is good, Josep.”

“It’s the wrong season to be butchering. Everybody’s too busy in the vineyards. I am myself. And if tomorrow’s warm…”

Jaumet removed his long knife from its scabbard. Josep watched as he made a long diagonal cut across the back of the pig, and two vertical cuts, and then peeled away a large flap of skin and a layer of fat. Beneath it he cut out and removed two generous square pieces of pink meat.

“The lomo, the best part. One piece for you, one for me.”

The bloody remains, with two gaping holes in its back, looked badly used. But by the time Josep placed the meat inside the house, Jaumet had found two shovels among the tools and was waiting for him to select a spot on the property where it was all right to dig.

Josep gave his piece of meat to Maria del Mar, who—at first—didn’t seem terribly happy to receive it. She had put in a full day of hard work herself and was not enthusiastic about the necessity to cook the pork at once, before it could spoil. But she was also relieved that the threat of the boar had been removed, so her thanks were sincere.

“You will come tomorrow and eat it with us,” she said, not quite grudgingly.

So the next evening he sat at table with Maria del Mar and Francesc. She had stewed the lomo with root vegetables and dried plums, and he admitted to himself that the result was even better than what he could do with a rabbit.

34

Wood

One evening as he walked through Santa Eulália, he saw a group of boys laughing, shouting insults at one another, tussling on the ground like animals. They were youths teetering on the edge of young manhood, still children in many ways, and too soon those who were not first sons would face unemployment, the rough ways of the world, and the problems of dealing with the future.

That night he dreamed of village boys challenging each other and carrying on—but these were
his boys,
Esteve with his crooked smile; sullen Jordi; earnest, round-faced Xavier; Manel laughing at Enric as he pinned him to the ground; smart Guillem watching everyone quietly. When he awoke, he lay in his bed and wondered why all of them were gone—why they would be boys forever—while he had survived to worry about ordinary things.

He was working within view of the road that afternoon when, to his surprise and great pleasure, Emilio Rivera drove up in a small wagon pulled by a single horse.

“Ah, so you had business nearby?” Josep said after they had exchanged greetings, and Rivera shook his head. “It was the beautiful weather of spring,” he said sheepishly. “I tasted the warm sea breeze and knew I couldn’t stay inside the cooperage. What the hell, I thought, I’ll ride up into the pretty hills and fix that vat, the one that’s troubling young Alvarez.”

When Josep ushered him to the vat in question, Rivera examined it and nodded. In the wagon he had brought some oak boards, split with the grain and already nicely
tongued and grooved. Soon, while Josep returned to his work on the vines, from the shed at the rear of the house came the comforting sounds of sawing and hammering.

It took Rivera several hours of labor before he came out into the vineyard and declared the vat repaired and guaranteed to be unleakable. Considering the trip and the amount of work the man had done, Josep steeled himself for bad news when he asked what he owed, but the answer left him grateful and clearly in Rivera’s debt. He wished it were possible to cook the cooper dinner in gratitude, a rabbit or a chicken, but instead he did the next best thing, and soon the two of them were seated at Nivaldo’s small table, drinking sour wine with the grocer and eating great bowls of his stew.

“There is something I’d like to show you,” Josep said when they had finished, and he took Rivera next door to examine the ill-used entrance to the church.

“What would it cost for wood to replace this door?”

Rivera groaned. “Alvarez,
Alvarez
! Have you a single profitable project to bring to me?”

Josep grinned. “Some day, perhaps. I should have plied you with a bit more wine before showing you this door.”

“You say you want only the wood? You’ll do the work yourselves?”

“Just the wood.”

“Well, I have some good oak boards. They’ll cost more than the rough plank you got for your wagon. These will have to be nicely planed, so they can be sanded and stained to make a handsome door…But I’d keep the price of the wood down, for a church.”

“How would I go about putting the boards together?”

“How would you
put them together
…?” Rivera stared at him.

He shook his head. “Well, for a little more money, Juan could cut squared channels into the sides of the boards, and he could make wooden strips, called splines, that are twice as wide as the channels are deep.

“You coat a channel with glue and tap the spline into it. Next, you coat the channel in the side of another board, and you fit that board onto the exposed part of the spline, carefully tapping until the edges of the boards are tightly joined.”

Josep listened attentively.

“Then you put the boards in some nice, big clamps and leave them overnight, until the glue has dried.”

“Big clamps?”

“Big, tight clamps. You have someone in the village who owns big clamps?”

“No.”

They regarded each other in silence.

“…You own clamps such as that?” Josep asked.

“Big clamps are very expensive,” Rivera said dourly. “I don’t allow mine to be taken out of the cooperage.” He sighed. “Look. Damn it to hell. I’ll be using the clamps myself for the next two weeks. But if you show up at my shop two weeks from tomorrow…By
yourself—
By Déu, do not bring a committee from the church into my cooperage! I won’t need to use the clamps for that week and I’ll allow you to work quietly, alone in a corner. You can assemble and finish the door yourself. Juan and I will keep an eye on you, so you don’t get into a shit of trouble, but otherwise you won’t bother us. Agreed?”

“Oh…agreed, senyor,” Josep said.

For the next two weeks he labored in his vineyard with new purpose, for he needed to complete the bulk of his work before he could spend his time on the door.

On the day specified he rode Hinny down from the highlands and was at the cooperage by mid-day.

Rivera greeted him gruffly, but by then Josep was accustomed to his personality. Rivera had cut lengths of string to the measurements of the old church door before he had left Santa Eulália, and he had five nicely planed and channeled boards waiting for Josep, as well as four splines and a receipt for Josep to give to the church. The cost of the boards was reasonable, but when Josep had stacked them on the table in the promised corner, he examined them anxiously, realizing that if they should be ruined by his lack of skill, he would be responsible for their expense.

Yet Emilio Rivera had not left him too much he could ruin. It took him surprisingly little time to join the first two boards, following Rivera’s instructions precisely, placing a battered block first on the spline and then on the second board to absorb the shock of the tapping hammer without marring the wood. Rivera ignored him, but Juan checked his work quickly and then showed him how to set the heavy clamps that were necessary to hold the boards together under pressure while the glue dried, and Josep left the cooperage while there were still several hours left in the afternoon.