Valley Fever (5 page)

Many of the farmers in the valley that year had bet on rain, but the rain didn't come. When it did, it came too light and too late. The peaches turned yellowy orange and red, but when a scarcity of water left the fruit vulnerable to that fungus, they stayed small like nuts. Then, toward the end of August, the small red nutlike peaches fell between the rows, so that from the golf course and from Lake Millerton and from certain houses along the river, you could see bright orange-red stripes between the spotty green rows of trees.

 

4.

“Why would I want to go to Carmel and see all the people I hate in Fresno?” Summers, my mother preferred to stay in her house on the river with all the windows open. She would play solitaire at the kitchen table for six hours straight, without getting up to eat. “I just stay here and don't go into town and pretend I'm in the Dordogne,” she said. “It works. Try it.”

“Are you depressed?” I said.

“Why would I be depressed?” she said.

“You're in your pajamas all day.” Her long white nightgown had holes in it all over. She didn't bother to change when she went outside to prune roses, and the thorns had snagged holes in all of her house clothes. Often she pruned roses without wearing any underwear beneath her nightgown, and this was one of those days.

“Well,” she said, as if it were a secret, “I went out to get the roses in the front, and then I was coming around to the back, but I saw the cards here on the table. So I thought I'd come in for a while and play. And then you came in.”

“It's after three.”

“I'm not going anywhere.”

“It just seems like, I don't know.”

“Dad is coming in for lunch.”

“I know!” It was insulting when she talked about Dad like I didn't know who Dad was. Dad had been coming in for lunch every day since I was four. (As they say, grapes don't stop growing on Saturday.) “Don't you see anybody?”

“I see people.”

“Who?”

“I see people who come to the house.”

“Uncle Felix. That's all.”

“Sometimes Miguel comes to the house.” Miguel was my father's foreman. “Have you eaten?” she said. “Let's have eggs.”

“Mom, when you run out of things to talk about, you talk about food.”

“I don't like the way you're speaking to me.”

“I'm not hungry. I've told you I'm not hungry.”

“But they're Miguel's eggs,” she said. They were a great luxury. “Or I made the grape pie. I made it with Leonard's Bakersfield grapes. We went down there to pick the ends of the rows.” The mechanical harvesters can't get to the ends of the rows, so all these overripe, juicy, fragile grapes are left for Leonard's friends to forage—the sort of grapes that explode if you just slightly pinch them. The real delicacy, of course, is if you're in the field yourself and eat those end-grapes right off the vine. All that tension and sugar bursts with just the slightest pressure, a warm explosion of sweet and tart pulp. These are the secrets of the Central Valley that make us farm kids feel superior. No one who grew up in a city has eaten an after-harvest grape picked directly from the end of a vine during the last hot days of the season. This is a thing you can't know unless you knew it already. Also, you can't get a 100-degree grape in a market. There is nothing like a hot grape, too sweet even to pick, the bunch carefully broken off the vine and eaten directly from the spine.

“I'll try the grape pie.”

“I just had to go get those grapes,” she said. “First extra grapes of the summer.”

Mother was so skinny you couldn't help but notice she must think of nothing but food. When you make concord grape pie, you must pick all the hundreds of tiny grapes off the stems, one by one, and concord grapes don't come off all that easily. Your fingernails are stained for days.

Years ago, more than thirty years ago, Mother had known a German woman who married a farmer in town, and this German woman would make the grape pie with the tender stems still in it. Mr. Coleman complained and complained about his wife's grape pie, and his wife refused, as if on principle, to take the time to pick the grapes from the stems. The stems do cook down and you can hardly tell they're there. But they're there, and they have a little bite.

When Mr. Coleman and his wife divorced, she failed to pay her electric bill, an attempt to demonstrate to the court how little money he was giving her. She'd come from Hamburg and wasn't used to the heat. The summer of their separation was particularly hot, even for Fresno, and temperatures outside rose past 120 degrees. Mrs. Coleman died at her kitchen table of heatstroke. She was very German, Mrs. Coleman, and had been keeping a log of her body temperature to show to her lawyer. When she last recorded, she wrote down 105 degrees. When the police found her, her body was at 120. Mr. Coleman married again soon after, and there aren't many people in the valley who remember his first wife.

Nearly every time Mother makes the grape pie, she reminds us about the German woman who had married Mr. Coleman and how she left the stems in, how the stems led to a heat-rotten body slumped at the kitchen table, and how no one remembers her. Mother recites this as if it were a morality tale.

That afternoon, Mother's fingernails were clean and white, because in thirty years she'd learned to wear surgical gloves when she removed the grapes from the stem.

“Who's not hungry for eggs? They're Miguel's eggs.”

“I'd rather have a drink.”

“I wish you wouldn't drink.”

“I wish you wouldn't talk about food the whole time.”

“It's bad for your skin,” she said. “And you're still young.”

Miguel's wife raised chickens in the back of their house, just up the road from ours, in a shed my father and Miguel built themselves one weekend when I was a child. I remember the weekend, because I remember the splinters I got trying to help, and that a few splinters stuck in my hands until my body got rid of them on its own. I wanted a chicken coop, too, very badly, and Miguel said I could share his. Even now, twenty-five years on, Miguel brought over weekly eggs, keeping his promise.

Mother said, then, “Eggs are so easy to eat.” She focused on the cards in front of her. “Put on the water, Inky.”

“Who do you see, Mom?” I filled the blue iron pot we used for boiled eggs.

“Don't forget to put in the toast.” She tapped at an orphaned jack. “Not good, not good.”

“Do you see Wilson? What does Wilson have to say about the bank and everything?”

“Wilson's an idiot. Uncle Felix is an idiot. I'm surrounded by idiots.”

“You need to manage Wilson better.”

“He's supposed to manage us.”

“Maybe you should get a new accountant.”

“Charlie says I should get a lawyer.”

“Of course you need a lawyer.”

“Wilson says a lawyer would just take our money and make no difference in the end.”

“You just told me Wilson's an idiot.”

The banks had started to call in the loans from everyone in town. This happened every few years, but Dad, in the past, had enough sway that the bank gave him time. This year the banks weren't listening to Dad's pleas and they weren't, apparently, willing to wait to see what next year's peaches did. It was an unusual scenario. Felix thought the banks were bluffing. Only small farmers ever lost their land.

Still, as they say, the grapes would save us.

The bougainvillea had taken over the arbor outside the kitchen and the drying pink leaves blanketed the tile, so the patio was all dust and crepelike leaves and dead bees disintegrating and the vague smell of rot. A small brown spider with a thick triangular belly sped in through a gap in the screen, through the open window by the sink. “Spiders,” I said, “are good luck.”

“Not in the house,” Mother said. “Smash it, will you?”

“Not good, not good.” I squashed the thing with a paper towel. “Bad luck,” I said.

“Wilson says to wait until the grapes are picked and see what the situation looks like then.” Mother got that crease between her eyebrows she gets when she's angry or tired or sad.

“I don't know why you listen to what Wilson says.”

“Your father wants to listen to Wilson,” Mother said. With her index finger, she tried to put her eyelashes back in order. They were all crisscrossed one over the other. “Your father is a wonderful farmer and a wonderful husband, but he can't spot an idiot.”

“Felix listens to Wilson, I guess.”

“Felix doesn't listen to anyone but Felix.”

“You know, he talks a lot, but I've had wines that cost more than ten dollars at Uncle Felix's house.”

She looked at me, and all I could see was that awful crease. “You really can't believe one word he says.” When I was in high school, Uncle Felix had federal charges brought against him for trying to pass off cheap grapes as cabernet. He had tossed cabernet leaves over grapes from a less expensive varietal. He worked out a plea to avoid jail, but he is now, technically, a felon. “You know that, right?”

“Let's go to Zapato's,” I said. Even the flicker of heat from the stove to boil the eggs was too much to bear in this house, in July, in Fresno. I don't know how Mother managed to bake the pie. “And then let's go get you new nightgowns.”

“I don't like the food at Zapato's. You like Zapato's because you want a margarita.”

“Or Bootsie's.”

“Yes, you should go see Bootsie,” Mother said. “Poor Bootsie.” Bootsie Calhoun moved back from New York to look after the family's property (her brother was useless and smoked too much heroin) and had opened a small but popular restaurant in the Tower District. Her father was killed in a car accident on Avenue 22. He'd gone missing, and by the time they found him in his overturned car on the dry embankment of the Mendota Canal, his identification and sheepskin seat covers and the hubcaps from his old Mercedes had been stolen.

“You should come with me,” I said.

“I don't want to go out of the house.”

“Mother.”

“I lost the keys to the silver drawer. I don't know where the keys are.” She continued playing cards.

“They'll turn up.”

“Do you think someone came into the house and took the keys?”

“No. I don't think that.”

“Well, my heart is racing. I don't want to leave the house without knowing where those keys are. Don't tell your father.”

“Do you want me to crack your eggs for you?”

“You always mess up the yolk.” She tapped the egg delicately. “I'm afraid someone took those keys out of my purse.”

“They'll turn up, Mom.”

“Did you make toast?”

I sliced the toast into six little strips and placed them in front of her, next to the cards.

Mother dunked her toast soldiers deep into the egg so that yolk ran over the shell. “You made a nice egg,” she said. “I want you to eat yours.”

“I can't really eat.”

She nodded. “You should call Bootsie Calhoun.”

My throat filled. “You should call a lawyer.”

There was a silence in which she flipped cards, gathered them up, and shuffled. “Maybe we should have a party. A party like we used to,” she said.

“You hate parties.”

“I hate other people's parties. My parties are fun.”

“A party's a party.”

“I don't like having to make conversation with people I didn't pick myself.”

“People might steal your stuff.”

“I'm not telling you anything from now on.” Mother wiped her fingertips on a paper napkin printed with green grapes, taken from a pile in the center of the table. “We need something cheerful around here. A harvest party is what we need. Turkeys lined up down the length of the dining room table. Doesn't it sound fun?”

“It's too hot. Grandma's parties were in the fall.”

“Oh, Ingrid, you're really a buzzkill.”

“I thought you were poor.”

“Not too poor for a harvest party.” She swept her fingers again and again across the paper napkin. “With absolutely everyone. A party like your grandmother used to give.”

“Are you going to roast a lamb on a spit?”

“Don't be sarcastic.”

Every Easter, my father's parents really had roasted a lamb on a spit. They had learned it from the Greeks who owned the land next door. “There are going to be many more harvests, Mom. We don't need to have a party this summer.”

“But why not this summer? Or we could wait until the fall. But by the fall you'll be busy, you'll be gone.”

“All right, if you like, this summer.”

“After I find the keys to the silver.”

 

5.

The heat did not slow down and the drought kept up and the grapes grew plump. Dad's grapes, fed largely by well water and protected by riparian rights and not wholly dependent on the water districts, grew especially plump. Vines love a little bit of stress. The grapes would get us through another year after all.

There had been earlier seasons when Dad grew a few thousand acres of Thompson grapes and sold them as fruit or laid them out to dry, but table grapes and raisins weren't as profitable as the cabernet, and many years ago he had ripped out half the Thompsons and put in wine grapes. He'd left a thousand acres of Thompsons in the vineyards surrounding the house, because big green grapes reflect more light on the vine. Thompsons were part of Mother and Dad's landscape.

Now, apparently, they were making wine from the table grapes.

It was the middle of July, and Dad liked to pick early, so the fruit would have a little less sugar than usual but there'd be no chance of the grapes being ruined by rain or late-season bugs or an unexpected spike in heat that could spoil them. Under Uncle Felix's high-Brix plan, the Thompsons had at least another couple weeks to hang. They already tasted delicious to me, and those first few days and then weeks I was back home, neither working nor pretending to work, I liked to walk up and down the vines like I did when I was little and pick the ripest fruit direct from the sun-warm bunches.