Conquistador (52 page)

Boys and dogs probably came from one of the steadings he saw now and then at the end of a tree-lined dirt side road heading westward; farmhouses low-slung and roofed in Roman tile, built of whitewashed adobe or pale cut stone, and all set well back from the river. They were surrounded by gardens, often with some of the huge coast live oaks and valley oaks left standing near them. Big red-painted hip-roofed wooden barns loomed behind the dwellings.

Nobody builds that type anymore except for tourists,
he thought.

But these were real barns, holding fodder and livestock and equipment; and none of the other outbuildings were the simple utilitarian sheet-metal shapes of modern working agriculture either. Even the silos were plank bound with steel hoops, like giant cylindrical barrels.

He turned a farm boy's eye on the tilled fields; harvested flax, some potatoes already lifted and others still roughly green, and the yellow-gold grain.

“Winter wheat, I suppose?” Tom asked.

“Plant in late November or early December, harvest in June,” she confirmed. “Barley and oats too, of course.”

“Wait a minute,” he said, thinking back.

The tractors he'd seen on the road or working in the fields were little red fifty-horsepower models with open cabs and small front wheels. That was the obsolete image most city folk had when the word “tractor” went through their minds, the sort of thing his grandfather had used when he got back from Korea.

I wonder just how old-fashioned they are here?
Tom thought.
They could import anything they wanted, after all.
He went on aloud: “How exactly do you harvest your wheat?”

“Tractor-drawn reaper-binder,” she said. “Then we pitchfork the sheaves onto a flatbed wagon, tow it back to the barnyard, and build big grain ricks. Blessing of a dry summer—we've got until October to get it threshed. Why did you think I needed all those extra hands?”

“Why not combines?” he said.

“Those million-dollar air-conditioned monsters twenty feet high you use FirstSide?” she said, and snorted. “Aesthetics aside, they wouldn't pay.”

“Harvest's risky enough without borrowing trouble by dragging it out,” he said. “A modern John Deere can do better than three hundred acres a day, with one driver and some trucks to unload into.”

“Not here it wouldn't,” she said. “Seven Oaks and Rolfe Manor are the only estates in this domain that have three hundred acres in small grains anything like close together. Big combines would have to spend half their time on the road between tenant farms with maybe thirty acres of wheat each, tops—and this is pretty well the only paved rural road in New Virginia, and that's because of the power projects up north and the quicksilver mines. We'd need a couple of combines for every pocket of settlement from San Diego to the Willamette, because there aren't any roads to speak of between a lot of them—and shipping them up and down the coast by sea would be ridiculous. Say three to each area, so there'd be one working, one traveling between jobs, and a spare in case one of the others broke down unfixably in the middle of the harvest. Call it eighty acres a day, maximum, in actual output and counting all three machines. It'd be a waste of capital.”

“I see your point,” he said, doing a little arithmetic in his head. “You'd be paying a lot more than twice as much for a machine that only doubled the acreage per day.”

“Right,” she said. “Plus it would spend the rest of the year sitting in a shed depreciating, while a good Fordson-type tractor with a power takeoff can be out doing other work all year 'round.”

He grinned, shaking his head. After a moment she added: “Penny for them.”

Tom shrugged and spread his hands.
Actually, I was thinking that it was a long time since I'd met a woman I could talk farm machinery and costs with,
he thought.
But I'm not sure I want to get
that
friendly again just yet.

“That makes sense,” he said instead. “I warn you, though—I've never pitched a sheaf of wheat with a fork in my life. Maybe my grandfather did when he was a kid.”
Mixed farming with a vengence,
he thought. “I can learn, I suppose. . . .”

The road swung west around a series of low hills that reared up out of the flat land, then back east toward the river as the valley broadened out again. They'd been passing tall stone gateways every few miles, the entrances to the estates of the Rolfe domain's landholders. Another gateway appeared: stone pillars, joined by an arch of wrought iron that spelled out “Seven Oaks.” Underneath it the same metal curlicues showed the outlines of seven great trees.

“Home,” Adrienne said, and sighed.

Odd,
Tom thought.
Been a long time since I had a place I could call home.
His apartment in Sacramento had just been the place he lived; so had a long succession of billets and married quarters and barracks before that, ever since he left the house his great-grandfather had built.

The estate road ran west and a little north, toward a deep V-shaped notch in the low mountains that rimmed the valley. Tall palms lined it on either side, their tips catching the sun's gilding as it dropped ahead of them. He could see white buildings in the west now, flickering glimpses through the trees. The road ran on to a creek lined by a narrow strip of forest, crossing it on a wooden bridge. He looked down into the little stream as the Hummer's wheels did a rhythmic thutter across the thick planks; a school of steelhead trout lingered around the pilings, gleaming metallic blue-gray like streamlined river wolves.

“Does it rain more here?” he asked Adrienne.

Usually creeks this size would be drying up by now.
And steelhead didn't run anymore even in the main stream of the Napa River back where he came from, much less the tributaries.

“Oh, no, it just looks like it. Higher water table, less silting and erosion, more forest on the hills. You get more dry-season flow that way; more springs and sloughs, too.” She pointed toward the dense forest and brush that clad the mountain slopes and gullies. “Those were never logged off or grazed; they hold the water and release it gradually all through the summer. There's a little check-dam and a reservoir up there to collect springwater for the houses and the winery and barns.”

Over the creek the road turned left and ran more directly west; he could see a large stone-built house set in lawns and landscaping ahead; there were seven large oaks grouped on the long sweep of bright-green grass. To the right of the house grounds was a stretch of vineyard, the goblet-trained vines rising from the earth like arthritic fingers covered in green, and beyond that an orchard of smallish trees with gray-green leaves—olive groves. Off to the left were other dwellings—a two-story adobe, with the beams of its vigas protruding through the thick sun-dried brick, and several smaller houses, with a long structure that looked like a ranch bunkhouse as well. Beyond and behind those were barns, stables, corrals, equipment and storage sheds, and one odd structure that looked like the front of a stone building with double-car-garage-sized doors and a central gable pasted into the face of a steep hillside.

The great house itself seemed naggingly familiar: a big red-tiled foursquare Italianate building of two tall stories, with wings set back on either side and quoining work at the corners. Seven tall windows spanned the second story of the main block; a wrought-iron balcony fronted the one over the heavy carved wooden doors. In fact, if you subtracted the ebony of the doors and the silver lions' heads that adorned it, and the climbing passionvine that covered a lot of the building's stone with white flowers shaded in pink and lavender . . .

“I'd swear I've seen this before,” he said.

“You may have,” Adrienne said with a chuckle. “It's, ah, inspired by—read ‘stolen'—from a design Julia Morgan did in Berkeley back in the 1920s. On Claremont Avenue, to be precise; the residence of the vice president of the University of California. Aunt Chloe's husband picked it, shortly before he drank himself to death in 1952.”

“Any particular reason?” Tom asked, looking around at the great estate, tinted gold by the evening sun. “For his crawling into a bottle, that is, not for picking the design—steal from the best, I say.”

She shrugged, keeping her hands on the wheel and her gaze straight ahead; from her carefully neutral tone he suspected some lurid family stories about the late unlamented great-uncle.

“Aunt Chloe was the Old Man's sister, but nobody much liked her husband; one of her less successful strays. He never really adjusted to life here in New Virginia, especially after he lost his Gate privileges—he couldn't keep his mouth shut back FirstSide when he'd had a few. He broke his neck taking a horse over a fence when he was so pie-faced he couldn't have walked to his bedroom without an assistant and a map.”

A pair of girls working in a field full of vegetables flagged the Hummer down and tumbled into the back, along with big round baskets full of baby lettuce and peppers and green onions. He missed their names in the hasty introduction; one was brunette and bashful, the other an enormously freckled redhead and outgoing, and they both made him feel ancient with their sheer burbling energy.

“That's the
mayordomo
's house,” Adrienne said, her voice eager with home-coming, pointing to the big adobe, mostly hidden now behind hedge and trees. “Cindy and Anne-Marie here are his eldest granddaughters. That false-front thing is the entrance to the wine caves—cut into the rock; that's where the stone for the big house came from.”

A crowd stood waiting to greet them at the entrance to the inner garden around the main house. In fact . . .

“Sort of a village, judging by the numbers,” he said.

“Seems that way sometimes,” Adrienne said. “We New Virginians do go in for big families. It mounts up. Four generations now: two, four, sixteen, thirty-two.”

The Hummer came to a halt and the passengers alighted. Most of the people waved; a line of ten young
nahua
bowed with their straw hats in their hands; the senior adults came forward to shake hands; large dogs with a good deal of Alsatian and mastiff in their ancestry came leaping around, adding an element of chaotic enthusiasm to the whole proceedings. Particularly as several of them were dedicated crotch sniffers determined to make the tall newcomer's olfactory acquaintance. Adrienne made introductions:

“This is Vance Henning, my
mayordomo,
and his wife, Jenine; his sons, Robert, Sam, Eddie . . . Mitchell Desjardins, crop boss and winemaker . . .”

The names and handshakes turned into a blur.
Christ, there must be thirty people here, not counting the
braceros,
and the little kids,
Tom thought.

The last to be named were a couple of single men and women who cheerfully classified themselves as “corks” who turned their hands to anything; he got the unspoken impression they were temporary, and they were all quite young as well.

“Got the hands we need, Vic,” Adrienne said at last to the
mayordomo;
he was a lean, weathered-looking man with sun-streaked brown hair going gray. “Twelve—or possibly fourteen.”

He nodded. “Thanks, Miz Rolfe,” he said. “That does relieve my mind. We'd be right pressed for time if we waited any longer.”

Tom recognized his reflexive look upward; it was the glance of a farmer worrying about weather and time.

Who ever got the idea that the countryside has less in the way of anxiety?
he wondered.
There's nobody more dependent on things going right, things they can't control at all.

Henning looked around. “Miz Rolfe will be wantin' to settle in, everyone,” he said, and the crowd dispersed.

A murmured question to Adrienne revealed that everyone except the
nahua
and the corks had been born here, and there were half a dozen retirement-age parents as well. When the others had left, a final figure tottered forward—a thickset Indian woman in a Mother Hubbard who looked older than God, with wrinkled brown skin, tattooed lines from lower lip to chin, and sparse silvery hair. She had a stick clasped in one knotted hand to help her hobbling walk; when they came close Tom realized that she wouldn't have stood over five feet even when her back was straight. The younger woman who helped her forward might have been her granddaughter, if her other three grandparents were Caucasians in that particular woodpile; she had straight raven-black hair and a hint of ruddiness to her complexion. She was also extremely good-looking—in a buxom, full-breasted and wide-hipped way. He suspected that a lot of outdoor work had contained a natural tendency to a brick-outhouse build; she was in her late twenties, possibly a year or two younger than the owner of Seven Oaks.

Adrienne sighed as the crone poured out a torrent of some language that definitely wasn't English and hugged her around the waist. She patted her on the head and replied in the same tongue—haltingly—and waited patiently. At last the Indian woman dropped into English; she was still speaking earnestly, reaching up to grab Adrienne by the lapel with one hand while the other held her stick.

“ ‘. . . but listen to me now,' Coyote said. ‘I am going away. My grandson doesn't like it here, so I am going away. I am going away. We are going away.' ”

Adrienne nodded. “Yes, good mother, I know. I remember the story. And then he said to his wife, Frog Old Woman: ‘Come on, old lady, gather your beads and your baskets; let's go.' ”