The Winemaker (12 page)

“The thing I remember the clearest about being a soldier was the other soldiers,” Nivaldo told Josep one evening in the grocery. “When we were fighting with people who were trying to kill us, I became very close to my companions, even the ones I didn’t really like.”

Josep could count Manel Calderon and Guillem Parera as his good friends, and he liked most of the others in the group of hunters well enough, but there were several of the youths with whom he had no desire to become close.

Like Jordi Arnau.

Teresa, who had become moody and querulous of late, had used Jordi to let Josep know where her desires lay: “Jordi Arnau and Maria del Mar Orriols are marrying soon.”

“I know,” Josep said.

“Marimar told me they are able to marry because presently Jordi will be a soldier. Like you.”

“It isn’t certain any of us will be soldiers. We must be selected. The reason Jordi and Marimar must marry quickly is that she is pregnant.”

“She told me.”

“Jordi has been boasting of it to everyone. He is very stupid.”

“She is too good for him. But if he is not selected for the army, what shall they do?”

He shrugged grimly. Pregnancy wasn’t a disgrace; many of the brides who walked down the aisle of the village church did so with heavy bellies. Padre Felipe
Lopez, the village priest, did not aggravate such situations with recriminations; he would rather give a quick blessing and spend most of his time with his devoted and close friend, Josep’s neighbor, Quim Torras.

But though a couple joined in a “necessary” marriage suffered few recriminations, it was madness to try to support a new family with no work to be had, and Josep knew that for the trainees in the hunting group, the future was in doubt.

The youths had no idea which of them might be chosen and which rejected, or how the selection process would work.

“There is something…
odd…
about it,” Guillem said to Josep. “The sergeant has had a good chance to judge each of us by now. He has studied everyone closely. Yet he has eliminated no one. It must have been quickly apparent to him, for instance, that Enric is always clumsy and the slowest in the group. Peña doesn’t seem to care.”

“Perhaps he is waiting until the end of the training, and then he will choose those who will be allowed into the army,” Manel said.

“I think he is a strange man,” Guillem said. “I would like to know more about him. I wonder where and how he got his wound.”

“He doesn’t answer questions. He is not a friendly person,” Manel said. “Since he lives in our hut, my father has invited him to our table, but he always eats alone, then he sits alone outside the hut, smoking long, skinny black cigars that stink like piss. He drinks a lot, and he has money. Every night my father has to buy him a full pitcher of brandy from Nivaldo’s barrel.”

“Perhaps he needs a woman,” Guillem said.

“I think he goes to a woman nearby,” Manel said. “At least, sometimes he doesn’t spend the night in the hut. I see him coming back, early in the morning.”

“Well, she should do a better job. She should learn to do things to put him in a better humor,” Guillem said, and the three of them laughed.

They had five sessions of firing the Colt revolvers, each session preceded by practice in loading the weapons and followed by practice in cleaning them. They grew faster and more adept but never fast enough to suit Sergeant Peña.

At the sixth firing session, the sergeant ordered Josep and Guillem to hand him their Colts. When he had received them, he drew other guns from a sack.

“These are for you two alone. You are our marksmen,” he said.

The new gun was heavier than the other and felt formidable and important in Josep’s hand. He was ignorant about firearms, but even to him it was apparent that this gun was different from the Colt. It had two barrels. The top one was long and similar to the Colt’s barrel, but directly beneath it was a second barrel, shorter and fatter.

The sergeant told them the gun was the LeMat revolver, made in Paris. “It has nine revolving chambers instead of six, firing the balls from the upper barrel.” He showed them that the top of the hammer had a pivoting striker that was rotated to fire the lower, larger barrel, which could be filled with small shot to spray a wide target area. “In effect, the lower barrel is a shotgun, sawed off,” Peña said.

He said he expected them to learn to load all nine chambers in the same time it now took them to load six.

The LeMat felt similar to the Colt when the upper barrel was fired. But when Josep fired the lower barrel for the first time it felt as though a giant had placed a palm against the muzzle and pushed it back, so that his shot went wide, spraying the upper branches of a plane tree with bits of lead.

Guillem had the advantage of having observed him, so he used two hands when he fired the shotgun barrel himself, extending his braced arms as he pulled the trigger.

They were amazed at the wide area of fire from the lower barrel. It left holes in the trunks of four trees instead of one.

“Remember this when you fire the LeMat,” the Sergeant said. “There is no possible excuse to miss with this gun.”

15

The Sergeant

Nobody saw the newcomer arrive on his black horse. On a Wednesday morning, when the hunting group drifted toward the clearing in the woods, they observed that the horse was tied to the shack, and when the sergeant emerged from the shack to join them, with him was a middle-aged man. The two were a study in contrasts. Peña, tall and fit, wore soiled work clothes, ragged in places. He had a dagger in a scabbard tied to the calf of his left leg above the top of the boot, and there was a large gun on his hip in a leather holster. The newcomer was shorter than the sergeant by a head, and stocky. His black suit was wrinkled from riding but well-cut of a beautiful material, and he wore a derby that was the finest hat Josep had ever seen.

Sergeant Peña did not introduce him.

The man walked alongside Peña as he led the group to the more remote clearing where they did their firing, and the newcomer watched as each of the youths shot in turn at targets on a tree.

The sergeant asked Josep and Guillem to fire for a longer period than the others; when each of them had fired all chambers and both barrels of the LeMat twice, the stranger spoke quietly to the sergeant, who told them to reload and fire again. While they did so, Peña and the stocky man stared without speaking.

Afterwards the sergeant told the group to be at ease. He and the visitor walked away, the stocky man talking urgently in low tones, and the youths were content to loll on the ground.

When the two men returned, Peña marched the group back to the woods behind the Calderon property. While the youths prepared to clean their weapons, they saw the sergeant salute the civilian, not self-consciously as they were prone to do, but in a single fluid motion so practiced it appeared be almost careless. The other man seemed startled by the gesture, perhaps even embarrassed. He nodded curtly and then touched his fine black hat and got on his horse and rode away, and none of the youths ever saw him again.

16

Orders

In the next weeks the December weather turned cold and wet, the rain a mist so fine that it added little moisture to the soil. Everyone put on an extra layer of clothing against the rawness and found jobs that could be done inside. Josep swept and dusted the house and then sat at the table and put keen edges on the machetes, hoes, and spades with a small-toothed file.

Two weeks after the stranger’s visit the rain stopped, but when the hunting group assembled in the woods, no one sat on the wet ground.

It was the day after Christmas; most were still in a holiday mood and had already been to the early Mass.

Sergeant Peña stunned them with an announcement.

“Your training while living in Santa Eulália is now at an end. We’ll leave here tomorrow morning to take part in an exercise. After that, you will become soldiers.

“You won’t need your guns. Oil them and give them a light coating of grease, and wrap them in triple layers of oilcloth, as they were wrapped when you received them. Make a second small packet of your ammunition and gun tools in triple layers of the oilcloth I’ll give you. I suggest that you bury both packets somewhere where water doesn’t collect, for if the exercise is cancelled we would return here and you will need the guns.”

Jordi Arnau cleared his throat and dared a question. “All of us are to go to the militia?”

Sergeant Peña smiled his smile. “All of you. You have each done well,” he said sardonically.

That evening Josep greased the gun and buried it still unassembled. Repós en pau, rest in pieces. The driest earth he knew was a little sandy patch in the rear of the adjoining Torras vineyard, a meter beyond the end of his father’s property. Their neighbor, Quim Torras, was a bad and lazy farmer, who spent so much of his time with Father Lopez that their friendship was a scandal in the village. Quim worked his vineyard soil as little as possible, and Josep knew he wouldn’t disturb the earth of this neglected dry corner.

His family took the news of his impending departure with visible astonishment, as if they had never really believed the hunting group would lead to anything. Josep could see relief on Donat’s face; he had always been aware that it had not been easy for Donat to have a younger brother who was so clearly a better worker. His father gave Josep a heavy brown wool sweater he had owned less than a year. “Against the chill,” he said gruffly, and Josep took it gratefully to wear under his winter jacket. It was only slightly too large and it contained the faint smell of Marcel Alvarez, a comfort. Marcel also went into the jar behind his clock and came up with a small bundle of bills, eight pesetas, which he pressed into Josep’s hands “for some emergency.”

When he went to the grocery to say goodbye, Nivaldo gave him money too, six pesetas. “Here is a little present of the season—Bon Nadal. Buy yourself an experience some night and think of this old soldier,” he said and embraced Josep for a long moment.

Josep found all the leave-takings difficult, but it was hardest to deal with Teresa, who turned pale at his words.

“You will never return to me.”

“Why do you speak that way?” Her grief magnified his own fear of the unknown future and turned his regret into anger. “This is our chance,” he said roughly. “There will be money from the militia, and I’ll come back for you when I can, or send for you. I’ll get word to you as soon as I am able.” He found it impossible to realize he was leaving everything about her: her goodness, her presence and practicality, her musky secret flavor, and the tender voluptuousness of the thin bloom, like baby fat, that graced her shoulders and breasts and haunches. When he kissed her she responded wildly, trying to devour him, but his cheek was wet with her tears, and when his hand reached to claim her breast, she pushed him from her and ran off into her father’s vines.

Early the next morning Peña showed up at the Calderon vineyard with a pair of two-wheeled carts hooded over by basket frames on which painted canvases were stretched, one new and blue and the other a faded and patched red. Each covered wagon was drawn by two mules, harnessed in line, and held two short wooden benches behind the driver with enough room for four passengers. Peña sat in one of the carts with Manel, Xavier, and Guillem, after loading the other cart with Enric, Jordi, Josep, and Esteve.

Thus they departed from Santa Eulália.

The final sight Josep had of his village through the flaps of the wagon canvas was a glimpse of Quim Torras. Instead of working on his scraggly vines, which needed all
the help they could get, Quim was straining to trundle the fat priest, Padre Felipe Lopez, across the bridge in his barrow, both of them convulsed in laughter.

The last Santa Eulália sound Josep heard was the hoarse and guttural barking of his good friend, the alcalde’s dog.

17

Nine on a Train