The Winemaker's Daughter

Book by Egan Timothy

CHAPTER ONE

Riding a memory, hot air floats up from the river and slides through an open door, finding Brunella Cartolano with her eyes closed. She takes a deep breath, feels lighter. Eight months of limited play and fitful sleep have passed under a cloud cover on the other side of the mountains, and now this—the air tickling the insides of her legs, a thermal tease. She orders black coffee and ice in a cup from the roadside caffeine hut and kicks off her shoes. She feels liquid.

“Let’s go sit on the rock.”

“Are there rattlesnakes?”

“Yes, but they usually warn you. Follow me, Ethan. I’ll show you something—”

“What if I see one?”

“You’ll feel alive.”

“And how long will that last?”

“As long as you dare.”

Crossing the Cascade Range, Brunella and Ethan Winthrop have stopped just east of the pass, an hour from the Cartolano family home, in a canyon lit by slices of sunlight. Though she lives in Seattle, barely two hundred miles from her father’s coulee, Brunella has not seen a summer in the land of her birth for three years. She is the middle child, the only girl. As they left thickets of salal and salmonberry and the mist of the maritime pelt of the Cascades behind, she felt the tug of home. She was a different person—she could feel the change coming on, mile by mile—whenever she crossed the divide from the wet west side of the Cascades to the desert east.

“I’ve never seen the river this low,” she says. As she leads Ethan around a boulder he stumbles a bit, the hesitant walk of an indoor man. “But look . . . see where it turns there? That’s where we used to go tub- ing. They say it’s class three: a few bumps but it won’t kill you. Not this year. Water’s too flat.”

“I’m hot.”

“It’s dry heat. Don’t you love it?”

“I hate the sun. Why live in the meteorological equivalent of a smiley face?”

“You’re such a stiff, Ethan.”

Here the big summits have given up their snow and the meadows are aflame with Indian paintbrush and columbine, brushed back by the thermal. She presses her feet into the sand and spells out n-e-l-l-a with her big toe. Two days removed from ice holds in the highest reaches of the mountains, the water slides over stones and pools up just downstream. Brunella takes off her top and wiggles out of her shorts.

“Hold this.” She hands him her clothes. Ethan glances back at the road, frowning.

“And you can look if you want.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Now listen.” She cups her hand to her ear, near the froth of a small channel of white water. Zeee-eeet! Zeee-eeet!

“You hear that?”

He shakes his head.

“Dippers. These dinky birds that live in the shade of mountain streams and love white water.”

She plunges into a deep pool just below the riffles and, when she is fully submerged, opens her eyes. The rocks are a polished blur, the river grass sashaying. Brunella lets herself go limp in the arms of the current, riding the water downstream until she is out of sight and her laughter bounces against the canyon walls.
They drive through a faux Bavarian village, the hotels, restaurants, and supermarket framed in costumes of alpine Tudor. At the town’s lone stoplight, she looks away at the crowded balconies of the town structures and wonders if they would hold up if this part of the Cascades went into a shudder. It is the kind of trance she has fallen into of late—staring at brick warehouses or the stilts of the bridges that stitch one hill to another and thinking tectonic thrust: ocean plates pushing up against continental ones, shaking off the urban attachments like fleas on a dog.

She pulls into the liquor store, buys scotch, gin, and a squat bottle of gold tequila for the party. “Is this going to be enough?”

“You know I don’t drink.”

She gives him a straight-on look, one eyebrow arched. “But you’ve seen people do it.” Her black hair is still damp from the swim, face primed for a laugh.

“It’s never enough, from what I can tell. Get another bottle. Get another half dozen, for all I care. I’ll pay.”

“Your millions are worth nothing on this side of the mountains, Ethan. Close your wallet and open your senses.”

“Then how will I sleep?”

Ethan has narrow fingers and hair as thin as spider webbing. He seems afraid to be out of the city, troubled by his sudden dependence on Brunella in unknown territory. In the city, he is master; without him, Brunella would never have made her name. She had been working nearly a year—for him—on their latest project when he told her he wanted to “see the West.” Not Arizona or Texas but the big brown land on the other side of the Cascade curtain. It surprised her. Ethan Winthrop, the Great Indoorsman? She promised to show him salmon in the desert, Indians at a rodeo, and sunrise over the North Cascades.

Driving east, the pull on Brunella is like gravity now, orchards all around, heat still rising, the land burnished in wraparound brown. At a fruit stand, she stops the car and rushes to a bin overflowing with peaches as if greeting a lost friend. “My God! Look at these Red Havens!”

She fondles a piece of the fruit and bites deep; the syrupy juice dribbles past her lips and onto her chin. She wipes it clean and shivers in joy. “Wars could be fought over a peach like this. Here . . . try it.”

A teenage girl sits at the cash register, fanning herself under a tarp. A sign, in bold colors, is hung just behind her:

SAVE OUR DAMS

She wears a button with the same message. Brunella sorts through the fruit, whistling a tune. “Oh . . . and cherries!” The Rainier cherries are nearly as big as plums, have the color of flushed cheeks, and taste like candy. She plucks one from a pile and tosses it to Ethan. “There is certainly nothing wrong with a garden-variety Bing cherry. But this—here—this is a cherry. And wait till you see our place. It’s mostly grapes, but my father grows a white apricot that is better than sex.”

She slips away to the bathroom. A sign over the toilet reads don’t flush unless you have to. When she turns on the faucet in the sink to wash her hands, a putrid coffee-colored liquid dribbles from the tap.

“What’s up with the water around here?” she asks the clerk.

The road levels out, the land losing its green except for the orchards. A few homes are planted in the foothills behind windbreaks of Lombardy poplars and cottonwoods. And here is the Columbia River, bulked up and sluggish, the flat water holding the sky of late afternoon, dimpled by little whorls. The high walls of the old river channel rise hundreds of feet above the surface, tiers of the ages bleeding minerals. Brunella turns down a rutted side road to a rusted fence, gets out, and opens a gate with a no trespassing sign shot through with bullet holes.

They pass an arthritic homestead, roof caved in, the wood sun-bleached and perforated. In front are lilac bushes, domesticated orphans now left to their own in the raw basin heat. The road ends suddenly at a cliff above the Columbia. They walk through dried brush, raising a clatter of hoppers, to the edge, where they can see what the river has done, consuming bluff and rock in steady gulps during its epochal mood swings. She picks a handful of olive-colored leaves from a scablands bush, crumbles them, smells the release, and offers Ethan a sample: sage.

“The scent of the West,” she says, with a proprietary hand sweep through the air, “and its biggest river.”

In a crease of beige rock, a petroglyph stands out: three human figures, floating and legless, with horned heads, following animals, next to a swirl—all of it scratched onto the desert varnish of oxidized stone. When Brunella presses the palm of her hand on the head of the rock image, it makes her tremble, as if she has just tapped into a current in the stone.

“This glyph is so simple. They’re hunting elk—”

“What’s with the antennas on their heads?”

“I think they’re horns. Like the elk.”

“I find these petroglyphs to be rather banal and overly romanticized,” says Ethan. “Is there really any difference between that rock sketch and an e-mail about what you had for dinner last night?”

“There’s no mystery to an e-mail. It’s a word fart.”

She moves closer to the cliff, crab-walks over a section, and is gone. Ethan pales, falls to his knees. “Brunella . . . ?”

She stands on a ledge barely wide enough to hold her feet, face to the desert wind, an eagle-beaked hood ornament out of Ethan’s sight. She fears nothing at this moment. She leaps from the ledge over a deep crack in the high cliff, to a landing closer to Ethan. As she comes down, she laughs, but a twitching muscle above her knee betrays her true feelings. The drop, had she missed, is several hundred feet.

Ethan stares at her. “Why would anyone build a house this high up from the water?”

“You’ve been to France, Ethan—”

“Every other year since I turned twenty-two.”

“I forgot: You’re a Francophile in addition to being scared of snakes, water, and sun. Or maybe that’s why you’re a Francophile.”

“Could you at least pretend to suck up to me?”

“This river gets its water from an area about the size of France, so they say. Think of the power. This old place was built high because those homesteaders were afraid of the river. They knew enough to stay out of its way in the spring.”

“Then why did they leave?”

“Our national impulse. Why do tumbleweeds roll?”

“What’s a tumbleweed?” Ethan says, but this time he winks at her.

...

They head north, following the river, Brunella still at the wheel, the window down to let the oven air on her face. Above, the walls of the canyon are lined with irrigation pipes, the coronary veins of the basin. Brunella steers away from the river and onto a gravel road, a steep switchback that contours along a streambed. She gets out and leads him by the hand to a ravine where a bare trickle of water flows toward the river. She crouches down and examines the ground.

“This is the stream I told you about.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Except I’ve seen puddles in the city with more water.”

“Where are the fish?” He mimics her. “ ‘Salmon the size of toddlers in the middle of the desert basin.’ ”

“There’s nothing here.”

“What’s that?” He points to a fish dried crisp by the sun, its eyes pecked out.

“We used to come here at night, me and my little brother Niccolo. You’d hear them thrash around, splashing up through this little canyon. It’s one of the things that made this place so magical for me, Ethan. And look at my little stream now: It’s been killed somehow. I don’t even hear a mosquito.”

“So this is the end of that run of fish?”

“Not if they can get water back in here.”

Up higher, groves of aspen and tamarack huddle in deep shade. Larch trees, their needles usually a velvety green in midsummer, are bare and sick, as if the tops and outer branches have been singed by a flame. Just inside the coulee, Brunella stops at an apple orchard overrun by dandelions gone to seed. The trees have not been pruned for some time; their tops are shaggy-headed, the trunks fountains of leggy sprouts. The fruit is sun-mottled and moth-eaten. Many of the leaves are chewed to the base, consumed by fibrous nests of tent caterpillars. A for sale sign is hammered to the base of one of the bigger trees. And beneath that: any offer welcomed.

She touches the hardened sap of the tree with her fingers, stepping around an anthill at the base. “My God. This is the Flax farm. You’ve seen those stickers on the polished apples at the store, Flax in Wax? This was their first orchard. I can’t believe the Flax family, of all people, gave up on apples.”

They drive through a natural portal of enormous stone; on the other side is a valley of near-perfect proportions, the granite walls of the north Cascades at the distant end, well beyond the coulee.

“È bello da mozzare il fiato!” says Brunella.

“Is that a curse?”

“That’s what my father says whenever he gives directions to our place. When you can say, ‘It’s so beautiful it takes your breath away’—È bello da mozzare il fiato—then you’re here.” She finishes the sentence with her hands, unbound again as she nears the refuge of northern Italy her father has built in the interior Northwest. “The mountains look like the Dolomites, don’t you think?”

“I’ve never been east of Nice.”

Sunflowers nod in the early evening breeze, their big heads lining the road. They follow the only road in the coulee, a single lane of rust-colored earth. It veers through a sentinel row of thick-waisted pine and then opens to a place where the coulee fans out into an amphitheater of vines, lavender, and fruit trees. The ages have worked orange and gold coatings into the big rock walls, slow-fading monuments to the epic flood that covered parts of three states, carrying water equal to ten times the flow of all the world’s rivers. This edge of the coulee, a tilted bowl facing south, catches more than thirteen hours of sunlight in midsummer. The last rays glance off clusters of red grapes from old vines trellised along galvanized wire. A river rock wall encircles a cream-colored farmhouse with a wraparound porch painted baby blue. Brunella stops just short of the house and jumps out of the car, leaving the door open and the keys inside.

“Have you ever seen a more beautiful place?” She pulls him toward the house. “Have you ever smelled a more fragrant garden? Look here”—she points to a row of fruited bushes in large terra-cotta vases, wheels at the base—“oranges, from my father’s limonaia. My God, how could I have stayed away? Have you ever seen such poetry in the land?”

“I’m soft-sentiment-impaired,” he says. “Don’t let that stop you.”

She pinches a sprig of rosemary and hurries up the steps. Opening the screen door, she calls out for her father.

“Babbo-oh!”

Nothing.

She calls out again, using the Tuscan word for father favored by her long-dead nonna. She walks to the edge of the stairway but goes no farther. Since the death of her own mother three years ago, Brunella has been afraid to see the little landmarks of the house, the nooks and corners where her mother used to read or sing, the window seat where she looked off to the east, faraway east, a three-thousand-mile stare. These places will never be neutral. And she cannot imagine her father roaming the two-story five-bedroom farmhouse without becoming a haunt who speaks to himself as he shambles past the rooms given life by thirty-seven years of marriage.

She leads Ethan back outside through the rose garden. Every few steps, a new wisp of floral perfume envelops them. Hummingbirds buzz in the last angled light of the day. A small fountain circulates water from a big earthen pond. She skips ahead, uphill, following the sound of a baseball game coming from a paint-splattered radio in the back rows of the vineyard. She spots her father from a distance, a Mariners cap on his head, wielding a pair of pruning shears like a conductor’s baton.

“Babbo!”

Angelo Cartolano is in cutoff jeans and high-top baseball cleats; he has winged eyebrows and a face of untrained honesty, wearing the years with a proper fit. He stares down the hill, squinting in the last sunlight. They hug and twirl around. She kisses his nose, spins the cap backward, and holds him tight. The sweat runs through his shirt, and his hair is moist and askew. She resembles her father in one striking way: They have the same green eyes, though most of the color has gone out of Angelo’s.

“You need some sun,” he says.

“I have three full days here to catch up, and then we’re going hik...