Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel (29 page)

No one spoke on the drive back to the vineyard, or when they arrived and joined Giuditta in carrying the empty casks up the hill and into the old wine cellar, where the walls were lined with large barrels like the one Dante had tapped at the harvest dance. As they raced back and forth between the wagon and truck and cellar, Rosa saw enough to understand that even if she had time to spare for a thorough search, she would not find a single grape in the old cellar, unless she counted the crushed liquids that were aging into wine in the hundreds of neatly arranged barrels filling every available space in the cool darkness of the cavern.

The Cacchiones were bootleggers.

A
fter the last empty cask was stashed in the old wine cellar and the door locked and bolted, Giuditta shivered in the cool night air and offered to make them something to eat while they sat in the warmth of the kitchen and talked. “The boys are exhausted,” Dante said, shaking his head. “Explanations can wait until morning.” Lars took Rosa’s arm and led her along the narrow, overgrown trail to the yard, where they parted ways with the Cacchiones and continued carefully down the vineyard path to the cabin.

They went inside, and Lars shut the door behind them and leaned heavily against it. Their eyes met, and Rosa saw her own bleak uncertainty mirrored in his.

“Maybe there’s a logical explanation,” she said.

“There is, and I know it,” said Lars grimly. “They’re selling wine.”

“I meant a different logical explanation.” One easier to accept, one that exonerated them of all wrongdoing.

Lars sighed and ran a hand over his jaw. “They’ll have all night to invent a good story.”

But Rosa didn’t want a reassuring lie. She wanted the truth.

In the morning, Rosa saw Marta and Ana off to the school bus stop before walking with Lars and the younger children to the Cacchione residence. Giuditta met them at the kitchen door and beckoned them inside, as she often did, for a cup of coffee before beginning the day’s work. As Rosa and Lars helped themselves, Giuditta treated Lupita and Miguel to fresh milk and bananas fried in honey and sent them off to play with her younger children. When Dante came in from his morning chores, he greeted Rosa and Lars with a nod, poured himself a cup of coffee, and sat down at the head of the table with a sigh of resignation. Giuditta took the chair at his right hand; Rosa and Lars sat down across from them and waited.

Dante was silent for a long moment, his gaze fixed on the cup resting on the table before him, his tanned, weathered hands encircling it for warmth. “What can we do to persuade you not to turn us in?”

“We’re not going to turn you in,” Lars answered for them both, although they had not discussed it. “We’re in no position to judge you. It’s none of our business how you run your affairs.”

“It is your business now,” said Giuditta. “We’d hoped to keep this from you, but now you know, and if we’re caught, you could go down with us.”

“We’ll say we knew nothing about it,” said Rosa.

Dante regarded her skeptically. “Even under oath? Even if your testimony against us is the price you have to pay for your own freedom?”

“I—” If Rosa were locked away as John was now, and all she had to do was tell the simple truth of what she knew to be released and reunited with her children…If the moment came, she did not know what she would do.

Dante nodded as if her silence confirmed his fears. “The less they know, the better,” he said to his wife.

She touched him gently on the forearm. “They already know enough to ruin us if they want to. Nils says they aren’t going to turn us in, and I believe him. Since they’ve learned what we do, they might as well know why.”

The Cacchiones had resumed selling wine only out of necessity, Giuditta explained, not avarice, not willful disregard for the law. Their luscious, vibrant wine, the result of years of toil and patience, was the family’s most valuable asset, second only to the land itself. The law required them to pay taxes on their sixty acres regardless of how much or how little it had profited them in a given year. They were required to buy an annual permit to store the wine they were not permitted to sell. They could not earn enough to pay those expenses by selling walnuts and prunes and lunches to infrequent tourists. If they hadn’t resorted to bootlegging, they wouldn’t have survived.

“I sell wine. I’ve always sold wine,” Dante broke in. “As a winemaker, I was a man of dignity and I won the respect of other dignified men. I earned a decent, honorable living. The politicians who made the laws forced me to abandon my livelihood—not only my profession but my very way of life. They’ve never met me. They’ve never visited Sonoma County. They know nothing about wine, this magnificent gift of God and nature and man working together in harmony. They care nothing for the families whose lives they’ve devastated. They care only about winning their next election and pleasing the influential people who can help them stay in office.”

The Cacchiones had never abandoned winemaking, at first because they believed Prohibition would be repealed eventually and they would need to have mature wines ready to sell, and
later, because they could not afford to stop. When Lars had examined the padlocked wire fencing in the wine cellar and noted that it was hardly an impenetrable barrier, he had been entirely correct. In the far corner, partially concealed by the water-filled barrels, Dante and Dominic had exploited a weakness in the enclosure, creating a low, narrow passage at the bottom just large enough to roll a wine barrel through. They filled the smaller casks and growlers with mature vintages, then refilled the empty barrels with new wine and wrestled the barricade back into place. It was a truckload of these casks, not crates of wine grapes, that Dante, Dominic, and Vince delivered to San Francisco each week, bribing the car ferry’s fire security officers so they could cross the San Francisco Bay unimpeded.

The daylong, hazardous journey to the city and back demanded constant vigilance, as federal Prohibition agents patrolled the city streets and the back roads of the countryside searching for bootleggers and smugglers. Until they unloaded their illicit cargo at various hotels, restaurants, and speakeasies throughout the city, they were in jeopardy, hunted by officers and gangsters alike. One summer evening gangsters masquerading as federal agents had hijacked them just north of Petaluma. They were driving south when suddenly two sedans pulled out from a side road and blocked their way, forcing Dante to slam on the brakes. Three men in dark suits brandished guns, ordered Dante and his sons out of the truck, and declared them under arrest. The Cacchiones complied and stood with their arms raised above their heads on the side of the road, expecting to be slapped into handcuffs and hauled off to prison, but instead two of the men returned to the sedans, the third climbed into the cab of the truck, and all three sped away, leaving the Cacchiones staring in stunned bewilderment after them.
The truck was later found abandoned outside of San Rafael, its entire cargo missing. When the officers who contacted the Cacchiones and helped them recover their vehicle asked why Dante had never reported the theft, Dante lied and insisted that he had, blaming the lack of a police report on misplaced paperwork.

The incident left the Cacchiones shaken, but they did not, they could not, forswear bootlegging. Instead they changed their schedule so that they left home in the morning and caught an earlier ferry into the city, but although this allowed them to avoid gangsters, it risked exposing them to more scrutiny by the police. They had to buy the silence of an entirely new shift of fire security officers so they could cross on the ferry, and they had to find new customers willing to accept deliveries in broad daylight. Although they took every precaution to avoid the attention of Prohibition agents, they lived under the constant threat of discovery, and the strain upon their nerves was almost crippling. That was why, when the delivery truck broke down the night before, they could not have waited until morning to unload the empty casks they had collected from their customers. If a police officer or Prohibition agent—or for that matter, a curious tourist or suspicious neighbor eager to profit from a reward—happened by and peered into the truck, the Cacchiones would have been undone.

“This isn’t how we want to live,” Dante said. “Who would live this way if he had any other choice? We know we risk arrest, imprisonment, and ruinous fines. We could be raided and be forced to watch agents break open our barrels and casks with axes and spill the wine out upon the ground. But what else can we do? We can choose the risk of losing all we own in a federal raid or the certainty of losing our home and property. Nearly
every winemaker in Sonoma County has made the same choice. What would you do?” He looked from Lars to Rosa and back, raising his chin in defiant challenge. “You have four children. What would you risk to keep a roof over their heads? What would you do to keep them fed and clothed and safe?”

The kitchen rang with expectant silence as Dante waited for an answer.

“You’re breaking the law,” said Lars, “but as I said before, we’re not going to turn you in. You’ve given us work and a place to stay, and we’re in your debt.”

“Your secrets are safe with us,” promised Rosa. Giuditta’s eyes filled with tears.

Someday, Rosa suspected, she might need Giuditta to preserve their secrets in return.

For a long time afterward, Dante’s words lingered in Rosa’s thoughts. What would she do to ensure her children’s happiness and safety? What sacrifices would she demand of Lars for their sakes?

What had she already done, and what had she failed to do?

In January 1921, the Santa Ana winds had brought summer out of season to the Arboles Valley. Strong, warm gusts from the eastern deserts flew across fields and hammered upon farmhouses, sending tumbleweeds bounding across roads, rattling windows, snatching laundry down from the clotheslines, and filling eyes, hair, mouth, and nostrils with dust. Everyone who visited the post office grumbled about the weather and hoped for a return of winter rains to fill the Salto Creek and cover the mountaintops with snow that would melt in spring and assure plentiful water come summer. Rosa too yearned for a change in the weather. The hot, relentless winds left her breathless and
dizzy and disoriented, nauseous and tired. Then the winds shifted. Clear skies and bright sunshine and ocean mists and pleasantly cool breezes once again blessed the valley, but Rosa felt no better. It did not take her long to figure out why.

At first she said nothing to anyone. The loose dresses she wore around the house concealed her condition for the first two months, but she had borne many children and she knew it would not be long before she began to show. Before her body gave away her secret, she told John. As she had expected, he sighed heavily and told her that perhaps this time God would bless them with a healthy child. “I hope so,” she told him tightly, forcing a smile to conceal a surge of anger. God might bless them with a cure for the beloved, imperfect children she had already borne if John would allow them to travel beyond the valley for treatment. John had responded the same way with each pregnancy after John Junior died, as if the children they had buried and those yet living within their home had profoundly disappointed him. She should be used to it, but his reaction had not lost the power to wound her.

She dreaded telling Lars and deferred the inevitable as long as she could, past the point when postal customers started giving her midsection surreptitious, curious looks and a few bolder neighbors had inquired whether she was “in a family way.” She avoided the subject for so long that Lars brought it up. “You’re looking well,” he remarked one Monday afternoon as she refilled his coffee cup and topped off her own. “You were getting a bit thin, if you don’t mind my saying so, but it looks like you’ve put on some weight.”

“I have.” She returned the coffeepot to the stovetop and settled back into her chair, cupping her suddenly icy hands around her cup for warmth. “I’m expecting a baby.”

Lars watched her in perfect stillness for a brief moment that to Rosa seemed to stretch out for an eternity. “Congratulations,” he finally said. He didn’t look surprised. “When?”

“September.”

He drew in a slow, deep breath, and she knew he was counting the months backward. “Then the child could be mine.”

She nodded.

“Do you know for sure?”

“No, I don’t.”

He reached across the table and took her hands. “Rosa, think carefully. How likely is it that the child is mine?”

“I don’t know,” she said, pronouncing each word distinctly.

“If this baby
is
mine—”

She slipped her hands from his grasp and knotted her fingers together in her lap. “Either way, John will be his father, or her father, just as he has been Marta’s. It’s the only way.”

“It’s not the only way,” said Lars, incredulous. “It’s not even the best way. You love me. I love you. That’s never going to change. John mistreats you, and it’s not good for the children to see that. You can’t expect me to let him raise my child, not this time, not when I’m sober and perfectly capable of—”