The Brotherhood of the Grape (10 page)

I
T WAS DARK
when I finished unloading the truck. A pumpkin moon slipped above the treetops, lighting up the site of the new smokehouse—a freshly poured concrete slab. My father was right. It was going to be a small uncomplicated job and we would be out of there in about ten days.

A
NO VACANCY
sign blazed above the porch as I brought the truck back to the motel office and parked. I went inside, past the desk and into the kitchen, where a poker game was in progress, the four paisani seated around a table covered with a white oilcloth. Mrs. Ramponi, a brittle, diminutive woman, was serving wine from an Angelo Musso jug. She was quite frail, clasping the jug to her bosom with both arms as she poured, her skin the color of wax beans, her scalp beneath thinning white hair shining under the overhead drop light.

The way Sam Ramponi treated his wife, Gloria Steinem would have gunned him down on the spot. He did not trouble to introduce me, and when she nodded, smiling with broken teeth, I said hello.

“Give him a drink,” Sam said.

Mrs. Ramponi placed the jug on the sideboard in order to free her hands and offer me a glass. I thanked her as she poured.

“You’re welcome,” she said.

“Out,” Sam ordered.

At once she crossed the kitchen to an open bedroom and sat in the semidarkness near the door, arms folded, awaiting further orders. She reminded me of the old women attendants in the men’s washrooms of Rome nightclubs. I thought of joining the card game for a while, but obviously I was an outsider, not of their generation, and nobody invited me to sit down. But I moved closer to the table and watched the play. Ramponi put a fresh cigar into his mouth and searched for a match. She was there at his side immediately, holding a match under his stiffened jaw.

“Cabin seven,” he said. “Turn mattress. Change sheets for Nick and son.”

She left at once.

Sam Ramponi dealt the cards. It was draw poker, open on anything, two-bit limit. The chips were for nickels, dimes and quarters. So far it was an even game, everyone with about the same number of chips.

When Zarlingo picked up his cards I saw that he held a pair of queens and an ace, not bad for openers in a small, sociable game. But he said, “Pass.”

The others passed too. The pot was sweetened with another dime from each player, Ramponi dealing. Again I looked down at Zarlingo’s hand. This time he held a pair of kings and an ace.

“Pass,” he said.

They all passed and four more dimes were added to the pot. It was that kind of a game, tight-assed, cutthroat poker, building up the stakes, waiting for the nuts. Fortunately for my old man, the stakes were small and limited. He was too volatile for poker, too impatient, a born loser playing in the wrong game. And yet, alas, it was his favorite game. He liked to charge in there boldly. The patience of his opponents, their stoicism, steamed him into rash decisions. A bad hand, and he sagged in despair. Three aces and he was grinning from ear to ear. Trapped and beaten, he was too proud to drop out and tried to bluff. And then they shafted him. I had witnessed it so many times I marveled they could take his money.

Tonight it did not seem that kind of a game, nor would it last long. He, Zarlingo and Cavallaro were haggard from exhaustion, bodies crumpled from dissipation. They had drunk wine the night before and most of that day, and now they were juiced again on Angelo’s grapes.

Mrs. Ramponi returned and handed me the key to Cabin 7. “I hope you’ll be comfortable,” she said, standing there a moment, pretending to watch the game. Ramponi frowned at her.

“Food,” he said.

Immediately Mrs. Ramponi produced a loaf of bread and a jar of mayonnaise. That Ramponi! Eyes in the back of his head, for she was behind him as she began to spread mayonnaise for sandwiches.

“Butter,” he said.

She brought out the butter. I gave Zarlingo the keys to his truck and backed toward the door. The poker hand was a showdown between my father and Ramponi. My father spread out kings and queens: two pair. Ramponi spread three deuces and swept up the pot.

I said good night to everyone, but the gamblers ignored me as I started for the door. Without enthusiasm, without sincerity, Ramponi called, “Hey, Tony. Sure you won’t play a hand or two?”

“Let him go to bed,” my father said. “He’s got a big day tomorrow.”

T
HE NIGHT WAS
cold and misty. From half a dozen cabins came the voice of Archie Bunker insulting his wife, the audience shrieking with delight. No doubt about it, Archie belonged in that poker game, his kind of people.

I carried the luggage and a sack of tools from the truck to Cabin 7. The accommodations were routine motel décor: a kitchen with a bar, a divan, a rug, a couple of chairs, a TV and a bed.

The bed I did not like. It was a double bed and it meant I would have to sleep with the old man. Fretting, I sat on it and considered the dilemma. I had never slept with my father. I had rarely in my life even touched him, except for a rare handshake over the years, and now I had no desire to sleep with him. I considered his old bones, his old skin, the lonely, ornery oldness of him, the wine-soaked oldness of him and his sodden, sinful friends, the son of a bitch he had been: unreasonable, tyrannical, boorish, profligate wop who had trapped me on this snafu safari into the mountains, far from wife and home and work, all for his bedizened vanity, to prove to himself he was still a hotshot stonemason.

Then it all began to come back. I was ten years old at a street dance in San Elmo, the night of the Fourth of July. I was in the alley behind the dance, searching trash barrels. In the darkness I saw a man and woman making love against a telephone post, the woman holding up her dress, the man throwing his body at her. I knew what they were doing, but it scared me as I crouched behind a pile of crates. Hand in hand the man and woman walked toward me. The man was my father. The woman was Della Lorenzo, who lived two doors from our house with her husband and two sons, my classmates in school. After that I never played with the Lorenzo kids again. I was ashamed to look into their eyes. I hated my father. I hated Mrs. Lorenzo; she was so common, so frumpy and plain. I hated the Lorenzo house, their yard. I kicked their mongrel dog. I strangled one of their chickens. When Mrs. Lorenzo died of breast cancer the next year I was indifferent. She had it coming. No doubt she was in hell, making a place for my father.

Easter Sunday. I was twelve. We were at the Santucci farm, the entire family. Hordes of Italians from all over the county, long tables sagging with wine, pasta, salad and roast goat, my old man with a goat’s head on his plate, eating the brains and the eyes, laughing and showing off before women screaming in horror. Afterward, a softball game. Somebody hit a ball over the hedge in the outfield. I leaped after it and landed on top of my father, hidden in the tall grass, his bare bottom white as a winter moon as he pumped Mrs. Santucci, who was supposed to be my mother’s best friend. Astounded, I ran toward the orchard, over the creek, down the pear grove. My father came racing after me. I had the speed of a deer. I knew he would never catch me, but he did. He shook me. He was throwing spit in his rage. “One word to your mother and by God I’ll kill you!”

I spent the rest of the long afternoon at my mother’s side while she gossiped on the lawn with the other ladies. I would not leave her. I sat on the grass and clutched the hem of her dress and it annoyed her. “Go play with the other kids,” she said. “You’re bothering me.”

No. I would not lie down in the mountain darkness beside that abominable old man, rewarding him with affection and companionship after a lifetime of unrepentant sensuality at the expense of his wife and family. No wonder my poor mother thought of divorce, and Virgil was ashamed of him, and Mario fled from the sight of him, and Stella disapproved of him.

I found an extra blanket in the closet, kicked off my shoes, and curled up on the divan. Hours later I wakened to voices outside, drunken laughter, the banging of car doors. I went to the window and watched Zarlingo and Cavallaro drive off in the Datsun. It crept along, barely moving in the deep mist as my father ran alongside, waving his arms and shouting, “Turn on your lights!”

The lights speared the mist and the car crawled away. The disappearing taillights through the forest road promised certain doom. I was sure the old dudes would never make it back to San Elmo, that they would drift off the road into some canyon wasteland. But I was wrong. They made it home in four days, traveling ninety-five miles by easy stages, stopping at every saloon that popped up along the perilous route.

It was after one o’clock when my father tumbled into the cabin. He switched on the ugly light in the globed overhead chandelier, left the door open, and marched straight to the bed, where he collapsed. In thirty seconds he was deeply asleep, his breathing heavy, his mouth open. I locked the door, peeled off his clothes, and rolled him under the covers. As I turned off the light and lay down on the divan he began to moan, “Mama mia, mama mia.”

Then he was sobbing. Was this any way for a man to fall asleep, calling for his mother? It seemed he would never stop. It tore me to shreds. I knew nothing of his mother. She had been dead for over sixty years, had expired in Italy after he had left and come to America, still visiting him now in his old man’s sleep, as if he felt her near in his dreams, like one lost and wandering, crying for her.

I lay there tearing my hair and thinking. Stop it, Father, you are drunk and full of self-pity and you must stop it, you have no right to cry, you are my father and the right to cry belongs to my wife and children, to my mother, for it is obscene that you should cry, it humiliates me, I shall die from your grief, I cannot endure your pain, I should be spared your pain for I have enough of my own. I shall have more too, but I shall never cry before others, I shall be strong and face my last days without tears, old man. I need your life and not your death, your joy and not your dismay.

Then I was crying too, on my feet, crossing to him. I gathered his limp head in my arms (as I had seen my mother do), I wiped his tears with a corner of the sheet, I rocked him like a child, and soon he was no longer crying, and I eased him gently to the pillow and he slept quietly.

H
E WAS SOMBER
and wretched in the morning, eyes smoldering beneath the ashes of the night before. Dangerous he was, breathing pain, hostile to the dreary prospects of a gray, new day. He began with the usual ritual of the wine, removing one of the gallon jugs from a cardboard carton and tilting it on his elbow, sucking with the greed of an infant. He turn to growl at me as he corked the jug.

“Get up. Time to work.”

I sat up and reached for my jeans. He crossed to the window and stared at a bleak, foggy world.

“I don’t like this place,” he complained. “I musta been crazy to take this job.”

“Let’s shove it, then. Let’s just leave.”

“Only thing to do is get out as fast as we can. Four or five days.”

“I thought you said ten days.”

“Get some breakfast. We got work to do.”

As he left there was activity in the parkway, car motors coughing and wheezing in the thin, cold atmosphere as the motel guests began to drive off. It felt like impending snow as I stepped outside, clouds bloated and hanging low, a dismal and remote corner of the earth. Down south at this hour I would be in bed still, bright sunshine through my window and a view of the sea. I would put on a robe and have my first of ten cups of coffee, contemplating a walk along the warm deserted beach or perhaps a sunbath, altogether a dreamy day of rest and calculated indolence, putting off an hour or two of work to the late afternoon when it could no longer be avoided.

Though the motel had no restaurant, our arrangement with Ramponi included board and room. I crossed through the office to the kitchen, where Mrs. Ramponi was preparing my breakfast, my father having told her I was on my way. We said good morning and I sat at the table and asked if my father had eaten a good breakfast.

“Brandy and coffee. It’s all he wanted.”

She looked fresher than the night before, with the clean, well-soaped complexion of a Swede or German, pale eyes and white eyebrows. When Ramponi wasn’t around to crush her she was vivacious and pleasant and not bad-looking for an older woman. She wore a blue scarf around her soft hair, her figure covered by the kind of apron worn by hotel porters, full length with many pockets. A place was set at the table, and she served me a breakfast steak with two eggs and toast and coffee.

Mrs. Ramponi was loquacious, eager to talk, a workhorse who loved to chatter about her tasks, for she did everything around there: registering guests, carrying luggage, cleaning the rooms, doing the laundry, keeping the books, managing the whole setup. She said Sam never lifted a finger to help her.

“Why not?”

“He works in Reno.”

“Reno?”

“He deals blackjack at the Blue Nugget.”

I savored the excellent steak and thought of last night’s poker game at that very table—Sam Ramponi, a cold sober, professional card dealer matching his skill against three old friends drunk out of their skulls. Sam must have wiped them out of what their wallets held, which wasn’t very much.

Mrs. Ramponi watched me put away the last of the steak. “There’s more,” she coaxed, lifting a sizzling piece from the griddle and ladling it to my plate.

“You’re a hell of a cook, Mrs. Ramponi.”

She tossed her head in a pixie way.

“I’m a hell of anything I choose to be,” she laughed. “You may think I’m just a maid around here, Sam Ramponi’s old woman, but believe me, I’m not!”

Her eyes zoomed in on me steadily, searchingly, and I felt the gentle strum of my libido. It startled me. Was this sweet, blue-eyed old lady making a pass? Impossible. Women never made passes at me anymore, not even my wife. Of late, the only action coming my way was from some reveries on paper, hot off my typewriter.

I evaded her scrutiny and kept busy cutting my steak.

“Tell me, Mrs. Ramponi, why the smokehouse?”

“Why, to smoke meat, of course. Venison.”

“Sam hunts deer?”

“I do the hunting in this family,” she said proudly.

She was so small, so prim and genteel, I found it hard to believe. “You don’t look the type.”

“What type?”

“The hunter type, stalking deer.”

“I don’t stalk them. I shoot them from my back porch. Just sprinkle a little grain over the snow and they follow it to the door. Then I let ’em have it.” She gave her elbow a jerk, as if firing a rifle.

“That’s entrapment. It’s against the law.”

“Not if they trample your crops.”

I had to smile. “What crops, Mrs. Ramponi?”

She folded her arms.

“I grow lots of things up here. Besides, I don’t hear you complaining about the steaks you wolfed down. That was entrapment too. Got him from ten feet. Right between the eyes.”

I controlled myself. I couldn’t say anything. My plate was empty. The meat was inside of me. Where had that angelic old lady come by her killer instinct? Maybe she was killing Sam Ramponi vicariously.

“I don’t believe you,” I said, rising. “You’re simply not the kind of a person who’d shoot down a hungry deer. It’s not your nature. I
know
! You’re much too fine a human being.”

She frowned, mulling it over as I turned and walked out. She hurried after me. “Be quick about that smokehouse!” she demanded. “I’ll be needing it any day now, quick as it snows.”

I found old Nick seated on a rock, sharpening wooden stakes with a hatchet. “Hey,” I said. “How’d you do in that poker game?”

“Who wants to know?”

“I have a particular reason for wanting to know.”

“You win some, you lose some.” He nodded toward the pile of sand. “Screen some sand.”

“You know Sam Ramponi is a pro, that he runs a game in Reno?”

“So what else is new?”

“He took you guys, didn’t he?”

“He got eight dollars offa me.”

“How about Lou and Zarlingo?”

He pointed. “See that shovel? Use it.”

The sun jumped out from behind the mist; the clouds scattered, driven off, and the warmth poured down. We were in an enchanting spot, an island in the forest, the land cleared to the border of giant trees. No wonder there were deer. A little stream bisected the property, giggling over stones in the shallow water. The Ramponi cabin was only fifty yards away, the kitchen window overlooking a view of the clearing. And there I was, screening sand to make the mortar to hold the stones in the walls that formed the slaughterhouse to smoke the deer that Mrs. Ramponi shot by luring them to her window. I screened sand and thought, oh, shit, what am I doing here?

The old man began to move around, going from corner to corner of the slab, driving stakes and securing a plumb line to them. It was a simple operation, but it left him puffing, and he returned to the stone and sat down. He took off his battered brown hat and sweat seeped out of his hair.

“Go get the jug,” he said.

I looked at my left palm and saw my first blister.

“It’s too early in the day,” I said.

It stung him and he put his thumb in his mouth and snapped it toward me, a scurrilous Italian gesture the meaning of which I never found out, though he had done it three or four times a day throughout his life. My guess was that it meant: up your ass. Then he clumped off sullenly toward the cabins.

I stood sucking my blister and examining the pile of stones. They were chunks of rough-hewn granite, gray and misshapen. I bent down to heft one of the smaller stones. Not that it was heavy, it was preposterously, unbelievably heavy, at least a hundred pounds, and no bigger than a basketball. The others were like it or heavier. I could help him lift the smaller stones to the wall, but it was going to be a killer job for a man of seventy-six with soft hands and soft muscles who had done no physical labor in five years. He could sprain his back, or pop a hernia, or break a blood vessel. I had observed the flaming veins of his eyes. The wine had been thorough and the damage had been done. It was madness to challenge the danger, but my old man was mad, the burden of his uselessness was madness, and the sense of his entire life coming to an end in a struggle with stones was the maddest part of it all.

Why was he doing this job? A smokehouse for the curing of deer meat! Chances were that twenty years ago he would have turned the job down as too remote from his home, too insignificant for his pride.

He could of course go another route in his final days, getting smashed daily at the Café Roma. Or slouched in the parlor watching television, enduring the cackle of his wife hovering over him with plates of pasta as she speculated on the joys and sorrows of widowhood. Or he could sit on the front porch overlooking Pleasant Street, watching the exciting spectacle of an occasional dog or human being passing by. Or cultivate tomatoes and green peppers in the backyard. Not Nick Molise. He wanted a wall to build—that was it. He didn’t care what wall it was, but let it be a wall that brought respect from his friends who knew he was abroad in the world, a workingman, a builder.

He returned from the cabin swinging the jug and looking better, looking pleased. He offered me a drink and I took a mouthful.

“Keep it cool in the creek,” he said, and I lowered the jug into the chill water and let it sink to the shallow bottom.

We mixed the mortar and I carried a bucketful to the mortarboard at the corner of the slab. He stirred it with his trowel, sloshed and slurped it around to get it to the right consistency. Then he pointed to one of the smaller stones.

“That one.”

I hefted it to the slab. He troweled a bed of mortar and took the stone from my grasp, his hands about it. That was the moment of truth. His face purpled and his eyes wanted to explode as he let go the stone and dropped to his knees. He tried again. This time he was able to imbed the stone into the mortar, but he was cursing in Italian, cursing the stone, the world, himself. I watched and he did not like it, and he cursed me too.

Trying to soothe him, I said, “Don’t worry, you’re a little out of shape, that’s all.”

“Shut up.” He pointed with the trowel. “That one.”

It was another hundred-pounder. I gathered it up.

“Tell you what, Papa. You spread the mortar and I’ll lay the stone.”

“Shut up.”

He unfurled the mortar and took the stone from my arms, fighting it bitterly, overwhelmed by it, even though he got it properly positioned.

After two hours we had used up the small stones and he tried to stand erect, but his lower back was unhinged and he could not make it. Bent like an ape, he shambled to the creek bank and lifted out the jug. He eased himself to his belly on the ground and pulled at the cold wine. His face sagged mournfully, his eyes sunk in disappointment. The forest looked down and comprehended his plight. The trees sighed. Birds gossiped in alarm. The sky stared in compassionate blue. My father, my poor old man! He was beaten and he knew it, but he would not admit it. He had built his share of things with stone, churches and schools and at least one library, but now he was having a hell of a time putting up a ten-foot smokehouse with no windows and only one door.

Let defeat sink in, I thought, let him face the fact that it is beyond his strength and his years, let him throw in the trowel so that he can get the hell off this mountain and go home. God bless the deer!

Flopping down beside him, I took the jug. That wine! It renewed my mouth, my flesh, my skin, my heart and soul, and I thanked God for Angelo Musso’s hills. We sprawled in silence, listening to the birds, passing the jug.

I asked what he had in mind.

“We have to bust the rocks, make little ones out of big ones.”

Mrs. Ramponi appeared, carrying sandwiches and a bowl of fresh strawberries on a tray.

“Lunchtime,” she said.

My father ripped a bite from his sandwich without so much as a glance at it. “Good,” he said, putting it aside and going for the jug again.

I opened my sandwich suspiciously. It was ham and mayonnaise. Mrs. Ramponi watched in annoyance. “What’d you think it was, deer meat?”

No matter what it was, I could not eat it.

She turned to my father. “Nick, you look tired. Why don’t you go back to the cabin and sleep a while? No use killing yourself on the first day.”

“That’s right,” he said.

She turned and walked back to the motel. I pulled off my shoes and dipped my feet into the creek. There was only one way to sabotage the Ramponi smokehouse and that was not to build it. I looked at my father. He was asleep, with a sandwich dangling from his fingers. I shook him.

“Go take a nap for a while.”

He rose painfully and walked on unsure legs toward the motel. I sat with my feet in the creek, eating the strawberries. Then I dozed off, and when I wakened the old man had not returned. I put on my shoes and socks and started for our cabin. He wasn’t there. But I spotted him through the kitchen window. He was coming stealthily from the back door of Cabin 6. Mrs. Ramponi followed. He moved toward the smokehouse and she went off toward the motel office. I waited for the old man to move out of sight in the trees and then I ran to the office. I didn’t know what had happened between them in Cabin 6, probably nothing, but she was not good for my father and I hated her anyway. I rang the bell in the office and she appeared from the kitchen.

“Leave my father alone,” I said.

“What on earth are you talking about?”

I was unreasonable but I didn’t care. “Just keep your hands off my father.”

Her mouth curled in scorn.

“If you were half the man your father is, you wouldn’t dare talk to me like that. Get out, you creep.”

I backed out, ashamed, sick at myself, wondering what the hell was happening to me. I blamed the altitude, 7,000 feet of it. Bizarre creatures were seen in these uncanny forests, gnomes, the ghosts of old prospectors, lost survivors of the Donner party, even the tracks of Big Foot. It was getting to me.

Back at the smokehouse my father seemed invigorated, and the kink in his back was gone as he selected a long-handled sledgehammer and positioned himself before a craggy chunk of granite four feet square. He was about to make little ones out of big ones. I stood aside and watched him swing the sledge powerfully, half a dozen blows until the stone began to break, not in clean sheaths, but twisted, jagged chunks and splinters.