So she sits there by the ashes of the cold fire, listening to the furtive groans and thumps of the old house. The night deepens, the stars draw back, higher and higher, arching into the backbone of the sky. She is waiting for something she can’t name, a beautiful old lady clothed in cats, my widow, just waiting. It is very still.
The Underground Gardens
But you do not know me if you think I am afraid….
All he knew, really, was digging. He dug to eat, to breathe, to live and sleep. He dug because the earth was there beneath his feet, and men paid him to move it. He dug because it was a sacrament, because it was honorable and holy. As a boy in Sicily he stood beside his brothers under the sun that was like a hammer and day after day stabbed his shovel into the skin of the ancient venerable earth of their father’s orchards. As a young man in Boston and New York he burrowed like a rodent beneath streets and rivers, scouring the walls of subway tubes and aqueducts, dropping his pick, lifting his shovel, mining dirt. And now, thirty-two years old and with the deed to seventy bleak and hard-baked acres in his back pocket, he was in California. Digging.
FRIENDS! COME TO THE LAND OF FERTILITY WHERE THE
SUN SHINES THE YEAR ROUND AND THE EARTH NEVER
SUBMITS TO FROST! COME TO THE LAND THE ANGELS
BLESSED! COME TO CALIFORNIA! WRITE NOW, C/O
EUPHRATES MEAD, Box 9, Fresno, California.
Yes, the land never froze, that was true and incontrovertible. But the sun scorched it till it was like stone, till it was as hard and impenetrable as the adobe brick the Indians and Mexicans piled up to make their shabby, dusty houses. This much Baldasare discovered in the torporific summer of 1905, within days of disembarking from the train with his pick and shovel, his cardboard suitcase, and his meager supply of dried pasta, flour, and beans. He’d come all the way across the country to redeem the land that would bloom with the serrate leaves and sweetly curling tendrils of his own grapes, the grapes of the Baldasare Forestiere Vineyards.
When he got down off the train, the air hot and sweet with the scent of things growing and multiplying, he was so filled with hope it was a kind of ecstasy. There were olive trees in California, orange and lemon and lime, spreading palms, fields of grapes and cotton that had filled the rushing windows of the train with every kind of promise. No more sleet and snow for him, no more wet feet and overshoes or the grippe that took all the muscle out of your back and arms, but heat, good Sicilian heat, heat that baked you right down to the grateful marrow of your happy Sicilian bones.
The first thing he did was ask directions at the station, his English a labyrinth of looming verbs and truncated squawks that sounded strange in his ears, but was serviceable for all that, and he soon found himself walking back in the direction he’d come, following the crucified grid of the tracks. Three miles south, then up a dry wash where two fire-scarred oaks came together like a pair of clasped arms, he couldn’t miss it. At least that was what the man on the platform had told him. He was a farmer, this man, unmistakably a farmer, in faded coveralls and a straw hat, long of nose and with two blue flecks for eyes in a blasted face. “That’s where all the Guineas are,” he said, “that’s where Mead sold ’em. Seventy acres, isn’t it? That’s what I figured. Same as the rest.”
When he got there and set his cardboard suitcase in the dust, he couldn’t help but pace off the whole seventy acres with the surveyor’s map Euphrates Mead had sent in the mail held out before him like a dowsing stick. The land was pale in a hundred shades of brown and a sere gray-green, and there was Russian thistle everywhere, the decayed thorny bones of it already crushed to chaff in his tracks. It crept down the open neck of his shirt and into his socks and shoes and the waist of his trousers, an itch of the land, abrasive and unforgiving. Overhead, vultures rose on the air currents like bits of winged ash. Lizards scuttered underfoot.
That night he ate sardines from a tin, licking the oil from his fingers and dipping soda crackers in the residue that collected in the corners, and then he spread a blanket under one of his new oak trees and slept as if he’d been knocked unconscious. In the morning he walked into town and bought a wheelbarrow. He filled the wheelbarrow with provisions and two five-gallon cans that had once held olive oil and now contained water — albeit an oleaginous and tinny-tasting variant of what he knew water to be. Then he hefted the twin handles of the new wheelbarrow till he felt the familiar flex of the muscles of his lower back, and he guided it all the long way back out to the future site of the Baldasare Forestiere Vineyards.
He’d always thought big, even when he was a boy wandering his father’s orchards, the orchards that would never be his because of a simple confluence of biology and fate — his brothers had been born before him. If, God forbid, either Pietro or Domenico should die or emigrate to Argentina or Australia, there was always the other one to stand in his way. But Baldasare wasn’t discouraged — he knew he was destined for greatness. Unlike his brothers, he had the gift of seeing things as they would one day be, of seeing himself in America, right here in Fresno, his seventy acres buried in grapes, the huge oak fermenting barrels rising above the cool cellar floors, his house of four rooms and a porch set on a hill and his wife on the porch, his four sons and three daughters sprinting like colts across the yard.
He didn’t even stop to eat, that first day. Sweating till his eyes burned with the sting of salt, his hands molded to the shape of the wheelbarrow’s polished handles, he made three more trips into town and back — twelve miles in all, and half of them pushing the overladen wheelbarrow. People saw him there as they went about their business in carriages and farm wagons, a sun-seared little man in slept-in clothes following the tread of a single sagging tire along the shoulder of the broad dirt road. Even if he’d looked up, they probably wouldn’t have nodded a greeting, but he never took his eyes off the unwavering line the tire cut in the dirt.
By the end of the week a one-room shanty stood beneath the oak, a place not much bigger than the bed he constructed of planks. It was a shelter, that was all, a space that separated him from the animals, that reminded him he was a man and not a beast. Men are upright, his father had told him when he was a boy, and they have dominion over the beasts. Men live in houses, don’t they? And where do the beasts live, mio figlio? In the ground, no? In a hole.
It was some day of the following week when Baldasare began digging (he didn’t have a calendar and he didn’t know Sunday from Monday, and even if he did, where was the church and the priest to guide him?). He wanted the well to be right in front of the shack beneath the tree where his house would one day stand, but he knew enough about water to know that it wouldn’t be as easy as that. He spent a whole morning searching the immediate area, tracing dry watercourses, observing the way the hill of his shack and the one beside it abutted each other like the buttocks of a robust and fecund woman, until finally, right there, right in the cleft of the fundament, he pitched his shovel into the soil.