Two feet down he hit the hardpan. It didn’t disconcert him, not at all — he never dreamed it would extend over all of the seventy acres — and he attacked the rocky substrate with his pick until he was through it. As he dug deeper, he squared up the sides of his excavation with mortared rock and devised a pulley system to haul the buckets of superfluous earth clear of the hole. By the close of the second day, he needed a ladder. A week later, at thirty-two feet, he hit water, a pure sweet seep of it that got his shoes wet and climbed up the bottom rungs of his homemade ladder to a depth of four feet. And even as he set up the hand pump and exulted over the flow of shimmering sun-struck water, he was contriving his irrigation system, his pipes, conduits, and channels, a water tank, a reservoir. Yes. And then, with trembling hands, he dug into the earth in the place where the first long row of canes would take root, and his new life, his life of disillusionment, began.
Three months later, when his savings began to dwindle down to nothing, Baldasare became a laboring man all over again. He plowed another man’s fields, planted another man’s trees, dug irrigation channels and set grape canes for one stranger after another. And on his own property, after those first few weeks of feverish activity, all he’d managed, after working the soil continuously and amending it with every scrap of leaf-mold and bolus of chicken manure he could scrounge, was a vegetable garden so puny and circumscribed a housewife would have been ashamed of it. He’d dreamed of independence — from his father and brothers, from the hard-nosed Yankee construction bosses of Boston and Manhattan Island — and what had he gotten but wage slavery all over again?
He was depressed. Gloomy. Brooding and morose. It wasn’t so much Mr. Euphrates Mead who’d betrayed him, but the earth, the earth itself. Plying his shovel, sweating in a long row of sweating men, he thought of suicide in all its gaudy and elaborate guises, his eyes closed forever on his worthless land and his worthless life. And then one rainy afternoon, sitting at the counter in Siagris’ Drugstore with a cup of coffee and a hamburger sandwich, he had a vision that changed all that. The vision was concrete, as palpable as flesh, and it moved with the grace and fluidity of a living woman, a woman he could almost reach out and … “Can I get you anything else?” she asked.
He was so surprised he answered her in Italian. Olive eyes, hair piled up on her head like a confection, skin you could eat with a spoon — and hadn’t it been old Siagris, the hairy Greek, who’d fried his hamburger and set it down on the counter before him? Or was he dreaming?
She was giving him a look, a crease between her eyebrows, hands on hips. “What did you say?”
“I mean”—fumbling after his English—“no, no, thank you … but who, I mean …?”
She was serene — a very model of serenity — though the other customers, men in suits, two boys and their mother lingering over their ice cream, were all watching her and quietly listening for her answer. “I’m Ariadne,” she said. “Ariadne Siagris.” She looked over her shoulder to the black-eyed man standing at the grill. “That’s my uncle.”
Baldasare was charmed — and a bit dazed too. She was beautiful — or at least to his starved eyes she was — and he wanted to say something witty to her, something flirtatious, something that would let her know that he wasn’t just another sorrowful Italian laborer with no more means or expectations than the price of the next hamburger sandwich, but a man of substance, a landowner, future proprietor of the Baldasare Forestiere Vineyards. But he couldn’t think of anything, his mind impacted, his tongue gone dead in the sleeve of his mouth. Then he felt his jaws opening of their own accord and heard himself saying, “Baldasare Forestiere, at your service.”
He would always remember that moment, through all the digging and lifting and wheelbarrowing to come, because she looked hard at him, as if she could see right through to his bones, and then she turned up the corners of her mouth, pressed two fingers to her lips, and giggled.
That night, as he lay in his miserable bed in his miserable shack that was little more than a glorified chicken coop, he could think of nothing but her. Ariadne Siagris. She was the one. She was what he’d come to America for, and he spoke her name aloud as the rain beat at his crude roof and insinuated itself through a hundred slivers and cracks to drizzle down onto his already damp blankets, spoke her name aloud and made the solemnest pledge that she would one day be his bride. But it was cold and the night beyond the walls was limitless and black and his teeth were chattering so forcefully he could barely get the words out. He was mad, of course, and he knew it. How could he think to have a chance with her? What could he offer her, a girl like that who’d come all the way from Chicago, Illinois, to live with her uncle, the prosperous Greek — a school-educated girl used to fine things and books? Yes, he’d made inquiries — he’d done nothing but inquire since he’d left the drugstore that afternoon. Her parents were dead, killed at a railway crossing, and she was nineteen years old, with two younger sisters and three brothers, all of them farmed out to relatives. Ariadne. Ariadne Siagris.
The rain was relentless. It spoke and sighed and roared. He was wearing every stitch of clothing he possessed, wrapped in his blankets and huddled over the coal-oil lamp, and still he froze, even here in California. It was an endless night, an insufferable night, but a night in which his mind was set free to roam the universe of his life, one thought piled atop another like bricks in a wall, until at some point, unaccountably, he was thinking of the grand tunnels he’d excavated in New York and Boston, how clean they were, how warm in winter and cool in summer, how they smelled, always, of the richness of the earth. Snow could be falling on the streets above, the gutters frozen, wind cutting into people’s eyes, but below ground there was no weather, none at all. He thought about that, pictured it — the great arching tubes carved out of the earth and the locomotive with a train of cars standing there beneath the ground and all the passengers staring placidly out the windows — and then he was asleep.
The next morning, he began to dig again. The rain had gone and the sun glistened like spilled oil over his seventy acres of mire and hardpan. He told himself he was digging a cellar — a proper cellar for the house he would one day build, because he hadn’t given up, not yet, not Baldasare Forestiere — but even then, even as he spat on his hands and raised the pick above his head, he knew there was more to it than that. The pick rose and fell, the shovel licked at the earth with all the probing intimacy of a tongue, and the wheelbarrow groaned under one load after another. Baldasare was digging. And he was happy, happier than he’d been since the day he stepped down from the train, because he was digging for her, for Ariadne, and because digging was what he’d been born to do.
But then the cellar was finished — a fine deep vaulted space in which he could not only stand erect — at his full height of five feet and four inches — but thrust his right arm straight up over his head and still only just manage to touch the ceiling — and he found himself at a loss for what to do next. He could have squared up the corners and planed the walls with his spade till all the lines were rectilinear, but he didn’t want that. That was the fashion of all the rooms he’d ever lived in, and as he scraped and smoothed and tamped, he realized it didn’t suit him. No, his cellar was dome-shaped, like the apse of the cathedral in which he’d worshipped as a boy, and its entrance was protected from the elements by a long broad ramp replete with gutters that drained into a small reflecting pool just outside the wooden door. And its roof, of course, was of hardpan, impervious to the rain and sun, and more durable than any shingle or tile.