Page 53 of Before We Say Goodbye
“Oh, don’t do that. No more travel for a long time.”
“I’ve heard that before.” It was bound to happen. Her exasperation with the man she’d married teetered on the edge of climax. “You promised me that if we didn’t sell, you’d start taking better care of yourself.”
“And Iam. It’s us and the farm now, the rest of the year. I have our distribution in place. Now it’s up to you to set pricing. I’ll tell our network I don’t want to travel as much next year. Not even for a sales meeting. We’re right where we need to be.”
She nodded half-heartedly.
He lifted her chin. “Things are going to change.”
“How many times do I have to—”
Over her shoulder, something caught his eye. He brushed past her before she could finish her question. “What is this?” he asked, reaching for one of the many millions of leaves on the property. Holding the stunted green leaf in his hand, he saw what looked like warts covering it. “Bec, is this ...? No.”
Down the entire row, nearly every leaf looked the same, and it had happened so fast. All the elation he felt, all the hope, it fell to the earth like a hot air balloon that had lost its air.
Otis climbed up onto his John Deere and drove toward the vines that he and Bec had planted. She and the boys were in the house, and he’d asked her to keep them there, because he didn’t want them to see him this way, didn’t want them to see their father’s descent.
Never had he failed so utterly and completely. He’d heard whispers of phylloxera sneaking into California, but Otis was confident that their vines would be okay. His older vines had survived for a century, and he’d chosen the perfect rootstock for all the new plantings. At the recommendation of the local nursery, they’d gone with the AXR1 variety, which UC Davis touted as a dream rootstock that was easy to cultivate, issued high fruit quality, and resisted phylloxera. Then he’d forgotten about it.
Of course, he knew about phylloxera from his studies, how the pests had decimated France in the eighteen hundreds and how France had saved itself only by acquiring rootstocks from California, but they’d had to replant and start over. It was like a pandemic, this phylloxera. Since first discovering it on that day walking with his family, Otis had consulted Carmine, who’d confirmed his fears. He’d also found others who were suffering the same fate. It wasn’t the leaf damage that was the main issue. Those same insects, the tiny yellow lice, had burrowed into the ground and fed on the roots, making them vulnerable to fungi that crept in and finished them off.
Sadly, there was only one solution. Dig up the vines, burn them, and rip the soil with ripper shanks. Then inject methyl bromide to kill everything,includingthe trillions of healthy microorganisms in the soil. Afterward, they would cover the land with plastic tarps and start overwith properly resistant vines. From what he’d learned so far, he’d go back to the tried-and-true St. George rootstock.
All that hard work lost; he could barely stand it. Two-thirds of his vineyards were dead vines walking. All that he and Bec had planted, all those vines coming into their own. Even the legacy centennial vines that had once attracted him to the property had also been hit.
And the soil ... how many years would it take to bring it back to life?
Carmine had told him to get the vines out of the ground as quickly as possible, then to burn them, but Otis held on until he saw the spread, how the infestation was hopping blocks. Now he sat behind the wheel of the tractor, bandanna on his head to keep the sweat from burning his eyes, wishing that they’d sold to Gallo when they had the chance.
Tears fell as he jabbed the front loader into the earth, and the vines began to fold over. These vines had made him who he was. These vines had bought back investors, paid for their lives.
He’d attempted to keep the news quiet, begging everyone with whom he’d consulted not to mention it, but there was no smaller world than Sonoma Valley, and by now everyone knew that Lost Souls had been hit hard. Likely, his competitors were shaking their heads and saying he’d done something wrong while also scrambling to spray and do whatever it took to keep the lice from getting their crops too.
Row by row he went. It felt like having each nail plucked from his fingers, ripping up as many vines as the front loader would carry and then driving them to the far end of the property, where his vineyard guys had cleared an area ready to burn. It would take two years to get any fruit from newly planted vines, which meant he’d lost at least two years of income from his estate plantings. It would take another seven to ten to grow fruit worth talking about.
In two days, he had wrung from the earth a lifetime of dreams. He slept on a stack of hay bales that abutted the outside wall of the tractor shed, desperate to avoid Bec. Shame caked his insides. Had he let her win, none of this would have happened.
The second morning she came out with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and begged him to eat.
“It took so many years to get here, Bec.”
“We did it once, we can do it again.” She was always optimistic, but he could hear the note of doubt in her voice.
He ran a hand through his hair, looking out over the empty rows, knowing that he had to treat the soil and get to planting if he wanted the roots to take before winter. “We won’t have anything to sell for two years, Bec. Even then, it’ll be too young to offer any complexity. People will say that what we do have in barrel is tainted. We’re already the laughingstock of California.”
“People will stand behind you, Otis. Lloyd will be here tomorrow, and we’ll work it all out.”
“Lloyd? How can he help? I don’t want more of his money. I don’t need his advice. I want him out of my life. Out of yours.”
Later that morning, with his men standing beside him, Otis struck a match and lit a section that he’d doused with gasoline. His assistant vineyard manager, Scooter, a calloused-handed man from Santa Fe who’d been with Otis three years now, stood by with a hose for safety.
The flames rose as high as the trees and kicked off a heat that burned Otis’s skin. Sweat dripped down his face and neck. He turned back and saw his boys watching through the window.
A sharp pain took him by surprise and caused him to reach for his chest. His legs gave way, and then all went black.
Otis woke in a hospital bed. Monitors chirped. An IV drained into his arm. He felt a warm, familiar hand slip into his.
“What happened, Bec?”
