Fields of Wrath (Luis Chavez Book 1) by Mark Wheaton Read Free Book Online

Marshak came to the West Coast from Indiana to try his luck at farming in the twenties. He’d tried his hand at cotton, but after three bad harvests in a row, he switched to wine grapes. For this, growing a fruit that required careful and dedicated cultivation, he had a knack.
    Then came Prohibition.
    Though bootleggers slipping liquor across the Canadian border got all the headlines, California vintners were also busy keeping the country stocked with illegal wine. While the making of wine used in communion services was exempted by the Volstead Act, the rate at which California wineries kept producing would have been enough to stock churches well into the twenty-first century.
    Government agents got wise and tried to shutter the renegade vineyards, but sympathetic Sheriff’s Departments made it their civic duty to tip off the local farmers. Men like Walter thrived. And when Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the cozy relationship between vineyards and law enforcement continued.
    Though he became something of a decent wine grape grower, Marshak was no visionary. He had a solid work ethic and enough discipline to break even almost every year, but expansion never entered his mind. For Walter’s sons, Henry and Glenn, this was all they’d thought about since childhood.
    The younger brother, Glenn, had the head for business. Twelve when he took over his father’s books, he dove into the numbers with near-religious zeal. He saw only flaws in the way his father did things. He attacked these imperfections, working late into the night to prove his ways were more efficient and profitable. At best he’d receive a shrug or amused nod for his efforts, at worst an admonishment to stick to the task at hand.
    The experience made Glenn first hate and then pity his father, but it didn’t affect his relationship with Henry. Though firstborn and favored, Henry never lorded it over his younger sibling. Henry’s gifts manifested themselves in the vineyards. He shared his brother’s zeal to innovate and constantly experimented with new farming techniques. When his father frowned on this, Henry shrank his sample size but continued to work.
    After Walter died, the brothers implemented their changes the very next season. They increased their profits and market share so quickly, even the press noticed, dubbing them an overnight success. Where their father had been content to partner with vintners, the brothers cut out the middlemen and established their own winery. They bought up land, vanquished the old notion that a winemaker’s focus should be on creating the finest quality product, and entered the marketplace with a line of affordable table wines aimed at the American mass market.
    While aficionados regarded them as apostates, by the midsixties the Marshaks were a household name, and wine was no longer something just for special occasions. Soon, Americans drank more wine from Marshak vineyards than all European imports combined. As the brothers reached their fifties, their annual income was in the tens of millions.
    They continued to expand, turning their attention to other big California produce, like strawberries and lettuce. Almost superstitiously avoiding cotton due to their father’s early failed harvests, they moved into citrus, buying orchards up and down the state. They moved into nuts. They bought dairy farms. They established their own warehouses and systems of distribution.
    Now in his eighties, Glenn ran the business from downtown Los Angeles, as well as the main administrative campus closer to the fields in Ventura County, a warren of offices nestled in the foothills of the Santa Ynez range.
    Henry, however, had checked out almost three decades prior. He was still listed as his brother’s partner but was semi-retired. After his wife, Robin, died, he took back control of a few select fields, on which he could experiment with new methods of irrigation, organic fertilization, or soil compositing—a farmer’s version of