The Winemaker by Noah Gordon Read Free Book Online Page B

attention.
    “Spinners…and…looms,” he mouthed silently. “And…other…things…”
    “How…many?”
    “Three…hundred!”
    He led Josep and they swam through the sea of sound. Donat’s gestures indicated how draymen poured coal directly from delivery wagons into a chute that dropped it close to two boilers into which four half-naked stokers shoveled fuel without pause, creating steam that ran the great engine powering the looms. Down a brick corridor was a room where the raw wool was taken from bales and sorted for quality and staple length—Donat signified that the longer lengths were better—before being fed onto mechanized tables that shook the wool to allow dirt to sift through a screen onto a container below. Scouring machines washed the fleece and shrank it, and carding machines straightened the fibers and prepared them for spinning. In the carding room, Donat smiled at a friend and touched his arm.
    “My…brother.”
    His co-worker smiled at Josep and took his hand. Then the man touched his own face and turned away. It was a workers’ signal, Josep would learn, indicating that a boss was watching. He could see the overseer—seated behind a table on a small raised platform in the center of the room—looking sharply at them. Next to the overseer a large sign proclaimed
    WORK IN SILENCE!
    SPEAKING DOES NOT ALLOW YOU TO DO PERFECT WORK!
    Donat quickly led him from the room. They followed the path of the wool through the many processes that led to the spinning of the yarn and thread and the weaving anddyeing of the cloth. Josep was dizzied by the noise and the combined stinks of raw wool, machine oil, coal lamps, and the sweat of a thousand active workers. By the time Donat proudly instructed him to stroke the finished rolls of richly colored fabric, Josep was trembling, and eager to do or say anything that would allow him to get away from the ceaseless, conglomerate screaming of the machines.
    He helped Donat dispose of the rotting bale of wool in a dump behind the factory. The sound of the machines followed, but he was grateful to be away from them.
    “Can I have a bag of this stuff? I believe I can use it.”
    Donat laughed. “Why not? This stinking mess is no good to us. You can have as much as you can bear away.” He filled a cloth sack with the wool and smiled indulgently when his strange brother carried it as they walked from the dump.
    Donat and Rosa lived in the mill village, in a tiny “cheap house,” so called because workers rented them from the company inexpensively. His was one in many rows of identical houses. Each house had two miniscule rooms—a bedroom and a combination kitchen and sitting room—and shared an outhouse with a neighbor. Rosa greeted Josep warmly and at once produced the two copies of the sales agreement. “My cousin Carles the lawyer approves the changes,” she said, and watched narrowly as her husband signed both papers. When Josep accepted one of the papers and handed Rosa the notes that were his first payment for the land, she and Donat beamed.
    “We will celebrate,” Donat declared, and hurried away to buy the ingredients of a feast. While he was gone, Rosa left Josep alone in the house but returned very quickly, accompanied by a buxom young woman: “My friend Ana Zulema, from Andalucia.”Both women had clearly prepared for the occasion and wore almost identical dark skirts and starched white blouses.
    Donat returned very quickly with food and drink. “I went to the company store. We also have a company church and a company priest. And a company school for small children. You see, all that we need is right here. We never have to leave.” He laid out spiced meat, salads, bacallá, breads, olives; Josep saw that he must have spent most of the first payment on food. “I bought brandy, and vinegar made by the people that used to buy from Padre. Maybe this very bottle of vinegar was made from Padre’s grapes!”
    Donat drank deeply of the brandy. Even