Valley Fever by Katherine Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

party’s a party.”
    â€œI don’t like having to make conversation with people I didn’t pick myself.”
    â€œPeople might steal your stuff.”
    â€œI’m not telling you anything from now on.” Mother wiped her fingertips on a paper napkin printed with green grapes, taken from a pile in the center of the table. “We need something cheerful around here. A harvest party is what we need. Turkeys lined up down the length of the dining room table. Doesn’t it sound fun?”
    â€œIt’s too hot. Grandma’s parties were in the fall.”
    â€œOh, Ingrid, you’re really a buzzkill.”
    â€œI thought you were poor.”
    â€œNot too poor for a harvest party.” She swept her fingers again and again across the paper napkin. “With absolutely everyone. A party like your grandmother used to give.”
    â€œAre you going to roast a lamb on a spit?”
    â€œDon’t be sarcastic.”
    Every Easter, my father’s parents really had roasted a lamb on a spit. They had learned it from the Greeks who owned the land next door. “There are going to be many more harvests, Mom. We don’t need to have a party this summer.”
    â€œBut why not this summer? Or we could wait until the fall. But by the fall you’ll be busy, you’ll be gone.”
    â€œAll right, if you like, this summer.”
    â€œAfter I find the keys to the silver.”

 
    5.
    The heat did not slow down and the drought kept up and the grapes grew plump. Dad’s grapes, fed largely by well water and protected by riparian rights and not wholly dependent on the water districts, grew especially plump. Vines love a little bit of stress. The grapes would get us through another year after all.
    There had been earlier seasons when Dad grew a few thousand acres of Thompson grapes and sold them as fruit or laid them out to dry, but table grapes and raisins weren’t as profitable as the cabernet, and many years ago he had ripped out half the Thompsons and put in wine grapes. He’d left a thousand acres of Thompsons in the vineyards surrounding the house, because big green grapes reflect more light on the vine. Thompsons were part of Mother and Dad’s landscape.
    Now, apparently, they were making wine from the table grapes.
    It was the middle of July, and Dad liked to pick early, so the fruit would have a little less sugar than usual but there’d be no chance of the grapes being ruined by rain or late-season bugs or an unexpected spike in heat that could spoil them. Under Uncle Felix’s high-Brix plan, the Thompsons had at least another couple weeks to hang. They already tasted delicious to me, and those first few days and then weeks I was back home, neither working nor pretending to work, I liked to walk up and down the vines like I did when I was little and pick the ripest fruit direct from the sun-warm bunches.
    I took Mother’s little black Jaguar through the dusty squares of the ranch toward Madera and found Dad riding his tractor through the vines of cabernet, the grapes he would sell to Uncle Felix just before the fall set in. Cabernet doesn’t thrive in the Central Valley except on a few thousand acres of Dad’s land, land that originally had peaches, and then Thompson seedless, and then, in the past twenty years, cabernet. The climate throughout the valley is too dry and too hot for it. Syrah does well, and merlot does fine, and for a long time those varieties had been shipped to Napa and Sonoma, but cab is more of a challenge. The grapes need moisture and cooler temperatures. Forty years ago, after Dad had inherited his original hundred acres but while he was still scrubbing tanks at Mello to support the farm, he started buying small parcels of land along the river, cheap land no one else really wanted; the humidity and the slightly lower temperatures can be dangerous for peaches or citrus or nuts. Some of this cheap and useless land,