Valley Fever by Katherine Taylor Read Free Book Online Page B

Dad thought, might be an ideal microclimate for cabernet.
    I saw the top of his red tractor deep in the vineyard before he saw me. He kept his father’s original tractor out here in a shed by the river, so he could ride through his favorite vines. He would stop every few rows to check how the bunches were forming, with enough space but not too much, heavy but not too heavy early on. Grapes too heavy earlier in the season need less water as the summer goes on, but watering less in the middle of a central California summer introduces an extra set of risks.
    Other farmers, growers far smaller than Dad, were in their pink stucco offices in the center of Fresno, making phone calls to their packing houses, to their buyers, to the chemical people for next season. Only Dad would be out now, checking his grapes.
    Daddy doesn’t even have e-mail.
    From Paso Robles to Lodi and to Napa, people always told Dad his grapes were the nicest. They were: tight and big and deeply colored. Dad was no good at business, but he was good at land. He only bought ground next to good farmers, and he only bought land that came with its own water. When he bought the ten thousand acres of peaches in the early eighties, he knew by then to rip out the trees within view of the river and plant cabernet in the sandy loam. Dad felt something beyond affection for the grapes, something much closer to love.
    I worried, then that summer but maybe always, that Daddy could be such a good farmer that he would get ruined. Dad thought farming was about ground and attention. He didn’t think quite enough about cost and return. Poor Dad.
    He climbed down from the tractor and rubbed dust and yeast from a cluster of young cabernet. I parked the car at the end of the row.
    â€œThey’re beautiful, Daddy.”
    He looked up, surprised not so much that I found him in forty-five thousand acres of vines and trees, but perhaps that I was still here, in Fresno, at all. He didn’t ask how I knew he’d be right here. Those few hundred acres were the first he’d bought; he saved checking them for the end of the day. He brushed dust off his pants, off his shirt. “They all wanted dry valley land. By the river you could flood,” he said. This was one of the things he said all the time.
    â€œI know it.”
    Dad loved to remind us how well he’d done by buying the land near the San Joaquin. We could hear the air move past the slow river from where we were standing. “So much for flooding.”
    Every year in California, the farmers got less and less water from the state. That year the state started talking about opening up the Friant Dam, saving the delta smelt, a tiny fish you can’t eat, and the farmers were beside themselves about the loss of water. Farmers get upset when it rains and upset when it doesn’t. Two years ago, a light rain fell in June and split all the cherries. Mother said every year, “They’re always complaining about something.”
    â€œWhen do these get picked?”
    â€œWhy don’t you move back here and work for me, Inky? The business isn’t so hard to learn.”
    â€œI have a job, Dad. I don’t want to scrub Uncle Felix’s tanks.” In fact, scrubbing Uncle Felix’s tanks would likely have been more satisfying than the work I was not doing every day. There’s something to be said for doing the kind of work you can see. But I wasn’t qualified to scrub tanks. It’s demanding physical labor, usually done by muscled twenty-two-year-old Davis graduates desperate to work in the wine industry, and I was pretty certainly not capable of it.
    â€œWe won’t make you scrub tanks.”
    Girls I’d gone to school with had come back from their spells in San Francisco or Boulder or New York to work in sales or management for their family farms or shopping centers or packing companies. Maria Angelico, who’d gone to high school and college with me, had