She turned to Echo and signed to her that she should get ready for her lessons. She didn't have to repeat it. Echo's face filled with brightness and expectation. She hurried off to get her books together, but mostly. I saw, to fix her hair the best she could and even sneak on a little lipstick. I didn't think Mrs. Westington had any idea how Echo was developing a crush on her tutor. When she looked at Echo, she still saw the child and not the budding adolescent. She thought her only reason for interest in Tyler was educational.
"There's proof that there are all sorts of hungers in this world," she told me, nodding after Echo. "That girl's starving for knowledge, You just watch her go at it, climbing over one obstacle after another."
"I will." I said, and then I went out to see exactly what Trevor was doing, since she had mentioned it.
He was standing in his section of grapevines, carefully plucking rapes and placing them in a basket. Even with the small section he had grown, this would take forever, I thought. He glanced at me and continued.
The September sky had a bit of a haze but the sun was raining down its rays intensely. Small beads of sweat were shining like tiny pearls on Trevor's forehead. Age hadn't diminished him much. I thought. He was still a big man who looked very powerful, with a full head of stark and thick white hair. However, despite the size of his hands and the thickness of his fingers. I noticed he worked with a surgeon's accuracy and care.
"Good morning," I said.
"Morning. Sleep a little better?"
Trevor was at breakfast the morning after Uncle Palaver's funeral, and he had seen the tossing and turning I had done through the night before scribbled all over my face and highlighted by my drooping eyelids.
"Yes, thank you."
He paused and looked at me. "Know anything about grapes and wine?"
"Not much. I know there's red and white." I replied, and he laughed.
"Don't forget rose. These grapes are
Chardonnay grapes for white wine, which was the Westington's speciality. I didn't know much more about wine than you do when I first set foot on the property. I had just lost my job at a lumber company and that very day Mr. Frank, Frank Westington, stopped in to place an order for some lumber. He overheard me being laid off and asked me if I wanted to come work for him. He wasn't much older than I was, but he had just inherited all this and wanted to expand. He wasn't even married yet, Married Mrs. Westington five years later. Asked me to be his best man, which didn't please his younger brother. Arliss. much. By then they weren't even friends, much less brothers," he added, and plucked some more grapes.
"Why was that?"
"Oh, they got into a furious battle when their daddy left title to the house and property completely to Mr. Frank. His brother. Arliss, was a wasteful, lazy, and self-indulgent young man who thought everything was coming to him," he said, and leaned toward me to add. "That's who Rhona takes after. her uncle Arliss. Anyway, they were what Mrs. Westington called oil and water. Makes you wonder how they could have had the same daddy and mama." He looked at the house and then he leaned toward me and in a loud whisper said. "Makes you wonder if their mama didn't maybe look elsewhere once or twice. Sometimes, I thought the only thing they shared was a last name."
I watched him return to picking the grapes. He had a way of doing it very quickly even though he handled each grape as if it were a valuable jewel. Later. I would hear him call the juice "liquid gold."
"Isn't there an easier way to harvest the grapes?"
"Easier? Sure. Better? No. I hand pick them and put them into small crates to protect them from being crushed in the field. Every step of this process is precious," he emphasized.
"How come you only have this small patch acing?"
He laughed and looked at the house. "She thinks it's because she's always yelling at me for wasting time on a dead cause, but the truth is the tight spacing encourages competition among the plants, yielding small clusters and berries, but more
concentrated fruit. Here," he said, offering rile a grape. "Taste it."
I did. "Sweet as honey. Like a fig or..."
"Ripe apple?"
"Yes," I said.
He nodded. "Chardonnay is one of the few grapes that don't require blending. It stands on its own." He gestured at the small vineyard. "I cloned all these vines from the best Mr. Westington had."
"Why didn't Mrs. Westington want to continue the whole vineyard and the winery?"
"It wasn't her passion. It was Mr. Frank's and there wasn't anyone to inherit it. Certainly not Mr. Arliss and surely not Rhona. She never did any chores around here and had no interest in wine except to drink it with her friends."
"How come they had only one child?"
He continued to pluck the grapes without responding, so I thought he wasn't going to answer. A breeze had picked up from the north and the cooler air felt refreshing. I saw Echo standing behind the screen door looking out at the driveway in anxious
anticipation of Tyler Monahan's pending arrival.