Valley of the Moon. Melanie Gideon

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СКАЧАТЬ Now I was doomed. I would have to attend the party.

      “Get down here, you cranky old man!” she shouted.

      She stood in the meadow surrounded by a group of children who all craned their heads up and began shrieking for me as well. My heart filled at the sound of their voices.

      If only I’d brought my camera. I was not a sentimentalist, but I would have liked to have captured that moment. To freeze time in my lens. To be able to gaze back at the image of the party just beginning. To remember precisely how it felt when the pitchers of lemonade were full. When the cake had not yet been cut, and the afternoon stretched out in front of us.

      Early the next morning, before dawn, I went outside to relieve myself. As I was walking back into the house, the floor began to shake. A temblor. I froze in the foyer, waiting for it to stop. It did not.

      Martha shouted from upstairs. “Joseph!”

      “Come down!” I yelled. “It’s an earthquake!”

      Martha appeared at the top of the stairs in her nightgown, her eyes wide. The staircase rattled, the banister undulated.

      “Hurry!” I held out my hand as she ran down the stairs. I threw open the front door and we stumbled into the yard. The full moon was a bone-white orb in the sky.

      The sounds that followed next could only be described thus: a subterranean clap of thunder, an ancient sequoia splitting in two, a volley of bullets, the roaring of a train coming into the station. A preternatural whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, a lasso spinning through the air.

      We’d been through many earthquakes and I knew one thing for certain. Never had there been one like this.

      It was April 18, 5:12 A.M. We clung to each other on the front lawn and waited for the shaking to stop.

      When we walked back into the house, Martha gasped. Nothing had been disturbed. No painting had fallen off the wall, no porcelain jug had bounced off a counter. No books had slid out of a bookshelf. No brick had cracked in the chimney. Everything looked just as it had before. It was incomprehensible. In every earthquake, no matter how minor, we’d sustained some damage. This temblor was clearly a monster and yet …

      “Quickly,” said Martha. “We must see how the others have fared.”

      We all knew the emergency drill. Fire or quake—congregate at the dining hall.

      The sky slowly brightened, from indigo to a robin’s-egg blue. We walked through Greengage in a state of disbelief. No trees were downed. No chasm rent a field in two. The schoolhouse, the cottages, the dormitories, the winery, the barn, the cooper’s shed, the workshop, every structure was intact.

      Martha, who rarely showed her affection for me in public, picked up my hand and threaded her fingers through mine. It was not a romantic gesture. It did not make me feel like we were husband and wife. Instead it stripped me of my years and made me feel as if we were two orphan children wandering through a vast forest.

      You might think our behavior odd. Why weren’t we rejoicing? Clearly we’d been spared. But I was a realist, as was Martha.

      Something was very wrong.

      Everybody was present and accounted for, and there wasn’t so much as a single scratch or a scraped knee. If there were wounds, they were not the visible sort.

      The only thing that was different was the towering bank of fog that hung at the edge of the woods.

      “Glen Ellen,” Magnusson reminded us.

      “Yes,” said Martha. “Of course, our friends in Glen Ellen.” She clapped her hands together and shouted out to the crowd. “We can’t assume they’ve been as fortunate as us. We must go to them.”

      I stopped a moment to admire my spitfire of a wife. Barely five feet tall, maybe ninety pounds. Butter-yellow hair, which was loose around her shoulders, as the earthquake had interrupted her in mid-sleep. Martha was not a woman who traded on her beauty. It shone through, even though she eschewed lipstick and rouge and wore the plainest of serge skirts. I felt a sharp prick of pride.

      It took us nearly an hour to organize a group of men and a wagon full of supplies.

      “Be careful,” said Martha nervously as I climbed up on my horse. “There could be more aftershocks.”

      “The worst is over,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”

      “I don’t like the look of that fog,” she said. “It’s so thick.”

      It was a tule fog, the densest of the many Northern California fogs. When a tule fog descended upon Greengage, spirits plummeted, for it heralded day after day of unremitting mist and drizzle. But these fogs were vital to the vineyard as well as the fruit and nut trees. Without them the trees didn’t go into the period of dormancy that was needed to ensure a good crop.

      “I know the way to Glen Ellen. I could get there blindfolded.” I smiled brightly in order to allay her fears. “We’ll be back before you know it.”

      Within seconds of entering the fogbank, I fell off my horse, gasping for air. Disoriented, confused, my chest pounding. A profound, fatal breathlessness.

      The two men who had gone before me were already dead.

      I was lucky. Magnusson pulled me out before I succumbed to the same fate. Friar, our doctor, came running. He later told me that when he felt my pulse, my heart was beating almost four hundred times a minute. Another few seconds in the fog, and I would have died, too.

      In my experience, when the unthinkable happens, people respond in one of two ways: they either become hysterical or are paralyzed. Greengage’s reaction was split down the middle. Some panicked and screams of anguish filled the air; others were mute with shock. Only a minute ago we’d ridden into the fog, as we’d done hundreds of times before. And now, a minute later, two of our men, husbands and fathers both, were dead. How could this be?

      I preferred the wails; the silence was smothering. People covered their mouths with their hands, looking to me for answers. I had none. I was as shocked and horrified as anybody else. The only thing I could tell them was that this was no ordinary tule fog.

      We put our questions on hold as we tended to our dead. The two men had been stalwart members of our community, with me since the beginning. A dairyman and a builder of stone walls.

      Magnusson tossed a spadeful of dirt over his shoulder.

      “Let me help,” I said to him, feeling a frantic need to do something.

      “No. You are not well.”

      “Give the shovel to me, I’m fine,” I insisted.

      Nardo, Matteo’s sixteen-year-old son, took the shovel from Magnusson. “You’re not fine,” he told me. “You’re the color of a hard-boiled egg.”

      He was right. Whatever had happened in the fog had left me utterly exhausted, and my rib cage ached. It hurt to breathe.

      “Thank you,” I said.

      The boy bent to СКАЧАТЬ