Estate Bottled Tears

Ambitious peaceful beginnings and the cost of waiting

I hadn't heard a thing about the witches before I talked to Fred, and even after he brought them up, I was skeptical. I stood in the front room of his living quarters for several minutes, gazing around and puzzling over the best way to direct the conversation to other things, real things, things I hadn't heard earlier.

Hanging randomly from the dark-stained gloss varnished walls, were four mandolins, a few broad-brimmed hats, and three racks of long guns sorted by type: antique/black powder, shotguns, and a selection of modern rifles that gleamed silently from a rack by the dark vacant window. The room had no overhead lights and the three shaded floor lamps cast those kinds of shadows that made space larger. They failed, however, to illuminate the elk head over the fireplace until your eyes adjusted completely to the shadows. It seemed real for an instant, and my heart surged for a few beats.

Fred's furniture, expended from the main house as styles changed over the years, was too large for the room, and I sat in a well worn overstuffed chair while he handed me a jelly jar full of red wine, the wine he and Ernie'd been into for a while now.

I asked him how long he'd worked here, but he didn't answer at first. Instead, he put a log on the fire and leaned back in his chair, then he took a long sip of wine and began with, 'well sir, I'll tell you.'

He'd worked for Polly's father, and then for Polly, most of his working life. He'd been discharged from the navy in San Francisco after the Korean War and not wanting to return to New Jersey, he'd responded to a help wanted ad in the San Francisco Examiner.

'The winery was in its heyday, then,' he said. He pointed through the kitchen door to shelves of bottled wine that he'd saved over years. They weren't shelves, though, like I'd come to know shelves. They were diamond shaped holes in a massive floor to ceiling lattice work constructed out of one by twelve redwood boards. Ernie and I could see the protruding bottle necks through the kitchen door.

'Everybody took pride in their work, then,' he said, 'pride in the wine.'

He was one of those people you'd known all your life, though we'd only met a few hours earlier. He'd come to Polly's office to complain about Ernie, who he hadn't met yet, and who'd parked outside the front gate in an effort to deliver my luggage.

Tall and still pretty agile for a man passing middle age, he'd hooked his fingers over the door sill and hung in the entrance of the library like a snow-haired orangutan while he said to Polly and Mrs. Lattimer, 'there's some scissorbill wants in out at the front gate. Says he's got a delivery for some guy named Lanny O'Brian.' Of course, I'm Lanny O'Brian.

But now, while staring into the extreme depths of the fire, Fred's narrative veered from the chronology of his employment, to a description of some of the more recent and troubling aspects of it. It's funny how, when you ask an innocent question, people seem to know what you're really after, especially if they have an overriding reason to want to tell you.

'Polly's father, Herb,' he continued, 'always was a big drinker, but it got worse after Ted. Real bad the last ten years; made bad decisions, hired the wrong people, fired the wrong people, and pretty much trusted the wrong people.'

Fred contemplated the wine in his glass before going on. 'Had a bookkeeper run off with half a million bucks. Cops found the guy in Vegas; money was gone. He went to jail, but Herb had to borrow to meet payroll and pay the bills.'

I didn't need so much detail but I wanted to let him tell it his own way, so I said nothing. Ernie sat in the glow of the fire, not moving, like a still life painting.