WINERY PEAK
by Chris Scott Graham
CHAPTER ONE
The headache pounded relentlessly against the back of his left eye, waking him again from a night that brought nothing other than troubled fits of sleep. With extreme effort and a low moan he partially opened his bloodshot eyes and then winced in response to the stabbing pain as the light hit his retina. Concentrating, although unable to fully focus, he desperately squinted across the room for the presence of his wife. Locating her soft outline near the doorway quieted his anxiety over being left alone. Another moment passed quietly until, with a tremendous expenditure of his dwindling energy, he lifted his head slightly from the soiled pillow and began to speak haltingly towards his children. Not knowing how to respond to this sudden display of attention, they continued to huddle anxiously against the wall next to the splintered packing crate that served as a makeshift table.
Tall and rangy, and usually clean-shaven with the exception of a dark black pencil thin mustache, he had always been admired among his friends as a strong and handsome man. A deep black stubble peppered with gray flecks now created shadows in shrunken cheeks, and his height even while prone served only to accentuate the spasms that racked his body with every phlegm filled cough. Amid his somewhat disjointed ramblings he continued to quietly repeat, over and over, the same phrase uttered in the urgent tones of a warning; “amargo . . . agua amargo . . .” Another cough triggered spasm racked his chest, further pressing him against sheets damp from a long night of fever induced sweat, and he fell silent. Still feeling weak, he partially rolled over onto his left side and motioned for more water to sip from a small partially cracked Peter Pan cup. The cup was the personal favorite of his six-year-old daughter. With the innocent love of her youth, upon the onset of his illness she had insisted that drinking from it would certainly make everything better.
When he was done drinking his wife carefully took the small plastic cup from his outstretched hand that shook as if with palsy. Although feeling confident in the strength of her prayers, her uneasiness continued to grow as she watched his strength persistently continue to diminish. Her husband had never been seriously ill in the 23 years of their marriage and she had nothing to compare to his present condition, which now included waves of searing heat alternating with bone numbing chills. As he slipped back into a disturbed sleep she drew his five children closer around the threadbare blankets that covered his makeshift bed.
The migrant fieldworker and his worried family were housed in a small building, located near the center of a haphazard cluster of tin sided sheds that made up the close community of vineyard laborers. Constructed in a style that existed throughout the Napa Valley wine growing region, but located out of sight of the well heeled tourist centers, the building consisted of two small rooms and was built using single wall construction. Sheets of metal were nailed to wood framing that was open and exposed on the inside of the building. Light from a small candle added to the light that managed to filter through the room’s single dirty window. There was neither wiring for electricity nor any other heat source. Interior plumbing was also nonexistent. Although located in one of the wealthiest agricultural valleys in California, where large estates and spacious houses dotted the landscape amid picturesque vineyards that provided a favorite assignment for reporters and photographers from magazines throughout the world, among his own people poverty and sickness was not uncommon nor terribly unexpected. Every year many fell ill and died at ages that were far below the “national average.”
Vineyard workers were almost always migrant farm workers as the more labor intensive agricultural practices in the valley did not require full crews on a year round basis. Generally undereducated and most often underrepresented, they uniformly suffered from a complete lack of the basics in sanitary working conditions or housing, and generally experienced a consistent absence of any degree of interest from anyone outside their close-knit community. What was occurring at Winery Peak, however, was becoming impossible even for the outside community to ignore much longer. Over the last several weeks too many good workers had fallen critically ill, all of whom were displaying the same general symptoms, and the publicly available numbers of those affected had spiked upwards in the last three weeks. None of those suffering from the condition, however, had yet died from their illness. But the situation had become serious enough that the county health department had finally directed one overworked case worker to consider the possibility of the outbreak of an epidemic. The case worker had made the effort, on an already overbooked schedule, to drive out to the winery with the hope of conducting a few short preliminary interviews.
Although reaching the remote site where most of the cases were located would involve a drive clear across the valley from her last appointment, and she was sure that her department-issued car was going to break down as soon as she was well outside a reasonable walking distance of the town, the case worker rationalized that the exertion would be worthwhile if she could pull together enough information to write a report that would satisfy her immediate supervisor and push the matter to one of the county’s two health inspectors charged with field investigations and ensuring compliance with temporary housing permits. An hour after reaching the small community she was back on the road, her half-hearted efforts to assess the situation unrewarded. The well intentioned attempts to interview the stricken fieldworkers and their families had been quietly rebuffed despite her attempts to explain to suspicious minds that she was not an investigator from the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization.
The case worker had not been surprised by her lack of success and, as typical when making site visits, walked among the building in order to gather as much information as possible and left behind pamphlets in English and Spanish detailing the services offered by his department. Even though the economics of the wine growers in the valley, and the agricultural industry in general, were dependant on the lower wages that could be pressed on undocumented aliens, the “fueled by fear” politics of the state consistently identified illegal workers as a handy target during troubled economic times. For some time hospitals and clinics throughout the agricultural areas of the state had reported smaller numbers of patients as illegal aliens had avoided any situation were their status may come to the attention of the government, and her visit to the winery was not going to change the course of that troubling trend.
After the case worker left the small group of buildings that included the shed housing the stricken fieldworker his wife hurriedly returned from the doorway to her husband’s side. She dipped a small square of cloth torn from the winery-issued bedding into a pan of cool water and gently wiped his forehead. After a time she paused to tiredly push a small graying strand that had fallen out the mass of her hair that she had clipped into a bun. Looking down at his body, each inch of which was so well known and loved, she was finally convinced that he would not respond without medical help. With a sigh she decided that the risk of involving strangers could not possibly outweigh the risk of losing him. Turning to her eldest son, who had been sitting on the threshold of the doorway looking sullenly out at the world in which his family was forced to live, she handed him the materials the caseworker from the county health department had left behind and instructed him to go and ask for help.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The dirt road wound its way across the hill and into the valley before again disappearing from sight around a sharp bend. Spring wildflowers crowding the sides and small plants growing along the center of the road attested to its general disuse. As the county health inspector paused at the top of the steep slope to catch his breath he turned and examined the view that stretched out behind him. From his current vantage point he could see the edge of the vineyards in the near distance. At this time of year the fields were a beehive of activity as the vines were checked and drip systems repaired. Lining the sides of the fields was an eclectic mixture of trucks and cars, parked haphazardly as the workers arrived that morning from their company housing at the far side of the winery. Although the inspector was now several hundred yards away from the edge of the fields, when the wind gusted the faint smell of commercial fertilizers rose unpleasantly to his face. The gusts also caught and swirled small dust clouds at his feet, leaving a fine grit lining on the edge of his clothes and a definite thirst on the top of his throat.
Tom Murphy had been a health inspector for the county for almost seven years and understood why ten years was considered the maximum before job burnout set in. The valley wineries historically paid its field labor subsistence wages, despite the highly publicized efforts of the labor unions during the past two decades, and “company housing” often consisted of thrown together shacks that lacked electricity or plumbing. Some families obtained water from centralized field wells when available, but many skimmed water from closer irrigation streams and ponds. From time to time union representatives would rouse themselves from their encampment in various dark and cool bars, where they could usually be found generously allocating the union dues to another round of drinks, and lodge a formal complaint with the responsible county authorities. Since the county was effectively controlled by the larger wineries, and the tax revenues that their profits generated, the complaints would be appropriately filed and ignored. A small number of the complaints were investigated from time to time, to make sure the system ran smoothly and to avoid involvement in the periodic claims for farm labor reform. The county health investigators learned how to handle their work discreetly, and quietly point out the more serious problem areas to the appropriate winery foremen for correction. Knowing how this game was played made Murphy a well-liked player among his friends in the department, but did little for his self-esteem.
Walking forward Murphy watched his boots kick little puffs of dust from the road, which consisted mostly of two well-worn tire ruts through a former meadow leading to an old long abandoned limestone quarry. Had he been paying attention, he probably would have enjoyed the pastoral setting of yellow and purple wildflowers amid tall grasses waving slowly in the light breeze. Murphy’s mind, however, was still back at that hot tin shed with the feverish fieldworker and his distraught family. It had not taken Murphy long to realize that the farm worker could soon die without immediate medical attention, and he had exercised the full extent of his very limited authority by calling in a paramedic unit for assistance. The family had insisted, in a mixture of Spanish and halting English, that their family member had fallen ill after coming into contact with “bitter water” near the site of the old quarry. Although Murphy now half wished that he had simply returned to the county health offices and filed the appropriate report for handling by others, upon learning of the nature of the illnesses permeating the cluster of sheds he had concluded that he was not dealing with some semi-isolated form of viral outbreak that could be simply reassigned back to one of the department’s overworked caseworkers. Spurred on by the knowledge that a simple report would merely lie fallow in someone’s overstuffed in-box, and angered by the lack of care that allowed such conditions to exist, he felt compelled to spend the remaining time available that afternoon to search for the cause of the problem.
The quarry had been extensively mined in the early twenties, when limestone had been in great demand for the construction boom that was surging through the growing metropolis to the near south. Over the years the cost of running the operation had closed the mine as cheaper building materials had become available. Rainwater over time had gradually filled the great pit, and rusted the remaining pieces of heavy machinery that lay in broken jumbles around the site. Murphy rounded the bend in the road to be greeted by the sight of a rust-pitted crane that stood as a silent sentinel over the scene. He walked cautiously up to the cyclone fence that enclosed the quarry. A heavy padlock and steel link chain encircled the fencepost to the gate, which in turn rested on a large grate that had been designed during the heyday of the mining operations to keep the local dairy cows from wandering down the road and into the open pit when the gate was open. Without a second glance at the gate Murphy ducked through a large hole that had been torn in the side of the fence and returned to the road on the quarry side of the gate. Underfoot the loose dirt on the road gradually changed from a light brown to a dirty white from the powdered limestone residue, and the grasses that grew in the middle of the road thinned out and eventually stopped altogether. The road continued through a cut in the soft rock of the hillside and eventually wove its way up to a flat area near the low lip that separated the two sides of the pit.
During his questioning of the fieldworker’s wife Murphy had learned that the fieldworker had been swimming with several of the other workers in the pit. According to her hesitant explanation, since their arrival at Winery Peak her husband had joined the other men on Saturdays evenings after the afternoon shift. The family had arrived approximately one month earlier for the spring season after harvesting winter crops from the fields near Palm Desert in Southern California. Since there was a lack of sufficient sanitation facilities at the housing sheds their activity was not unusual, and the pit was the only large source of freestanding water that the family had readily available other than the large pond that fed the field pumps. Murphy, thorough as his reputation led people to believe, had already checked the flow from the pumps to find that the draw from the pond and the wells was relatively clean. So he had decided that the quarry pit was also worth checking. This was a decision that seemed much more appropriate when he had parked his car at the farm worker’s shed than now after the long dry hike up the hill.
From the top of the lip of the quarry the water looked turquoise green, and almost motionless since the steep sides of the pit protected the surface from any wind. From his position, with the sun generally overhead but now moving to the west slightly in front of him, the light glanced brightly off of water and into his eyes like a signal. With sweat trickling down the side of his face and under his arms Murphy could feel how the water must have beckoned to the sun-parched workers. Walking to the edge of the water Murphy kneeled down and removed a small glass vile from his pocket. Where the water was shallow he could see the bottom of the quarry as if he was looking through glass. Nothing grew on the bottom to obscure his vision, and the complete absence of any living thing in the water was vaguely unsettling. He unscrewed the top of the vial and blew gently inside to remove any traces of dust before placing it carefully underneath the surface of the water. His steady hand avoided rippling the water, as any turbulence could stir the muck that had settled to the bottom and queer his sample. A small gurgling sound paid quiet testament to the process as Murphy filled the vial from just below the still surface of the quarry basin. Two more containers filled as quickly and he snapped the caps into place to seal the contents. Murphy paused where he crouched before slowly standing and shaking the dust from his knees and drying his hands on the seat of his pants. Before turning away from the calm waters Murphy again peered deeply into the depths of the quarry. A thought crossed his mind, half formed but then lost, and he gently rubbed the sweat from his bare forehead before starting the long walk back down the hill to his car.