Cochran was thinking of the god who had awakened him with an apparent earthquake in the Troy and Cress Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas nearly five years ago, and of Nina, who had preferred that god’s fatal love to his own.
“In the second line,” Nardie went on, “taxat is a first-declension verb, taxo, tax-are, meaning ‘hold, value, esteem.’ Literally, it’s ‘if your praise values you well; but in English that’d be ‘if you value your praise well.’ Sua is a possessive pronoun—it has to be in the nominative case, though I’d have liked suam better; anyway, it’s feminine, agreeing with the feminine laus, which is ‘praise’ or ‘fame.’ I think ‘your fame’ here is supposed to be actually, literally feminine in relation to this Amor person, who is fairly emphatically masculine. Laute is ‘gloriously.’ Tenebis is a second-declension verb: ‘to hold, to arrive at.’”
Mavranos was impatiently waving the eyeliner pencil in front of his face. “Nardie, what does the goddamn thing mean?”
A shaky sigh buzzed out of the speaker. “I’m explaining why I think it means what I’m gonna tell you, Arky, okay? Now listen, the last line really does flicker between alternate readings; I just finished untangling this a few minutes ago. Sole, with a comma after it, is like Roma in the first line, it has to be the vocative of sol, direct address for ‘sun,’ as in ‘O Sun.’ Medere is an infinitive or a gerund—or, as we’ve got here, an imperative—of ‘cure, remedy’; it’s not so much ‘to cure’ or ‘curing’ as it is an order, see—‘fix it!’ or ‘remedy it!’ Rede is ‘louse,’ the singular noun, as in Pliny’s use pediculus or the English word ‘pediculosis,’ which means an infestation of lice. Now the verb Ede is very interesting here; it’s either from edo, edere, edi, esum, which ‘is the usual Latin verb for ‘devour, consume, eat away’—or else it’s another verb, edo, edere, edidi, editum, which means ‘breathe one’s last, bring to an end,’ or at the same time ‘give birth to,’ or ‘give forth from oneself.’ Either verb works here, though the long e imposed by the trochaic meter makes me favor the second one. Perede is lemphasis, emphatic repetition of the previous verb, whichever that is. And melos is generally translated as ‘song,’ but it’s a Latinized Greek word—obviously, from the suffix, right?—and the Greek for melos can also be ‘limb.’ As a Latin word it could be either nominative or accusative here, but with the Greek form it’s got to be accusative, a direct object.”
“What,” said Mavranos, speaking with exaggerated clarity, “does—the-damn-thing-mean?”
“Okay. In my interpretation, it means: ‘O spiritual power on Earth, the god of love will come to you suddenly and abruptly,’ either ‘with dancing movements’ or ‘as an earthquake’—or as both, conceivably. ‘If you value your praise highly you will hold it’—or ‘arrive at it’—‘gloriously. O Sun, remedy the louse: give forth from yourself, and give forth from yourself again, your limb.’ And with the confusion of the two edo verbs, there’s the implication of ‘your devoured limb:’”
“Leave the suicide king in the deck,” said Plumtree.
Mavranos frowned at her, but nodded. “I think I tried to tell Scott that, when we went to Northridge after the earthquake a year ago. The subterranean phylloxera lice were a summons from…under sanctified ground.”
“He never could bear to cut back the grapevines, in the midwinter,” said Nardie’s voice from the speaker, “after that first year. Even when the babies started to get fevers and pulmonary infections in the winters, and he had to eat No-Doz all day long, and his fingernails bled.” There was a pause while she might have shrugged. “He was still strong in the summers.”
Cochran was remembering putting out his hand to keep the face in the stump from being beheaded. “What we do next,” he said, glancing at everyone but finally fixing his gaze on Angelica, “is what?”
Angelica gave him a tired smile. “Thank you for the we,” she said. “We won’t ask you for your gun again. What we do next,” she said, stepping away from the counter and stretching, “can’t be anything else but summon Kootie’s silly old black lady, I guess.” She dropped her arms and looked at Plumtree. “We’ve got to talk to her in person.”
“In this person, you mean,” said Plumtree, though only in a tone of tired resignation. “Jeez, if my own genetic father, imposed on me, gives me toothaches and nosebleeds, God knows what this strange old woman will be like.”
“No,” said Kootie, “your father never died, but Mammy Pleasant did. She’s a ghost. When Edison had possession of me, there was nothing like that afterward. Ghosts don’t have the, the psychic DNA of a body anymore, they’ve got no vital structure to impose on the living body that hosts them.”
“Cool,” sighed Plumtree. “Not really my idea of a fun date anyway, to tell you the truth, but I guess that’s neither here nor there.” She stood up from the table. “Tell me what I’ve got to do.”
“I’m Bernardette Dinh,” came the voice from the speaker, “at the king’s overthrown Camelot in Leucadia.”
“I’m Janis Cordelia Plumtree, and my compadre here is Sid Cochran. I hope we can all meet in person one day, in the presence of the king.”
“Back in Solville,” said Kootie hesitantly, “Mammy Pleasant told us, ‘eat the seeds of my trees.’”
Angelica now reached into the pocket of her denim jacket and pulled out a fistful of what looked like angular gray acorns. She dropped them onto the kitchen table, and their rattling was nothing like bar dice. “We picked these up this morning, at the foot—sorry, at the waist—of one of her suffering trees. Koala bears eat this stuff, so it’s probably not poison,” she said. “I figure we can make an infusion in wine, with some of ’em, and grind up some others to mix with flour and make bread.”
BOOK THREE: GOUT DE TERROIR
The vine by nature is apt to fall, and unless supported drops down to the earth; yet in order to keep itself upright it embraces whatever it reaches with its tendrils as though they were hands.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
“I am afraid of it,” she answered, shuddering.
“Of it? What?”
“I mean of him. Of my father.”
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
IN the Salinas and Santa Clara and Livermore valleys, on the jade green slopes that stretched away from the highways up to where the Santa Cruz Mountains in the west and the Diablo Range in the east met the gray sky, the newly head-pruned grapevines stood in rows like gnarled crucifixes, as if a tortured god hung at endlessly reiterated sacrifice in the cold rain.