Caire had made his fortune catering to the needs of the forty-niners, dispensing picks and shovels and the like as they hit the pier running with maddened looks on their faces and hand-drawn maps of the Feather River drainage, Coloma and Dutch Flat clutched in their sweating hands, and offering them French porcelain, Sheffield china and fine cutlery when they returned flush with their profits, and this was all well and good. But his ambition was far grander. He saw himself as a propriétaire presiding over a château and cellars of his own, like those of Bordeaux or Languedoc. He had the terroir, now he needed les vignes. (And, not incidentally, a wife, a chatelaine to help him found the dynasty he was building in air each night as his head hit the pillow.) He sailed back to Europe first to acquire the wife — Maria Christina Sara Candida Molfino, of Rapallo, a district where the grapevines had woven their way across the terraced hills from time immemorial, a place where people knew grapes, where they knew wine, where their blood was infused with it and no meal, even breakfast, was without its medicinal touch — and then sailed again to bring back the finest French rootstock he could find.
He chose well, both in marriage, which was to produce nine children, six of whom survived into adulthood, and in matching his grapes to the terroir. The central valley, with the rich mineral content of its soil, its warm days and cool, sea-misted nights, presented ideal conditions for the growing of a suite of varietal grapes, and by the early 1890s the Santa Cruz Island label was shipping high-quality zinfandel, pinot noir, Burgundy, muscat de frontignan, Chablis and riesling up the coast to San Francisco. And when the Phylloxera aphid ravaged the Old World vineyards and laid waste to some 75,000 acres in California as well, Monsieur Caire’s 600 acres of grapes were unaffected — neither the aphid nor the adult Phylloxera fly had the means of crossing the barrier of the channel. Wine was scarce. Prices went up. Even after the proprietor’s death in 1897, the winery continued to prosper in the hands of his two sons, Arthur and Frédéric, right up until the unnatural disaster of Prohibition crushed it some twenty-two years later. Unaffected by such vagaries, the hogs continued their raids and the sheep grazed at will, until finally the sons dug out the vines and threw them on the dung heap for burning, so that all that remained were the deep horizontal furrows striping the flanks of the hills like the scars of an ancient wound.
The proprietor’s will had divided the island into seven parcels, one for each of his children, and one — parcel 5, by far the largest, on which the main ranch and winery stood — for their mother, Maria Christina Sara Candida Molfino Caire, or Albina, as she was known, mercifully, for short. The division was contentious. Each of the siblings felt cheated. Arthur, the eldest son, for instance, was given title to Christy Ranch in the west, but there was no serviceable harbor there to make it useful, while Edmund Rossi, son of his deceased sister Amélie, was awarded the far more desirable parcel number 7, on the eastern end of the island, and Arthur’s sister Aglae wound up with parcel 6, which included Scorpion Ranch and its excellent and protected anchorage. Litigation ensued. The original heirs began to die off and their heirs in turn took up the fight. Conditions deteriorated, the Depression intervened, the sheep kept on grazing.
Finally, in 1937, the main ranch and the four western parcels adjoining it were sold in large to an oil man from Los Angeles, Edwin Stanton, who attempted to revive the sheeping operation, bringing in domestic stock to interbreed with the remnant of the original flock and lure in the outliers. He soon gave it up when the whole of the flock, domestic and feral alike, scattered to the far ends of the island, making it too great a nuisance to round them up annually for shearing, docking and branding, and so he shipped 30,000 sheep to slaughter and focused on cattle, with mixed success. On his death in 1963, his son Carey took over majority ownership and ran the cattle operation until he himself died in 1987 and ceded the entire property to the Nature Conservancy, which hired a professional hunting concern to exterminate the remaining sheep, finally putting an end to the ovine occupation of the major portion of Santa Cruz Island.
But on the eastern two parcels, which remained in the hands of Monsieur Caire’s descendants, the sheep went right on ruminating, stripping the bark from the endemic oak, cherry and ironwood trees, grinding the bishop pine seedlings between their reductive molars, running every stamen and leaf and scrap of pith through the chambers of their four contiguous stomachs till the hills felt the pressure of them like a cinched belt, cinched and looped and cinched again.
By the time Bax took over the operation in 1979, things had fallen to ruin and the sheep were little more than an afterthought. The current owners, Pier and Francis Gherini, great-grandsons of the propriétaire, had come up with a scheme for developing their portion of the island into a resort, replete with marina, golf course, lodges and restaurants, but when the County of Santa Barbara denied them permits at the urging of the National Park Service, their interest flagged and whatever Scorpion Ranch once was, it was no more. It was Bax who brought it back to life. They hired him in an attempt to squeeze some profit out of the place, and he threw himself into the task, taking on new hands, repairing fence, rounding up as many of the ferals as he could and bringing in seventy prize Rambouillet rams to breed up the stock. Rita threw herself into it too. And Francisco. And Anise. They all did. But how could anyone hope to hold anything together when the world was as liable to fracture as Bax’s ribs and the long white bone that was like the bone of a ghost on the sheeny black X-rays of his left leg? Bax was laid up, that was the fact, and trespassers were out there shooting their guns at will and scaring the ewes off their lambs.
Anise had been inconsolable. Once it was over — and it was over when the ravens decided it was, lifting themselves from the bloat and scatter like great winged slugs — Rita went to her. She found her crouched in the beaten grass with the lambs all gathered to her, the hair strung dripping across her face, her shoulders quaking and her clothes wet through with the rain and the blood. Some of the lambs were too weak to stand, their outsized ears fanned out in the grass, their bleating like some diachronic dirge. They needed their mothers — for protection, warmth, milk — and if they didn’t get them soon the loss would go far beyond the seventy-three corpses Rita had already counted.
“Come on, honey,” she said, struggling to control her voice. “Let’s go back to the house and get into some dry clothes. I’ll make you some tea. Or hot chocolate. How about some hot chocolate?”
Anise didn’t respond. She sat hunched over her knees, rocking back and forth, the line of her clenched jaw as bloodless and jumpy as a diviner’s rod. She didn’t even lift her eyes.
Rita stood there in the rain, trying for her daughter’s sake to be gentle, reasonable, calming, motherly, but she felt none of these things. The fact was that in that moment Anise looked exactly like Toby, Toby when he was down, when they played and nobody showed, when the A&R man at the record company told them he had reservations about some of the songs on their second album, that they were weak, worse than weak, that they were shit, pure and unadulterated, and Toby was the last thing she wanted to think about now. Toby with his tantrums, his cheating, his coke. Cocaína, he always called it. As in, Let’s do some cocaína. Cute. Real cute. When they couldn’t even pay the rent.