The Stonemason’s Wife

When I turn into the farmhouse road, the hum of snow tires changes to the crunch of ice shattering in the frozen puddles of Isabelle’s driveway. Timothy stubble from last autumn’s harvest pokes through a crust of snow in the quiet fields. Only the wavering, mirage-like air above the flue cap suggests anyone is home. That, and an unfamiliar pickup parked by the chicken house. Beyond the shadowy line of cedars along the west pasture, Spanish Peak rears resplendent with dark timber veiled in scarves of fog. The smooth granite shoulders of the Seven Sisters glisten in snow.

The Giannetti place has fallen into disarray. The garden that each year sprang into a riot of vegetables now sprawls thigh-deep in the skeletons of tansy ragweed and thistles. Long, leafless leaders of quince and forsythia droop to the ground along the driveway. Wild rose and dock crowd the fence lines.

Before I can raise my hand to knock on the screen door, Isabelle opens it. In the few long seconds it takes her to bring my name to her lips, I understand that I have dropped by at the wrong time. Her cloud-flecked blue eyes glower with a coldness I’ve never seen in her. She wears a horrible falling-apart soccer jersey, probably cast off from one of her granddaughters who are now grown women with children of their own. Her iron-gray hair sticks to her head in clumps. Behind her, where coleus and tomato plants had clambered in the sunny windows of the mudroom, a cluttered darkness yawns. She pushes the door open and I ready myself to nudge aside the scrum of cats and kittens that will come streaking out. But there is only a narrow swath of dirty newspapers making a path into the kitchen beyond. Inside, the air stings with the tang of smoke escaping from an opened wood stove door. A fresh pine log spatters.

Emilio sits at the Formica dining table by the wood stove, his great stonemason’s hands clutched before him. He’s an old man now, shrunken and sinewy. As he rises to greet me, I see that his trousers are held up with a frayed hemp rope. He rearranges the deepest note of hurt in his faded brown eyes as he stands to welcome me. The air of the dark kitchen sizzles with the blue flame of an argument in full swing.

I take a chair at the table and shoot Isabelle a questioning look. I haven’t seen her husband in this place for ten years. After their boys left home and married, Emilio took a fancy to a piece of land in the hot tangle of oak and Manzanita in the western foothills of the Sierra. There, near the wastelands of the California Gold Rush he made a whole new farm with his own hands—every brick, post and wire—and settled in to grow persimmons in the great, shimmering heat of the chaparral hills. Isabelle chose to remain in the mountain valley on the farm they wrested from decay as newcomers to the northern Sierra.

A lifetime ago I first saw Meadow Valley through the windshield of my Volkswagen Squareback on a trip with my friend Sherilyn to buy eggs and goat’s milk. We were in thrall with the Giannetti farm because Isabelle and Emilio grew, raised, or made everything their family needed. We loved talking with the Gianetti men: three young adult boys and their father, Emilio, our favorite. Shirtless on the scaffold in summer’s golden days, he could be mistaken for one of his sons: dark-haired and narrow-waisted, with boyish, resilient muscles, burnished skin and a joyous shine in his soft eyes.

When we came to have Sherilyn’s nanny goat bred or to return a glass gallon milk jar, Emilio would step down from the scaffold where he was replacing the wooden siding of the barn with soft brown brick. We girls stood barefoot in the dirt driveway in our halter tops and long hip-hugger skirts, exchanging recipes with him in the clean mountain light: sprouted mung beans, brewer’s yeast cocktails, lentil loaf.  Emilio raved about Bragg’s Multi-Amino recipe for a high-potassium shake he said turned his greying hair black again.

While we dallied with Emilio, Isabelle labored in the distance, keeping to the chores her husband set for her. She moved deftly down the garden rows, carried feed to the barn, brought a brimming pail from the milking stanchion. Occasionally Emilio interrupted our chat to line her out with a curt order: “Put fresh straw in the chicken house!” “Let the pigs out into the south pasture!”  We thought it odd that she didn’t visit in the sun with us. We wondered about her, this shy woman who kept a subsistence farm on ten mountain acres with her handsome husband. What was her story?

I only learned how Isabelle met the Italian who became her husband long after Emilio left her alone in the mountains. As the years of his absence lengthened, I continued to stop by for eggs and goat’s milk. Bit by bit, as I sat with Isabelle in her kitchen over fresh cheeses and homemade bread and wine, she told me of her girlhood and her early life with Emilio.

“My parents fled with the children to France from Northern Italy during the second world war,” Isabelle told me in the charming French accent she’s retained over the long years. “I was just a child. My grandmother kept a tavern in the French countryside, so we had something to eat,” she says, holding out her cupped hands. “Growing up, I waited on soldiers there. Those young men—boys, really—craved the food of their home villages. They came flocking to our tavern for the anti-pasto my grandmother made, the goat’s milk cheese, and slices from our giant wheels of bread.”

There at the tavern, Isabelle first laid eyes on Emilio, a soldier and a stonemason. As I sit at Isabelle’s Formica table sipping her dark red wine on a beautiful autumn day, Isabelle brings an album and shows me the sole photo that remains of Emilio in those war-torn years. He is jaunty, self-assured, handsome and intense. “Good-looking, yes?” she asks with a shrug, as if there is any question. It’s easy to see how she took a liking to him when he stepped to the bar for a plate of her grandmother’s anti-pasto.

The war dragged on. Emilio and the soldiers came and went. Isabelle grew up under the weight of that war¾the privation and constant specter of death. “I saw the Nazis round up the Jewish people in our village. The troopers had guns and they marched our neighbors to big canvas-covered trucks and drove them away. We never saw them again.” She knew the unspeakable secret that for years, friends sheltered a man beneath the floorboards of their barn.

Under her mother’s watchful eye, Isabelle passed through adolescence chaste and obedient. Her sole experience of the world beyond the tavern was a weekly walk with her grandmother. They lugged their willow baskets of bedding and soiled work clothes to the village fountain where the women gathered on washing day. “I hated their gossip,” Isabelle tells me. “They said horrible things about the other women in the village¾how someone flirted with someone’s husband, whose children misbehaved in church, whose bodice was too tight. I preferred the easy talk of men and boys at the tavern.”

The war years were lean. “We were always hungry,” Isabelle mutters in a far-away voice. “But my mother didn’t send me away to work as a seamstress’s apprentice or a cook’s helper. They indentured young people to trades in those starving times,” she says, holding her hands to her chest as if in grateful prayer. “Instead, my mother walked out to work at nearby farms for a dozen eggs, a pound of butter or a pail of milk for the family. I stayed at the tavern and worked with my grandmother.”

After the war, the stonemason came back for Isabelle. “To tell the truth,” she remembers, dropping a modest gaze to her work-worn hands, “a couple of other boys were interested too. I didn’t know how to choose between them. So, when Emilio came around, I thought, “Why not?” She was intrigued by him—Emilio Giannetti—whose eyes on her were like melting dark amber.

But her uncle warned: “He just wants you to wash his socks. You could have a better life.” Today, at her kitchen table with the wood stove crackling, Isabelle remarks, “My father was the finest man ever. He wasn’t crazy about Emilio. ‘Don’t do it,’ he cautioned me. My grandmother didn’t approve either.”

But she married him, and after a few months they sailed for Canada. She sighs and whispers, “I never saw my mother again.”

Another winter blows into Meadow valley. I’ve recently married and moved to my husband’s cabin about a mile from the Gianetti place. A gathering storm sweeps snow from the quiet country road as I walk to visit Isabelle. The aroma of baking bread swirls into the frigid air as she pushes the back door open. For a moment her white-flecked blue eyes shine with an expression of surprise I can imagine on her face as a young girl. I hang my scarf and coat on the laundry rack that stands winter-long the by the crackling woodstove in Isabelle’s kitchen, grateful for the warmth. Snowflakes hurl at her kitchen window.

“So you sailed with Emilio to Canada,” I offer, hoping to kick-start more of her story.

“Well, we went in steerage,”  she says in a voice dark with memories. “I was pregnant, weak and sick. I could barely stand when we finally walked off the ship in Montreal. My time wasn’t far off.” She goes inward a few seconds, lost in time, then leans to open the woodstove to set a Doug fir log on the coals. “We took a cheap room in an immigrant hotel by the St. Lawrence River. We didn’t have a crumb to eat. Emilio got up before light, put on his wool coat and cap and went out to find work.”

Isabelle waited as the day ripened and shadows crept across the room. Hunger gnawed at her belly. Evening drew down and she still stood, distraught, at the window, searching the narrow, dirty street. It was long after dark when Emilio showed up in the company of a French priest. He’d lost his way. “I came to the door in tears,” she says, her face distorted. “But he didn’t comfort me. ‘Stupid girl!’ he shouted, shaming me in front of the priest.”

Shortly, they moved to a boarding house teeming with other immigrant workers. “The concierge was mean,” Isabelle tells me, “A shouter. She gave me only a few minutes to make one meal a day in her kitchen. It stank with rot.”

The baby boy came squalling into the world in their barren room. “My husband wrapped him in a clean shirt and taught me to diaper, bathe and feed him. How did he know?” Then began a lonely time when Isabelle and the baby waited in the bleak room for Emilio to return from the world of sunshine, work and the bustling streets with their tangle of languages.

“I wrote to my mother,” Isabelle admits, wringing her hands with the grief she remembers. “I told her I was saving for the passage back to France.” But a scorching letter of reply came back, admonishing her to be faithful to her husband.

It’s high summer. I’ve ambled over to Isabelle’s, eager for her company and a dose of her stories. We’re nibbling snap peas from her garden. Loaves of fresh bread cool on the kitchen counters. “Okay,” I start, impatient for Isabelle to continue her story. “But how did your family end up here, in the northern Sierra?”

For the next twenty years Emilio uprooted her time and time again, taking her to small towns and farmlands across Canada and the United States. She bore and partly raised two more sons, and prepared, tended, and abandoned a half-dozen garden plots for the promise her husband sensed just beyond the horizon of each new home.

“Well,” Isabelle begins, “We came to Meadow Valley by accident. We’d settled in St. Helena, you know, California’s wine country. We were happy there.” She shows me a Polaroid photo of her family at the dining table, perhaps celebrating a birthday. Isabelle, an Italian woman from the old country, stands, young and stylish in a form-skimming floral sixties dress, beaming among her handsome boys and husband.

The family happened upon the lush mountain valley on a summer drive through the northern Sierra. There, on a ten-acre parcel stood a house and barn on a south-facing pasture with a For Sale sign in the yard. Snow gleamed on a granite ridge that sheltered the valley. Dark green cedars lined a gurgling irrigation ditch. A country road wandered past gold-rush-era cabins and patches of conifer forest. Creeks watered intricate meadows where snipes chuckled and red-winged blackbirds trilled.

“I cried when Emilio put a FOR SALE sign in front of our house in St. Helena. I begged him not to move the family again! I took the sign down every morning after he left for work and put it back before he came home for lunch.” Isabelle sighs and gazes down at her hands gripping one another as she remembers this fraught time. “But a gentleman showed up one lunchtime one day and our place was sold.”

Emilio set about putting the mountain farm in order. He hauled the junk, righted the fences, dug thistles and brought water to the fields. Goats, feeder calves and pigs ran free on the immaculate pastures. Chickens and turkeys bantered in clean-swept runs. He coaxed a quarter-acre garden from the rocky soil with straw mulch and manure.

From time to time, Emilio drove Isabelle to town to buy essentials they couldn’t make themselves: matches, baking soda, salt, coffee, sugar, toilet paper. Once in a great while I would see her in the grocery, scuttling down an aisle with a small plastic grocery basket hanging from her arm, her head down in shyness. When Emilio finally replaced the washboard with a real washing machine, Isabelle splurged and bought laundry detergent. “Our homemade fat-and-lye soap gummed up the new washer,” she explains with raised eyebrows, as if the purchase of store-bought soap was an ill-gotten pleasure.

Summer and winter, plastic bags and barn rags, shirts and jeans fluttered on the clothesline at the Giannetti place. Carboys of wine bubbled in the back room where jars of antipasto lined the shelves. Cheeses aged in their cocoons of cheesecloth. Ham hocks hung in the smoke house. Bread rose under damp cloths in the kitchen. Wandering Jew prowled the mudroom windows.

Isabelle packed sausages in pig’s intestines, rendered fat to soap, milked, churned, brushed the aging cheeses with butter and slopped the chickens and pigs. She knelt in the vast garden, put up corn, peas and tomatoes, made wine and antipasto and kneaded bread. In the heat of late summer, Isabelle scythed and raked hay with her husband and sons. “Every evening, my hungry men came to my kitchen,” she says as she stares out the window, smiling in memory of those golden days.

In time, the Giannetti sons settled nearby in Meadow Valley. Isabelle cooked and sewed for their American wives, and soon, for their young daughters too. The grandchildren made miniature loaves with their grandmother, strewed their crayons and ribbons around her kitchen, and their art projects crowded the refrigerator door.

The sons had learned the mason’s art at their father’s side. With their fine-sculpted bodies and curly dark hair, the four of them cut handsome figures as they worked together, balancing on the high scaffolding. Their stone works became renowned among the valley people, who called on the Giannetti boys to build patios, fireplaces, retaining walls and chimneys. Soon the sons were driving to distant mountain villages with their bricks and mortar, flagstones, wheelbarrows, cockscombs, drags and chisels. They prospered and faced their own houses with stone, and built grand rock retaining walls along their curving driveways.

Meanwhile, Emilio’s lust for a new land overtook him. He hungered for an orchard in the dry foothills to the west. But Isabelle would not be uprooted again. “Go,” she told him. She stayed on then, seeing to the garden and the animals, stripping the heavy tomato vines and walking to the barn at dawn with the milk bucket dangling from her arm. She knitted for her small granddaughters and baked great batches of bread for her sons’ families. The little girls spent bright days in their grandmother’s kitchen. They lolled in the rump-sprung loveseat by the woodstove and sewed dresses for their dolls from scraps pulled from the remnants bag. Every few days Isabelle coasted past our cabin on her old blue bike, its basket laden with fresh loaves or gallon jars of milk for her sons. She’d look up with her startling blue and girlish eyes, give a small wave and pedal past on the quiet road under the soughing pines.

After Emilio left, the garden flourished for a time. Generations of rabbits increased in the barn, and Isabelle sold them for meat or for local kids’ 4-H projects. People still came from miles around for fresh goats’ milk and eggs. Round cheeses, jars of fresh-canned tomatoes and loaves of all kinds cluttered the kitchen counters.

In off years, she hired a bull to breed the milk cow. She weaned the calf and put it out to pasture. Emilio would drive up from the valley each year when the December frost settled in¾his mission for today, in fact, and the reason I find him sitting in Isabelle’s kitchen¾to shoot the calf for meat. He’d say his pleasantries to his wife and haul the calf’s meager body home to his farm in the foothills.

As grey crept into Isabelle’s hair, she learned to drive, took house-cleaning jobs in town, saved enough money to take her boys and their families to the old country. Neighbors died or moved away and newcomers came to claim the modest houses on Bucks Lake Road. The little girls grew up and married soldiers who took them to harsh places far away. Bit by bit the garden shrank and weeds stole along the fence lines. A faint stink still hung in the air of the barn where the bill-goat had been penned. The rabbit hutches stood vacant. In the farmhouse, bedrooms and sitting rooms fell into disuse and became catchalls for the detritus of farm life. Dusty spider webs dangled from the ceilings.

I walked over to visit Isabelle every few months after Emilio left. As we talked, our lips became stained with her dark wine, and she gradually shared her grief and anger. Hers was a sorrow laced with fury that rolled on and on like thunder. It seems that some years before he went to the foothills, Emilio had joined a religious cult in the valley. That these people didn’t celebrate Christian holidays became a red-hot wedge that would not be cooled between Emilio and Isabelle. She keened, “What kind of man would refuse his family the turkey, the lighted tree, the presents, the grace we said at the family table, the candles, the excitement of our granddaughters at Christmastime?” But Emilio would have none of it. “He abandoned his family for those crackpot ideas,” she told me flatly, with her empty hands held out in front of her.

I remember those long years as I sit uncomfortably in Isabelle’s kitchen on this winter day while flames huff in the stove. Emilio wrings his hands with a tenderness that makes me wonder if he longs for his wife’s comforting touch. Isabelle stands stock still by the stove, clutching her elbows, ignoring Emilio. It’s awkward, seeing them locked in their dark struggle. I gaze through the window at the empty pastures, hoping to see that the golden days are still out there, shining on the green meadows.

But everything has shifted here in the mountains. The northern spotted owl is endangered. Because of this, timber sales have stalled, lumber mills closed. There hasn’t been enough work for the sparse populations of these mountain valleys. People haven’t been able to pay their mortgages and many of our neighbors have lost their houses to the banks. Stores in town have closed. My own family is hurting for work. We think we’ll soon have to leave the life we love here in these mountains. Every time I drive back to the valley from town, I feel the wrenching sadness of an impending departure.

So, I’m checking in on Isabelle, my stalwart friend whose hard work has created a life of plenty. I hate the thought of leaving her behind if my family is forced to move away. Today I savored the thought of making a happy stop at her farm, to chat in her bright, busy kitchen and perhaps drink a bit of her homemade wine. But the sunshine of the Giannetti place has turned to something hopeless and bitter.

Emilio reaches over and adjusts the damper. Isabelle doesn’t take the end chair at the kitchen table but stands with her back to him. A long moment passes, during which fond greetings should be exchanged and the kettle set on the eye of the snapping stove. “Are you having a fight?” I propose, by way of acknowledging Isabelle’s stiff pose and the angry words that hang severed between them by my presence. Emilio shrugs and offers to the air between us that he is only visiting his wife, as he always does. His lips shape the angular foreign words with a sweetness and a slight lopsidedness that makes this intelligence seem a delicious fact. In his reedy tenor he adds that this is his home too, after all.

Isabelle whirls, but instead of delivering a retort, she bears down on me with a cold rage I see has completely extinguished the loss she felt at his leaving. The lingering hope and utter despair she knew were gone. In their place remains only the dregs of a life that was sweet for a time. I lower my head because I don’t know how to respond to Isabelle’s glower.

Snow begins to snick at the kitchen window. I take a deep breath and let go of my idea about a pleasant visit in Isabelle’s snug kitchen on a winter day. I glance around in hopes of garnering some scrap for conversation that can cool the anger in this room, but my mind only grasps that years of wood smoke have overlain the pale green kitchen walls with a curious brown patina. Precariously leaning stacks of papers crowd the counters. A washing of pilled and twisted polyester clothes dries on the wooden rack beside the woodstove.

Emilio now offers for her to come live with him at his foothill farm. His musical voice shapes words promising warm winters. “We can come back to the mountains to escape the heat of the valley in summer,” he proposes, aiming a reasonable and conciliatory expression in my direction. The cords of Isabelle’s neck stand out as she makes her way into a bitter rant. She turns, speaking over Emilio’s head with cold finality: “I will never agree to live with a religious crackpot!” Then, with a face that pleads for me to agree, she hisses: “It’s embarrassing. And besides,” she adds, “he has already ruined his family.”

Now Emilio is off and running, struck by the light of God himself. He half rises from the vinyl chair to stand in some invisible shaft of heavenly light while he defends his religion, the people of his church and the absolute truth of his faith while Isabelle huffs and rolls her eyes to show me the depth of his stupidity. Still standing with her back to Emilio, Isabelle clenches her fists and says, sotto voce, “How can he believe this shit?!” But Emilio doesn’t stop. And so, their voices rise in an incredible duet of dissonance as each proclaims to me the dead-center truths of their convictions.

The light begins to dim, and now Emilio points out the meaninglessness of the colorful decals of Frosty and Rudolph the grandchildren stuck to the kitchen window some happy winter long ago. “So what?” Isabelle screams, “Can’t families celebrate the season?” I sit slumped at the table with my forehead in my palms. What way is there out of this wilderness? “Yes, let’s celebrate,” I say, “Good lives, good friends, good memories!”

Isabelle goes to the pantry for a bottle of wine, muttering, “What kind of religious cult could forbid families to have a little joy at Christmastime?” Emilio lowers his head and looks up at me through his eyebrows to let me know what a stubborn one she is. When Isabelle returns with the glasses, we drink in silence. And fill our glasses again. Darkness falls. The logs shift in the stove. “Of course she’s stubborn,” I say to Emilio. “You broke her heart.”

Suddenly stillness clutches the room, holding us in a long awkward moment. The burning light goes out of Emilio’s eyes as he stumbles over this strange information. I struggle to get my breath. Isabelle’s lower lip trembles. She whispers, “Just this morning I hoped something would happen today to change things.” Emilio’s shoulders sag. His gaze drops to his gnarled hands.  Silence. He’s lost. Isabelle pours another round beneath the steamed-up window where faded reindeer decals prance in a snowy sky.