Read the book: «Valley of the Moon»

JOSEPH

Valley of the Moon, California 1906

The smell of buttered toast was a time machine. I stepped inside it and traveled back to 1871. Back to London. Back to my childhood kitchen, to the lap-bounced, sweets-chunky, much-loved seven-year-old boy I once was, sitting on a stool while Polly and Charlotte flew around me.

Whipping cream. Beating eggs. Chopping parsley and thyme. Oh, their merry gossiping! Their pink cheeks. Nothing scared them, not mice, spiders, nothing. Shoo. All the scary things gone.

“More biscuits, please,” I said, holding out my empty plate.

“No,” said my mother, working the bread dough. She wiped her damp forehead with the heel of her hand. “You’ve had enough.”

If you’d walked into the kitchen at that moment, you’d have had no idea she was the lady of the house, working right alongside the servants. My mother, Imogene Widger Bell, was the only daughter of a knocker-upper. Her father had made his living by rising at three in the morning to knock on the windows of his customers, waking them like a human timepiece. My mother herself had entered service on her twelfth birthday. She was cheerful, hardworking, and smart and ascended quickly through the ranks. From laundry maid to scullery maid. From kitchen maid to under cook. When she was sixteen, she met my father, Edward Bell (the son of the gardener), by a stone wall. She, enjoying a break, the sun beating down upon her face, the smell of apple blossoms in the air, an afternoon of polishing silver in front of her. He, an assistant groundskeeper, coiled tight, knee-deep in brambles, and desperate to rise above his class.

Besotted with my mother, he presented a lighthearted façade to woo her, carefully hiding the anger and bitterness that fueled his ambition. His only mistake as he saw it? To have been born into the wrong family. My mother did not see things that way. Her belly was full every night. She worked alongside honest people. Her employers gave her a bonus at Christmas. What more could one ask?

They were terribly ill matched. They never should have married, but they did. And though it took many years, my father eventually did what he’d set out to do: he made a fortune in textiles. He bought a mansion in Belgravia. He hired staff. A lady’s maid and a cook for my mother. A valet for him. They attended concerts and the opera. They became patrons of the arts. They threw parties, they hosted salons, they acquired Persian rugs for every room.

And in the end, none of it mattered: they remained outsiders in the class that my father had hoped to infiltrate. His new “friends” were polite to his face, but behind his back referred to him as “that vulgar little man.” He’d earned his fortune, it was not passed down to him—they would never forgive him for it. All the bespoke shirts in the world couldn’t hide the fact he was new money.

“Joseph, five minutes and then back upstairs to your schoolwork,” said my mother. “Did you finish your sums?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“No,” said Madeline, the governess, who had appeared in the doorway and was holding out her hand to me. How long had she been standing there?

I groaned and slid off the stool.

“Don’t you want to go to university one day?” asked Madeline.

I should have been in school already. That my mother had convinced my father to allow my sister’s governess to give me lessons at home was a miracle. My father consistently reminded me this would come to an end and I would soon be sent away to a proper school.

If only he knew what really happened at 22 Willoughby Square once he left the house every morning. My mother sailed us out of the sea of oligarchy and into the safe harbor of egalitarianism. We became a community of equals. Titles evaporated. Young Master, Little Miss, Cook, Girl, Mistress, Governess. Poof, gone. Polly, Madeline, even Charlotte, the lowliest kitchen maid, called my mother Imogene.

As a result my education was broad. I was taught not only how to multiply and divide, to read and recite, but how to blacken a stove, how to get candle wax out of a tablecloth, and how to build a fence. Some of the lessons I disliked more than others. Egg gathering, for instance: the chickens terrified me. They’d run after me, pecking at my feet.

“I hate the chickens,” I said to my mother. “Why do you make me go out there?”

“How else will you learn what you love to do?” she said. “You don’t have to like everything, but you must try.”

What my mother loved was greengage plums.

The most sublime-tasting plum in the world, she always said, but the tree had a fickle temperament and was notoriously difficult to grow. She had a small orchard in the back of our garden. I had never tasted one of her greengage plums, or if I had I couldn’t remember. The last time her trees had fruited, I was a baby. Every July I’d ask if this was the year the plums would come.

“You must be patient,” she told me. “Everything good takes time.”

I was a greedy boy. I stamped my foot. I wanted a plum now.

“How to wait,” she said, looking down at me with pity. “It’s the hardest thing to learn.”

I was always waiting for my mother to come home. Most afternoons she left the house to attend one meeting or another. She was devoted to many causes. Education. Women’s rights. Land reform and the struggles of the working class. She made signs. She marched in the streets. Once she even went to jail with a group of her fellow suffragettes. Much aggrieved, my father went to retrieve her, paying the exorbitant two-pound bail to set her free. When they walked in the door, my mother looked shy and triumphant. My father was enraged.

“You’ve made me a laughingstock in front of my friends,” he spat at her.

“They are not your friends,” she said, taking off her gloves.

“You have forgotten your place.”

“And you have forgotten where you came from.”

“That is exactly the point!” he bellowed.

They slept in different bedrooms that night and every night thereafter. My father had done everything he could to erase his history and pull the ladder he’d climbed up behind him. He forbade my mother to join any more organizations. She agreed, and instead began holding meetings at the house while he was at work. In her mind, everybody deserved a better life and it was her responsibility as a woman of means to help them achieve it. Unmarried women with children, spinsters, laundresses, jakesmen, beggars, and drunks all traipsed through our doorway and were led into the parlor to discuss their futures.

When I was eight, my mother left. She told me she was going on a painting trip to Provence. She’d been unable to bring herself to tell me the truth: my father was admitting her to an institution. He did it without her consent. He needed only two signatures to have her committed, his and his lawyer’s. Her diagnosis: unstable due to overwork and the inability to handle domestic responsibilities. She was gone for four months.

She returned fifteen pounds lighter and the color of curdled cream. She used the same light, cheery voice she always had with me, but I wasn’t fooled. There was no joy in it anymore. She spoke as if she were standing on the roof of a building in which somebody had forgotten to build the stairs. She’d fight to sustain eye contact when we spoke, but as soon as we stopped our conversation, her gaze would fall to the floor.

It was Charlotte, the kitchen maid, who finally took pity on me and told me the truth. “Painting, my arse. She got locked up by your father. Sent away to the loony bin.”

I didn’t believe her, but the governess corroborated the story. Polly, the cook, too.

“Don’t tell her you know,” said Polly.

“But what do I do?”

“Treat her exactly the way you’ve always treated her,” she said.

“But—she’s different,” I whined. I wanted my real mother back. The playful, optimistic, bread-making, injustice-fighting, eye-glinting woman who called everybody by their first names no matter what their stations.

“She’ll come back,” said Polly. “You just have to be patient. Sit with her. That’s all you have to do.”

It was easy to sit with my mother. She rarely left the house anymore. Most days, after breakfast and a bath, she retired to the parlor.

“I’ve taken up some lovely new pursuits,” she said. No longer did she work in the kitchen alongside Polly and Charlotte. Instead she sat on the chaise and embroidered, the curtains drawn, the lamp lit, her head bent studiously over her work.

“Shall I read to you?” I asked.

“No, thank you. I prefer the silence.”

“Shall I open the curtains? It’s a beautiful day.”

“I don’t think so. The light is too bright for me.”

“Then I’ll just sit here with you.”

“Wonderful,” she murmured.

I lived on that “wonderful.” A crumb, but I swallowed it down, pretending it was a four-course meal.

She would come back. Polly said she would. I just had to be patient.

Over the next year she stopped leaving the house altogether. Twilights were especially difficult. Once my mother was a sunflower, her petals spread open to the sky. Now, one by one, her seeds fell out of their pod.

It was a cold day in November that she told me she would be wintering in Spain. She’d developed arthritis, she said. A warmer climate would suit her.

I’d overheard my father talking to his lawyer, making the arrangements, so I knew she was lying—he was sending her back to the asylum. He’d institutionalized her because he wanted an obedient wife who was satisfied living a quiet, domestic life. Instead she’d been returned to him a ghost. He didn’t know what else to do.

I didn’t know what to do either, but even though I was only nine, I knew locking her away again was not the solution. I threw my arms around her and begged her not to go.

“I’m sorry, I don’t have a choice.” She looked down at me as if I were an inanimate object—a book or a shawl.

“You’re lying. You’re not going to Spain.”

“Don’t be silly, of course I am.” She pushed me away. “And you’re far too old to be acting this way.”

“Mama,” I whimpered.

For a split second her expression softened and I saw my old mother gazing back at me with empathy and love. But a moment later the light drained out of her eyes.

“Take care of your sister,” she said.

“You must run away,” I cried, desperate. “Someplace he won’t be able to find you. Leave tonight.”

She pursed her lips. “And where would I go?”

“Anywhere.”

“There is nowhere else,” she said.

I wept silently.

A week later, the night before she was due to leave, her bags already packed, my mother lay down on her bed in a long dress like the Lady of Shalott, drank an entire bottle of nervine, and took her last breath. In an instant everything changed. Polly became Cook. Charlotte became Cook’s Girl. Madeline became Governess. I reverted back to Young Master; my sister, Little Miss. And my father packed me off to boarding school.

I would never see the greengage trees fruit again.

My toast had grown hard. The butter congealed. The consequences of time travel.

“A girl,” reported Martha, walking into the kitchen. “Ridiculously long lashes. Dark hair. Looks just like her mother.”

My American wife was an herbalist and midwife, as were her mother and grandmother before her. She carried soiled linens into the scullery.

“Are they still planning on leaving?”

“I assume so.”

“Did you ask them?”

“No, I didn’t ask them, Joseph. I was in the middle of delivering a baby. And it was a breech, at that.” She lowered the sheets carefully into the copper. “Thank you for filling it.”

Getting the water was my job. The scrubbing of the stains out of the linens was hers. I was progressive in all matters, including women’s suffrage, but I had my limits.

She stirred the sheets with a wooden spoon and sighed. “I’m sure they haven’t changed their minds.”

Greengage had lost more than a few families in the past year. I suspected it came down to the siren call of modernity. Electric lights. Steamships. The cinema. They were afraid of missing out.

When Kathleen O’Leary was a few months along, her husband, Paddy, had let me know they were moving back to Ireland.

“You understand,” he said to me in his thick brogue. “We’re not from here. We must stop our fooling around and go home. If we stay any longer, we’ll never leave.”

As if Greengage had been nothing but a holiday.

Martha was a tiny thing. When I was sitting, we were practically the same height. She put her cheek next to mine. She smelled of lavender soap. Soon she’d also smell of the chicken fat she used to moisturize her red, chapped hands.

“There isn’t anything you can do about it,” she said. “Greengage is your dream, Joseph. It’s not everybody’s dream. You have to remember that. Besides, maybe they’ll come back.”

“This optimism is quite out of character for you.”

“Yes,” she mused. “There’s something about a birth. One can’t help but be hopeful.”

After boarding school, I had attended Pembroke College at Cambridge, where I’d graduated with a dual degree in classics and economics. Then my father insisted I embark upon a Grand Tour. I thought it an antiquated rite of passage, but he thought it a necessary rounding out of my education. How he prized worldliness! He wouldn’t be able to pass as gentry, but damn it, his son would.

I traveled to France, Italy, and Germany. The Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland. I was supposed to go back to London then, to officially join Bell Textiles as my father’s second-in-command; instead I dropped down into Turkey and then made my way to Egypt. From there I went to the Far East, and after that, to Russia. I finished in Greece, spending a few weeks in Athens before finally returning to England.

I was gone for over a year. It took me that long to realize how depressed I was at the idea of my future—sitting in a glass room looking down at the unlucky souls on the factory floor. The women spinning and operating the looms. The men weaving and carding. The boys sweeping the floor, dust and lint choking the air. My father’s employees labored twelve hours a day, six days a week, amidst deafening noise for paltry wages. And why was I sitting in that glass room rather than on the floor? Not because of hard work, but because I’d been born into the right family.

This was not the life I wanted.

I couldn’t stop thinking of those shimmering days before my father sent my mother away. The world she created. Between the hours of eight and seven, the household hummed and buzzed joyfully. No job was valued more than another. There were no delineations between rich or poor. To be useful, to do good work with people that you respected, that’s what was important. But that world did not exist anymore.

I’d have to go out and create it.

It was in June of 1889 that I stepped off the train in Glen Ellen, California, steam curling around my ankles, the smell of fate in the air. I took a deep breath. A perfume of mountain laurel, ripening grapes, and chaparral danced on the breeze, deepened with a base note of sun-baked rocks and ferns.

My requirements for our new home? Close to a train—there were two train lines that ran through Glen Ellen. Near a large city—Santa Rosa and San Francisco were not more than a few hours away. Arable land—the hills were veined with springs.

I was enchanted as soon as I stepped off the train. As were the hundreds of others who got off the train with me who were now in the process of climbing into buggies and wagons, en route to the dozens of resorts, enclaves, and tent campgrounds in the area, where they would soak up the sun, get drunk on Cabernet, swim and picnic in the druidy redwood groves while reciting Shakespeare.

I climbed into a wagon and was driven off by a Mr. Lars Magnusson to view the old Olson farm. We traveled a mile or so into the hills, past oak glens, brooks, and pools of water, past manzanitas, madrones, and trees dripping with Spanish moss. Sonoma Mountain was to the west; its shadow cast everything in a soft purple light. When we finally reached the farm and I saw the luscious valley spread out in front of me, I knew this was it. Greengage. It would be a home for me and Martha at first, but I hoped it would soon be something more. A tribute to my mother and her ideals; a community in which she would have flourished, where she would have lived a good long life.

Greengage. The burbling creek that ran smack down the middle of the property. The prune, apple, and almond orchards: the fields of wheat, potatoes, and melons. The pastures for cows and sheep. The chicken house and pigsty. The gentle, sloping hills, mounds that looked like God’s knuckles, where I would one day plant a vineyard. I was done with fancy trappings, done with servants, with balls and hunts, with titles, with soot, with my Cambridge pals, the stench of the city streets, with war. I was about to cast off my old life like a tatty winter coat.

“Did you know the Olsons?” I asked Magnusson.

“We emigrated from Uppsala in Sweden together.”

“Why are they selling?”

“Dead.”

“Dead? Of what, may I ask?”

“Husband, diphtheria; wife, scarlet fever.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that.”

“One right after the other.”

“Really?” My mouth twitched in sympathy. “How difficult that must have been for you.”

Magnusson scowled. Compassion from a Brit was both an unexpected and unwelcome intrusion. “You plan to use this farm for a commune?”

“A commune? Who told you that?”

“Jake Poppe. The proprietor of the general store.”

“No. He is mistaken. It will be just me and my wife. At first,” I added, not wanting to mislead him. There were already twelve people waiting to join us. Three farmers and their wives, four children, a carpenter, and a stonemason.

“You will need help. It’s a large property,” he said.

“I’ll get help.”

“You will pay well?”

“Yes.” And I would pay for everything to get the farm up and running, but hopefully it would eventually pay for itself. That was my plan.

“Look, what is your price?” I asked, unwilling to reveal anything more to him.

Magnusson stared stonily down into the valley as if I hadn’t spoken. I couldn’t have guessed that this gruff, withholding Swede would not only join my endeavor but eventually become my indispensable right-hand man.

“Five thousand dollars,” I blurted out. “That’s more than fair. Fifty dollars an acre.”

In a matter of weeks, on my twenty-fifth birthday, I would come into my full inheritance, and that would fund not only the purchase but all the other initial costs. My father would not be pleased. I would rarely speak to him again once he heard of my cockamamie plan.

Five thousand dollars was a fair price. The farm had gone to seed; it would take a lot of work to bring it back. Magnusson snapped the reins, growled ja, and just like that I was the proud owner of one hundred acres of the promised land.

Within a few years Greengage was well under way. Word quickly spread of the farm in the Valley of the Moon where residents would not only be given a fair wage (men and women paid equally no matter what the job) but share in the eventual profits.

Was I a dreamer? Yes. Was it a foolishly naïve scheme? Possibly. But I was certain others would join me on this grand adventure, and it turned out I was right.

Our numbers rapidly increased. We built cottages for families and dormitories for single men and women. We erected a schoolhouse and a workshop. We repaired the chicken coop and the grain silo. The jewel in the crown, however, was the dining hall. The hub of the community, I spared no expense there. In the kitchen there were three iceboxes, two enormous Dutch stoves, and a slate sink the size of a bathtub. The dining room was a bright and cheery place: southern exposure, redwood floors, and five long trestle tables. Greengage was still small back then, only a few tables full at mealtimes, but I hoped one day every seat at every table would be taken.

“Please don’t tell anybody about the O’Learys leaving,” I said to Martha.

“No goodbye party? You just want them to sneak out in the middle of the night like thieves?”

That’s exactly what I wanted. Leaving was contagious. In 1900, we’d had nearly four hundred people living at Greengage Farm. Now, in 1906, we were just under three hundred.

“They deserve a proper goodbye.”

“A small party,” I conceded. “Let’s have it here, rather than the dining hall.”

“No,” said Martha, putting an end to the conversation. “It will be in the dining hall just like all the rest of the parties.”

After she went back upstairs, I pulled a small tablet out of my breast pocket. In it, I kept a roster. I found the O’Learys’ names and put lines through them with a pencil. I would just have to look for a new family to replace them.

The O’Learys left on a beautiful day in April. I’d gone to their cottage before the party I couldn’t bring myself to attend, said my goodbyes, then made my excuses. An upset stomach. I said I was going off to the infirmary in search of an antacid. Instead I climbed up into the hills.

A hawk circled above my head. I soothed myself by looking down upon Greengage, which looked particularly Edenic that morning, bathed as it was in the late morning sun. All was as it should be. The hens were fat and laying eggs. Sheep grazed in the pastures and bees collected nectar.

I could see Matteo Sala working in the vineyard. He leaned back on his shovel and wiped his brow with a hankie. He came from a family of Umbrian vintners and was doing what he was born to do—what made him happy and fulfilled. That was the entire point of Greengage. Why would anybody want to live anywhere else?

The bell gonged, announcing the start of the party. People walked toward the dining hall. Fathers carried their children on their shoulders. Women strolled arm in arm. What was on the menu? Butter and cheese and apples. Mutton stew. Lemonade and beer. The smell of freshly baked sponge cake was in the air.

I’d worked hard over the years, carefully cultivating relationships outside of Greengage, gaining a solid reputation as a fair and honest businessman. We sold much of what we grew to restaurants in San Francisco and Glen Ellen. It wasn’t difficult. Our produce was magnificent. When asked how we did it, I talked about nitrogen-rich cover crops, compost, some of the traditional Chinese farming methods that we employed. I didn’t tell them our secret: contentment. We were a happy lot.

“Joseph!” called a woman’s voice from down in the valley.

My sister, Fancy, had caught sight of me. Now I was doomed. I would have to attend the party.

“Get down here, you cranky old man!” she shouted.

She stood in the meadow surrounded by a group of children who all craned their heads up and began shrieking for me as well. My heart filled at the sound of their voices.

If only I’d brought my camera. I was not a sentimentalist, but I would have liked to have captured that moment. To freeze time in my lens. To be able to gaze back at the image of the party just beginning. To remember precisely how it felt when the pitchers of lemonade were full. When the cake had not yet been cut, and the afternoon stretched out in front of us.

Early the next morning, before dawn, I went outside to relieve myself. As I was walking back into the house, the floor began to shake. A temblor. I froze in the foyer, waiting for it to stop. It did not.

Martha shouted from upstairs. “Joseph!”

“Come down!” I yelled. “It’s an earthquake!”

Martha appeared at the top of the stairs in her nightgown, her eyes wide. The staircase rattled, the banister undulated.

“Hurry!” I held out my hand as she ran down the stairs. I threw open the front door and we stumbled into the yard. The full moon was a bone-white orb in the sky.

The sounds that followed next could only be described thus: a subterranean clap of thunder, an ancient sequoia splitting in two, a volley of bullets, the roaring of a train coming into the station. A preternatural whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, a lasso spinning through the air.

We’d been through many earthquakes and I knew one thing for certain. Never had there been one like this.

It was April 18, 5:12 A.M. We clung to each other on the front lawn and waited for the shaking to stop.

When we walked back into the house, Martha gasped. Nothing had been disturbed. No painting had fallen off the wall, no porcelain jug had bounced off a counter. No books had slid out of a bookshelf. No brick had cracked in the chimney. Everything looked just as it had before. It was incomprehensible. In every earthquake, no matter how minor, we’d sustained some damage. This temblor was clearly a monster and yet …

“Quickly,” said Martha. “We must see how the others have fared.”

We all knew the emergency drill. Fire or quake—congregate at the dining hall.

The sky slowly brightened, from indigo to a robin’s-egg blue. We walked through Greengage in a state of disbelief. No trees were downed. No chasm rent a field in two. The schoolhouse, the cottages, the dormitories, the winery, the barn, the cooper’s shed, the workshop, every structure was intact.