No Human Contact. Donald Ladew
Father.”
“All young boys do this thing, Vincent. We priests can always tell. Have you been abusing yourself?”
“No, Father.”
“Don’t lie, Vincent. It is a sin to lie. God will punish you.”
“I am not lying, Father.”
“Yes, you are. Take your pants down, Vincent. I need only to look at you to tell,” he leaned forward impatiently.
“I won’t do that, Father.”
Father Paul stood, abruptly, his face screwed tight with anger. “You dare disobey me you, you, bastard child!”
He swung his hand at Vincent’s face in a blur. Vincent ducked away and felt the tip of the priest’s fingers scratch his face. He could not say later what made him go forward instead of flee. At some point one runs or one fights and he had years of rage bottled up waiting to get loose.
He lowered his head and charged into the taller man knocking him to the floor. After that the memories were hazy. He hit the older man many times, and kicked him and hit him again, even after the priest was unconscious. He meant to kill him, he knew that and it was luck alone that prevented it.
Instead he ran from that place and didn’t stop until he was many miles away. He found his way to the wholesale food market and hid there among the stacks of lettuce and fruit boxes. Cold and dirty, he waited and watched, and in the early hours climbed aboard a produce truck that said Napa Valley Vineyards.
Out of the city across the Bay Bridge past Oakland, Berkeley, Vallejo, around the east side of the bay to route 29 north into the Napa Valley and the heart of the wine country, each mile like another stone lifted from his shoulders. He would never go back. Better to be dead.
He jumped off the truck at a cross roads, crept through a vineyard and hid in a grove of California Cypress. He stayed there the whole day, occasionally venturing out to steal a hand full of ripening grapes. They didn’t taste anything like the grapes they had once a week at the orphanage. The were tart, almost sour, with a strong flavor that hinted of many things. These were grapes that made great wine. They were never meant for the table.
Late in the day he washed as well as he could in a nearby pond.
In the evening a dog came into the grove and barked at him, got bored after a while and wandered off. That first night he fell asleep by the edge of the vineyard, his last picture was a sky filled with stars. He was to remember it for the rest of his life as something good.
Etienne Joubert got up at five every morning, had coffee and a sweet croissant left by the housekeeper then walked to a different part of his vineyard to inspect the grapes and the vines. His was a small cru, less than five hundred acres, his total output in a good year, was perhaps fifteen thousand bottles. In the years of his father and since he had never failed to sell his wine at premium prices, most on consignment purchased a year ahead.
The morning mists were beginning to lift when he walked down among the vines. The last thing he expected to find was a boy lying asleep in the dirt, his head on his arms. And it wasn’t a good sleep. He turned and twisted and moaned and ground his teeth. The war did not stop when Vincent closed his eyes.
Joubert watched him for a moment then reached out with his walking stick and poked Vincent in the side. Vincent woke instantly, jumped to his feet and crouched like an animal at bay. He could run but where? He looked at the old man and waited for him to make a move.
“Bon jour, young man. What are you doing here, sleeping with my grapes?” He smiled. “Not that it is a bad thing. I would sleep with them from time to time but I have the rheumatism.”
Vincent backed away a few steps. “I will not go back, ever again.”
Something about the tone and manner of that simple statement caught the old man’s attention totally. He looked at Vincent for quite a long while. Vincent shivered. He was soaked, dirty and very cold.
“Ca va’, you will not go back.”
Vincent understood and relaxed slightly.
“Come along then. I must look at my grapes.” He walked back and forth among the vines, touching the leaves, looking at the roots. He would pick a grape from a deep purple, close to black bunch from time to time and break the skin, squeeze the pulp, smell it and finally taste.
“If the sun comes strong later in the season I will make a great wine this year, perhaps the greatest I have ever made. Come, now, we will go to the house. You must have a bath and some dry clothes.”
Vincent would not come close, yet he followed Joubert. Once back at his house he had his housekeeper, a young Mexican woman, named Lupita, show Vincent to the bath and get him cleaned up. Dry clothes were found and when he was ready she brought him to the kitchen where the old man was seated at the table drinking coffee.
She cooked for them both. It was the best breakfast he’d ever had in his life.
“So, we must know your name.” Joubert said.
He looked at them both. “Vincent.”
“Is that all?”
“Vincent.”
Joubert nodded. “All right, it is enough for now. Would you like to stay here for a while?”
“I will not take my pants off in front of you or anyone else, ever. You try to make me and I will...kill you; I won’t do that!” Vincent didn’t realize he’d shouted.
Joubert, a normally cheerful old man looked infinitely disgusted. Lupita the cook was close to tears.
He was very gentle when he answered. “You will never have to do that here, Vincent, never. We would never permit that sort of thing.”
“If I stay I will work, I will work harder than two men, if you let me stay. I promise and I will never break my promise.”
“All right, Vincent, I accept your word. It is the deal, yes?”
“Thank you...”
“My name is Etienne Joubert, you will call me Monsieur Joubert, and this is, Lupita. She is my housekeeper and cook and everything else that I cannot do. You shall call her Senora Rivera because that is polite. Here we will always be polite...even when we are angry, after all, we are just people.”
For the next year Vincent slept in a tack room behind the great barn where the wine was pressed. Joubert paid him a small wage and saw that he was well clothed and well fed. Vincent kept his word and worked far longer and harder than the old man would have demanded. Always in his eyes there was fear, not of Joubert, but that for some reason the old man would ask him to leave. Anxiety had become a way of life and it was not easy to shed.
He talked only when spoken to and then only the bare minimum needed to understand what was needed or wanted of him. He never talked about the past, where he’d been, how he ended up in Joubert’s vineyard. And the dreams were always there, as relentless as a cancer that never quite kills.
The old man made a few attempts to get him to talk, but seeing the way of it didn’t press. Lupita would have mothered him as she had affection to spare, but he would not permit it so she waited and fed him more than he needed, and talked to him of inconsequential things, normal things in the hope hearing them would make him normal. She had no way of knowing that no part of his life had ever been normal.
At the end of the first year Vincent had reached a point where he would occasionally smile at some of Joubert’s comments, which were colorful and hopelessly French.
That Christmas he gave the boy three glasses of wine and patiently got him to talk and he finally did. Afterward the old man wished that he hadn’t asked, but at least he understood some of what drove Vincent to act the way he did. Who can resist a mystery?
The next two years were better than the first. Vincent was his shadow. He never let the old man out of his sight. And he learned the wine business from a master