Valley of the Moon. Melanie Gideon
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careful,” said Martha nervously as I climbed up on my horse. “There could be more aftershocks.”
“The worst is over,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t like the look of that fog,” she said. “It’s so thick.”
It was a tule fog, the densest of the many Northern California fogs. When a tule fog descended upon Greengage, spirits plummeted, for it heralded day after day of unremitting mist and drizzle. But these fogs were vital to the vineyard as well as the fruit and nut trees. Without them the trees didn’t go into the period of dormancy that was needed to ensure a good crop.
“I know the way to Glen Ellen. I could get there blindfolded.” I smiled brightly in order to allay her fears. “We’ll be back before you know it.”
Within seconds of entering the fogbank, I fell off my horse, gasping for air. Disoriented, confused, my chest pounding. A profound, fatal breathlessness.
The two men who had gone before me were already dead.
I was lucky. Magnusson pulled me out before I succumbed to the same fate. Friar, our doctor, came running. He later told me that when he felt my pulse, my heart was beating almost four hundred times a minute. Another few seconds in the fog, and I would have died, too.
In my experience, when the unthinkable happens, people respond in one of two ways: they either become hysterical or are paralyzed. Greengage’s reaction was split down the middle. Some panicked and screams of anguish filled the air; others were mute with shock. Only a minute ago we’d ridden into the fog, as we’d done hundreds of times before. And now, a minute later, two of our men, husbands and fathers both, were dead. How could this be?
I preferred the wails; the silence was smothering. People covered their mouths with their hands, looking to me for answers. I had none. I was as shocked and horrified as anybody else. The only thing I could tell them was that this was no ordinary tule fog.
We put our questions on hold as we tended to our dead. The two men had been stalwart members of our community, with me since the beginning. A dairyman and a builder of stone walls.
Magnusson tossed a spadeful of dirt over his shoulder.
“Let me help,” I said to him, feeling a frantic need to do something.
“No. You are not well.”
“Give the shovel to me, I’m fine,” I insisted.
Nardo, Matteo’s sixteen-year-old son, took the shovel from Magnusson. “You’re not fine,” he told me. “You’re the color of a hard-boiled egg.”
He was right. Whatever had happened in the fog had left me utterly exhausted, and my rib cage ached. It hurt to breathe.
“Thank you,” I said.
The boy bent to his grim task. Digging the graves.
That afternoon, time sped by. It careened and galloped. The men were buried one after the other. People stood and spoke in their honor. People sank to their knees and wept. Grief rolled in, sudden and high, like a tide.
Then it was evening.
I lay in bed unable to sleep. I felt hollow, my insides scraped out. I sought refuge in my mind. I turned the question of this mysterious fog over and over again. Maybe we were mistaken—perhaps the fog was not a fog, it was something else. Had the massive temblor released some sort of a toxic natural gas that came deep from the belly of the earth? If it was a gas, it would dissipate. The wind would eventually carry it away. By tomorrow morning, hopefully.
During breakfast in the dining hall, I relayed my theory. The gas was still there, as dense as it had been yesterday, though it didn’t appear to be spreading. There was a little niggling thought in the back of my mind. If it was a gas, wouldn’t it also emit some sort of a chemical, sulfurous odor?
I divided us into groups. One group set off to investigate the wall of gas further. Where did it start? Where did it end? Probably it didn’t encircle all of Greengage, but if it did, were there places where it wasn’t as dense? Places where somebody fleet of foot might be able to dart through without suffering its ill effects?
Another group conducted experiments. The gas had to be tested. Was there any living thing that could pass through it? The children helped with this task. They put ants in matchboxes. Frogs in cigar boxes. They secured the boxes to pull-toys, wagons, and hoops. They attached ropes to the toys and sent them wheeling into the gas.
The ants died. The frogs died. We sent in a chicken, a pig, and a sheep. They all died, too. The wall encircled the entirety of Greengage, all one hundred acres of it, every square foot of it as dense as the next. Whatever it was made of, it did not lift. Not the next morning. Or the morning after that.
The first week was the week of unremitting questioning. Wild swings of emotion. Seesawing. The giving of hope, the taking of hope.
Was it a gas? Was it a fog? Why had this happened? What was happening on the other side of it? Were people looking for us? Surely there’d be a search party. Surely somebody was trying to figure out how to get through the fog and come to our aid.
The second week was the week of anger. Bitter arguments and grief.
Why had this happened to us? What had we done to deserve this? Were we being punished? Why hadn’t any rescuers arrived yet? Why was it taking so long?
People grew desperate.
Late one night, when everybody was asleep, Dominic Salvatore tiptoed into the fog, hoping if he moved slowly enough, he would somehow make it through. He got just five feet before collapsing.
We lost an entire family not two days later. Just before dawn, they hitched their fastest horse to their buckboard, hid under blankets, and tried to race their way through the fogbank. The baker was the only one awake at that hour. The only one who heard the sound of their wagon crashing into a tree. The horse’s terrified whinny. The cries of the children. And then, silence.
After that, nobody tried to escape again.
The third week, the truth of our situation slowly set in. Meals at the dining hall were silent. Appetites low. Food was pushed away after one or two bites. Everybody did their jobs. What else could we do? Work was our religion, but it also produced our sustenance. It gave us purpose. It was the only thing that could save us. The cows were milked. Fields plowed. Everybody thought the same thing but nobody would voice it. Not yet, anyway.
Help wasn’t coming. We were on our own.
San Francisco, California 1975
I sat in the passenger seat holding a squirmy Benno on my lap. He had a ring of orange Hi-C around his mouth. I’d have to scrub it off before he got on the plane; it made him look like a street urchin. He sucked on the ear of his stuffed Snoopy while his sticky hand worked the radio dial.
He spun past “Bennie and the Jets” and “Kung Fu Fighting.”
“But you love ‘Kung Fu Fighting,’” I said.
He vehemently shook his head and Rhonda laughed, her Afro bobbing. An X-ray technician at Kaiser, she’d left work early to drive us to the airport and help me see Benno off. We’d been roommates for the past three years, and she was the closest thing I had to family in California. Right now she seemed to be the only person in my life who wasn’t keeping a constant tally of my failures (perennially late