While Vic Voracci had kept a portion of the apple orchard intact, most of his land had in recent years been covered with plastic and concrete—hydroponic greenhouses. Vic had begun this construction about eight years before, when the peach orchard had been decimated by a particularly harsh spring freeze. That portion of the orchard was bulldozed out and, with the help of some generous grants from the federal government, Tanglewood’s hydroponic greenhouse operations were launched. Within a couple of years, nearly all of Vic’s portion of the farm was covered with plastic and concrete. Gone were the green fields. Gone were the dark starry nights, masked now by the orange-green glow of the greenhouse lights. Gone as well was the annual Apple Festival, which had been a tradition at Tanglewood Farms for as long as anyone could remember, but which the Voracci brothers had always openly despised.
Taylor parked the golf cart beside the back porch and led Abe Wagner by the arm to his door. Wagner’s burning pain and outrage had exhausted itself within moments of leaving the pump-house, and now there was the subdued anguish of knowing a child was lost forever. On his porch, Wagner stared vacantly at the torn screen door until Taylor opened it for him and, hand on Wagner’s back, gently led him inside to the sunlit kitchen table.
“Thank you,” Wagner said. “But I should check on the vines.”
Ben understood this statement was a symptom of shock and grief, complicated by the prospect of going into an empty home.
Wagner was a widower. His only son had been estranged from the family for more than a decade. His only daughter, the child he had once held in his arms and had watched bloom from an infant nearly to full womanhood, was dead. Inside his house there was no one to hold, no one to share his grief with or to console. He was alone.
Wagner stared at the table before sitting down on a worn wooden chair. A plate of half-eaten toast, a jar of jam, a jug of milk and a cold cup of coffee waited on the table before him, remnants of a world that had been eclipsed for him less than an hour ago. That these items appeared to be within arm’s reach was an illusion. The world Wagner had known this morning was forever separated from him, Taylor understood.
“You should try to get some rest, Abe.”
“No,” said Wagner after a long, bewildered pause. “I need to keep busy. Keep my mind busy with work.” He pushed back the plate of toast and rested his elbow on the table. “I knew she didn’t leave.
No one believed me. I should have tried harder to find her. She was here somewhere all the time. You know, if I’d been working harder, I would have found my way out there. I might have seen her. I might have heard her…”
Wagner’s head and shoulders began to shake.
“Try not to think of these things. You did everything you could.”
Taylor stood behind him and rested his hand on the man’s shoulder until his silent, shaking subsided.
Wagner began to speak softly in German for several minutes, whispering more to himself than to Taylor before coughing and settling into a stunned silence. He stared at the food on the table, leaning forward, concentrating on the plate of toast and the few crumbs surrounding the plate, bewildered as if he were expecting the morning’s breakfast would scamper away if left unobserved for a moment.
Taylor patted Wagner’s shoulder before stepping outside and walking across the compound to the warehouse, the place he had been this morning when the world had seemed a bit brighter and much less distressing place. He passed the warehouse altogether and stepped inside the first greenhouse. It was quiet here. The pickers would not reach this end of the greenhouse for at least another hour. But picking they were. Outside of this momentary pocket of calm Taylor now found himself in, outside of the pumphouse where Anna’s body lay, and outside of Abe Wagner’s home, the gears of the world continued to turn.
Taylor gazed down the length of the greenhouse. Within the white arched walls were hundreds of rows of hydroponic tomatoes.
The vines were strung by wire eight feet from the ground and fed intravenously with a solution to promote the growth. The fruit which sagged like plump water balloons never saw the ground, which was coated with plastic splash sheets. Even the roots were denied earth. They grew in white fist-shaped blocks of rock wool to keep the vines weighted down.
Taylor wondered to himself if Antonio, Vic and Michael’s grandfather, would have ever allowed this type of farming. He doubted if any man with an appreciation for the land could have condoned such a solution. It seemed to Taylor too sterile, too automated and too precise for any man who truly loved the earth.
Taylor had grown up in Buckingham, a twenty minute drive from Andover. He had known very little about the town of Andover, but had spent four of his best summers working at Tanglewood Vineyards—long, satisfying summers. He had had the pleasure of talking to Voracci’s grandfather, Antonio, many times. He remembered very well sitting at a picnic table—white table cloth weighted with stones to keep it from blowing away in the breeze— with a dozen or so other students enjoying sandwiches made by Antonio’s wife, Juliana, and jugs of cold water brought up from the nearby well with an old iron hand pump. Often she would bring out fresh oatmeal cookies or slices of freshly-baked pie. More often than not, Antonio would take lunch with the students and would ask them about their plans for the future and tell them stories about his life. These were some of Taylor’s fondest memories. They were, in fact, a large part of his reason for returning here.
The vineyard and the farm seemed to be more profitable today, but it was no longer the happy place to work that Taylor had known as a student. As he looked now at the plastic walls, the concrete floor, and the plastic all around him, he shook his head; this was not the same farm at all.
Antonio Voracci had begun the vineyard as a hobby sometime in the early Sixties. Until then, it had been a potato farm and orchard, which he had purchased for a modest sum in 1968, after selling the menswear store he had established in Andover twenty years before. Both Antonio and Juliana had been raised on small farms in the mountains of southern Italy. While life in the city had not been bad to either them or their children, Antonio had craved the touch of fresh earth. In the city, they cultivated a large garden in their backyard, at the expense of any grass, where they’d raised their own potatoes, tomatoes, zucchini, grapes and a host of other vegetables, herbs and flowers. It was the garden that Antonio daydreamed about during his long hours handling cotton and silk at his store. He longed for the touch of fresh earth in his hands.
Juliana tended the garden each day, but thoughtfully left behind a small patch of the garden untouched for her husband to work on for a few minutes each evening. When he arrived home, he would put on his overalls and an old shirt to step into the backyard to happily pull some weeds in his garden. He would then lift a fist full of soil and rub it slowly between his palms with a tranquil softening of his eyes.
When he sold his store in the late Sixties, Juliana asked him while sitting on the swing in their garden one afternoon if he would consider buying a farm of his own. Antonio put his arm around his wife’s shoulders, threw back his head and sighed happily. At that moment, it was as if his life had suddenly been punctuated with exclamation marks, with an honest life with the land marking both ends.
He had purchased the farm from a man named John Harris whose wife of nearly fifty years had recently passed away. John Harris, whose family had traced their ownership of the farm to the years following the War of 1812, had been alarmed at the amount of residential development he saw around his land. He was happy to pass his farm to Antonio, with only one stipulation: the property was to remain farmland or allowed to grow wild. No houses or shopping centres were to be constructed here. Antonio, from the depths of his farmer’s heart, had insisted that stipulation be put in writing, even though John Harris had been satisfied with his word and a handshake.