Valley of the Moon

“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.

Martha, who rarely showed her affection for me in public, picked up my hand and threaded her fingers through mine. It was not a romantic gesture. It did not make me feel like we were husband and wife. Instead it stripped me of my years and made me feel as if we were two orphan children wandering through a vast forest.

You might think our behavior odd. Why weren’t we rejoicing? Clearly we’d been spared. But I was a realist, as was Martha.

Something was very wrong.

Everybody was present and accounted for, and there wasn’t so much as a single scratch or a scraped knee. If there were wounds, they were not the visible sort.

The only thing that was different was the towering bank of fog that hung at the edge of the woods.

“Glen Ellen,” Magnusson reminded us.