The van of the coroner came up the gravel drive at eight o clock the next morning, followed by a dusty white pickup that I recognized as the truck of Ruben. I stood on the porch in my robe holding a cup of coffee and watched them park beside the pile of stumps that the crew of Ashley had left behind. A woman in khaki pants and a county jacket climbed down from the van with a soft brown case. Her name was Dr. Okonkwo. She had a quiet voice, and she asked me whether we might walk out to the third row together.
We walked slowly. The sun was already hot on my neck, and the smell of turned earth rose up the way it does just after the first dig in spring. Ashley followed three steps behind, clutching her elbows. The deputy and Ruben carried folding screens. At the oldest row, the one that Tomás never let anyone prune but himself, a rectangle of dirt had been marked off with yellow tape, perhaps six feet by three. I knew what that shape meant before anyone said a word.
“I need you to understand,” the doctor said gently, “that we are not here because we think a crime was committed. We are here because the tin that the crew of your daughter found had a letter in it, and the letter says where a person is buried. I would like to confirm it before anyone makes a guess.” I told her I understood. I have kept the books for grape growers for thirty four years. I know the difference between a guess and a ledger. I asked her to begin.
It took two days. They worked with small brushes and wooden tools, the way you would clear a place for a baby to sleep. On the second afternoon, a pair of boots came out of the dirt first, old leather boots with a patch of green felt sewn inside, and I made a sound I did not know I had in me. Tomás had sewn that felt into every pair of boots in the family. Under them were the bones of a tall man, laid out straight, hands crossed over the chest.
A secret buried with love can still become a wound, but only until someone brave enough digs it up and gives it a name.
The letter in the tin, Dr. Okonkwo told me, could be read now. She had copied it into English and set it on my kitchen table in a clear folder. Ten short lines in Spanish, in a hand I recognized from the Christmas cards my brother in law once sent before he vanished. He wrote that he was dying of a fever, that he did not want hospitals, that Tomás was to bury him beneath the first cuttings of their father. He wrote that no one was to blame. He wrote that the land would be safer if nobody knew.
That last sentence told me everything. In 1981, Tomás and Ernesto were two young men without papers on forty acres they had bought with a handshake and a note from a Lodi farmer. If a death was reported, the authorities would come. They might take the land. They might send Tomás back across the border, away from me and from the baby I was carrying. So my husband did what a frightened, loving man does. He did as his brother asked. And then he carried it alone for forty four years.
I sat at the table and read that letter until the ink blurred. I was angry, I will admit it. I was angry that Tomás never told me. But I was also holding the faded photograph that Ruben had brought, found in the same tin, of two skinny young men squinting into the sun with their arms around each other. Under it in Spanish, someone had written, Hermanos para siempre. Brothers forever. And I understood that my husband had not been hiding a crime. He had been guarding a grave.
Ashley came into the kitchen late that night. She had been crying for days. She stood in the doorway and said, “Mom, I did this. I tore up the garden of Dad and I dug up his brother.” I told her to sit down. I told her that if the crew had not found Ernesto, he would have lain under a swimming pool, and that nobody would ever have known his name. I said the earth had given him back at the exact moment we were ready to hear it. She put her head on the table and I rubbed her back.
The burial took place on a Saturday in August at the Lodi cemetery, under an oak tree beside the grave of Tomás. The county signed the paperwork without a fuss. The Mexican consulate helped us find the family of Ernesto in Michoacán, two nephews and a very old niece who flew to California for the first time in their lives. They stood in the sun with their hats in their hands. A priest from the church in Galt read the Spanish prayers, and Ruben and his crew carried the casket, all six of them in clean white shirts.
Afterward, we planted. Ruben and his crew came back with the sixty zinfandel cuttings that I had ordered from the nursery, and we put them into the ground together, including Ashley, including the boys, including the nephews from Michoacán in their city shoes. Ashley did not mention the pool again. She dug until her hands bled, and when she finally sat back on her heels, she looked at me and said, “Mom, I want to learn how to prune.” I handed her the shears of her father.
This fall we made one barrel of wine in the barn, the way Tomás always did. We labeled it by hand. The label says Ernesto, 1981, and under it, in Spanish, Brothers forever. I am seventy three years old. I drink a small glass on the porch in the evenings, watching the new rows turn gold, and the kitchen light across the yard stays on late. Sometimes my daughter comes over with the boys to sit with me. Sometimes she just waves. I wave back.