Harvest Moon

Prologue: Twisted Roots

You got all types at the Girelli House. Leila had learned that fact early on, while spending the greater part of her childhood running about the mansion inn owned by her great aunt, Antonia Girelli, who bore the unofficial title of Dionysia's Most Notable Eccentric, which was saying something, indeed.

Leila mused that Aunt Toni's reputation may have started back in 1929, when she won the distinction, at the tender age of seven, of being the youngest known person to be arrested for the unlawful sale of alcohol. In those dry days, the little Northern California town that owed much of its livelihood to its lush vineyards had changed its name to Temperance, and had its own reputation to worry about. The peculiar thing about this case was that, despite the suspicions of the authorities, who had reason to believe that the Girellis were violating the Prohibition, upon search of their home no trace of illegal substances could be found. The only evidence to support the case against the family was the mason jar confiscated from the accused young miss, still half-full of the mysterious concoction that was suspected to be the cause of the day's earlier commotion, in which four severely intoxicated teenage boys were apprehended in the town square. Interrogation of the youths was something of a problem, as they were unable to stop laughing. The fact that they were all completely nude at the time of their arrest did not help matters, either. Finally, between giggling gasps, one boy managed to give the name of the Girelli girl. Unfortunately for the astounded sheriff, this would be all the information to be attained from the boys, because the very moment little Antonia was named the culprit, all four became suddenly and violently ill, and continued to be whenever any of them tried to speak for the next week.

This would be the first in what would add up to such an impressive list of incidents that, by the time Antonia turned eleven, many residents of Dionysia (having reverted to its pre-Prohibition moniker), had begun to regard her as quite dangerous, and forbade their children to go near her. Those who dared approach her found a child contradictory in her nature to the one alluded to in all the slanderous rumors. To her family and few friends, Antonia was known as a spirited but kind girl, who had the tendency to take other picked-on children under her wing, a fierce defender of the underdog. It was true that the girl did seem to have a knack for trouble, turning up at the center of more than her share of bizarre events. When Antonia was eight, a teacher who had been punishing her with a switch ended up with welts across her own posterior, after, as the whole class hysterically maintained, her own instrument turned on her and chased her around the room. Then there was the time Antonia and her younger siblings were accused of trying to steal watermelons by the owner of a neighboring ranch, who called them some nasty names that implied their family lacked documentation and cast doubt on the identity of their father. The proprietor then watched in horror as every single melon in his field exploded, and the children (who had really only come onto the property in pursuit of a migrating group of butterflies) quickly took the opportunity to continue their entomological studies somewhere less hostile.

Because of these and other strange occurrences too numerous to outline in this account, which is, after all, not Antonia's story but Leila's, nobody was really surprised when, shortly after her eleventh birthday, young Antonia Girelli, the suspected criminal moonshiner, who was capable of overpowering and viciously attacking innocent schoolteachers, who was known to enlist her young siblings in the senseless vandalism of watermelon fields, who was also a crazed arsonist, subversive saboteur, and let's not forget spawn of the Devil, was abruptly uprooted and sent to an out-of-state reform school, where she would spend the next seven years. It should be mentioned that Cesare and Amelia themselves never actually came out and said that was where their daughter was spending nine months of every year, but then again, that was not the sort of thing an otherwise respectable family would advertise. In any case, most people were simply too grateful to be rid of "that depraved Italian waif," and could not be bothered to dwell much on her whereabouts.

Antonia was "released" from the nameless correctional academy the summer she turned eighteen. She returned to her parents' house briefly before leaving for Europe, "to give aid where it was needed," much to the amazement of the locals, some of whom used Antonia's new sense of patriotic duty as a shining example of the wonders that could be worked by a good long term of involuntary reconditioning.

The people of Dionysia largely forgot about Antonia and her odd ways as they busied themselves with the surge of grape-crushing, shop-building, and baby-making that followed in the productive post-war years. The Girellis themselves enjoyed their own share of the prosperity, their wine sales allowing them to finally finish renovating their ramshackle Victorian that sat overlooking the vineyards on the edge of town. They even had enough money left over to finance young Cesare Junior's wedding to the town beauty, Giovanna Spaggio. For the happy event, Antonia made a brief return, which was memorable only by its relative uneventful quietness. Dionysia would not see her again for another ten years.

It was for a much sadder event, namely Giovanna's funeral, that Antonia made what would be a permanent return to Dionysia, in the winter of 1958. She decided to stay to help her grieving brother raise his ten-year-old daughter, Olivia, in whom she saw perhaps more than a little of herself.

If Antonia had been the sort of woman to be haunted by things, it was perhaps this well-meaning decision that would come closest to doing so in the years that followed. What kept her from being that sort of woman were her firm convictions about the nature of fate, something she had learned early on in her years of unconventional education, further reinforced through experience. Antonia knew fate moved mysteriously, in a dance too subtle and slow to be appreciated in the mere flicker of a human lifespan. Even the cursed few who were allowed cryptic glimpses of the choreography could not do much with their insights, which appeared like strange butterflies that lit briefly on one's hand, and then were gone before they could be pinned to a board and properly classified. What their ultimate place was in the evolutionary scheme of destiny, no one could know.

For who could know, ultimately, which butterfly, in which vineyard or melon field, will be responsible for the proverbial fatal flutter, the one that sets in motion that essential breeze or sneeze that leads to the stampede, shifting tectonic plates, sending ripples across oceans, ending in storms on distant, dark continents?

Had Antonia been offered a glimpse, she liked to think that it would not have kept her away from Dionysia. Each image that could have cautioned her was an incomplete flicker, only part of the whole truth. Her brother and his son-in-law, lying side by side in the red mud, staring blankly up at the gray sky. Her niece, staring just as blankly into space, raising a bottle to her lips, ignoring the frantic questions of the tearful little girl at her feet. A small boy playing alone at the edge of a dark forest, humming a child's song as a shadow closes in on him. A woman weeping on the floor of a cellar, surrounded by the unsympathetic oak barrels, shaking with a secret, unbearable grief.

Antonia liked to think that she would have been strong. In any event, she was spared the burden of seeing into the future. Having such visions in one's past was bad enough; to dig them up again, to dust them off and arrange them together and try to make some sense of them, to divine some purpose behind them, would be a useless waste of tears and time. It was quite literally not her job.

In any case, Antonia believed in moving forward. So much did she believe in it that it made her an outcast in more circles than just the one of fellow business owners in Dionysia. She continued to do what she could to improve both worlds she lived in, growing more confident over the years that they would remain separate. She had kept a hopeful eye on her niece, until Olivia had moved beyond hope in every sense of the word, and then in turn watched Olivia's eldest daughter, Leila, who, miraculously enough, carried with her into adulthood plenty of hope, but none for the life Antonia had longed to pass on.

If Antonia could not share her secrets with her beloved great-niece, at least she could take comfort in the knowledge that Leila would never be hurt by them, either. It became a wonder in itself to watch a girl, who had experienced more sorrow than any child should have to deal with, grow into a confident, intelligent young woman with a world of her own, just as fascinating in its own way.

When she walked with Leila in their vineyard, telling her the stories of her youth, the safe ones, she would watch the girl happily turn her face toward her aunt's words, like a vine toward the sun, unaware of the twisted roots buried deep beneath her feet, tangled among the hard stones, the old bones. Antonia liked to think it would stay that way.

From this soil may you reap only happiness, little one.

Had Antonia known just what Leila's harvest would be, she might have done things differently, done more to prepare her, perhaps...but she would not have stood in the way.