Sacrifice by Charles Haddox Cruel winter gave place to an unusually hot spring, and it seemed for a time that the old black Muscat vines lovingly tended for so many years would fail to produce any fruit. Planted in rows down the length of a rock-strewn ravine that met up with a tiny creek shaded by cottonwoods little by little falling under the axe, they had always been temperamental, unaware that truly noble grapes must always suffer. It is said that this variety was brought from Cyprus to the West during the Third Crusade by Leopold V of Austria, also known as Leopold the Excommunicate. Originally of the green variety, it was only after his excommunication, punishment for imprisoning Richard Cœur de Lion, that the grapes turned black. Such was the story that was told out here in the wastes, where the common settlers and dishonest merchants believed every legend that came their way. We survived by cultivating grapes or fruit trees, or by trading, all of us: Californios, adventurers, outcasts, renegades and deserters. We tore a living from the grassy swamps and red sandstone hills ringed by oak-covered mountains with their blind trails and steep pitch fit only for Indian ponies, all slickrock and confounding undergrowth of sagebrush and cactus and toyon. One day a goat herder joined us, but his goats ate fiddleneck and went mad and died of sunstroke. A preacher arrived on a blue mule and built a church of mud and ocotillo stalks, a single low room without seating or altar or ornament. He baptized the scarred and ignorant farmers and storekeepers and craftsmen who were the best of our settlement in Redfork Creek, and expected to see us on Sunday in his windowless sanctuary. When the vines and citrus trees condescended to produce a little fruit we dried it in the sun and sent what we did not need for ourselves to San Francisco by wagon and pack horse. I occasionally made a little wine from my black Muscats, as the wild reds that the others cultivated were unfit for that purpose. My wine did not find favor with our reverend in his empty mud lair. I was crisscrossing the ruddy, dusty slope, carefully examining the ragged vines for signs of flowers, when an ox train carrying salt from New Mexico came down the bit of trail that followed Redfork Creek as it meandered west. They stopped at the base of the rise and asked me for permission to fill their water barrel and make camp in the shade of a cottonwood that hugged the creek. “Suit yourselves, but leave your rifles in the wagon.” Worse than the lot around here, I thought to myself, and my estimation of humanity had already fallen a long way since settling in California. The teamsters were always drunkards and dipsomaniacs who saw the ghosts of men they had killed in the war, chicken thieves and lackeys and bullies. 96 theMeadow
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