The Fighter Read Online Free Page B

straight rows, trunks wrapped in cyclone fence.
    Ten
minutes passed before it hit him.
    He'd
looked away. He'd broken eye contact first.
    He'd
lost a stare-down...
    ...to a dog.

     
    The
Ripple Creek winery was spread across fifty acres of land overlooked by the
Niagara Escarpment. Paul's folks had planted the vines themselves some
twenty-five years ago.
    Paul's
father, Jack Harris, had fallen in love with Paul's mother, Barbara Forbes, the
daughter of a sorghum farmer whom Jack first saw slinging sacks of fertilizer
into the bed of a rusted pickup at the Atikokan Feed'n' Seed, and whom he saw
again at the annual Summer Dust-Off, where she danced with raucous zeal to
washboard-and- zither music. He fell in love with her because at the time he
felt this coincidental sighting was fateful—later both came to realize that
they'd lived little more than thirty miles apart, but in northern Ontario it
was possible to go your whole life and never meet your neighbor two towns
distant. They had made love behind the barn while the Dust-Off raged on, in a
field studded with summer flowers on a muffet of hay left by the baling
machine. Afterward they lay together with hay poking their bodies like busted drinking
straws, feeling a little silly at the unwitting cliché they'd made of
themselves: gormless bumpkins deflowered in a haypile. Even the dray horse
sharing the field with them looked vaguely embarrassed on their behalf.
    After
graduating high school Jack spent the next year tending his father's
cornfields. He married Barbara and she moved into the foreman's lodgings on
Jack's father's farm. Barely a month had passed before Barbara began to chafe
under the deadening monotony.
    One
night Jack returned from the fields, filthy and itching from corn silk, to find
his wife in the kitchen. The table was piled high with books on wine making.
    "What's
all this?"
    "What
else would you have me do all day," Barbara wanted to know,
"crochet?"
    Jack
knew not a thing about wine. He favored Labatt 50 from pint bottles.
    "You
want wine, I'll head to the LCBO and pick up a bottle."
    "I
want wine, I'll head to the LCBO and buy myself a bottle." Barbara closed a
book on the tip of her finger, keeping the page marked. "We might try
making our own."
    She
told him that the soil of southern Ontario, much like that of southern France,
was well suited to grape growing. But wine ... it conjured images of
beret-wearing Frenchmen zipping down country lanes in fruity red sports cars.
An altogether foreign image, Jack thought, leagues removed from his tiny
foreman's cabin on the edge of the Ontario cornfields. Then again, why not? He
knew how to grow corn; why not grapes? And a gut instinct told him that a curve
might be developing; if they hopped on now they might land a few steps ahead of
it.
    One
afternoon they headed down to the Farmers' Credit Union and applied for a
small-business loan. With it they purchased a homestead on fifteen acres in
Stoney Creek, a farming community in southern Ontario. Fruit country: local
farmers grew peaches, cherries, blueberries. Jack was the only one growing
grapes; this incited a degree of neighborly concern. Concords? other farmers asked. Juice grapes? When Jack told them no, a
Portuguese variety called Semillon, the farmers shook their heads, sad to see a
young fool leading his family down the path to financial ruin.
    Jack
was in the fields every day that first spring, pounding posts and stringing
vines. He was out in the cool dawn hours with scattered farmyard lights
burning in the hills and valleys. He was out in the afternoon as the sun
crested high over the escarpment, its heat burning through the salt on his skin
to draw it tight. He was out in the evening with the wind wicking moisture off
the soil until it was like tilling shale. Jack's boots became so worn he padded
them with newspapers; his feet turned black from the ink. For weeks they ate
nothing but peaches: at night, Jack snuck into his neighbor's groves to