Chapter 1
A COYOTE WITHOUT A PACK
Late September, Washington State
Under the light of a wide-eyed moon, Otis Pennington Till strolled into his syrah vineyard, puffing on an unlit briarwood pipe. At sixty-four, and despite a lower back still tender from lifting a wine barrel earlier in the year, he moved with a fair amount of grace.
Not too far away, the coyotes called up into the moonlit big sky night, their howls and yelps disturbing the calm of Red Mountain. He could hear the uneasy baas of his flock of Southdown sheep stirring in the pasture below, and he knew his huge Great Pyrenees, Jonathan, was on high alert.
“Baa back to you, friends!” he shouted with a British accent, the leftovers of his London childhood.
Kicking aside a tumbleweed with his work boot, Otis plucked a few grapes from one of the ten-year-old syrah vines and put them in his mouth.
He closed his eyes, and as the skins burst between his teeth, the juice coated his tongue.
He hoped to be overwhelmed by the complexity of the fruit, the mouth-watering acidity, the velvety tannins, the elegance.
But the nuances he’d grown used to tasting in ripening Red Mountain grapes didn’t treat him tonight.
For a couple of weeks now, Otis had been struggling with his sense of smell and taste.
When he first noticed the symptoms, he chalked it up to a cold or a hiccup of growing old; perhaps a result of too many hours spent with his tobacco pipe as of late.
But his condition was getting so bad that he might be incapable of making wine this year.
Otis spat the seeds to the ground like he was spitting in his opponent’s face. He cast his pipe into the dust, cursing.
Trying to wrangle his anger, he filled his lungs with the cool, clean air and gazed at the harvest moon, the bright orange eye of the night. “Please don’t take my wine away from me,” he begged. “It’s all I have. You might as well kill me now.”
Otis tossed his tweed cap to the ground.
He removed his cardigan and plaid button-down shirt, his boots and trousers and the rest. Naked, he stood tall and proud.
Chill bumps rose on his arms. He lifted his hands in the air, as if ready to catch a star.
He drew his right hand to his face, kissed his palm, and blew that kiss up towards the heavens, up towards the rest of his family—his sons and wife.
“I could be joining you sooner than later, my loves.”
Lowering to his hands and knees, he looked back to the moon and howled. Without a trace of self-consciousness, like a child, he howled. As loud as his body would let him, he imitated the wild dogs out there, pacing in the darkness, calling out, singing their songs.
Ahhhhhh-oooooooooo! Ahhhhhh-ooooooooo!
Stopping to catch his breath, Otis noticed the coyotes had raised the volume of their own song, perhaps welcoming him. He could hear the higher pitch of the young ones and the deeper haunting sound of the eldest, and Otis howled even louder and with more heart.
Ahhhhhh-oooooooooo! Ahhhhhh-ooooooooo!
Feeling better, Otis dressed and made his way back toward the house at the western end of his forty acres.
He took pride in the fact that every square foot of his property was tidy.
Despite the occasional strong winds that often brought trash from the road, not even a bottle cap could be found on his land.
Every hose was coiled to Army standards.
Weeds were virtually non-existent. You could have slept in the sheep corral or dined in the chicken coop.
He entered the stone home he and his wife had built and made his way to the study.
Most evenings, when he felt too lethargic to tackle anything constructive, he found at least a modicum of solace in gazing at the wall-to-wall shelves lined with his collection of books, all well-read, thoroughly enjoyed, and dog-eared, especially those written by English authors, like Shakespeare, George Orwell, D.H.
Lawrence, Graham Greene, and Churchill. He felt a kinship with them, even though he’d been an American citizen since his early teens.
At the touch of a button, Art Tatum crooned from the CD player.
Otis poured himself a peaty twelve-year-old scotch from a crystal decanter and carried the glass over to his recliner.
Since his wife had died five years before, he hadn’t slept in their bed.
He couldn’t even bring himself to lie down in it.
He couldn't bear to revisit their intimate moments there—their naked bodies wrapped around one another, Rebecca stroking his hair and murmuring in her soft morning voice that he missed so dearly, their silly pillow fights and their once-a-month lazy Saturday mornings when they wouldn’t get out of bed until noon.
Since she passed, he had slept on the couch or in this recliner, a beast of a chair he’d worn in so well that the outline of his body was visible in the cracked, worn leather.
Using a letter opener that had belonged to his father, a journalist who wrote for London’s The Daily Telegraph and then the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, Otis rifled through the stack of mail.
Eventually he drew out a letter addressed in large, flowery handwriting.
He recognized it as being from his maternal aunt, Morgan.
She didn’t believe in computers, she loved to brag, so her correspondence was by virtue of the United States Postal Service.
Just seeing her name on the return address made Otis moan.
Morgan was the Queen Bee of Montana—the belle of the ball, but Otis could handle her only in small doses.
Her personality matched her handwriting—too big and forceful for her petite body.
She’d outlive him by thirty years; he was sure of it.
As always, the letter began innocuously. But Otis was wise enough to expect a surprise. He found it, and the words made him jump to refill his glass. He could hear her high-pitched voice as he re-read the end:
I’m coming to see you, sweetie pie. What’s it been?
Five years? Since the funerals? Not acceptable.
Seems like you and I are the only two of our blood who are managing to survive this sometimes awful world.
We should share secrets. I’ll be there on Monday.
According to the lovely lady at the post office, you should get this letter on Saturday.
I didn’t want to give you the time to stop me.
Make sure you pick up some Folgers and half and half.
You know I can’t stand that Seattle single-origin crap.
See you very soon,
Morgan
Otis reached for a half-eaten bag of pork rinds and worked his way through them while pondering her intentions. He raised his eyes to the urn that held the last of his wife’s earthly remains, the turquoise vessel a gift from a potter friend in Sonoma.
“You wouldn’t believe who’s coming to town, Bec,” he said, setting down his snack. “Aunt Morgan. She’s still trying to pair me up with some other girl.” He shook his head. “Morgan loved you so much. I don’t know why she’d ever want me to replace you.”
No one knew Otis had kept his wife’s ashes.
He’d told her brother and her best friend that he had spread her remains in their vineyard on Red Mountain, as she’d wished.
But he liked having her in their home, and he wasn’t ready to say goodbye.
He stared at the urn for a while, revisiting old memories—trying to focus on the happier ones.
Then he bid his dead wife goodnight and returned to thoughts of his impending visitor.
Aunt Morgan. Coming to Red Mountain. What a disaster. She’d been hinting at this trip for months now. She’d decided he was lonely and sad, and it was time he started dating again. She made him feel like he was fifteen with her overprotective smothering. And now she was coming to town.
Involuntarily, Otis’s imagination played a series of disastrous scenarios resulting from her visit; all of them centered on his being embarrassed in front of his friends and fellow Red Mountain inhabitants.
Otis knew his reputation on the mountain.
He was a respected leader, a pioneer, the wisdom bearer, the godfather, the man the young winemakers and grape growers came to see.
How easily Morgan could burst this persona, leaving him vulnerable and exposed, to be picked apart and laughed at by the vultures of youth. His thoughts finally faded to black.
He woke in the chair hours later. The window faced the top of Red Mountain, which was about 1,400 feet at its highest point. The sun hadn’t quite peaked over the mountain but had brightened the night to a tarnished silver, illuminating the silhouettes of the vines running along the hills.
Twenty yards out, a lone coyote stood there looking at him, white-gold eyes glowing in the early morning light.
Otis wished it was Amigo, the coyote pup he’d saved years ago.
He hadn’t seen his old friend in months and could only hope he’d followed his pack to somewhere even more majestic.
Maybe one day they’d see each other again.
After a long stare down, Otis tipped his tweed cap toward the wild dog and then closed his eyes again.