Chapter 12
It had taken three days to rebuild the wall. Another to heave the dirt back over the wall one shovelful at a time, every now and then climbing up the foot-wide set of stairs he’d rebuilt into the wall to tamp it down.
Then they’d gone after the vines with hand clippers.
There had been a long debate with many words on either side (that neither understood) and far more gestures. He wanted to cut them to some semblance of shape, maybe doing a green drop as well to winnow it down to a dozen grape clusters per vine. Emilio argued for a graduated cut across multiple years. (“Years” had taken him a while to get as Emilio kept gesticulated at the sky showing the sun higher and lower then higher again. Then he’d finally understood anno as the root of “annual” but they’d moved on by th
