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passed them. Josep stepped back. Without a word the girl slipped away from him and fled down the street.
    He stood there, not knowing where to gaze, certain that everyone in the vicinity was staring at him accusingly for having pressed his hardened maleness against the purity of such a female. But when he raised his shamed eyes and glanced about, he saw that no one looked at him with any interest or appeared to have noticed anything, and he hurried away from there also.
    For weeks after that he avoided the girl, unable to meet her eyes. He thought it was inevitable that she would never want to have anything to do with him. He sorely regretted that he had gone to the blacksmith shop on the Santa’s day, until one morning he and Teresa Gallego met at the well in the placa. While they were drawing water, they began to talk.
    They looked directly at one another, and they spoke for a long time, quietly and seriously, as befit two people who had been brought together by Santa Eulália.

5
    A Thing Between Brothers

    Exactly a week after Josep’s return, his brother, Donat, came to the masia with his woman, Rosa Sert, his face a curious mixture of welcoming and foreboding. Donat had always been stocky, but now there were dewlaps under his jowls and already his belly was swollen like rising dough. Josep saw that soon Donat would be a really fat man.
    His older brother, a fat semi-stranger who lived in the city.
    They both exchanged kisses with him. Rosa was short and plump, a pleasant looking woman. She was watchful but smiled at him tentatively.
    “Padre said you were gone for a soldier, probably in the Basque country,” Donat said. “Wasn’t that the purpose of that hunting group, to train you to be a soldier?”
    “It didn’t turn out that way.”
    Josep offered no explanations, but he told them about his four years of work in Languedoc. He poured a taste, the last from the wineskin he had brought from France, and they complimented the vin ordinaire, though it had long since lost its edge.
    “So you’re working in a cloth factory? Is the work all right?”
    “I like it enough. There’s money twice each month, whether there is hail or drought or any other calamity.”
    Josep nodded. “Steady money is good. And what is your job?”
    “Helper to a worker who keeps watch over the spools that feed the looms. I’m learning things. If the thread or yarn breaks, we rejoin it with weavers’ knots. Before the spools run out of thread, I replace them with fresh spools. It’s a big mill, lots oflooms, driven by steam. There is opportunity to advance. I hope some day to be a mechanic of the looms or the steam engines.”
    “And you, Rosa?”
    “I? I examine the cloth and mend faults. Take care of stains and such. Sometimes there is an imperfection or a tiny hole, and I use needle and thread to fix it so it can’t be seen.”
    “She’s very skilled,” Donat said proudly, “but they pay skilled women less than unskilled men.”
    There was a momentary lull.
    “So what shall you now do?” Donat asked.
    Josep knew they would have noted at once that the FOR SALE sign was gone.
    “Grow grapes. Make wine for vinegar.”
    “Where?”
    “Here.”
    They were both looking at him with horror. “I earn less than two pesetas a day,” Donat said. “I will be on half-pay for two years, while I learn the trade, and I am in need of money. I’m going to sell this land.”
    “I am going to buy it.”
    Donat’s mouth was open and Rosa’s lips were pressed tight, making her mouth a worried line.
    As patiently as possible, Josep explained. “Only one person is willing to buy this land—Casals, who would pay piss-money for it. And of the alcalde’s piss-money, one-third would come to me, as the younger son’s share.”
    “Padre always made it clear. The entire vineyard was to go to me!”
    Padre had always made that clear. “The land was to go to you unbroken because only one family can survive on it by growing grapes and