Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [6]
TWELVE years earlier, Red Ray had bought the old Sally Morrot ranch near Rito as an extravagant, hysterical ploy to distract himself from drinking and thus save his marriage.
The ranch had been part of Henri Morrot’s original holdings. A month before he died in 1915, Morrot parceled out his land, in what he believed to be an equitable manner, to his seven children. Famous for their contentious natures even as infants, six of the heirs felt gravely wronged. Old sibling rivalries intensified in the public arena of the courtroom. Feud fueled feud, hostilities became generational, and litigation replaced ranching as the Morrot family business. The courts impounded acre after acre for costs, and the Fitzgeralds bought up the land at auction for a fraction of its worth. After three generations, the Morrot empire had shrunk like a vast landlocked lake until only a few groves remained in the family name.
Sally Morrot, Henri’s youngest child, had taken her allotted, lady-sized inheritance of 250 acres without dispute and repulsed all suitors, claim jumpers, and obsequious volunteer heirs for the next sixty-five years. On the west end of her property, she built for “her Mexicans” nine unplumbed, unheated, yet sturdy wooden bungalows, a packing house, outbuildings, and a company store. Her workers lived there year round, raised children, planted perennials, considered the place home. Half a mile away, on a knoll surrounded by two acres of rolling lawn, Sally Morrot constructed a three-storey mansion as spindly and delicate as a wicker throne. A prototype of already outdated Victorian whimsy, the house sported narrow bay windows, gables, balconies for every bedroom, finials, crest work, scrolls, and a wide portico that wrapped around three exposures. Six chimneys and two turrets were pink limestone block. The architect took lace from his wife’s undergarments, reproduced it in wood, and mounted it along the eaves and ridges of the roof.
Aloof and iron-willed, Sally Morrot managed her groves like a feudal lord. She made money through both world wars and the Great Depression. When avocados became a viable commodity, she planted 30 acres of the Haas and Bacon varieties. She put over 130 acres in citrus. She gave generously to charities and sent her disenfranchised nieces and nephews through college. She allowed the University of California to use her ranch as a field station and, in exchange, was the first in the valley to implement technological innovations in the citrus industry. She credited her vitality and advanced age to a series of pagan rituals and herb teas provided by her chauffeur, Rafael Flores, who was a curandero—a healer—among his people.
Sally Morrot was savvy and indomitable and an institution, but old age eventually wore her out. On her ninety-second birthday, deaf and half-blind, she packed a single suitcase, put her bug-eyed papillon lapdog in a picnic hamper, and took a taxi to her favorite nephew’s house in Oxnard, never to return. Even as she lived on, her relatives plundered the nineteen furnished rooms, sold off the valuables, and abandoned the rest, including dirty dishes on the drain board and the dog’s bowl on the floor. When Sally Morrot died at the age of ninety-five, her nephew hired a corporation to oversee the groves, and the first corporate decision was to evict the nine families from the village.
Organized by a young firebrand in their midst named David Ibañez, the so-called Mexicans—most were third- and fourth-generation Californians—took their case to court in the spirited