They make a lot of noise. I long to inform you I have grown to tolerate it, but it is not true. Some nights, it is the sound of laughter—a threatening laughter. Others, I hear grinding metallic squeals. Thus, I bolt awake and tremble, with a vision of starved hogs imprisoned down a dried well. The worst is the scraping. A distant scratching sound would gradually stalk toward me and assault my eardrums until I was certain I would go deaf. With the last instance of this, I swear to you now that I felt a hot breath on my ear. Lighting the bedside lantern drew silence.

Seventeen years have passed since my uncle, an oil man of great triumphs, had vanished. He was not a typical enterprise head in terms of greed. A portion of his earnings had secured this hundred-year-old vineyard estate. Uncle Renald donated to the town development with a great majority of his oil company’s revenue. Renald’s employees benefited from wages quadruple they would find elsewhere. Suffice to say, he was a man to be missed at his post.