A Garden in the Dark

Things grow wherever Persephone sets her hands, and at twenty-seven she has never been allowed up the mountain alone, where the old women say a stair goes down to the king of the dead. The barley on the upper terraces is heading, green and full, and the wind off the sea goes through it in long passes. She kneels between the rows with both hands in the soil. The soil is warm from the morning sun. When she draws a weed, the root comes up dark and damp, and she presses the earth back over the bare place with her thumbs, and the barley above it stands straighter. It always does. She has never asked why.

Below her the terraces step down toward the sea in green shelves, each one held by a wall of fitted stone. Above her the mountain climbs away bare and gray into the heat. She has worked every shelf of this hillside since she was small. The village women bring her what fails: a fig in a clay pot that will not root, a vine gone yellow at the leaf, seed that will not sprout for any other hand. She sets her fingers in the pot's dirt and tells them to water it and wait. It always roots. She wipes her hands on her chiton and thinks no more of it. It is only what her hands do.

Her chiton is saffron linen, pinned at the shoulders with bronze and belted with a green cord, the hem kilted up through the belt for work. Her legs are bare and dusty to the knee. Her feet are bare in the furrow, and the earth is packed under her nails. She is tall, taller than any woman in the village, long-limbed and long-necked, slender through the waist, her arms olive and warm from the sun. Her hair is dark chestnut and very long, and it is coming loose from the thick braid pinned up off her neck, damp strands sticking where she has been bending. The wind brings the sea up the hill with it, and her lips taste of salt.

Her mother comes down the path at midmorning with a cloth over one arm.

Demeter is tall and broad-shouldered, a head above the women of the village, her forearms brown and strong from a lifetime of sickle and flail. Her hair is thick and dark and gone iron at the braid, worn in a crown of plaits. She wears a green peplos and a wheat-colored himation, and there are ears of barley thrust through her belt, as there always are. Where she passes along the lower shelves the grain stands taller, and where she is displeased the world goes thin and dry. This morning she is pleased. The whole hillside knows it.

"Here." Demeter unwraps the cloth and sets it on the terrace wall: bread still warm from her own oven, olives in oil, a small jug of wine cut with spring water. "You were up here before the dew was gone."

"The light was good."

"The light is good all day." Demeter looks over the rows, and her eyes miss nothing: the weeds gone, the furrows straightened, the heads standing full and heavy. "The middle terrace wants clearing along the wall. Do that after you have eaten. Then the lower strip, where the drainage runs. I will send for you when the shrine wants its honey."

"Yes, mother."

Demeter touches her cheek, once, with a hand that smells of bread and crushed barley, and goes back up the path. Persephone eats sitting on the warm stones of the wall. The bread is soft inside and tastes of the oven's smoke. The olives are black and sharp. She eats all of it, every olive, because her mother will ask, and because it is easier to be asked about bread than about anything else.

She has barely stood again when her mother comes back down the path a second time, with her comb.

"Sit."

"I have earth on my hands."

"It will keep." Demeter sets her on the wall, in the thin shade of the old olive that grows out of it, and draws the pins one by one, and lets the braid down. Her fingers are sure and gentle. She combs the length of it out over Persephone's shoulders, section by section, unhurried, and works it back into a single braid drawn tight and smooth. Persephone sits with her earth-dry hands folded in her lap and lets it be done, as she has let it be done every morning of her life. She is a grown woman, and her mother braids her hair for her.

"You went out without your himation," Demeter says, behind her.

"The sun is warm."

"The sun is fierce, and it will burn your shoulders." It is not true, and they both know it. Her shoulders only brown. The pins go back in, one at a time, her mother's mouth pursed around the ones she is holding. "There." Demeter turns her gently by the shoulders and studies her face a moment, and whatever she is looking for, she finds it, or does not. She kisses her brow. "My girl."

She goes. Persephone stands in the shade of the olive with her hair drawn back smooth and tight as a bound sheaf, and the warmth of the kiss stays on her brow longer than the kiss deserves.

Her mother has come to her twice, and the sun is not yet at its height.

She works the middle terrace until the light stands straight down. The cicadas start up in the dry grass at the wall's foot and stop and start again. She clears the drainage run with her hands, lifting out the silt in wet armfuls, and the water, thin as it is, runs gratefully through.

The third time, her mother brings the honey.

It is in a clay jar sealed with wax, and Demeter sets it into her hands rather than on the wall, so that she has to take the whole weight of it. "To the shrine. Tell the women it is from the hives by the lower spring, and tell them to pour slowly. The dead are in no hurry." Her mouth softens at her own words. "Go before the worst of the heat. And come straight up to the house when it is done. I am baking."

"Yes, mother."

Three times before noon, and every errand chosen for her.

The harvest shrine stands at the foot of the lowest terrace, where the path turns for the village: an altar stone black with old oil, a plane tree for shade, a cleft in the rock for the pouring, and a bench worn smooth. Below it the path goes on to the harbor, where one sail is standing out to sea, small and white and going somewhere else.

The old women are there before her, pouring honey for the dead. On the altar stone: a barley cake, three black figs, a cup of unmixed wine, and the jars the households have sent, each one greater or smaller with the year's fortune. The eldest of them is small and bent, with hands like roots. She takes the Demeter jar from Persephone and holds it against her hip.

"From the lower spring hives," Persephone says. "She says to pour slowly."

"She would say that." The eldest says it fondly, and breaks the wax.

They tip the jars one by one into the cleft, and the honey runs slow and dark gold, and the hot rock drinks it, and each woman speaks the name of her own dead under her breath. A husband. A son lost off the cape. A daughter who did not keep her first child. Persephone stands with them, because it is proper. The smell of the honey rises around them all, dark and heavy, smelling of thyme. The eldest dips one finger in the stream before it reaches the cleft and touches it to Persephone's tongue, as she has done since Persephone was small enough to be held.

"So the dead know we keep sweet things for them," the old woman says, as she says every year.

The honey is dark on her tongue, and tastes of thyme and smoke.

It is the youngest of the shrine women, gray at the temples herself, who says it, wiping her hands on a cloth. "My mother used to tell of a stair up there." She nods at the mountain. "Past the high spring. A cave where they kept a shrine once, long ago. Behind the shrine there are steps cut in the living rock, going down."

One of the others clicks her tongue. "Old women's talk."

"We are old women." No one laughs.

The eldest does not laugh either. She stops the jar she is pouring and looks up at the mountain, and the others go quiet for her, the way the whole village goes quiet for her when she chooses to speak.

"It is there," she says. "My grandmother's sister walked down it, the year both her sons were lost at sea, to pour oil for them at the river itself. Living feet may walk it, if the will is their own. No one can be carried down it, and no one can be tricked onto it. And what goes down by the stair comes up by it. That is the old word, and it is a true one."

"She came back up, then," Persephone says.

"She came back up." The eldest takes up her pouring again. "She never said what she saw below. Only that the lamps there burn without flickering, and the king keeps what he is given, and asks before he takes."

The women name the king of that place rarely, and softly. The eldest names him now, low, into the cleft of the rock, with the honey still running: Hades, lord of the Many, whom the sun has never seen.

Persephone looks up at the mountain. The high spring is a white thread in the gray stone, and above it there is nothing but the shoulder of the hill and the heat rising off it. She has asked, in one way or another, every year of her life, to be allowed to go up past that spring alone. The answer has always been her mother's arm around her shoulders.

"Is the stair still there," she says, "after so long?"

"If it ever was," the youngest says, and shrugs.

The eldest says nothing at all, and lets the last of the honey run down slowly, the way it should be poured, and that nothing goes home up the hill with Persephone and sits down beside her heart.

The house stands above the terraces on its own shelf of ground, stone-walled, cool inside after the glare. In the hearth room: the fire going low, the loom with its half-worked length of green wool, the bread oven glowing at the hearth's side. Her mother is at the loom, and the loom weights click softly, and the smell of the baking is everywhere, warm and sweet.

Persephone stands in the doorway with the sun at her back and asks for it plainly.

"Mother. Give me one day on the high mountain. One day of my own, alone. I will go up at dawn and come down before dark. I will carry water, and bread, and I will take the good path past the shrine of the spring."

The loom weights stop.

Demeter does not turn at once. Then she comes across the room and takes her daughter into her arms, all of her, the way she gathered her up when she was small, and holds her against the broad warmth of her chest. She smells of bread and wool and the green wool's dye.

"No," her mother says, tenderly, into her hair. "The mountain is bare, and the path is loose stone, and the sun is fierce up there with no shade and no water you did not carry yourself. There is nothing for you up there. Nothing." She rocks her a little, as if the no were a grief she could comfort in advance. "Ask me for anything else, and I will give it gladly. The red wool off the trader's ship. A new himation, dyed proper. A day at the harbor when the fish come in, with me beside you."

"I do not want the harbor."

"Then ask me again tomorrow, and I will think of something better." Demeter kisses her brow and lets her go, and the refusal is done, and it is complete, and it has an embrace pressed around it like wax around a seal.

Persephone stands in the cool of the house with the warmth of her mother's arms still on her shoulders, and says, "Yes, mother."

She has said it all her life.

Her own room is small and cool, off the hearth room: a narrow bed, a cedar chest, a shelf of clay jars where she keeps her seeds. She has seed of everything that grows on the hillside, saved with care across the years, each jar marked in her own hand. She kneels by the shelf in the dimness, and works by feel and habit, and does not hurry.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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