The Ferryman's Hearth

Her husband went into the ground with nothing under his tongue, and so for a year he has waited at the edge of the black river for someone to pay the ferryman. The frost is on the kiln yard before Korinna is. It lies white as sifted ash along the lee of the shed wall and down in the hollows of the clay pit, and the stacked rows of waiting pots carry it on their rims. The sea below the valley is the color of iron in the dark, and the dark is short this time of year. The cold comes up through her bare soles from the packed earth, and she lets it. The cold is honest.

She unbars the wheel shed and goes in. On the yard behind her: the kiln with its cold round mouth, the wood stacked under its roof of reeds, the pit where the good clay waits under layers of straw, the long table where the painting is done, the drying shelves with their rows of bowls and jugs and one tall jar, hers, thrown yesterday and already firm. All of it quiet. All of it hers to keep, for now.

She has carried a coal down from the house hearth in its little pot, and she lights the lamp from it and sets the lamp on the shelf above the wheel. The flame stands up straight. The shed makes itself around her in the light: the wheel, the wet box, the bats, the cutting string, the pails of slip gone skinned over in the cold. She lifts the straw off the clay and the smell rises, wet and dark and a little sour, the smell of the whole valley ground fine and mixed with water.

She cuts a wedge with the string and works it on the stone. Heel of the hand, turn, heel of the hand, until it comes together smooth and even, with no air left in it to burst in the firing. She touches it to her tongue. Iron, and rain, and the faintest salt. Good clay. It was good clay when Nikias's grandfather dug the pit, and it is good clay now, and it does not care whose hands work it.

She sits at the wheel and throws. The lump centers under her palms and rises and opens, and the wall of the pot comes up between her fingers, thin and even, and she holds it at the edge of collapse the way she has held ten thousand others. She is tall even on the wheel's low seat, long-armed, long-backed, and the work has made her strong in the forearms and the wrists. Her mourning peplos is deep blue-black wool, finely woven, fitted close at the belt, pinned at the shoulders with two bronze pins that were her mother's. Her hair is black and very long, and she wears it coiled and pinned at the nape, out of the clay. Out of doors it goes under the dark fold of her himation that the valley calls the widow's fold. The coil is heavy. She has thought of cutting it. She has not.

She is thirty-one years old, and she has been a widow for one year.

The fever came up the valley with the autumn rains. It took the old first, and then it took whoever it wanted. Nikias had been strong as a draft ox, broad at the wheel, thick-handed, thirty-four years old, and the fever took him in six days. She had sat by him through all six. She had held the cup to his mouth and said his name and changed the wet cloths, and at the end of it he had died before dawn, and the rain had gone on falling on the roof.

They buried him in haste, at the first cold, because the fever was still in the houses and the valley buried its dead fast that autumn. She had not been allowed to lay him out herself. Custom said the women of the house did that work, but the fever had changed every custom, and Lykon's men had carried him up the hill sewn in his shroud and put him in the ground the same day. Three days later Lykon had come down to the yard and stood where she could see his face and told her that no one had set the obol under his brother's tongue. No one had remembered it. In the haste, with the fever in the valley, the coin had been forgotten.

A shade buried without its fare waits on the shore of the river. It does not cross. It waits, and fades, and waits, until its own people pay.

She had asked him why he had come to tell her that, and he had said that she had a right to know, and she had understood that he had come because he could not carry it alone. His brother, buried coinless in the fever autumn, by his own men's hands. It had not made him gentler. It had made him harder, the way firing hardens clay.

She pulls the string under the finished pot and lifts it on its bat and sets it on the shelf with yesterday's jar. A wine jug, plain and bellied, the kind the valley uses every day. She does not know who will fire it. She sits for a moment with her hands on her knees, clay drying on them to a gray skin, and looks at the lamp flame standing still above the wheel, and the year settles on her shoulders like the himation she is not wearing, dark and close and nearly finished.

The light comes gray and slow over the ridge. She hears the yard gate and knows the step before she sees him. Lykon comes across the yard in his heavy himation, heavy-shouldered, thick through the middle, his short dark beard salted with frost where his breath has touched it. He does not come to the shed often. He farms the family's olive terraces above the village and leaves clay to those who love it. He stops in the doorway and fills it.

"Eight days," he says. "The year-turning."

"I know the day."

"If you do not pour, the house is mine by custom. The kiln and the clay pit with it, and the women with them. My sons will keep the work going."

"You have told me before."

"I am telling you again so you cannot say you were not told." He says it levelly. He is not a cruel man. He is a proper one, and in the end it amounts to the same thing for a kiln. "The village will be there. The libation is poured by the widow of the house or the house passes. That is the custom, and it is older than any of us."

"I know the custom."

He looks at the shelf, at the jug and the tall jar, and something moves in his face and is put away. "You have kept the place well," he says. "No one says otherwise. My sons will keep it well too. There is no shame in it. A kiln is no work for a widow alone."

She wipes her hands on the rag and does not answer that, because there is nothing in it that answering would improve.

"I am going away today," she says.

His head comes up. "Where."

"Out of the valley."

"Away." He says the word slowly, as if he does not like the weight of it. "Eight days before the year-turning. The village will say you have gone mad with grieving."

"The village may say what it likes."

"You will be back." It is not a question, quite. Under the order in it there is something else, and she knows what it is. He wants to be told the kiln will be his by right and not by her absence. He wants the custom to do its work cleanly. "You will be back to pour, or you will not be back, and either way the day comes."

"I will do what is right before the village," she says. "I have never done anything else."

He looks at her a long moment. He is her husband's brother, and there is Nikias in the set of his jaw and nothing of Nikias anywhere else. He nods once, as if something has been agreed, and goes out across the yard, and the frost crackles under his sandals, and the gate falls shut behind him.

She sits until her breath is even again. Then she wraps the clay and covers the pit and banks the little coal in its pot, and takes the lamp, and goes up the path to the house.

The house is cold and small and swept clean. On the hearth-shelf sits the jar of coins. She made it herself in the second year of her marriage, a plain wide-mouthed jar with a band of waves painted around the shoulder, and the slip has fired the color of dark honey. She takes it down and sets it on the table and lifts out the cloth lid. Inside: obols and drachmas, the household's money, the money of a workshop that has been kept well for a year by three women.

She takes out two obols and holds them in her palm. Thin little coins, worn smooth, cold as river stones.

One of them is for Nikias. A year late, and carried by the one person who never forgot him. She wraps it in a scrap of soft wool and sets the small bundle inside her belt, against her skin.

The other is her own. She has thought about this for months, in the dark hours, turning it over the way she turns a pot. The living pay a fare like the dead. It is a courtesy and not a binding, and she means to pay it and owe no one below anything. Not the ferryman, not the House, not any lord of it. She goes down to do one thing, and she will pay her own way there and back, and the coin for that is hers and no one else's. She ties it in the corner of a square of linen and knots it to her belt where she can reach it with one hand.

Myrto comes down the path as the sun touches the ridge. She is small and wiry and gray-haired, and she has worked this kiln since Nikias's father was a young man, and she looks at the banked coal-pot in Korinna's hand and at the sandals on Korinna's feet, and her mouth goes thin.

"You're going somewhere," she says.

"I am."

"The firing is stacked and ready. Three days in this cold, no more, or the slip will craze." She says it to the kiln, not to Korinna. "The big jar on the end wants a slow start. The rest will take what it takes."

"The firing is yours," Korinna says. "From today. You know this kiln better than I do, and it should hear you say so."

Myrto looks at her then, directly, for a long count. "When are you back."

"Before the year-turning."

"Eight days." Myrto nods once. "Come back before the eighth, or Lykon will have the lock off the shed door and his sons at the wheel, and I am too old to throw the big jars myself. That is not sentiment. That is clay."

"I know."

"Hmm." Myrto picks up the coal-pot. "Then go and do whatever it is. The kiln will be here."

Phila is at the long table when Korinna comes back through the yard with her himation on and a small bundle of bread and cheese and a skin of watered wine at her belt. She is painting slip on a row of cups, brown braid over her shoulder, and her hand is the steadiest in the valley, and she does not look up until the line is finished, because she never looks up until the line is finished.

"You're wearing sandals," Phila says.

"I am going up the mountain."

Phila sets down the brush. She is quiet, and then she is sudden, the way she always is, the words coming out of the quiet like water out of a jar.

"My father is on the hill above the terraces," she says. "The herders buried him where he fell, that same autumn, when the fever was everywhere. They did what they could. There was no one to carry a coin up to him, and no one to say his name over him." Her voice is level and her eyes are not. "Glaukos. He kept goats. He is buried above the village with no coin under his tongue, the same as your Nikias, and nobody pours for him."

Korinna stands very still. She takes the name and sets it down carefully inside herself, the way she sets a finished pot on the shelf, where it will not be knocked and will not be forgotten.

"Glaukos," she says. "I will remember it."

"It doesn't change anything," Phila says, and picks up the brush again. "It's only that someone should say it."

"Someone should," Korinna says. "And someone does."

She goes out through the gate and takes the path up past the terraces, and the frost is melting in the first sun, and the dry thyme gives up its smell where her himation brushes it, sharp and clean and warm with the day coming. Below her the valley lies small in its bowl: the kiln with its cold mouth, the pit, the long table, the gray sea beyond the headland, iron gone to bronze where the sun touches it. She does not look back at the house, or at the jar on the hearth-shelf with its cloth lid lifted.

She climbs.

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

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