Taste of the Bitter Herb

"You want me to hold your life in my hands?" I said. The rope lay in the dust between us, coiled and yellow, and Viola stood there with her arms crossed like she had just asked me to pass the salt.

"That's the size of it," she said. "Yes!"

We had been arguing for three summers about the press houses up on the ridge. I used the collapsed ones for my tumble tower practice. She gathered herbs along the same terraces and told me every July that my metal tower was an insult to the dead people who had pressed grapes in those stones. Now she had walked all the way down to my camp with a rope and a basket and that same flat look.

"Tomorrow is the feast," she said. "The bitter herb has to come off the south cliff before dawn. You know this. Everyone in Uvac knows this."

"I know the feast. I don't know why it's my problem."

"Jelena has the fever. She's in bed at her sister's and can't stand up straight, let alone hold a rope on a cliff edge. You're the only other person who has walked that path with me." She nudged the rope with her boot. "You've watched me do it once. You know the anchors."

I looked at the rope. I looked at her. Viola was thirty-nine that summer and I was forty-two, and in three summers I had learned exactly two things about her. One, she never asked anyone for anything twice. Two, she was right about almost everything, which was the whole reason we fought.

"Say it plainly," I told her. "Ask me."

She exhaled through her nose. "Stanley. Please hold the rope for me tomorrow so I don't fall off the herb cliff and die before the feast."

"Well. When you put it like that."

"Don't make it a joke."

"I'm not making it a joke. I'm saying yes." I picked up the rope. It was good rope, waxed, the kind you don't buy for one job. "This is serious rope."

"My father bought it when I was a baby. It's held four generations of herb cutters and it will hold you standing at the top doing nothing but sitting down."

"That's the plan. I sit. You hang."

"That's the whole plan," she said, and then she almost smiled, which for Viola was a lot.

We started up through the terraces at five in the morning, while the valley was still gray and the stone walls held yesterday's heat like bread. I carried the rope coiled over my shoulder. She carried the basket and a sickle with a cloth wrapped around the blade. Nobody talked for the first half hour. That suited me. My legs knew the route anyway.

Here's what I should explain. I read sea turtle tracks for a living. Not live turtles, tracks. After nesting season I walk the beaches of the Adriatic and read the crawl patterns in the sand, and the work pays badly and comes in seasons, and in the off months I drift. Three summers ago I drifted up into this valley with a portable metal tumble tower, which is a stacking balance game, four feet of steel rods that come apart into a backpack. I set it up on the flat floor of an old press house whose roof had fallen in, and I practiced on the stones where grape carts had rolled for maybe three hundred years, and Viola found me there and told me I was dancing on graves.

I didn't think I was dancing on graves. I thought the floor was level and the acoustics were good, the tower clinking against the cliff face when I missed a catch. But I kept coming back, and she kept finding me, and somewhere in there it stopped being an argument and started being a schedule neither of us would admit to.

"You've claimed the second press house," she said as we passed it. She said it the way you'd note weather.

"I have not claimed anything."

"You swept the floor. I saw the broom."

"That's maintenance. Level floor, safe practice."

"Three summers of maintenance on a ruin you don't own." She climbed a step in the wall and reached back without looking, and I took her hand without thinking, and she pulled, and it was done. We kept going. "The roof fell the winter before I arrived. You could fix it."

"I could," I said. "If I were staying."

"Aren't you staying? The tracks end in September."

"September I go south. Brindisi, probably. Maybe Patras." I heard myself say Patras and regretted it, because the last woman I'd been with, the biologist, went to Greece and that was the end of it, four years ago now. Viola didn't know that story and I wasn't going to tell it on a herb path at dawn.

"Patras," she repeated. "Well."

The terraces narrowed. Wild fennel grew waist high on both sides and the smell of it got into everything, and under it the thyme from the drying sills of the press houses below. The south cliff showed itself all at once when we rounded the shoulder of the hill. It was maybe forty meters of gray rock with a seam running up the middle, and the bitter herb grew out of that seam in dark clumps, silver underneath the leaves.

"There," she said. "You see the ledge at a third of the way up."

"I see it."

"I anchor at the top, drop the rope, and work the seam downward. You sit above me and take in slack. If I say pull, you pull. If I say nothing, I'm cutting."

"If you say nothing for more than a minute, I'm pulling anyway."

She stopped and turned around on the path. "No. If I say nothing, I'm working. The herb fights the sickle. You'll hear it."

"How will I know the difference between working and trouble?"

"You'll know," she said. "The rope tells you. A living person on a rope feels different from a falling one. I learned it in one morning and Jelena is afraid of mayonnaise."

I laughed before I could stop myself. She didn't laugh, but her mouth did something at the corner, and then she turned and kept climbing, and I followed, and I thought, this is the strangest morning of my three summers here.

At the top of the cliff there was a bent iron stake driven into rock, old enough that the wind had polished it. She threaded the rope through it with hands that clearly had done this a hundred times, tied two loops, handed me one.

"Sit here. Wrap it twice around your back, brace your feet against that stone, and never stand up." She looked at me straight on. "Stanley. If you stand up, we both die. Do you understand?"

"I understand."

"Say it back."

"I sit, I brace, I never stand. I take slack when you take slack and I pull when you say pull."

"Good." She took off her outer shirt and folded it into the basket, and underneath she was in a plain gray tank top, and her arms were a lot more muscled than I had ever let myself notice from across a terrace. She swung over the edge like it was a curb, not a cliff, and the rope came taut across my back, and I settled in and felt her whole weight arrive on the other end of it.

"Hold me," she called up, half joke, half not.

"I've got you," I called down, and I meant both things you can mean by that, and the sun came over the ridge and lit the seam of the cliff, and the sickle started clicking against stone.

The rope told me things. When she moved down the seam it hummed, a steady low pull across my back. When she stopped to cut, it went quiet but not slack, a live kind of quiet, like holding a sleeping animal. The sickle clicked against stone and then there was a tearing sound, the herb fighting it, just like she said.

"First clump," she called. "It's good. Dark, lots of silver."

"How much do you need?"

"Basket half full by noon. The feast needs more than people think. You dry it and it shrinks to almost nothing."

I leaned back and the rope shifted with me and she swore softly below.

"Sorry," I said. "I moved."

"Don't move."

"I'm not moving."

"You're literally talking, which moves you."

I shut up. The sun got higher. My shoulders found a rhythm with her, her weight and my weight on one rope, and every time she reached for a new clump the pull came harder across my back and I braced harder into the stone, and I started to understand what Jelena learned in one morning. A person on a rope is a person. You feel their decisions.

"Stanley."

"Yes!"

"Take in two hands of slack. I'm crossing to the far clumps."

The rope came through my palms and I felt her traverse, a sideways drag, and then she was settled again and the quiet came back.

"You're good at this," she called up.

"I read turtle tracks. This is basically the same."

"It is not basically the same."

"Both jobs are a woman yelling at me from below."

There was a pause. Then she laughed, an actual laugh, short and surprised, and the rope jumped with it.

"That's the first time I've heard that," I said.

"Heard what."

"That laugh."

"Don't get used to it." But the corner of her voice had changed, the way a corner of a mouth does. "Fourth clump. The sickle's dulling on the stone."

"Does that happen every year?"

"Every year. Jelena brings a whetstone and I forget it's in the basket until I'm already down. Every July, same argument with myself."

"Where is it now?"

"Bottom of the basket. Under the shirt. Why?"

"So I can tell you next year."

She was quiet a second. "Next year," she said, like she was testing the weight of it. Then the sickle clicked again and that was the end of that conversation.

By the time the basket was half full the sun had cleared the ridge and the cliff was hot and my hands had the rope burned into them in a nice way. She came up the seam hand over hand, tank top dark at the back with sweat, and I hauled on the last meter and she came over the edge and sat down next to me hard, breathing, and we were both quiet for a good half minute.

"Hand," she said.

"What?"

"Give me your hand." I gave it. She turned it over and looked at the rope burns. "You held the whole descent on your palms. Most people choke the rope with their forearms."

"I didn't know there was a wrong way."

"There's always a wrong way. You just didn't pick it." She pressed her thumb along the burn line, once, checking, and something went up my arm that had nothing to do with the rope. She let go and stood. "Come on. Herb has to be on the sills by ten or it sweats."

* * *

The press house was cool inside, the way stone buildings are when the roof is gone but the walls are thick. She laid the herb out on the sills in single layers, dark leaves silver side up, and the bitter smell filled the whole room in about five minutes. Sharp. It got in your nose and stayed.

"That's the smell of tomorrow," she said. "Everyone in the valley will have it on their hands by sundown."

"And what does the feast do, exactly? Nobody's actually told me. Three summers and I still don't know."

"You eat the bitter herb so the year starts honest. Sweet first and you forget what things cost. Bitter first and you remember."

"That's not a ritual, that's just breakfast with extra steps."

She threw a dried fennel stalk at my head. I caught it.

"Set up your tower," she said. "I've never watched you actually play."

"It's not playing. It's practice."

"It's blocks, Stanley."

I carried the backpack out to the flat stone in front of the second press house and assembled the rods, four feet of steel