Cradled in my arms, Patricio slept. He must have felt my body trembling when the farmer emerged at last from his house to shovel dirt, cleaner than himself, onto my blessed one. Patricio must have heard the summer soil crumbling as it hit the myrtle leaves and then the small wooden box beneath. It was the sound of a sudden downpour, and it made me look up at the sky. The date of Giorgio’s passing, August 17, 1850, I have committed to memory, but it was this rain of dirt that marked when my blessed one was taken from me, when the distance separating his body from mine became eternal. Words and numbers could never do the same.

On our lane, the mothers—previously so close-lipped, their eyes hooded in judgment—felt pity toward me. They came to my front door, in twos and threes, with whole walnuts, hazelnuts, and almonds. In Lefkada town, these were offered for the remission of the sins of the recently departed. The custom was familiar to me, but their choice of offerings was not. Every night, I threw the walnuts, hazelnuts, and almonds away with the vegetable scraps. Every morning, Old Iota picked them out, wiped clean their hard shells, and stored them in a clean cloth sack. By the end of the first week, she had enough for months’ worth of baking. She was practical in ways that I had yet to learn.

I asked Old Iota if she knew what these mothers—I did not say “mothers,” I said “hags”—had said about her when she was not in the room.

Without looking up from the eggplant peelings and the tomato seeds that her hands were searching through, Old Iota asked whether I knew that the walnuts, hazelnuts, and almonds were not for Giorgio’s sins but for mine. “On Santa Maura Island,” she said, “the hags bring sugared almonds when a baby passes.”

The women had whispered to me—as if Old Iota did not know the details of her own life and might overhear them and learn something new—a story that began with a sixteen-year-old Iona, as she was called then, the only daughter of a widower who married her off to the eldest son of a farming family, a day’s mule ride from Lefkada town.

Iona did not meet her husband until the day that they received the Sacrament of Marriage. In a house in the middle of a sea of olive trees, Iona then gave birth to five boys in six years, but none of them had a heart that would beat for more than a month, the last one not even a day.

How many dishes of sugared almonds did Iona discard before she understood that there would be another? The mothers on the nearby farms would continue to offer them, a custom of the Orthodox Church but with roots that were deeper, older, and more practical. These mothers with their work-worn hands were guiding Iona onto her back again, so that she could be one of them again. They told Iona to eat half of the sugared almonds, to let their sweetness spread over her tongue, and then feed the rest to her husband with her fingers. This made Iona blush. “Another baby will soon grace you,” said these mothers. They said “grace” to cover up the animal acts that they wanted for her, and Iona did as she was told.