The Book of Longings(51)

His eyes held mine for so long, I fought not to look away. They were tinged with disappointment that slowly softened, then ebbed. He said, “Little Thunder, I won’t judge the knowing in your heart or what choice you make.”

It was the first time he spoke the pet name he would call me until the end. I accepted it as an endearment. He heard the quake that lived at my center, and he didn’t seek to silence it.





vi.


The days he was away crept on tiny, unhurried feet. Sometimes in the evening my feeling of aloneness was so great, I snuck Delilah into our room and fed her citrus peels. Other times I carried my mat to the storeroom and slept beside Yaltha. I marked Jesus’s absence with pebbles, adding one each day atop his sleeping mat, watching the little pile grow. Nine . . . ten . . . eleven.

On the twelfth day I woke knowing Jesus would return before dark, bearing some sort of propitious news. I couldn’t concentrate on my tasks. In the afternoon, Mary came upon me staring idly at a spider that dangled from the lip of a water jug. “Are you well?” she asked.

“Jesus will come today. I know it.”

She didn’t question my certainty. She said, “I’ll ready his meal.”

I bathed myself and dabbed clove oil behind my ears. I let my hair loose and dressed in the dark blue tunic he loved. I poured wine and set out bread. Over and over I went to the doorway and looked toward the gate. A blaze of yellow on the hill . . . the first grains of darkness floating in the air . . . dusk skulking across the compound.

He arrived with the last trace of light, bearing his tools and enough wages to replenish our wheat stores and add a lamb to the stable. In the privacy of our room, he gathered me into an embrace. I could smell the weariness on him.

Filling his cup, I said, “What tidings do you bring?”

He described his days, the work he’d been hired to do.

“And Tabitha? Do have any word of her?”

He touched the bench beside him. “Sit.”

Was the news so grave I must sit to receive it? I sank down close to him.

“I was hired by a man in Japha to fashion a new door for his house. Everyone in the village knew of Tabitha, including the man’s wife, who said that few had ever seen her and most feared her. When I asked why this was, she said Tabitha was possessed by demons and kept locked inside.”

This was not the favorable news I’d expected. “Would you take me to her?”

“She’s no longer there, Ana. The woman said she was sold to a man from Jericho, a landowner.”

“Sold? She’s a slave in his house?”

“It seems so. I asked others in Japha about her and they told me the same story.”

I laid my head in his lap and felt his hand stroke my back.





vii.


Throughout the year that followed, I grew accustomed to Jesus’s absences. The temporary loss of him became less like a spear in my side and more of a splinter in my foot. I went about my chores, relieved when I’d completed them and could sit with Mary or Yaltha and beg for stories of Jesus’s boyhood or tales of Alexandria. I thought sometimes of my parents, an hour’s walk away, and of Judas, who was I knew not where, and a gnawing forlornness would rise in me. There’d been no word from any of them. I tried not to think of Tabitha, enslaved to a stranger.

Whenever Jesus was away, I wore the red thread on my wrist, as was my custom, but early in the spring, on a day when my mind could settle on nothing, I noticed how frayed the thread had become over the past year, so wizened I feared it would soon wear apart. Touching it with my fingertip, I assured myself that if such a thing happened, it would signify nothing ominous, but then I thought of the ink splotch in my incantation bowl, the gray cloud over my head. It was hard to imagine that meant nothing. No, I would not risk a broken thread. I undid the knot and slid my tattered bracelet into its goatskin pouch.

I was tightening the cord when I heard Mary shout from the courtyard, “Come quickly, Jesus has returned.”

For the past two weeks he’d been in Besara making cabinets for a winemaker and staying with his sister, Salome. I knew Mary was anxious for news of her daughter.

“Salome is well,” he reported when the flurry of greetings had subsided. “But I have bitter news. Her husband has a weakness in his leg and arm and a slur in his voice. He no longer leaves the house.”

I looked at Mary, how she gathered herself, her arms wrapping about her sides, her body saying what her mouth did not: Salome will be a widow soon.

That night all of us except Judith and the children huddled about the cook fire speculating about Salome’s husband and sharing stories. When the heat had nearly gone from the embers, James turned to Jesus. “Will you make the Passover pilgrimage for us this year?”

James, Simon, and Mary had traveled to the Temple in Jerusalem the year before while the rest of us stayed home to work and tend the animals. It was Jesus’s turn to go, but he vacillated.

“I don’t yet know,” he said.

“But someone must go from our family,” James responded, sounding annoyed. “Why do you hesitate? Can’t you leave work behind for those few days?”

“It isn’t that. I’m struggling to understand if God wishes me to go at all. The Temple has become a den of thieves, James.”

James rolled his eyes skyward. “Must you always concern yourself with such things? We have a duty to sacrifice an animal at Passover.”