Poisoned Honey: A Story of Mary Magdalene (20 page)

“But they didn’t?” prompted Matthew.

“Not at all!” said the storyteller. “They didn’t want anything to do with that Rabbi Yeshua! The townspeople begged him, very politely and sincerely, to please leave and never come back again. For they all had large herds of pigs.” The dining room rang with more laughter and applause.

A fine story, thought Matthew. It insulted the Romans and made fun of the Gentiles. It also showed the rabbi’s cleverness. He’d tricked the demons into leaving the possessed man. The rabbi had had a good idea how the pigs would react
to being possessed. And once the pigs were dead, of course the demons had nowhere to go.

As the laughter died away, a woman at the back of the room spoke up. “I wonder where all those demons went?”

There was an uneasy silence, and several of the guests made the sign against the evil eye, to ward off any stray demons that might have drifted across the lake. Matthew, eager to keep the party going, clapped Philip on the shoulder. “Tell us some more news, my friend!” So the salt merchant launched into a description of the magnificent public square that Herod Antipas was building in Tiberias.

A few weeks later, after the rainy season had begun, Matthew received a message from his father: the first meeting in Magdala with the young woman and her family had been arranged. Her name was Mariamne, widow of Eleazar. Her father was no longer living, but her cousin’s husband, a well-thought-of cloth dyer, was negotiating for her. She’d been married only briefly before; her old husband had died of a stroke, and there were no children.

Again Matthew imagined the beautiful young widow close to him, and he caught his breath. He quickly made arrangements to leave the tollgate in charge of his guards for a few days.

On the appointed day, Matthew and his father put on
their best striped coats and hurried through a downpour to the house of Silas, Mariamne’s cousin-in-law. The host himself met them at the gate and showed them to the upper room, where a young woman with a round, cheerful face took their wet cloaks. Matthew liked her on sight, and a picture flashed in his mind of her tenderly washing his feet at the end of a long day’s work.

“Welcome to our home,” Silas said to Alphaeus and Matthew. “This is my wife, Susannah. And this is her cousin, Mariamne.” He motioned to a tall girl standing behind Susannah who bowed to them.

So
this
was Mariamne. She was pretty enough, thought Matthew. But her cool way of looking at him, as she helped her cousin serve refreshments, made him uneasy. After they were all sitting on the cushions making polite conversation, he noticed that her slim hands moved restlessly. She kept touching her left shoulder, and at times she seemed to be listening to faraway sounds.

Aside from that, Matthew thought there was something familiar about this girl. Of course, he may very well have seen her in Magdala sometime or other. Perhaps in the synagogue, in the years when Alphaeus and his sons were still attending.

It was pleasant for a tax collector to be welcomed into a respectable Jewish home so cordially, even though Matthew had been told why Silas and Susannah were eager to promote
this match. According to a reliable source, Alphaeus said, Silas had taken a bad loss on a shipment of cloth to Sepphoris. The entire shipment had been stolen on the road by bandits.

Matthew glanced at his father. Alphaeus was saying to Silas with a meaningful smile, “I wouldn’t be surprised if your cloth could slip out of the harbor from now on without paying any customs tax.” He nudged Silas to make his meaning clear.

Silas nodded, looking embarrassed. “Most gracious … most appreciated,” he muttered.

“Please take another spice cake, sir!” Susannah put in, offering the platter again. “I baked them just this morning.”

Matthew caught Mariamne staring at him with a slight frown, and he realized that he’d been looking at her the same way. Suddenly an expression of disgust and contempt came over her face. In that same moment, he knew where he’d seen her before, with exactly that same expression. “You’re the girl who spit on our doorway,” he said in an undertone.

“And
you
are the tax collector’s son!” Mariamne didn’t bother to lower her voice. She turned on Susannah. “How could you possibly think—” Jumping to her feet, she backed toward the wall. In a different, imperious voice she declared, “I was promised a prince. I deserve a prince! I spit again, on you and your offer of marriage.”

Mariamne seemed ready to actually spit on Matthew, except that her cousin leaped up, grabbed her arm, and turned her aside. Still, Mariamne continued to speak in a queenly voice that was interspersed with chirps uncannily like a bird’s.

The rest of them jumped up, too. Silas was talking quickly, making soothing motions, but Alphaeus cut him off. “A
little odd
, you told me,” he accused Silas. “Odd! This girl is out of her mind. She imagines she’s some kind of a princess, or is it a sparrow? You thought you’d fob her off on us … oh yes, good enough for the tax collector. Maybe she has leprosy, too?”

A wave of fury and shame swept through Matthew. How could a shrewd businessman like Alphaeus have been deceived? He was almost angrier for his father’s sake than for his own.

“Your business isn’t really in trouble, is it?” Matthew demanded of Silas. “That was just a cover for the truth about her. And the truth is, you’d better take her to an exorcist. After that, maybe someone else will have her!” Grabbing his still-damp cloak from a peg, Matthew stamped out into the driving rain.

Alphaeus followed his son down the stairs, flinging over his shoulder, “And don’t expect any customs-tax breaks from me!”

The first morning after his return from Magdala, Matthew rode up to the tollgate in a gloomy state of mind. So much for his bright marriage prospects with the suitable young widow. “A little peculiar,” his father had told him! Completely deranged was more like it.

To add further insult, the demented woman had scorned
him
. She might be stark, staring mad, but she wouldn’t sully herself by marrying a toll collector. Matthew laughed hollowly. He supposed it was good that both he and the young widow, although shunned by the rest of the Jewish community, still had their shreds of pride left.

Matthew squinted into the morning sun. A group was approaching the tollgate from the east, the direction of
Bethsaida-Julias. It wasn’t a merchant’s caravan, or a train of cushioned wagons bearing wealthy travelers, or farmers with carts full of produce. Just a group of men on foot. Judging from their rough, worn clothes, their cloaks had to double as their blankets at night.

There were about thirty in the group, but as they approached the gate, several dropped away. These laborers couldn’t afford to pay the toll, even the small fee for travelers on foot without merchandise. Instead, they’d hike over the rocky hillside and rejoin the road farther south.

Matthew expected the whole group to peel off—why should any of them pay just to walk through his gate? But the core of the group, led by a tall, long-faced man with an easy stride, kept coming. As they neared the gate, Matthew heard the others arguing with their leader. “Rabbi, why not turn aside? Why should we pay the toll? We need to save the money. Simon can’t feed all of us.”

“That’s right, Rabbi,” said the biggest man in the group. “On this road, we always cut across the hill back there, to duck the toll.”

Since they were calling the tall man rabbi, Matthew guessed that he must be one of the many wandering preachers who led disciples here and there around Galilee. Matthew glanced up at the ridge to see if Herod’s soldiers were
keeping watch—although this ragtag band didn’t look like much of a threat.

Their leader held up one hand to answer his followers. “It’s important to walk through the tollgate,” he answered. “I have business there.” The others fell silent.

What possible business could a wandering preacher have at the tollgate? wondered Matthew.

The rabbi stopped in front of him. “Peace, Matthew bar Alphaeus.”

Matthew was startled. The rabbi had called him by name. Of course, he might have found out Matthew’s name from another traveler. What was much more surprising, a holy man was greeting a toll collector as if he was a decent human being. Matthew felt confused. “Peace, rabbi,” he mumbled.

The rabbi caught Matthew’s gaze and held it. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you,” he said.

What! Matthew was too amazed to answer. He glanced at the rabbi’s disciples to see if this was a joke. But they looked as surprised as Matthew felt.

Finding his voice, Matthew was further surprised by the words he spoke: “Let’s see—ten of you would be four sestercii—I’ll give you a break and call it only three sestercii. Wait … only two sestercii.”

The rabbi nodded and gestured to one of his followers to pay the toll. But he didn’t gush with gratitude, as Matthew
expected. He looked at Matthew encouragingly, the way a patient teacher looks at a pupil who has learned
aleph
, the first letter of the alphabet.

Then the rabbi walked through the stone arch, and his disciples followed like ducklings after their mother. They took the branch of the highway that wound down toward the lakeshore, and soon they were out of sight.

One of the guards said to his fellows, “Now that’s a new trick, the way that rabbi got his whole gang through the gate for half the toll!” The other guards didn’t look openly scornful—Matthew paid their wages, after all—but Matthew knew he’d lost some of their respect.

Strangely, Matthew didn’t feel tricked. He felt as if a new possibility had opened up for him. He watched the rabbi and his disciples reappear farther down the hill, turning off on a dirt road that led to Capernaum. Matthew went over in his mind how it had felt when that man met his gaze. When he said, “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

He really did want to meet me, thought Matthew. The rabbi was a working-class man for whom even two sestercii was a price to be spent carefully. Rabbi Yeshua must have thought it was worth the price, to meet Matthew. To get his attention? Matthew was mystified but at the same time filled with hope.

Matthew’s hopeful mood grew during the rest of the day.
He gave a reduced rate to several travelers, none of whom could do him any favors. He restrained his guards from beating an olive oil merchant who tried to sneak around the tollgate. He didn’t overcharge anyone, not even the obviously wealthy trader with the Persian rugs.

At home that evening, however, Matthew began to worry a little. The tolls he’d collected that day didn’t even add up to the Romans’ portion. He had to take a few coins from his own money chest and put them in the Romans’ strongbox. Well, it was all right to be generous at the tollgate for one day. He’d make up for it the next day.

But in the next days and weeks, generosity became a habit with Matthew. He got a secret thrill out of seeing travelers react to his unexpected kindness. Some of them looked as if they hadn’t expected any good surprises for the rest of their lives. When their eyes widened and their faces lifted, Matthew felt his own heart lift. It was like the satisfaction he used to feel for protecting his brother from the bullies at synagogue school, and now he seemed to sense James’s approving gaze on him.

Matthew began attending the Sabbath prayer meetings in Capernaum again. He still got a chilly reception at the synagogue, but it was worth it on the days that the rabbi was there. Rabbi Yeshua, as he was called, apparently traveled a
good deal; the rest of the time he lived in Capernaum with Simon, one of his disciples. Whenever Yeshua caught sight of Matthew at the Sabbath meeting, he nodded and said,
“Shalom.” No
one else did, not even Yeshua’s followers.

Yeshua’s followers. How had the rabbi chosen them? Matthew wondered. Most of them seemed to be peasants-fishermen or other laborers—but each of them had an air of confidence that didn’t fit with their low class.

There were even
women
among Yeshua’s disciples! It took Matthew a few weeks to come to this conclusion because, at first, he naturally thought the women in Yeshua’s following must be either wives of the disciples, or prostitutes. But these women did not act meek, like wives, nor did they have the come-hither manner of prostitutes. Like the men, they seemed confident in themselves. Furthermore, Rabbi Yeshua spoke to them as if he hadn’t noticed they were women.

After a Sabbath meeting, Rabbi Yeshua would lead a crowd out of the village to the hillside. They sat down there to listen to him speak. Matthew came, too, but he stood at the back of the crowd, so as not to make people shrink from him. He listened to the rabbi like a dog gobbling scraps.

“Blessed are the merciful,” said Rabbi Yeshua one day, “for they shall obtain mercy.”

“Yes!” Matthew exclaimed, causing people to turn and
stare at him. But didn’t they see? It was just simple arithmetic, like “two and two is four.” When Matthew went easy on a poor traveler at the tollgate, he could feel his own mercy reflected back on himself.

At the end of the month, the Roman overseer came by to collect the take from the tollgate. Matthew noticed that Quintus Bucco looked weary. “I hope all’s well with you and your family,” said Matthew.