Two from Galilee (11 page)
Authors: Marjorie Holmes
But no—no, how could she entertain such thoughts on this night of her betrothal when the moon was shining for good luck? It was still fairly early; the working people of Nazareth could not spend much of the night in celebration, for they had to rise at dawn. The moon was still so bright they had scarcely needed torches going home. It was flooding her little room and she couldn't bear it, this restlessness, fed by the moonlight.
By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth; I sought him, but I found him not.
I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth. . . .
She found herself at the window. The moon possessed the sky. It traced every tree and twig and bush and branch in silver, laying inky shadows, giving everything a stark clarity seldom seen by day. "Joseph.
Joseph!"
she whispered toward that blandly smiling and triumphant face. Was he sleepless too, perhaps pacing alone in this unutterable light, or gazing up in a frenzy of longing? And all because she had indeed set forth on the streets like the bride in Solomon's dream:
. . . but I found him whom my soul loveth: I held him, and would not let him go, until I had brought him into my mother's house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me. . . .
My dove, my perfect one, is only one, the darling of her mother. . . .
Hannah. Poor brave beaten little Hannah, who had been finally reconciled. Who slept in the next room by her husband's side. While the bride . . . the groom? Mary shuddered and pressed her hands to her breasts.
"A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse"
Joseph had gone on singing from those selfsame songs,
"a spring shut up, a fountain sealed."
Joseph. Joseph. She gave herself over to the final memory, held back to savor utterly. The moment in the garden when both her mother and father had been busy with the guests and they two had drawn a little apart. He had gripped both her hands within his own. "Would to heaven this were our wedding night!"
"Yes. Yes," she whispered, swaying toward him. "But we must be patient, and it won't be long, I promise. Just as I persuaded my father before, I'll surely be able to persuade him not to postpone the wedding for long."
Yet even as they gazed at each other in the nakedness of their yearning, she had begun to shrink from the task ahead. Having yielded thus far, her parents might feel it a point of honor not to yield again. Besides, they loved her, she was their firstborn. She knew that they would keep her with them as long as possible.
JOACHIM saw his daughter now with a dumb aching resignation. It was done. Her spirit had fled the house, she belonged to another, so let her go, let her go. His wife, however, was adamant. The wedding would be in the fall, shortly after the Feast of the Tabernacles, and not a moment before.
"It will take Joseph at least that long to finish a proper house. Otherwise you would have to move in with his family."
"You did," Mary reminded.
"Yes, and a sorry day that was." Hannah's needle stabbed the cloth she was stitching. Her face was determined. She knew that she was wounding Joachim with her words, but so be it. It was necessary these days to wound someone in order to ease her own constant sense of defeat and loss. Mary had won, she was going to marry the man she wanted, just as she had always gotten nearly everything else from Joachim. Now it gave Hannah a queer, fierce delight to have her way in the matter of the wedding.
Actually she felt she had been generous in not making them wait the entire year. Now Mary's impatience, and the fact that Joachim was obviously suffering at the thought of losing her—so much that he was even anxious to have it over with—such only enhanced Hannah's obstinance.
"Come now, surely it was not so bad living in the house of my mother," Joachim said.
"You know yourself we had no moment's peace or privacy. Not until you took me to a house of our own did we truly know happiness."
To avoid the taunt in her eyes he betook himself to the yard, where he paced in his misery. Truly his wife's love had been a long time coming; but it was not so in the case of Joseph and Mary. They would need neither peace nor privacy for what they felt for each other. A blur of pain enveloped him. He was jealous of Joseph—his youth and his love that was so richly returned. Yet if she must be given to someone, let it be a good gentle man like Joseph, and let it be soon.
Hannah had no idea what it was like to be a man—this waiting. No woman could comprehend physical passion. Even Mary, with her great eyes starry with longing, her lips drooping before Hannah's decision. She was but a child; she did not have the faintest concept of the demon-god that entered a youth's loins at puberty and gave him no peace thereafter. That drove him, a whip goading, lashing him sometimes beyond all reason and honor. Six months, Hannah had compromised. He snorted. Six months could be an eternity when you were enflamed by a woman and already bound to her.
He felt deeply for Joseph. He was rankled and saddened before the fact of it, but he was also sympathetic. And concerned. He was very much concerned. . . .
Hannah sewed on, taking satisfaction in the soft fall of cloth across her knees, the thread so neatly binding the seams. And in Mary, dreamily embroidering, and Salome, a slow careful round-eyed child, working earnestly away at the loom. These were women's tasks, to spin and weave and bind and impose order upon the importunate men. When Mary went into the house of Joseph she would not be found wanting by her mother-in-law, she would take a full chest. Six months were scarcely enough-she thought of the bedding, the tablecloths, the towels, the draperies for the doorways. Hannah yanked the cloth impatiently, her fingers dipped even swifter. Yet she felt a keen thrill of sheer organization. She felt her own brisk control. And this mounting stock of linens—weren't they proof of her devotion for Mary? And underneath this surface of vigorous, practical activity ran a river of rebellion that surpassed Joachim's. And an incessant secret wailing:
Mary. Mary!
My blessed, first fruit of my fallow womb—how can I bear your going?
Already the house seemed stripped, emptied of the precious presence now committed and focused upon a new house and life of its own. You could not reach Mary, however you shouted at her and bade her be still for the fitting of garments. You could not shake her into an acknowledgment of you who had borne her, slaved for her, well-nigh worshiped her. She thought only of Joseph, the hour when he would come to work in the garden beside her, or sit with the family making polite conversation, while the thing that was between them chimed and quivered and lent discomfort to all.
No, no ... it would be a good thing when they were safely married. Joachim was right, it would be a relief. Yet she clung to her decision. And it was only sensible with all the preparations, Joseph's as well as theirs. She could not have her daughter going to live in that hovel with his parents, not after all her fine talk.
Hannah cringed sometimes to remember. Well, the Lord had seen fit to chasten her. Perhaps because she had loved Mary too well. For the Lord their God was a jealous God, and there was no denying it, she had loved Mary next to God and perhaps more. More even than Joachim, more than the other children that had come to bless their home. Even her passion for Esau was intricately bound with pity, whereas Mary—Mary was her pride, her obsession, imposing a burden of love so intense that she almost longed to be rid of it. She should be almost grateful to Joseph! Yet she was not. She could scarcely abide the sight of him striding up the hill, that comely, gray-eyed face of his aglow. She could not bear the sight of them murmuring together on pretext of weeding the garden or feeding the ass. She must hasten out, intrude herself, insist that they come inside for a cool drink of juice or wine. And she must sit with them, guarding them, guarding her child against this invader, this fair youth who had come to rob her of her dearest possession.
That it was unnatural, even wicked to feel so, she realized. She examined her conscience and found it squirming with evil. You would have kept her a callow lass forever, she castigated herself. You prayed that her development into womanhood would be slow. And God answered those dark and secret prayers. God stayed that fertile flow signifying that she was finally ripe for seed—seed that might well be holy seed. For wasn't every marriage bed the potential seedbed of the coming Messiah?
The marriage bed . . . was it that which made her heart shrivel? She wasn't sure. At great cost to herself, for she was innately shy despite her aggressive demeanor, she had warned Mary. "I was only twelve and my mother, dear soul, had never told me about the ways of a man. I want you to be prepared. The suffering and shock will be less if you understand what is expected of you."
Mary had gazed at her, bewildered. "Oh, Mother, no. This thing that we feel for each other, surely its expression could never be anything but beautiful."
"Beautiful.
You'll find out." Hannah jerked the millwheel savagely in her embarrassment. "Later—it's better later when you've lived a while together and come to trust each other. But in the beginning it's no pleasure for a woman, and I won't have you thinking otherwise."
Mary hadn't believed her, of course, and Hannah felt that she'd botched the whole thing. Well, she'd done her duty. If she'd affronted Mary she couldn't help it. Or could she? Had this too been an unconscious part of the resistance, the clutching, the evil toils in which she herself was writhing? Had she been striving to strike the stars from those dark eyes, bash that reminiscent smile, strew such doubt and fear that she might even yet rush in and reclaim that which she knew was lost?
Thus did Hannah torment herself, thus did she bleed and lash about inside that pert little frame that was openly so vigorous. She never ceased praising Joseph to others or to his face. Never ceased claiming that she was happy about the union. And all the while, on quite another plane altogether, hung a shadowy wing of premonition. It hovered there, apart from the dozen devils that dwelled within her and were chasing her, giving her no peace. It had nothing to do with her possessiveness as a mother. Shadowy, indefinite but strong, its chill threat followed her. And she was afraid for her child. She was desperately afraid.
Mary had never been so happy. When she awoke it was as if the new day had been ripened and polished and given gaily into her hand like a piece of choice fruit. The sunrise had never seemed so rosy, the women at the well more friendly. With them she laughed and gossiped and discussed her wedding plans. The wounds of Israel seemed distant and impossible. When her father discussed them she scarcely heard; it was an old song, too dreary to have any place in the life of a girl recently betrothed. Nothing lay ahead but delight, the hour when she would at last belong to her love.
Meanwhile, Joseph wove in and out of her life as much as possible under her mother's hawklike watchfulness. And sometimes she and her father would walk down to inspect his progress on the house. It was rising fast above its cave to keep them safe from earthquakes and stable the ass. Joseph's brothers were helping, and they sang as they mixed the mortar and fitted the stones, a merry lot. It would be sturdy and cozy, filled with the furniture Joseph was building long after he should be at rest.
Occasionally Timna or a sister would come out and invite them into their house for a cup of wine and a piece of cake. Joachim found excuse to demur but Mary went, and they would sit visiting, and worrying about how hard Joseph worked. "Try to persuade him not to drive himself so hard," his mother said. And Mary could only reply, "I have but it's no use." And they smiled at each other, feeling the closeness of women who love the same man, sharing the futility of trying to change him. And this too was warm and delicious, a part of the day's sweet fruit.
With Timna she felt at peace, loved without being devoured. There was none of the rivalry that stung the air when Joseph came into the presence of Hannah, only this sense of acceptance as the future wife. Joseph's wife—with its implications of intimacy already, sitting here with his mother who washed and mended for him, smoothed the linens of his bed. Mary's flesh sang.
For they had kissed now, several times. When two people loved this much they were deft and resourceful, there were ways. And the stolen kisses were unbearably sweet. A sample of joys to come. Poor Hannah. Mary felt only pity for the bungled warnings of her mother. Poor scared little Judahite carried away by a stranger, no wonder. And Hannah so confused, so energetically trying to manipulate other people's lives and emotions ever since.
Mary felt protective, almost as if she were the parent and Hannah the child. She wished it were possible to calm her, put her heart and her bustling little body at rest. But no, this was Hannah's nature, her outlet, her release—building toward the hour of the wedding just as Joseph was building his house. And her mother was not wrong, Mary realized. It was better to set a thing aside and work toward it, for surely the goal was dearer for the very discipline imposed. Wait, savor the dream yet a while longer.
Meanwhile the spinning, weaving, sewing, the drying of herbs and cheeses upon the sunlit roof, the making of the clay pots she would need. Hannah was right about this too, she must not come to her husband with empty hands. And it was all so womanly, her half of the partnership that began with the rapturous union of flesh and went on through all phases of life so that they might comfort and give joy to each other.