Two from Galilee (25 page)

The meaning of love. The meaning of love. ... He walked along beside her, not understanding. He was her partner in this thing, her protector, and he had not lost her—that must be enough. But his heart was raw.

"If it were not so," she said timidly, "if it were otherwise, my darling, why would the Lord have wanted us to be the earthly parents? Why wouldn't it have been better to put his child into the keeping of others who don't feel so strongly about each other? Even such as Deborah and Aaron?"

Joseph laughed shortly. "Who understands the ways of God?" And he thought: The meaning of love. For a man, at least, isn't the meaning of love fulfillment and not denial? This denial. This particular denial. Might it not be an exquisite form of punishment worked out for him? Yet a holy child, the Lord's own sonl Such a responsibility would never be entrusted to a man whom God wished to hurt. Mary was right, he saw through his confusion and pain. They had been chosen because they loved each other so much. So that this child, whatever his destiny, might begin his life in a home where there was love.

And perhaps desire was only one part of love. Perhaps denial was important too. The death of self in order to be born anew in the happiness and safety of the beloved. . . . Desire and denial. They wrestled in him as he walked along beside her on this night of the wedding with the sweet sensuous music raining down. And although Joseph could accept denial with his intelligence and his will, yet his passion, his nerves and tissues and blood, all that was essential to himself as a man, cried out.

Their cloaks blew about them in a sudden gust of wind as they approached their house. Unbolting the door, Joseph said, "I must see about laying by more firewood. It will be a cold winter I'm told."

"And I must get busy and sew more clothes for the baby. I want to have everything ready against the hour when it comes."

Joseph gazed at her in the moonlight, so small and trusting. "Mary, are you afraid?"

"Not so long as you are with me."

He was startled. A column of joy surged up in him. He would have expected her to refer instead to God.

Joseph was now very busy in the shop. For a time work had been slack. Many nights long after Mary was asleep he had lain worrying. How would he support her and the child, let alone aid his widowed mother if people were so offended they no longer patronized him? He tossed and turned or got up to study the Scriptures by the glow of the night light in its niche. He was careful not to wake Mary whose small shadow was thrown against the wall. Mary wrapped in her mystery.

His faith floated in and out of him. He made futile attempts to grasp it where it hovered somewhere in the region of his breast, as if he could somehow clutch it, implant it there forever and be at rest. But always, when or how he could not say, it coasted off. He would find himself dry, empty, drained and resigned, avoiding prayer, either formal prayer or that instinctive calling out upon something stronger than he was—something powerful and reassuring.

Then the farmers began to come in. They wanted their tools readied for the spring. He fancied a kind of sheepish apology in some of them. People forgave easily in Nazareth, or they simply forgot. If he had deviated from the proprieties, well so had many of them. "And how is your good wife?" they asked.

"Oh, fine, fine," he responded as proudly as if the coming child were his own.

It was at such moments that the sweet mists of God blew in. He could relax a little as he went about the challenge of his tasks. It was as it had been when he was building his home. He was fashioning something meaningful once more. He was working for love, whether for love of God or of his wife he could not have said. But he whistled as he worked, and in his being almost more than in his mind, he prayed.

Snug in her house, Mary heard the thunder and the pelting rains. "Listen to it, isn't it glorious?" she said to Timna, who often came to sew and spin with her.

"Yes." Timna cocked her white head, her blue eyes reminiscent. "Jacob loved the rain." She always managed to turn the conversation to him. Forgotten were his imperfections, she had adored him and now he was gone and she dwelled on him.

With Timna, Mary felt in harmony, at peace. She had dreaded what the scandal might do to their relationship, yet if anything Timna had seemed to love her more. "Oh, my child," she had cried in her gentle, dignified way, "how glad we all are that you have come home!" As for the baby, her only regre* was that Jacob had not lived to enjoy it. "He'd always looked forward to having a grandson to teach his trade."

His trade? A carpenter's trade for the son of God? Mary wondered. Yet she dared not speak of it. Timna accepted this child as the son of her son. To inform her, "This is not Joseph's baby, dear Mother Timna, but the child of the living God," would be both cruel and shocking. Timna would have been forced to reject it, as Hannah had rejected it. As countless others would, no doubt, reject it. Human passion people could comprehend. But the passion of God for man—no, it was too appalling.

A flame of portent licked through Mary. In the protective gesture she had seen her aunt make, Mary cradled her bulging sides.

The rains finally ceased and the cold came down. Joseph tightened the cracks in their house and went up the hill to make fast the house of his father-in-law as well. Mary wove extra blankets for the baby, and swaddling clothes of the softest camel's hair.

Her confinement would be upon her sometime in December. Women watched her with kindness now and plied her with tales. Unlike the weaklings of Egypt they prided themselves on easy births, yet they gloated too in their suffering, for was it not so ordered in the very beginning? Mary must be sure to put a knife under her pillow to cut the pain. Drinking purple aloes mixed with hot wine was good, powdered ivory if you could get it was better. Old Mehitabel, the crone at the well, slipped her a dead scorpion wrapped in a green rag. "Pin it to your skirt," she whispered, "it will drive the devils of pain away." Mary took it fearfully, yet she could not affront the eagerness to help that sprang from those rheumy eyes.

To help. To ease the birth a little, perhaps to share in its glory. Where did all this passion for birth come from, this lust for coming life?

She stood on the mountainside one day with her basket of faggots and dung for the fire. As far as she could see the fertile hills went rolling, flanks tawny, becoming lavender where they melted into the sky. They gave off a pallid sheen, like the flesh that stretched taut across her own belly, shielding its tumbling life. Their eternal rhythms echoed its curve, the shape of her body that cupped and held the child.

And the sky merged with the hills, resting now after their summer labors, yet already rich once more with their hidden burden of life. All the throbbing, pulsing, germinating seeds. "Be fruitful and multiply!" The ancient command would be fulfilled, for the spring rains and sun would bring them leaping forth, all the flowers and grasses and grains and little furred, winged things that now slept so peacefully. How joyous it all was, and how awesome. Life sprang out of the earth and out of a woman's belly and had its little span of time upon that earth, and then shriveled up like the weeds of the field and died. But the earth and the sky flowed on forever.

Were they then the only permanence? The only things fashioned by the hand of God that he loved enough to make eternal? Or was there something more, something that he meant to give the world through his coming child?

Close though she felt to Timna, as Mary's hour drew nearer she found herself wanting her mother. More and more often she climbed the hillside to be with Hannah for a while. "So you've come," Hannah would say flatly, belying the pleasure in her eyes. "Here, knead the dough and set it near the oven to rise. After that I've some flax to dye." It was good to be near Hannah in the old way, being ordered about. It was curiously like being a little girl again.

One day when they were at the dyeing in the yard, she asked, "When my time comes you will serve me as midwife won't you, Mother?"

Hannah turned from the steaming kettle, stick in hand. Her face flushed almost as crimson as the stuff bubbling in the pot. "Do you really want me? What about Timna?"

"She isn't the midwife you are. And I wouldn't feel safe with anyone else."

Hannah began stabbing and stirring the yarn in the vessel. "All right, if that's the way you feel." She wiped her hands on the tucked-up skirt of her tunic. "And I—I hope it will go easy with you, my child."

"I'm not afraid," said Mary. "God will be with me."

"He'd better be!" The new threads sank into the mixture—all hot and scarlet like blood, like woman's blood that the Lord had made for the sport and pleasure of man, and the ultimate agony of begetting man.

"Mother, Mother, must you always speak so?"

"I'm sorry, I have no gift for words like you. I mean only that since this is his doing, if indeed it is the miracle you believe, why then will you have need of a crude servant like me?"

"I don't know. There is still so much that I don't understand. As you say, another miracle may happen to bring this divine child forth from me. Yet I must be prepared, since I don't know." There was a look of patient bewilderment on Mary's face. "It's the not knowing that's hard. It's that, only that, of which I confess I'm afraid."

They were closer after that. The air between them was heightened and sweetened by this coming event which now concerned them both. Thus when Joseph came up one night to join them for the meal on the Sabbath Eve, they were astounded at his news.

Word of a decree from Caesar had reached Nazareth only a few hours ago. Hearing it angrily discussed in the shop, he'd flung his tools down and gone out to read the proclamation for himself where it was displayed on the notice board. "New taxes are going to be levied throughout the entire Roman world," he told them in a quiet outrage. "And to make sure nobody fails to pay up, they're going to take a new census. They've ordered every adult male citizen to proceed at once to the place of his birth to be registered and counted. For me that means Bethlehem."

Bethlehem! The family stared at him where he stood drying his flushed perspiring face and his hands. They needed no explanation; his parents had lived there when he was born, his birthplace was the one thing Joseph had in common with Hannah.

"But you can't go," Salome voiced their astonished protest. "You can't leave Mary."

"He's got no choice." Joachim moved to the corner where the sacred scrolls and instruments of ceremony were kept. The house was fragrant with the foods that the women had been preparing all day; it was to have been a happy evening. "None of us have." He was scowling, his voice fierce. "To defy those accursed swine would mean being thrown into prison. As if our taxes weren't enough to break our backs, now they must count us like beasts of the fields."

"Father, no," pleaded Esau. "It's not good to feel such hatred. Not on the Sabbath Eve."

Even as he spoke, two final blasts from the trumpets came thrilling through the night, signaling the time for the women to light their Sabbath lamps. A hush fell, and Esau knew that his mother was lighting theirs. He could smell the oil, feel its warm glow; he knew that all over the village other lamps had begun to sparkle, the Sabbath to shine. Mary had described it for him many times; it was like the starry skies. And he knew that bitterness and anger were clouds condemning all to a darkness worse than his. No, no, the Sabbath Eve should always be radiant when his sister had come home.

"In thy light shall we see light," he could hear his father praying. The sweet smelling wine was poured, there was the cool taste of it, the tinkling of the cups, and they strove to be at peace, reciting the sacred words together. But anxiety was upon them, and afterward, instead of discussing the Scriptures or singing psalms or telling stories, they could speak of nothing but this latest insult, with its terrible complications.

"I'll have to prepare for the trip as soon as the Sabbath is over," Joseph told Joachim. "I should leave early in the week. Fortunately my brothers can register here and look after the shop." He gazed wretchedly at Mary, who was helping Hannah clear the table, the only work they might do and not break the rules of rest. "As for Mary, my mother will look after her while I'm gone."

Hannah turned swiftly from the cupboard. "We'll look after her," she said, and for a moment she could not conceal her exultation. To have him out of the way at such a time! To bring the child into the world with her own hands, be the first to know it, love it; and for Joachim to be the first male to consecrate it by holding it upon his knees. Amazingly, it all seemed arranged for her benefit, a late but undeniable squaring of accounts.

But Mary had shaken the last crumbs from the cloth and crossed the room to stand by Joseph's side. "I want to go with you," she said.

"Mary, you can't. My beloved, you can't."

"He's right." Hannah sprang at them. "It's unthinkable. The mountains are treacherous in the winter and the nights are freezing. You might lose the child."

"I cannot lose the child."

"And what if your time comes upon you somewhere out in the wilderness among the jackals? Or somewhere along the road." Hannah was in a frenzy. She accosted her husband, who was regarding his daughter with a strange, fixed expression. "You tell her. Tell her she must not do this foolish thing."

"We will take shelter," Mary said. "We will be safe."