Bright Dark Madonna

by Elizabeth Cunningham

  He turned red, flustered, lost his place and, worse, lost his face before the crowd.

  “Who is that woman!” someone shouted.

  “She’s a gentile. What’s she doing here?”

  “She’s the fisherman’s doxy, I’ll lay odds on it. All that preaching about sin and look what the cat drug in.”

  I had my put foot in it. I had to do something, and of course, I did exactly the wrong thing.

  “No, I’m not,” I turned to the crowd. “I’m Jesus of Nazareth’s wi—”

  “Whore!” the crowd roared as I hesitated between the words wife and widow.

  “I recognize her,” someone shouted. “She was charged with adultery.”

  Just then a flock of doves wheeled over my head, and I felt even dizzier as different moments of my life converged. I was seeing from a dove’s eye view, flying to light on my beloved’s head in the dream I’d had long ago on Tir na mBan. I was also standing and staring at my beloved’s beautiful feet as the crowd waited for him to pass judgment on me. And I was here now, a pregnant widow, tired, sun-dazed, and hungry.

  “My little dove.” I heard the voice of Anna the Prophetess inside my head, and the Temple doves, who had always surrounded her, came to perch on me. “Always so impulsive. Well, since you’re here, little one, prophesy. You might not get another chance.”

  “The Kingdom of Heaven,” I began, “is at hand.” And I stretched out my hands. “My hands, your hands, our hands. The Kingdom of Heaven is small, small enough to hold in your hand, small as a mustard seed whose blooms spread over the hills making a home for the birds, small as a hazelnut with all the wisdom of the world held within, and it is also huge as the sea that flowed from my beloved’s side. If you want to see the Kingdom of Heaven, just turn, turn and look. That’s what repent means, turn, like a flock of birds on the air, like the tides….”

  “The woman is raving!” someone shouted.

  The crowd, agape at first at the sheer spectacle of a gentile woman daring to preach, exploded all at once. John and Andrew rushed to Peter’s side, shouting.

  “Stand back, make way. The woman is demon-possessed. Don’t worry. We have the authority to exorcise her.”

  Peter caught on then and advanced on me:

  “In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to come out of her!”

  The crowd was completely out of control by now, first a cripple rising up to walk and now an exorcism. But the excitement wasn’t over yet.

  “You will disperse at once!” A loud voice barked a command. “Or be arrested!”

  The Temple guard had arrived. At that point I did the only sensible thing a woman in my delicate condition (not to mention my dicey circumstances) could do:

  I fainted dead away.

  When I came to myself again, I was lying on a pallet in the upper room. Or so I assumed; the shutters were closed, and it was dark. The air should have been stuffy, but a breeze stirred now and then, scented with roses and garlic, and now and then a whiff of water and fish. There was a drone in the air that made me think of bees. For a moment, I didn’t remember how I had come to be lying there, and then it all came back. I had caused a near riot in the Temple, and Peter had tried to exorcise me.

  In the Name of Jesus Christ, I command you to come out of her.

  In the protective gesture of pregnant women everywhere, I put my hands over my belly. I felt no cramping, but just to be sure, I reached between my legs to check for bleeding.

  “Mary of Magdala.” The breeze lifted and the scent of roses grew stronger. “Your baby is unharmed.”

  Miriam of Nazareth, mother of Jesus, was sitting with me in the dark room.

  “And your secret is safe,” she added. “For now.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  MY THREE FATES

  “FOR NOW” WERE THE operative words. People say there is no such thing as being “a little bit pregnant,” but I say you are a “little bit pregnant” when the changes in your body don’t yet show, at least not to the casual eye, which my mother-in-law’s wasn’t. “For now” everyone concluded I had come unhinged by recent events (that was the charitable alternative theory to demonic possession) and they all agreed I needed a rest, which is another way of saying I was put under house arrest.

  “For now” I didn’t much mind when the disciples packed me off to Bethany and put me in Martha and Lazarus’s custody; I had always liked their house and land, how ample and well-tended everything was without being luxurious or ostentatious.

  You never hear much about Lazarus after he came forth so dramatically from the tomb. I can tell you he did not at all enjoy the notoriety that attends being brought back from the dead. Here is another unknown part of that story: I was the one who waited with Lazarus all those days in the place between life and death, a pebbled shoal in the great river, and I can tell you he would just as soon have crossed the river to join his ancestors, but he could not refuse his friend Jesus. It is my belief that Lazarus is the original for all the merciful fathers and vineyard owners in my beloved’s parables. And being called forth from the grave was just one more thing Lazarus had to forgive Jesus.

  At least Lazarus’s life was sweetened now by Susanna, the Samaritan woman of the many “husbands” who quite frankly stalked Jesus after their encounter at the well. I tried to unload her at Temple Magdalen (where her talents could have been put to use) when she flummoxed me by announcing that she had decided to become my follower instead of his. Having or being a follower is not something I’ve ever cared for. So I was pleased that Susanna had left me, so to speak, for Lazarus. He married her quietly, in the wake all of the recent drama, so quietly most of the disciples politely pretended not to notice. (I have never fully understood the hatred between Jews and Samaritans; they worship the same bloody awful One God, but I gather that’s the problem. A case of collective sibling rivalry.)

  Jesus loved Lazarus, not because he was a disciple or, as some people speculate, an initiate into Jesus’s esoteric mystery cult, but because he was a refuge. He didn’t talk much and preferred the company of plants and animals to human society, though he reluctantly performed his inherited service as a temple priest when his term came round. I felt that sense of sanctuary in Bethany, too. It is true that Martha never liked me, but her pride in her own hospitality kept her civil, and I had never taken her animosity personally. Who could blame her? And I suppose I gave her some comfort by taking her younger sister’s place as a source of irritation and bafflement. Mary B remained in the thick of things in Jerusalem, while Miriam, who drove Martha crazy for different reasons, retreated to Bethany with me.

  All things considered, the odd household got on well enough. I settled in peacefully, doing whatever small tasks Martha gave me to keep me out of the way. (My chief duty was to remove Miriam if she went into a trance, as she was apt to do, in the middle of the kitchen or anywhere Martha was trying to work.) If you’ve ever been pregnant, you may recall the dreamy inward pull of the first three months. I gave myself over to that placid bovine state, eating and sleeping, staring into space, ambling slowly if I had to go anywhere, managing not to think about much at all.

  Then, abruptly, this respite came to an end. One afternoon, shooed away by Martha, Ma and I took a walk, a little farther than usual. It was hard to say who was leading whom, but eventually I saw that we were heading to the olive grove that overlooked the Kedron Valley, the place Mary B had taken me the first night we met, demanding that I prophesy as the sun rose and turned to gold the Beautiful Gates of the Temple. Below us in the valley was the fig tree he had blasted in those fierce, desperate days of preaching and prophesying, the fig tree I had restored. The spring that had sprung into being that day still welled up, dark and cool, by the tree.

  It was too hot to walk down into the valley today, so Ma and I headed for the shade of an ancient olive tree, and I recognized it as the same one we’d sat under a year ago, just before my beloved’s infamous ride into Jerusalem on a donkey (in fulfillment of the sc
riptures, a phrase I was coming to detest). Before he upended the moneychanger’s tables and started a riot. Before the beginning of the end. That was the day I had found out that Anna the Prophetess, Miriam’s old friend and rival, was dead—though as Ma had put it, even death couldn’t shut Anna up. On that day, Ma had been the one to prophesy: “The Messiah will enter Jerusalem through the Beautiful Gates.”

  As Miriam and I sat down, each of us finding a place to nestle in the lap of roots, I closed my eyes. I found I did not want to gaze across the valley toward those Beautiful (Terrible) Gates. On the day that he left us, ascended if you must, I had watched Jesus walk through them—but not into Jerusalem, though his disciples still waited for him there, going over and over the scriptures to explain his absence and predict his return.

  Where had he gone?

  “Look how the sky’s doors open to your beauty,” I had sung a hymn of Isis the morning he disappeared. “Look how the goddess waits to receive you. This is death. This is the life beyond life.” In that moment, singing in her voice I had known everything I needed to know. Now I knew nothing, except that he was gone. I had been left on this side of the gates, and I didn’t know why.

  “The child, of course.” Miriam answered my thoughts. “What else?”

  “Would you please stay out of my head?” I said as politely as I could.

  “Maybe I will,” she retorted, “when you begin to use it again.”

  “What should I use it for?” I asked. “Arguing with Peter and the rest? That’s what Mary wanted me to do, but look what happened when I tried to speak at the Temple.”

  “From what I heard, you weren’t using your head, you were losing it.”

  “Yes, well,” I more or less conceded. “But I was trying to tell people what I knew about him, what I loved about him. What I love,” I corrected myself. “Was that wrong? I’m so confused, Ma. Mary says we must carry on his work, deliver his message, save the House of Israel, meet in his name. She says I am supposed to be a leader, but I don’t know how. I just…I just miss him. Am I failing him?”

  I lay down and put my head in her lap. She wasn’t my mother; in many ways, I’m sorry to tell you, she wasn’t very maternal, not in the conventional sense. But my own eight mothers were so far away. I didn’t even know if I could find their island again. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, in this world. How ironic that my beloved might have found the Shining Isles, a place he scarcely believed in, and here I was stranded just outside his Holy City.

  Ma did not cradle me or reassure me or tell me what I should do, but she did begin to hum, and the sound seemed to call to the honeybees, and stir the still air. It was Anna’s voice that answered me.

  “Little dove!”

  And with my dream eyes I saw her, not here in the Kedron Valley but in the valley between the mountains called Bride’s breasts, on the woman-shaped isle of Tir na mBan. She sat gazing into the well of wisdom.

  “Anna, Anu!” I called her the name of the Celtic goddess. Perhaps they were the same after all. “Is he there with you? Has he sailed to the Shining Isles?”

  “He who?” she said dreamily, tossing crumbs to the salmon of wisdom as she had once fed the Temple doves.

  “You know,” I insisted. “Him whom my soul loves. I sought him, but I could not find him, I called, but he did not answer. I charge you, daughter of Jerusalem, if you should find my love—”

  “Give the Song of Songs a rest, honey.” Anna looked at me across the worlds. “You did seek him, you did find him. Remember?”

  It was true. I had spent my life doing little else from the time I first glimpsed him across the worlds in that same well.

  “Well, he ran out on me again. He disappeared through the Beautiful Gates.”

  “Did he now?” said Anna mildly.

  “His disciples think he’s coming back. To rule the world as the Messiah—after it gets destroyed or something. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but if he’s coming back, I wish he’d hurry up.”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” Anna muttered.

  “What?”

  “I said don’t hold your breath. That’s just between you and me. The boys are being too literal minded, as usual. Remember how hard it was for them to understand a simple parable?”

  “Then he’s not coming back?” I kept to my point.

  “Little dove, he never left. There’s nowhere else to go. You should know that, daughter of the Shining Isles. It’s all mirrors and veils and shapeshifting. Magic wells and ways between the worlds. Now life, now death, now you see him, now you don’t.”

  “Well, right now, I don’t.”

  “You have to see with new eyes, love with a new love. The questions you need to ask, you don’t even know yet. But someday people will need those questions, the way earth needs rain to plump the grain.”

  “You said that before. You said that to him.”

  “Long ago and not so long ago,” she said in a sing-song voice. “When he was a boy and you were a dove with no control over your bowels. None.”

  In the Bride’s valley where Anna sat and crooned, the light was so thick and golden. I wanted to touch it; I wanted to taste it. I wanted to feel it settling heavy on my shoulders, a mantle of warmth. I wanted to go home.

  “Not yet, little dove, not yet. Your story isn’t over. Not that anyone wants to hear your story. You have to live your story before you tell it. You have to live.”

  “But my story was always about us. Him and me. Finding and losing and finding each other. Standing together under the Tree of Life. I don’t know any other stories.”

  “The druids wouldn’t like to hear that, lamb chop.”

  I recognized Dwynwyn’s comestible form of endearment even before she appeared beside the well wearing her blood red tunic with its girdle of skulls, white hair floating on the wind, looking just as she had on the day she helped save my beloved from becoming a human sacrifice, much good it had done him in the end.

  “There are many more stories. Have you forgotten about Invasions, Cattle Raids, Elopements, and Wonder Voyages?” Dwynwyn prompted, reeling off some basic bardic curricula.

  “I don’t seem to recall any stories about pregnant widows who live on after their husbands have died and become gods or saviors,” I said stubbornly.

  “Forgive her, Isis.”

  A third voice spoke, and I found myself looking at a pair of ancient feet that seemed to have planted themselves by the well like roots, all textured, twisted, and knotted. When I looked again, the feet were young, golden as the light in the valley. I lifted my eyes till I had to close them against the brightness.

  “Bride,” I murmured,” Bride.”

  When I looked again, I saw the Cailleach of Tir na mBan, her knobby bare feet, peeking out from under her grey cloak, as she stood spinning with her drop spindle. My own three fates together in one place, one timelessness.

  “She’s not herself,” added Anna. “She’s had some dreadful shocks.”

  “So back to the story, pigeon pie,” said Dwynwyn. “Posthumous pregnancy. Not a traditional tale among the combrogos perhaps but not a bad storyline, if you can manage to keep yourself alive and your child out of danger, though danger is always good for a story, gooses the plot—”

  “There’s often danger to innocents in Hebrew stories,” Anna observed. “Hiding babies in bulrushes to avoid slaughter and whatnot.”

  “I’m not putting my baby in the bulrushes,” I objected.

  “No, of course not, little dove. It was just an example.”

  You may have thought I was going to learn something substantive about my fate, but I knew better.

  “Let me see if I can get this straight,” I made an attempt. “Jesus is not coming back, because he never really went anywhere. I have to figure out what that means. My main task is to stay alive, and protect my child. And someday there might be a story worth telling? That people might listen to? That will feed them like plumped grain?”

  “Bright. Her
mothers called her Little Bright One,” said the Cailleach to the others. “I think perhaps they were referring to the hair color.”

  “Anything else? Leading a movement? Starting a mystery cult? Dipping people in cold, muddy water? Telling everybody what Jesus really said and how everyone else got it all wrong?”

  The three old women exchanged looks; then they turned their attention back to the well. I found myself gazing, too. For a moment it seemed that light and dark were about to cohere, and I would gaze again at my beloved’s face. Something bright swam up, broke the surface and leaped in the air. I felt the splash as the salmon of wisdom dove again, slapping the water with his tail.

  And then Miriam was shaking me awake. I sat up, a little disoriented to find myself looking over the Kedron Valley again, now engulfed in the shadow of the Temple mount. In the highest branches of the trees where the light still reached, the mourning doves called, and then fell silent as someone hurried towards us.

  “Miriam, Mary,” Susanna called to us. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Miriam, Your son is here.”

  “My son.”

  Miriam’s voice, as she spoke those two words, brought the sun back to the valley, made the day dawn all over again. And her face looked as young as the morning.

  “Yes, James has arrived. He’s come from Nazareth to take care of you both.”

  I watched as Ma turned back into an old peasant woman before my eyes.

  CHAPTER THREE

  LEVIRATE OR HOW TO SALVAGE A LINEAGE

  IF THERE HAD BEEN FINE CHINA and silverware in those days, you would have heard the sound of forks and knives scraping plates. It was that sort of a meal at the Bethany house that evening; the bustle of Martha dishing up seemed unnaturally loud and not at all reassuring. Maybe because you could hear people chewing, swallowing, and even sipping (or slurping) their wine, everyone felt self-conscious and constrained about indulging their appetites too freely and heartily.