Bright Dark Madonna

by Elizabeth Cunningham

  Everyone except me. I was ravenous as usual and ate with gusto until I finally realized everyone else had stopped and was looking (or trying not to look) at me.

  “Everyone” included the newly arrived James along with Mary B and the Twelve (or twelve again because of the newly elected Mathias). They had made the trek from Jerusalem to meet with James. Of course, Lazarus was there as well. Although women often did not eat with men, Ma, Mary B, and I were reclining with the rest while Martha and Susanna, by preference, served us.

  “Well,” someone said at last; I am not sure who it was.

  “Well.”

  “Yes, well.”

  “Pardon me, you go first.”

  “Well, all right.”

  There was prolonged throat scraping on James’s part. I looked at him curiously, a sober-looking man in his forties, his hair graying: Jesus’s half brother, the oldest of Joseph’s sons by his first wife, so technically Miriam’s stepson. I had met the brothers only twice. If you are thinking that I am subscribing to the Roman Catholic position that The Blessed Virgin Mary lived up to her title, I will take this opportunity to note the existence of Jesus’s long-suffering full sister, Leah, who had heretofore devoted her life to Ma (where was she? I wondered a little nervously) and another brother whose name I can’t remember, but might as well have been something like “chopped liver” as in What am I? All Joseph’s sons were exemplary in their behavior toward their stepmother, especially considering that her own oldest son and unquestioned favorite had been such a dead loss, disappearing on benders or quests his whole life, marrying a gentile whore, now getting himself publicly crucified during the holidays. I have to admit, if I were his brothers, I would have regretted not selling the brat into slavery while I had the chance. So I wasn’t exactly prepared for the first words that came out of James’s mouth.

  “Jesus is Lord.”

  There followed a silence in which mine was not the only jaw dropping. Then more throats were cleared, till Peter remembered his preeminent position and called upon himself to speak for everyone.

  “Er, yes, we know.”

  A great deal has been made of Saul of Tarsus’ dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus, how he turned from persecuting followers of Jesus to recruiting them. But I wonder why more people don’t wonder about James the Just, how he went from attempting to straitjacket his brother (Mark 3:21) to becoming the first bishop of the Jerusalem ecclesia.

  “Um,” Peter continued, definitely wondering, “How did you find out?”

  “He appeared unto me.”

  That is how James spoke. Very formally, as if he wanted his words to be written down as scripture right away.

  “He spake unto me and said, Brother, go you to Jerusalem and commend yourself to my followers, for you are of the royal house of David, even as I am, and you must prepare the way for the Son of David to return to his rightful throne in Jerusalem.”

  I glanced around the room, hoping to catch someone’s eye, so that I could subtly roll mine. The only time I had ever heard Jesus mention his lineage was when the druids demanded that he recite it during admissions screening. They asked for nine generations and were equal parts impressed and put out when he went back more than twenty-eight. But no one met my glance. James had everyone’s rapt attention, and everyone nodded for him to continue.

  “And further he spake unto me and said, in Bethany you will find my beloved mother, whom you have ever cared for tenderly (as if her womb had borne you and her paps given you suck), and with her you will find the wife of my bosom, whom you have graciously welcomed to your bosom, though she is a stranger from a strange land, who has worshipped false gods, even as once did our foremother Ruth, who followed after her own mother-in-law Naomi and married Boaz…”

  And if anyone had been writing down his utterances, he would have had to decide what to do about the run-on sentences. I was anxiously waiting for this one to run itself to ground.

  “…thus becoming the mother of kings, and when you find my mother and wife, I know you will do all that is rightful for a brother to do according to the Law of Moses.”

  It took us all a moment to realize that James had finally completed his sentence. Everyone was a little out of breath and waited uncertainly in the silence for someone to make an appropriate response.

  “And so here I am,” said James helpfully

  “And you are most welcome for as long as you like to stay,” Lazarus said.

  “But I suppose you will be taking the women back to Nazareth soon?” Peter sounded hopeful.

  “Indeed, after the wedding, I will take the women home to Nazareth where they will be safe and live a life in modest retirement, but myself, when I have done my duty unto my brother’s lineage, I will be returning to Jerusalem as often as I may to join you in the work of preaching God’s word, and preparing the way for his Messiah to return.”

  There was another silence. Since no one else seemed to know how to keep the conversation going, I decided to help out.

  “So who’s getting married?” I asked.

  Mary B, sitting across from me, suddenly choked and turned red, avoiding my eyes.

  “Mary!” I got up to give her a hug. “You’re so secretive. You never said anything.”

  “Mary,” she hissed in my ear. “It’s not me, you dolt.”

  “Then who—”

  I stopped abruptly, as everyone looked at me, then quickly looked away. Everyone but Ma, whose gaze hadn’t left the ceiling the whole evening. Martha and Susanna hovered in the wings, clutching each other.

  “Not,” I faltered. “You don’t mean. You can’t mean—”

  Me.

  “Wife of my brother’s bosom.” James launched forth again, though he appeared to be addressing the disciples rather than me. “You are a stranger from a strange land with strange ways and strange gods, and you do not know the Law, which the Most High God in his goodness and mercy has given unto his chosen people. The Eternal One knows that it is not good for a man to die with his seed unsown and his sons unborn, so he has vouchsafed that the brother of the man who has died with sons unborn must take unto himself the widow and go in unto her that the wife of the dead man’s bosom may yet bear sons of his line. And since the Lord in his wisdom has deprived me of the wife of my own bosom since, lo, she has died in childbirth, he clearly intends for me to be unto you your husband thus to ensure that his Chosen One will not die without an heir.”

  I turned to Mary B, on whom I always relied for exegesis. She looked at me, shrugged as if to say, “sorry”, and then she spoke one word.

  “Levirate.”

  With that one technical legal term she summed up all the longwinded James had just said. But I was still having a hard time taking it in.

  “James,” I turned to him. “Let me be sure I’ve got this straight. You’re asking me to marry you?”

  He looked honestly startled, as if the idea hadn’t occurred to him. I felt a wave of relief. It was all a misunderstanding.

  “Mary,” said Mary B. “He’s not asking. He’s accepting his obligation according to the Law of Moses. If he is able to marry you and impregnate you on behalf of his brother, it is his duty. Do you understand?”

  “But surely the widow has to give consent.”

  An awful silence answered me. I felt queasy, and realized I had eaten an inordinate amount of figs.

  “Come,” said Martha. “The men have matters to discuss.”

  I started to get up, not in acquiescence but because I needed to be sick, but Mary B yanked me back down.

  “Sit down, Mary. You, too, Martha and Susanna. Anything that concerns our duty to our beloved teacher affects all of us. You know he invited women to his table and included us in everything.”

  I reached for a wineskin and took a sip and nibbled some bread, hoping it might soothe my stomach. I sat up, took a breath, and then put my head between my knees.

  “Jesus,” I spoke to him inside my head, call it praying if you like. �
�What are you thinking? Before you go appearing unto people and arranging marriages for me, how about you try appearing unto me.”

  I waited for an answer, but I heard only my own breathing and the anguished workings of my digestion.

  “There is nothing to discuss, Mary,” Peter said testily. “James is honoring his brother and keeping the Law of Moses.”

  If it was a law, I was thinking, there had to be a loophole. I glanced at Miriam who was still gazing serenely towards the heavens and humming to herself. I knew I wasn’t the only one who suspected that Joseph wasn’t Jesus’s father, which would mean he wasn’t related to James at all or descended from the bloody royal house of David.

  “You bastard,” I prayed to my beloved. “You got me into this. Get me out of it.”

  All at once I felt inside me besides indigestion, the subtlest of fluttering. Not a kick yet—wings, fins, something tiny, tremulous, and strong.

  “Wait,” I said, lifting my head and feeling much better. “The law of levirate exists to ensure that the deceased has legitimate issue, correct?” I did my best to sound like a Torah scholar debating in the Temple porticoes. “Therefore, if the deceased already has issue, the levirate would be moot? That is to say, the widow would not have to marry the deceased’s brother?”

  There followed a lively discussion of the fine points of the levirate between Mary B, James, and the more erudite of the disciples. They had clearly forgotten the matter at hand and were going at it in fine rabbinical style when Martha (who had sat down) decided she had had enough.

  “Quiet! All of you!” She turned to me and fixed me with a stern look. “Mary, do you have something to tell us?”

  I felt a twinge of regret at yielding up my secret, one more loss but small enough to be absorbed in the great ocean of loss where my life already pitched and tossed.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do. I am with child. I’m going to have a baby,” I added inanely as joy of speaking those words took me by surprise. I didn’t even notice the silence that followed. My joy kept expanding, filling the room, the sky, knocking Miriam’s wandering gaze back into earth’s orbit.

  “Who is the father?”

  Who is the father? Who is the father? That question. That question again.

  I am standing naked and pregnant before the college of druids, until my beloved comes to stand with me and shield me with his body.

  “Esus is not the father,” I say aloud to the druids.

  “Ha! That’s what I thought.” Peter’s voice pulled me back to the present where I faced not druids but alarmed and grim-faced disciples. Just as bad. Maybe worse.

  “Jesus!” I swore; I prayed.

  “Jesus is not the father,” Peter said again.

  “He is the father!” I cried, still disoriented. “He is. This time he is.”

  “You just said he wasn’t.” Peter’s face was as red as it had been the day I first met him at the gates of Temple Magdalen when he brought us a load of fish to thank us for curing his wife’s infertility, the day it dawned on him that he was not the father of his own child.

  “But that’s not what I meant!” I protested. “I was talking about my first child. Jesus wasn’t the father of that child but he was ready to let the druids believe he was.”

  The men looked blank. None of them knew the story, and they didn’t want to know: their beloved master reckless enough to lie for a woman who had been unchaste from the start? As the old druid Nissyen would have said, it was not the story they were telling themselves, so they could not hear it.

  Only Susanna met my eye. She made a defiant gesture with a lift of her chin, as in, “Don’t let ‘em get you down. Us loose women have to stick together.” And I realized even she might doubt me. They all knew I had been caught committing adultery.

  Once a whore always a whore. Hadn’t I said it myself—and with pride?

  Who had knowledge of you? My beloved had demanded angrily when I told him I was pregnant so long ago now on the druid isle. Went in unto you. Because I know it wasn’t me.

  A god! I had ended up screaming at him.

  A god, Dwynwyn had told the druids.

  “A god,” I said aloud to the disciples. “The father of my child is a god, the risen Lord. He rose in me and I conceived a child by him. Believe me or not, it doesn’t matter. I know the truth.”

  The silence this time was vast and stormy, a sea with the men tossing helplessly and no savior to calm the waves, no Jesus walking towards them over the water, laughing at their fears, scolding them for lack of faith. All the while Miriam’s humming rose and fell like wind riding the swells.

  “Brothers, my brother and our Lord chose this woman,” James spoke at last, rising to his feet to address the assembly. I saw that whether or not the twelve liked it, James was assuming authority as spokesman for Jesus’s kin, and Peter and the rest would have to come to terms with him. “We must not dishonor him by doubting her word. If she says she is with child by him, we will believe her. And if a son is given to us…”

  Given to us?

  “…we will raise him as my brother would have wished, as befits an heir of the house of David. If my brother’s widow wishes, we may wait until the child’s birth.”

  “Wait for what?” I blurted out.

  “To know if the child is a son. And thus if there is a need to observe the law of levirate.”

  “You mean if it’s a girl….”

  James nodded at me gravely with a look of patience that fell short of warmth or kindness. He was just; he would do what was right. It did not occur to him that I would question the plan. I decided it was best not to enlighten him—or anyone. I lowered my eyes, bowed my head and remembered my beloved’s advice:

  Be wise as serpents, gentle as doves.

  Doves, of course, have wings.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WHAT MEN ARE FOR

  “GET USED TO IT, MAEVE.”

  The voice is my beloved’s, just as I remember it, rich as spring earth warmed by strong light, but when I sit up, the moonlight is thin and the air is cold. I look around the rooftop where I prefer to sleep. The other sleepers, servants mostly, don’t stir.

  “Get used to what?” I say aloud.

  But there is only silence and loneliness. I lie back down and pull the covers around me, and maybe it is my imagination, but I feel warm, warm as if I were not sleeping alone.

  “There, that’s better.” His voice envelops me again. Maybe I am dreaming. What does it matter?

  “Why can’t I see you?” I ask him, silently now.

  I feel the warmth not just around me but all through me, as if the sun shone inside me, as if my bones were radiant.

  “We are too close, Maeve. Our flesh is one. Don’t you remember? Don’t you know?”

  “Our flesh has made flesh,” I tell him.

  Then I sit back up again, shivering. I want to sink back into that warmth, the place where I am not missing him, where he is not missing, but I remember I have a bone to pick with him. Well, we fought all our lives. I don’t know why I expected it to be any different after death—or after death, resurrection, and ascension (if you must call it that).

  “Now that I’ve got your attention, what the hell are you thinking, trying to marry me off to your brother?”

  “Lie down, cariad.” I cannot resist his voice, the pull of his warmth. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You’re going to have to get used to people having visions of me, receiving messages from me. It seems to be a side effect of the god-making death, as you call it. The druids never warned me about it.”

  “Side effect? I think you’re trying to sidestep the issue. Did you or did you not appear unto your brother James and speak unto him that load of crap about his duty to your lineage?”

  “Not a load of crap, Maeve. Levirate. It’s in the Law. James might have thought of it himself, even if I hadn’t appeared to him. He’s always done the right thing.”

  “But did you tell him to marry me!” I was
insistent.

  “That’s what I’m trying to explain, Maeve, I can’t help appearing unto people when they call on me, when they believe in me. I might even speak unto them, but remember what Anna the prophetess used to say about prophecy, how it always loses in the translation and gains in the interpretation? It’s like that, and I’m afraid I don’t have much control over translation or interpretation.”

  “What? Can’t you speak plain Aramaic anymore?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “So what did you say unto James.”

  “I apologized to him. He was feeling badly for resenting me all my life, so I wanted to tell him: it wasn’t your fault. I left you holding the bag. I was free, because you took care of all my responsibilities as well as your own. I told him: you’re the true son of David, not me. Enjoy your life; enjoy the fruits of your labors. Well, you know how it came through to him. Listen, Maeve, I’m warning you, this god-making death has unforeseen consequences. It’s only just beginning. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I only know it’s not over.”

  I say nothing for a moment, considering. What my beloved says makes a kind of sense. People hear what they want to hear. James, being duty-driven, hears that he has a new duty. As for the fruits of his labor—picking up his half-brother’s slack all his life—well, why shouldn’t he become a leader in this new cult centered on his brother? Why shouldn’t he be the one to foster the heir?

  “I see,” I answer; then I add in honesty. “Sort of.”

  I don’t want to talk about James anymore. I just want to melt into the feeling of him being melted into me.

  “But it’s not such a bad idea,” he says, a little hesitance in his voice.

  “What isn’t?”

  “Marrying, James.”

  “Jesus!” I sit up again, and lose my sense of him. “No, don’t go.”