Bear one another’s burdens, Jesus had said. I wondered how heavy John’s own burdens might be.
“I thought you’d never ask!” I said lightly.
I smiled at him, and he smiled back. His teeth were crooked, but charmingly so, with gaps between them. And suddenly he looked so young, it dizzied me. I laid my hand on his arm to steady myself. He covered it with his own for a moment. Then he lifted my sacks from my shoulders and loaded them on his donkey. We didn’t talk much the rest of the way, for the climb made us breathless. Even so, I noticed the new lightness of my step.
When John crossed the threshold of Meryemana and came into Ma’s presence, he knelt before her and wept, as so many pilgrims had before him. When she recognized him, Ma wept, too, and reached for him, and they held each other for a long time, rocking, the comforted and comforter indistinguishable. Although my time with her was longer, and I am one of the unsung heroic daughters-in-law of the world, I do not begrudge John the lore of Marian devotion that surrounds him.
That night John and I sat up late beside the fire, while Ma slept, the night extending itself, opening out huge black wings to span the years we had been apart, to encompass all the loss. John’s brother James had been beheaded by Herod Antipas, like the Dipper before him, and many others of the Twelve had suffered various persecutions, imprisonments, and martyrdoms. His mother had died, too, but peacefully. Salome, my old friend and companion, who had let Jesus know that she expected her boys to have a preferred place in his kingdom.
“And you, Mary,” he said at length. “You have not said much for someone I remember as so outspoken.”
“That’s the pot calling the kettle black,” I tried to laugh, evading the question, not sure I was ready to part with a silence I had never meant to keep.
Then I looked up, to find him watching me as intently as if I were myself a fire, mysterious, bright, vanishing.
“You have been carrying your burdens for a long time,” he said.
“When did you get to be so wise, John Boanerge, Son of Thunder?” I looked away but not quickly enough to hide sudden tears.
Some men are smart with their bodies, know when to touch and when not to. They don’t second guess themselves. He reached for me and gathered me into his arms as if I were small as a child. He was a big man, bigger and broader than Jesus had been. His body was more like King Bran’s, my foster father, the first man I had ever touched—or smelled. John still smelled like the Sea of Galilee on a bright morning. He smelled like home. Softly at first, so that he had to bend his head to hear me, I began to tell my story to his heart. I told him everything, including my ill-fated seduction of Paul, and how I later threatened his life, along with Peter’s and James’s at knifepoint.
Here we paused for intermission while John gave way to laughter so boisterous and full-bodied that we both ended up rolling on the ground and had trouble recovering our breath.
“I needed that,” I said.
“So did I!” His belly was still shaking. “So what did you do next?”
“There is not much more to tell. I searched the seas for Sarah for nearly seven years, until Miriam summoned me to bring her to Ephesus. Sarah is grown now, and I think, I think she’s all right. I’ve had dreams, visions…” I trailed off. I was not ready yet to tell any apostle, not even this one, where Sarah might be. “And Miriam believes Sarah may come here one day.”
All roads lead to Ephesus, and all the paths of the sea, I silently repeated words that had become for me a charm, and invocation.
“Mary,” John said after a moment. “Do you ever feel him with you? He said he would be always with us, and the others never seem to doubt. But I...I do. Does he ever talk to you? Or appear to you.”
No need to ask he who.
“Not very often,” I said. “And there have been long, lonely desert stretches when I don’t feel him with me at all. The last time I knew he was there, he said it’s because he is so close to me that I can’t see him. He seems…not to judge me for my failures.”
“Oh, Mary, what failures?” John held me closer.
“What? Apart from his daughter running away from me at age twelve? Well, how about my own disappearance, never joining or challenging his ecclesia, never telling people what I know about him?”
“Well then,” said John after a moment. “I have failed him, too.”
“John, how so?”
“Look at me! I am no martyr, no preacher, no great debater. I’m still a fisherman. You won’t see me commanding crowds in the Temple of Jerusalem or the agora at Ephesus, for that matter. I was all right as his disciple, but those days were different. There was a place for someone like me, good-natured, if a bit hot-tempered, always ready to fight or party, it didn’t matter which, someone who could roll with the punches. But I’ve had to face it: I’m a follower, not a leader like Paul or Peter or Mary of Bethany. I’m no great shakes as a healer. I just remember how it was when we were together. I tell stories about Jesus, about those times. I try to live the way we lived then, easy, open, without so many rules.”
I shifted and turned, so that I was facing him. I took his face between my hands, feeling the mix of roughness and softness of beard and skin, as I looked into his eyes.
“John, listen to me,” I said. “You have not failed him. Your people here in the mountains are the only followers of the Way I’ve ever met who simply welcomed us, without question, who gave us food, shelter, just because we needed it—not because they wanted to convert us, or have us donate all our possessions to the ecclesia. I have been at peace here, more than anywhere since I left Temple Magdalen.”
John held my gaze for a moment, then he looked away, and I felt him tense and draw back just a little, suddenly self-conscious at our closeness. I dropped my hands and moved back a little myself.
“Well,” he said, clearing his throat, I suspected of his own unshed tears, “I am glad the people here made you welcome. But as to shelter, that skin contraption will hardly do for a mountain winter. I will call the people together and build you a real house of stone. We’ll start tomorrow. It’s very late now. I ought to go.”
He lumbered to his feet.
“Go where?” And I stood and looked at him across the fire.
“There are many shepherds who welcome me when I am here.”
“Have we not made you welcome at Meryemana?”
I swear he looked as bewildered as Peter at the gates of Temple Magdalen.
“Meryemana is not a whorehouse,” I pointed out.
“Of course not!” John’s brown face managed to turn red. “You are the Lord’s wife!”
“Widow,” I said softly.
And Jesus told me to take a lover, I did not say. Hadn’t I just railed against people dressing up their own will as his? Too many people were way too certain what Jesus wanted someone else to do. I wasn’t about to join their ranks.
“Good night, John.”
Without waiting to watch him walk away, I crawled into the shelter beside Miriam. Her body, ever lighter and less moored, gave scant heat. More and more, asleep or awake, she journeyed. Meryemana was for her a kind of portal to worlds not yet open to me. I could not escape the hardness of the ground, the coldness of my bed, the loneliness. Not long before dawn, I got up, stirred the fire and finally fell into a fitful sleep, curled next to its warmth.
“Mary?” someone whispered.
I did not wake all the way but wove the voice into dreams.
“Mary.”
In my dream I was cooking fish for breakfast by the Sea of Galilee. Jesus stood not far away calling to men to cast their nets to starboard. One of them called back to me.
“Mary.” A hand on my shoulder; this time I woke to see John bending over me. “He talked to me. He talked to me!”
“I’m glad for you, John,” I murmured. “What did he say?”
John looked utterly at a loss, but he struggled manfully.
“He says he wants me to, wants me to be—”
/> “John. Never mind what Jesus wants.” I thought I could make a pretty good guess. “What do you want?”
He let out a long, happy sigh.
“I want you.”
I reached for him, and drew him to me.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
HOLY OF HOLIES
AS SIMPLY AND SWEETLY as that, John, the beloved disciple, and I became lovers. (I am going to let him have the title no matter who was in that painting that won’t exist for another fourteen centuries. Because, as I think I have made overly clear, I am not a disciple.) And Jesus, so to speak, became a yenta, although marriage did not enter into it. It wasn’t that kind of love, and there wasn’t that kind of need on either of our parts. If you are wondering how an apostle could countenance what some Christians might call living in sin, well, I don’t know how to answer you. I’ve never had much of a grasp on sin, but that time with John taught me something about grace—the grace of soft rain after drought, the grace of food after famine, grace of a tide turning and flowing up a river. Who else could have been my lover but someone who had loved Jesus, too, someone who had danced with us at our wedding?
Maybe the spirit of Meryemana had something to do with the ease of it all. Everything that happened in that place seemed both miraculous and natural at once, and our lovemaking was no exception. Miriam never so much as raised an eyebrow, but seemed even more peaceful. Sometimes she smiled when she slept, which she did much of the time, even amidst the daily hubbub of construction. For, true to his word, John called together his followers, and they fell to work building a sturdy house with a stone foundation—far more substantial than most of the houses in the hills. It took shape swiftly, a miracle in itself, and was ready for habitation before the winds turned damp and bitter.
Almost every night, inside the house or outside if the weather was fine, we shared a meal with some of our neighbors, and afterwards we sang and told stories, just as we had at Temple Magdalen, only here most of the stories were about Jesus. John had sold himself short when he said he was no leader. He may not have been a preacher—for which I thanked Jesus every day—but he was a born storyteller, untaught perhaps, but the better for having no airs. You may be surprised, after the fuss I’ve made about no one hearing my story, that I was content to sit back and listen to John, even when his memory about some detail or another contradicted mine. To tell the truth, sometimes I didn’t pay attention to the words, just gave myself over to the reassuring rhythms of storytelling. I was so luxuriantly content to be in my body, in the present moment. Then one night John startled me out of my sensual daze.
“Mary knew him, too, you know,” he told our neighbors. “Mary knew him better than any of us. She was his wife.”
The neighbors nodded and smiled, under the benign influence of Meryemana, of Ma, who nodded, too, leaning against me as she dozed.
“Many of the apostles will not tell you about Mary, who she was to him. Paul of Tarsus will not, though he is a fine preacher and can cast out demons by the score, and Simon Peter won’t either. We were all jealous of her, you see—”
I started to feel uncomfortable, though I wasn’t sure why. Was it because I had made a deal with Peter and shared guilt with Paul? Was it because there was still so much of the story I couldn’t or wouldn’t tell?”
“John,” I said more sharply than I meant to. “There’s no need—”
“But there is need, Mary,” he interrupted me back. “It’s not right, it was never right for us to leave you out of the story, whatever Peter decided or thinks he had the authority to decide.”
The people had all sat up straighter, and watched us, some apprehensively, some with glee, all with the sense that they were listening in on a private conversation, that something might be rashly revealed, a disconcerting or thrilling moment for listeners, who almost always will keep quiet, hoping to hear something not meant for them. It is only human—an interesting phrase, for what else should we be?
“I thought you came here to be done with those quarrels, John.”
“And so I did, and so I am. How can anyone have a quarrel with the truth? And if you are not part of the story, how will people understand that Jesus was real, a man who loved a woman, who loved you, who married you even though you were a gentile whore and we all thought he was mad?”
Now there was the Son of Thunder I remembered, blurting out whatever he had on his mind, ignoring the consequences—in this case a few gasps, elbow nudging, the odd leer or wink. The story was pretty good before, but who can resist the hint that an unexpurgated version exists? And I was now not just a dutiful daughter or daughter-in-law (before, no one had cared) but a juicy new character.
“You just made Peter’s case, John,” I pointed out. “That’s precisely why he wanted me left out.”
“Tell,” said an old woman.
“There are children here,” I protested.
“They’ve heard the nailing of his flesh to the cross. Is there anything worse than that?” Miriam surprised us all, speaking from her seeming sleep. “You, Maeve of Magdala, don’t get all prissy and mealy-mouthed on us. It doesn’t become you. Are you telling us that you are ashamed of having been a whore?”
I thought of Temple Magdalen with sudden longing, the place that had sustained me all those years before Jesus returned (or was returned to me) the place where I had received all men as if they were my beloved.
“I am not ashamed,” I said loudly.
“Well, then,” John sent me a crooked smiled full of crooked teeth. “As I was saying—”
“No, John.” I glared at him fondly, if that is not a contradiction. “If you want to hear my part of the story, I will tell it. My way.”
“All right. But tell the truth.” He returned my fond glare. “Don’t make it all pretty and tidy and nice.”
Is it any wonder that Jesus chose this man for my lover?
“You asked for it, Boanerge!”
And so it came to pass that on winter evenings I told stories, too, stories only I could tell—like how Jesus and I both almost ran away the night before our wedding, how I restored the fig tree he blasted and then threw figs at him in the Temple porticoes before I ran away, back to whoring. I told about standing before Jesus to be condemned as an adulteress, and what he scratched in the dust that only I could decipher. I told about being sealed with him in the tomb, how I washed him with the vial of whores’ tears and with my own tears. I told about the morning in the garden, and how I did not recognize my beloved in the light of the golden tree until he called me by my name.
I only left one part out, one little tiny part about the size of the universe.
John guessed it.
That night we curled up together as usual in the little bedroom that Miriam did not use, as she needed the warmth of the hearth. Often our lovemaking just happened, one part seeking the other, nestling, like birds with their heads tucked under their wings. Sometimes we fell asleep still joined. But tonight, even though we held each other, I sensed him holding back. I fought the urge to ask: what’s wrong? That timeworn conversation between women and men. If he wanted to speak, he would. Or if I needed to, I would.
“I can’t believe it,” he said, just as I started to doze off.
“What?” I said a little crossly.
“I can’t believe I have been your lover.”
“Must you put it in the past tense?” I asked. “Look, John, at our age, we don’t have to do it every night—”
“I can’t believe I have done it all.”
If I had not had my arms wrapped around him, I think he would have rolled away from me, maybe gotten out of bed and started to pace.
“Easy, boy, easy,” I said. “We’ve been lovers for almost two months. What’s changed all of a sudden?”
“Your story,” he said. “Your story.”
I could feel a sob beginning in his belly and fighting its way up through all the resistant layers of manhood.
“My story hasn’t changed,” I said, f
eeling strangely unmoved by his struggle. “You knew I was his wife. You knew I was his lover.”
“I knew,” he said. “But don’t you see? I didn’t let myself know. Not from the inside. None of us knew. We all kept our distance from you. Not just because you were his wife and off limits, but because you were you, outside our ken, dangerous. We tried to pretend you weren’t there, even though you were more there than anyone. Am I making any sense?”
I waited a moment, my own old resentments rising.
“I don’t know about making sense, but you are not telling me anything I didn’t already know. I know you all just tolerated me for his sake. I suppose I did the same with all of you,” I admitted. “You’re right. No wonder we’ve all gotten so fractious now that he isn’t here to force us to love each other.”
“That’s not what I meant to say.” John let out a sigh of frustration, and as he did he softened a little. “I mean I didn’t know your story, how everything looked and felt to you. Believe it or not, I didn’t even know you stayed with him in the tomb. We were all so terrified and miserable and ashamed when you came to tell us you’d seen him. We thought you were crazy. We pushed you away. We didn’t want to know what happened. Even after we saw him again ourselves, we never thought about you, your part in it.”
I just nodded and rested my head against his heart, suddenly too weary even to say that’s all right.
“Mary,” he said, just when I thought he was done for the night. “You didn’t tell us everything that happened in the tomb, did you.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Will you tell me?”
I waited a beat, and then repeated the words that had so horrified Paul.
“He rose in me. He rose in me.”
All at once his sobs lodged in his depths wrenched themselves free and rose to a wail.
“Ssh,” I said, rocking his heaving bulk as best I could. “Shh. Don’t wake Miriam.”
“How…could…I…ev…ver…dare….to go….in…unto…you.” He hiccupped his words, like a child.
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