The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  “Know what?”

  “She has a terrible crush on you.”

  Rosa did look up at him with adoring brown eyes as he banged the keys and swore and sweated, and she was a nice girl, who worked hard and undoubtedly had some talent. If she would only stop asking so damned many questions.

  “How did you hurt your hands, Bird?”

  “A guard smashed them when I was in prison, down in the Southlands.” He answered curtly, looking at the music, away from the shock in her eyes, which somehow intensified his own hurt.

  “Why, Bird? Why did they do that?”

  “They wanted me to tell them something I didn’t want to tell them.”

  “What?”

  “Diosa, I don’t remember what, exactly. I didn’t want to tell them anything they could use against us.”

  “Did it hurt?” she asked quietly.

  “Of course it hurt. Look, don’t think about it, querida. It happened a long time ago. Think about getting the timing right on those triplets.”

  She did think about it. He could tell by the way she gazed at him with a mixture of pity and worship that made him want to slam the lid down on the piano keys and tell Marie to find her another teacher. But he couldn’t do that, not to a little girl. And the lessons forced him to play a bit, so he could answer with an honest “yes” when Sam asked if he was keeping up with his exercises.

  “I’m not noticing anything I could call improvement,” Bird said.

  “Give it time.”

  “I’m not sure we have time.”

  Sam made no answer.

  “Let’s begin,” Aviva called out. “Outside, everybody.”

  The ritual itself, Maya reflected, had added a bit of Pagan seasoning to its Jewish essence. She could almost hear the voices of her grandparents, sniffing in mild disapproval as Aviva led them into the garden to bless the elements and acknowledge the Four Sacred Things. Then the participants washed one another’s hands as a rite of purification and filed back indoors.

  When they were all seated at the table, Aviva held aloft the plate of sacred foods.

  “Here is the egg of life and the greens of spring,” Aviva said. “The bitter herbs, that stand for the bitterness of slavery, and the shankbone—in this case, a roasted chicken neck—to symbolize the burnt offerings brought to the Temple in Jerusalem.”

  “Perfectly Orthodox,” Maya whispered to her ghosts.

  Aviva continued. “And here is the charoset, this mixture of apples and nuts and wine and spices, which they always told us stood for the mortar in the bricks the Hebrews laid for their masters. But we know these are the sacred fruits of the ancient Goddess, apples of life, wine of intoxication, the tree fruits that honor Asherah, who stood reduced to the form of a pillar in the Temple of Solomon and who later was expelled from worship. Yet her memory was never truly erased, and down through the centuries her gifts have sweetened for us the harshness of life, even as this food sweetens the bitter herbs we dip into it. Let us taste it tonight as a token that no true power can ever wholly be lost, and as a promise that, whatever bitterness lies ahead, we will also find sweetness.”

  Maya could feel her ancestors bristle at the mention of the Goddess. Everything changes with time, or it dies, she told them silently. Be glad this ritual is still so alive. Now shut up or go away.

  Ari, a black-bearded bear of a man seated at Aviva’s side, stood up.

  “I dedicate the first cup of wine to the ancestors,” he said. “I honor the ancestors who were slaves under the Pharaohs.”

  One by one, going around the table, they spoke.

  “I honor my ancestors who were stolen from Africa to slave on this continent.”

  “I honor the ancestors of this land, enslaved by the Spanish.”

  “I honor my ancestors who died in the concentration camps of the Nazis.”

  “I honor my ancestors who died in the Palestinian relocation camps.”

  “I honor my ancestors who died at the hands of the Stewards in our struggle for freedom.”

  “I honor those who will die in the struggles to come.”

  A silence fell on the table, broken by the sweet soprano voice of a young woman who sang a blessing in Hebrew. They drank the first cup of wine.

  As the wine took hold, the arguments began. And that was quite traditional, Maya thought. She remembered the Seders of her childhood as nuggets of ritual embedded in a matrix of lively discussion, her uncles disputing fine points of ritual, her father, when he attended, challenging every reference to external divine aid, her grandmother popping up periodically to complain loudly to her grandfather, “Oy, Jake, hurry up. People have to eat.”

  As Aviva and Holybear argued amiably, Bird sat wrapped in silence. Maya reached over and touched his hand. He patted her hand abstractedly and gave her the little false smile she hated to see.

  Sam was reading from the Haggadah, the book of prayers and songs and stories. “ ‘And the Source of All brought us out of Egypt, with a strong arm and an outstretched hand.’ ” He paused, looking up at them over his thick reading glasses. “What does that mean to us? Personally, after the Millennialists, I’m wary of any sort of divine intervention. I come from the fine old leftist Jewish secularist tradition, where we were taught to use the strength of our own arms and hands. If there’s a God or Goddess offering deliverance, it had better be us.”

  “I read it as hope,” Aviva said. “Hope is the source of strength. We can depend on our own arms and hands, but we can’t do anything without hope.”

  “But it’s not just individual hope,” a woman Maya didn’t recognize said. “The strong arm is what we can lean on when all of our arms are working together.”

  “God is our united support,” Ari said.

  “But what about when you’re all alone?” asked the woman with the sweet voice.

  “You still have the strength of the group to draw on.”

  “And what if you don’t? What if you go against the group?” Holybear asked. “Are you then removed from the reach of the Goddess?”

  In the pause that followed, Bird spoke. He was looking down at his wineglass and his voice seemed far away, as if he had to come back from a great distance to meet them.

  “I have been in Egypt,” he said. They all turned to look at him. “And yeah, my own hands and arms and mind and magic got me out. But it wasn’t just me. And it wasn’t just the collective strength, because that seemed pretty damn far away at the time, and the people I was with—even together, we didn’t have much in the way of strength. So I can’t tell you what it was. It wasn’t an old guy with a beard, and it wasn’t a big lady in the sky. But when I was trapped there, something did reach for me.”

  “How do we invoke that?” Holybear asked quietly. “Where do we put in our order for divine intervention? Because without it, if it’s only our own arms and hands, however united, frankly I don’t think we’re going to win this one.”

  “I’m not talking about winning or losing,” Bird said. “I’m not even talking about getting free or getting caught or living or dying, really. I’m trying to say that this, this livingness we’re all in and of, has something in it that reaches for freedom. Maybe that quality isn’t first or most central. It could be just like a single thin thread buried in a whole carpet. But it’s there. The outstretched hand is there. If you reach for it, it’ll grab you back.”

  Aviva broke the silence that followed Bird’s statement by pouring out a new round of wine, and the ritual went on. They drank, they ate matzoh and dipped bitter herbs into charoset, they consumed an enormous meal of all the old foods Maya remembered: matzoh balls in chicken soup or vegetable broth for the vegetarians, gefilte fish that Ari had made from his grandmother’s recipe, roast chicken and potatoes and steamed vegetables. Aviva’s young niece stole the afikomen, the piece of matzoh set aside to end the meal, and Ari had to ransom it back by promising to let her off weeding the garden for a week.

  Finally they settled back for the closing. A ful
l cup of wine, traditionally reserved for the prophet Elijah, stood in the center of the table.

  “Let’s open the door for Elijah,” Aviva said, “and sing his song.”

  Maya had remained relatively quiet throughout the evening, but at this she had to speak up. “Oh, no!” she said. “You’re not really going to invoke that old religious fanatic, are you? I protest!”

  “Why?” Ari asked. “What’s wrong with Elijah?”

  “He slaughtered the priests of Baal, the consorts of the Goddess,” Maya said, “for no other reason than that they held to the traditions of their own land. He’s the Junipero Serra of the Bible, your typical racist imperialist bigot. Why the hell should we feed him? Better we should invoke the spirit of Jezebel!”

  “I just want to sing the song,” Sam said. “I’m not proposing we raise his ghost.”

  “You’re talking about singing an invocation, opening a door to a spirit and feeding him,” Maya said. “I’m sorry, to me that’s an act of magic.”

  “Do you know what the song means?” somebody asked.

  “It means Elijah the Prophet, Elijah the Tishbite, Elijah the Giladite. Place names. It’s talking about where he’s from,” said a young boy.

  “But what about the second verse?” His older sister spoke up. “I’ll translate it for you; it says, ‘Swiftly, in our days, will come our Lord, the Messiah, son of David.’ ”

  “Yeah, what about that, Sam?” Maya said. “You, the secularist, calling for the Messiah to deliver us.”

  “I just like the song,” Sam protested. “Is that a crime? It brings back happy memories of my childhood. The whole family sitting around the Seder table, fighting like we are now.”

  “Can I suggest a compromise?” Aviva said. “We’ll sing the song, to keep Sam happy, but with the door closed. Then we’ll open the door and call in the spirits of all those who have been murdered throughout history because of religious intolerance, and we’ll feed them.”

  “There isn’t food enough in all the granaries of the world to feed all those ghosts!” Maya said.

  “Symbolically, we’ll feed them. And ask them to help us withstand the coming times.”

  “I can live with that,” Maya agreed.

  “I just want to sing the song,” Sam said. “I don’t care if we invoke Elijah, Jezebel, Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny. Once a year, I like to hear this song.”

  With the door closed, they sang.

  Eliyahu HaNavi, Eliyahu HaTishbi,

  Eliyahu, Eliyahu, Eliyahu HaGiladi.…

  The minor strains filled the room, seeped out over the threshold into the night. Then Aviva opened the door, and the spirits of the dead rushed in. Maya thought she could see them, still faintly aglow with the light of the full moon, and hungry. For a moment the air was thick with their presence; then as the door swung shut they slipped out, back into the moonlit night where the tattered rags of old roads glinted like threads of a web. Far to the south, armies gathered. In the hills and dry canyons, the moon made mirrors out of shallow traces of water.

  That night Maya dreamed of the prophet Elijah. He came and sat at the foot of her bed. Much to her surprise, she realized he was a redheaded man.

  “What do you want, you old bigot?” she asked him. “I know you and I know your story. You’re nothing but a murderer with an inflated reputation.”

  “I want you,” he said.

  “Forget it.”

  “I want to help you.”

  “And what help have you ever been? Did you help the four hundred priests of Baal that you slaughtered in Jezebel’s time? Did you help the hundreds of generations who starved and sweated and suffered and, instead of raising a hand to better their own lot, waited on you to herald the Messiah? And what about women? Have you ever raised a finger of your hallowed and prophetic hand to help a single Jewish woman escape from an unhappy marriage, or learn to read the sacred books, or express her own thoughts and have them heard by the congregation? For hundreds of generations, Jewish women have invited you in each year to eat the sacred foods prepared by their own hands, the egg and the greens, the salt water of tears and the sweet charoset, the unleavened matzoh—bread of affliction, we call it—yet when have you ever lightened so much as a crumb of our affliction? And I’ll tell you something else—those foods are the real carriers of the tradition, the sacred mysteries. Not what comes out of your men’s mouths, the words and the stories and the endless arguments and explanations, but what we women provide to put into your mouth, the taste of pain, the taste of spring, the taste of hope and new beginnings.” Maya was sitting up in bed now. The room was filled with a faint light that seemed to emanate from the prophet’s body, and this made her angrier still. “What in hell are you doing here in my bedroom, you old fraud? Get out! I’m not opening any doors for you or leaving you any offerings. In my book, you are the enemy.”

  Elijah shifted his white robe, hitching it up on his left shoulder, and settled himself more comfortably on the bed.

  “Are you finished? Can I get a word in?”

  “I say to you what my grandmother would say—feh!”

  “Maya, since that’s what you choose to call yourself, let me just ask you this. What happens to the enemy who is invited to share the feast? Does the enemy not transform?”

  “What are you trying to tell me? That you’ve gone over to the side of the Goddess?”

  “You’ll never know if you don’t stop yelling at me.”

  “I’m not yelling! But you barge into my bedroom uninvited, refuse to leave, invade my space, as we used to say, so don’t be surprised if I get a little testy.”

  “I’m only here to do my job.”

  “Which is what?”

  “You know what. I’m the herald of the Messiah. I am the forerunner of deliverance, the harbinger of redemption.”

  “Did I send out for a Messiah? I’m sorry, I don’t remember. Look, Elijah, this one’s been done already, and not done well. The last Messiah gave us two thousand years of grief. Crusades, pogroms, missionaries, holy wars. Now the Millennialists. Do we really need another round?”

  “Maya, you’re an old woman, but I’m even older than you. Hasn’t it occurred to you that redemption might have changed its form in the last few millennia? How could it not? Is not God change?”

  “Jehovah? Doesn’t sound like him.”

  “Goddess, then. Does the name matter so much, or the form of the mythical divine genitalia? Maya, for year after year, generation after generation, I have been fed each spring by women. I have tasted the spring and the tears and the blood until something in me wanted to rise up and dance, to roll in the mud. I’m a changed man, Maya. Can’t you see? The Messiah I herald has become the redemption of the earth.”

  He was gazing at her with eyes that glowed softly, like water mirroring clouds. Oh, this is my problem, Maya thought, I always fall for them, the wounded men. Wouldn’t you think that at my age I would have outgrown it? Nevertheless, she could feel his appeal.

  “How can I trust you?” she asked, finally.

  “Touch me.”

  She reached a tentative finger forward, and he clasped her hand in his big freckled hand, the red hairs on its back glinting in the lamplight. Something moved through her, like a great unfolding tear wringing itself loose and flooding her, washing her clean, clean, so that all her empty, hurting spaces shone with light. The room filled with light, golden and silver and palest green, like tender new leaves budding off an old shoot, and a fragrance like the morning of flowers.

  “Listen to me, Maya,” Elijah said. “Tell your enemies this: There is a place set for you at our table, if you will choose to join us.’ ”

  Then he was gone. She sank into a dreamless, silver sleep. In the morning, when Bird brought in her tea, he sniffed the air curiously.

  “Why does your room smell like roses?” he asked.

  16

  In her mind, Madrone often carried on conversations with Maya or Bird. She had been in the hill camp f
or over a week; its discomforts had become familiar. You can get used to anything, she imagined herself explaining, as she stirred honey into acorn meal to make a meager breakfast, no different from her meager supper the night before. You can get used to hunger and thirst. The trick is not to think about it, or not to admit you were thinking about it. Goddess knows, there’s no lack of distractions.

  Her days were full of tasks, tending the sick and aiding the Melissa with the wounded, shelling the narrow acorns of the live oaks and the fat corns from the valley oaks, grinding meal, leaching its bitter tannic acid in such running water as they could find. She felt herself getting tougher, drier, more self-enclosed, like a leathery-leafed bush of the chapparal, which turns only the edges of its leaves toward the sun.

  Night after night she tried to dream back to Lily and the Council, but all she dreamed of was water, rain pouring down on the roof of Black Dragon House, the sound of the little stream outside their front door, the roaring of a river in a gorge high up in the Sierras, bowls of water left on altars as offerings, hot water pouring over her body in the shower.

  There is one thing I can’t get used to, Maya, she imagined herself saying. I can adjust to the meager diet, I can even put up with thirst, chewing on a raw acorn to let its astringent taste distract my mouth from its need for water. But I cannot get used to the dirt, the smell of my own unwashed body, the greasy strings of my hair. And what’s worse, the condition of my patients, which hardly bears thinking about.

  When her moon blood came, Rocky showed her the piles of soft mosses she had gathered to use as pads, but there were still smears on her legs and hands and everything began to smell and taste of iron.