by Anne Rice
No one knew how old she was. She might have been fifteen or sixteen. The Orphan had been younger.
Now, she stood before Joseph and very suddenly she broke into the gestures that signified her brother. Where was her brother? What had happened to her brother? No one would tell her. Her eyes swept the room, swept the faces of the women against the walls. What happened to her brother?
Joseph started to answer her. He started but once again the tears came to his eyes, and his pale hands hung in the air, unable to describe the shapes he saw or wanted to see.
James was worried. Cleopas started with words. He didn't know the signs very well. He never had.
Avigail could say and do nothing.
Finally I turned Silent Hannah to me. I made the gesture for her brother, and pointed to my lips, which I knew she could now and then read. I pointed upwards and made the sign for prayer. I talked slowly as I made the various signs.
“The Lord watches over your brother now, and your brother is sleeping. Your brother is asleep in the earth now. You will not see him again.” I pointed to her eyes. I leaned forward and pointed then to my own eyes and to Joseph's eyes, and the tears on his face. I shook my head. “Your brother is with the Lord now,” I said. I kissed my fingers and gestured again upward.
Silent Hannah's face crumpled and she pulled away from me violently.
Avigail took firm hold of her.
“Your brother will rise on the last day,” Avigail said, and she looked upward, and then, letting Silent Hannah go, she made a great encompassing gesture as if the whole world were gathered under Heaven.
Silent Hannah was in terror. She hunched her shoulders and peered at us through her fingers.
I spoke again, gesturing. “It was quick. It was wrong. It was like someone falling. Suddenly over.”
I made the gestures for rest, for sleep, for calm. I made them as slowly as I could.
I saw her face slowly change.
“You're our child,” I said. “You live with us and with Avigail.”
She waited a long moment and then asked Where was her brother laid to rest? I gestured to the far hills, high up in the hills. Silent Hannah knew the caves. She didn't need to know which cave, that it was the cave for those who die by stoning.
Her face was fixed again but only for a moment, and then with a strange fearful expression, she made the gestures for Where is Yitra?
“Yitra's family is gone,” I said. I made the gestures for mother and father, and little ones, walking.
She looked at me. She knew this couldn't be right, couldn't be all of it. Again, she made the gesture for Where is Yitra?
“Tell her,” said Joseph.
I did. “In the ground, with your brother. Gone now.”
Her eyes grew wide with shock. Then, for the first time ever I saw her lips draw back in a bitter smile. A groan came from her, a terrible tongueless sound.
James sighed. He and Cleopas looked at each other.
“You come on home with me now,” said Avigail.
But this wasn't finished.
Joseph quickly gestured to the Heavens again, and made the signs for rest and peace under Heaven.
“Help me with her,” said Avigail, because Silent Hannah wouldn't be moved.
My mother and my aunts came forward. Slowly Silent Hannah yielded. She walked as one in a dream. Out of the house they went, the group of them.
She must have stopped in the street. We heard a sound like an ox bellowing, a huge and awful sound. It was Silent Hannah.
By the time I reached her, she'd gone wild, thrashing at everyone around her, kicking, pushing, and out of her came this shapeless bellowing louder and louder, echoing off the walls. She pushed at Avigail and flung Avigail against the wall, and Avigail suddenly broke into sobs and began screaming.
Shemayah, Avigail's father, opened the door.
But Avigail flung herself on Silent Hannah, sobbing and crying and letting the tears run, and pleading with Silent Hannah to please please Come. “Come with me!” Avigail sobbed.
Silent Hannah had stopped her moans. She stood still staring at Avigail. Avigail let herself convulse with her sobs. She threw up her arms and then went down on her knees.
Silent Hannah ran to her and lifted her. Silent Hannah began to comfort her.
All the women gathered around. They stroked the hair of the two young women; they stroked their arms and their shoulders. Silent Hannah kept wiping at Avigail's tears as if she really could wipe them completely away. She clutched Avigail's face and wiped hard at her tears. Avigail nodded. Silent Hannah patted Avigail over and over.
Shemayah held the door open for his daughter, and finally the two young women went into the house together.
We went back into our house. The coals were glowing in the darkness, and someone put a cup of water in my hand, and said, “Sit down.”
I saw Joseph against the wall, his ankles crossed, his head bowed.
“Father, you don't come with us today,” said James. “You stay here, please, and watch the little ones. They need you here today.”
Joseph looked up. For a moment he looked as if he didn't know what James was saying to him. The usual argument did not come. Not even a sound of protest. Then he nodded and closed his eyes.
In the courtyard, James clapped his hands to make the boys hurry. “We mourn in our hearts,” he reminded them. “Now we're late. And those of you who work here today, I want this yard swept, do you understand? Look at it.” He turned around and around, pointing at the dead dried vines that clung to the lattices, to the leaves heaped in every corner, to the fig tree that was no more now than a tangle of bones.
Once we were on the road, crowded into the usual slow grind of wagons and teams of workers, he drew me close to him and said,
“Did you see what happened to Father? Did you see it? He tried to speak and—.”
“James, this day would have wearied any man, but after this . . . he should stay home.”
“How can we persuade him of that, that I can run things now? Look at Cleopas. He's dreaming, talking to the fields.”
“He knows.”
“Everything falls on me.”
“It's the way you want it,” I said.
Cleopas was my mother's brother. It didn't fall to him to be the head of the family. It was the sons of Cleopas, and his daughter Little Salome, whom I called my brothers and sister. The wives of these brothers were my sisters. The wife of James was my sister.
“That's true,” James said with a little surprise. “I do want it all to fall on me. I don't complain. I want things done as they should be done.”
I nodded. I said, “You're good at it.”
Joseph never went into Sepphoris to work again.
6
TWO DAYS PASSED before I got away to the grove, my grove.
In spite of unceasing work, we'd finished a series of walls early; nothing further could be done until the plaster dried, and so there came an hour of daylight in which I could go off, without a word to anyone, and seek the place I most loved, amid the ancient olive trees and veiled in a tangle of ivy that seemed to thrive in the drought as well as in the rain.
As I said before, the villagers were suspicious of the place and didn't go there. The oldest olives no longer bore fruit, and some were hollowed out, big hulking gray sentinels with wild young trees taking root in their emptied trunks. There were stones there, but I'd years ago satisfied myself that they'd never been a pagan altar or part of a burial ground; and the layer of leaves had long covered them so that the place was soft there for lying, just as an open field might be with silken grass, and in its own way just as sweet.
I had a roll of clean rags with me for a pillow. I crept in and lay down and allowed myself a long slow breath.
I thanked the Lord for this enclosure, for this escape.
I looked up at the play of light in the mesh of faintly moving branches. The winter days faded abruptly. The sky was already colorless. I didn't mind. I kn
ew the way back home plainly enough. But I couldn't stay as long as I wanted. I'd be missed, and someone would come looking for me, and I would be trouble, and that was not what I wanted to be at all. What I wanted was to be alone.
I prayed; I tried to clear my mind. It was fragrant and wholesome here. It was precious. There was no such place in Nazareth as this, and no such place for me in Sepphoris, or Magdala, or Cana, or anyplace in which we worked or ever would work.
And every room in our house was filled.
Little Cleopas, the grandson of my uncle Alphaeus, had married last year to a cousin, Mary, from Capernaum, and they had taken the last of the rooms, and already Mary was carrying a child.
So I was alone. Just for a little while. Alone.
I tried to shake off the atmosphere of the village, the air of recrimination that had settled on people after the stoning; no one wanted to talk about it, but no one could think of anything else. Who had been there? Who had not? And had those children run off to throw in their lot with the brigands, and somebody ought to seek out those brigands and burn them out of their caves.
And of course the brigands had been raiding the villages. That often happened. And now with the drought the price of food was dear. Rumor had it, the brigands had swept down on the smaller hamlets to steal livestock, and to steal wine-sacks and sacks of water. No one ever knew when one of these cutthroat men on horseback would come stomping through our streets.
That was very much the talk in Sepphoris, of brigands in a bad winter. But there was also talk everywhere of Pilate and his soldiers moving sluggishly towards Jerusalem with ensigns bearing the name of Caesar, ensigns which should not pass through the city gates. It was blasphemy to bring such ensigns, bearing the name of an Emperor, into our city. We didn't hold with images; we didn't hold with the name or image of an Emperor who held himself to be a god.
Under the Emperor Augustus Caesar nothing like that had ever happened. No one was really certain that Augustus himself had ever believed he was a god. He went along with it, of course, and there were temples reared in his honor. Perhaps his heir Tiberius didn't believe it either.
But people didn't care about the private views of the Emperor. They cared that those ensigns were being carried by Roman soldiers through Judea, and they didn't like it, and the King's soldiers argued about it, too, outside the palace gates and in the taverns, and in the marketplace, or wherever they might happen to be.
The King himself, Herod Antipas, wasn't in Sepphoris. He was in Tiberias, his new city, a city named for the new Emperor, that Herod had built on the sea. We never went to work in that city. A cloud hung over it; graves had been moved to build it. And once the laborers who hadn't cared about such things had flooded east to work there, we had more work in Sepphoris than we could ever want to do.
We'd always done well in Sepphoris. And the King sometimes came to his palace, and whether he did or not, there was an eternal parade of the highborn through his various chambers, and for their splendid houses, the building never stopped.
Now these rich men and women were as worried about the actions of Pontius Pilate as was anyone else. When it came to Romans taking ensigns into the Holy City, Jews of all walks of life were very simply Jews.
Nobody seemed to know this Pontius Pilate; but everybody despised him.
And meantime, word of the stoning had spread throughout the countryside, and people glanced at us as if we were the miserable mob from Nazareth, or so my brothers and nephews thought as they hurled back their own glances, and people disputed over the cost of grout for the bricks I laid, or the thickness of the plaster stirred in the pot.
Of course people were right to be worried about Pontius Pilate. He was new and he didn't know our ways. Rumor had it the man was of the party of Sejanus, and no one had any great love for Sejanus, because Sejanus ran the world, it seemed, for the retired Emperor Tiberius, and who was Sejanus, men said, except a conniving and vicious soldier, a commander of the Emperor's personal guard?
I didn't want to think about these things. I didn't want to think of Silent Hannah's suffering as she came and went with Avigail, clinging to Avigail's arm. Nor did I want to think of the sadness in Avigail's eyes as she looked at me, a darkling understanding that muted her easy laughter and her once frequent little songs.
But I couldn't shut these thoughts out of my head. Why had I come to the grove? What had I thought I could find here?
For an instant, I fell asleep. Avigail. Don't you know this is Eden? It's not good for a man to be alone!
I woke with a start, in the darkness, bundled up my rags, and went out of the grove to go home.
Far below I saw the twinkling of torches in Nazareth. Winter days meant torches. Men had to work a little while more by lamp or lantern or torch. I found it a cheerful sight.
But where I stood the sky was cloudless, moonless—and beautifully black with the countless stars. “Who can fathom Your goodness, O Lord?” I whispered. “You have taken the fire and out of it fashioned the numberless lamps that decorate the night.”
A stillness came over me. The common ache in my arms and shoulders died away. The breeze was chilling yet soothing. Something inside me let go. It had been a long while since I'd savored such a moment, since I'd let the tight prison of my skin dissolve. I felt as if I were moving upward and outward, as if the night were filled with myriad beings and the rhythm of their song drowned out the anxious beating of my heart. The shell of my body was gone. I was in the stars. But my human soul wouldn't let me loose. I reached for human language. “No, I will accomplish this,” I said.
I stood on the dry grass beneath the vault of Heaven. I was small. I was isolated and weary. “Lord,” I said aloud to the faint breeze. “How long?”
7
TWO LANTERNS WERE BURNING in the courtyard and that was cheerful. I was glad to see it, glad to see my nephew Little Cleopas and his father, Silas, at work on cutting a series of planks. I knew what this was, and it had to be done by tomorrow.
“You look tired, both of you,” I said. “Stop now, and I'll do this. I'll cut the wood.”
“We can't let you do it,” Silas said. “Why should you finish it all alone?” He gestured ominously towards the house. “It has to be done tonight.”
“I can do it tonight,” I said. “I'm glad to do it. I want to be alone just now with something to do. And Silas, your wife is waiting for you in the doorway. I just saw her. Go on.”
Silas nodded and he went off home up the hill. He lived with his wife in the house of our cousin Levi, who was his wife's brother. But Silas' son, Little Cleopas, lived with us.
Little Cleopas gave me a quick embrace and went into the house.
There was plenty of light from the lanterns to see what had to be done here, and the lines drawn had to be perfectly straight. I had the tool for it, the bit of broken pot to mark it. Seven lines to be drawn.
Up came Jason walking into the yard.
His shadow fell over me. I smelled wine.
“You've been avoiding me, Yeshua,” he said.
“That's nonsense, my friend,” I said. I laughed. I went on with my work. “I've been doing whatever needs to be done. I haven't seen you. Where have you been?”
He paced as he talked. I saw his shadow sharply on the flagstones. He had a cup of wine in his hand. I could hear him take a drink.
“You know where I've been,” he said. “How many times have you come up the hill and sat on the floor beside me and insisted I read to you? How many times have I told you the news from Rome and you've hung on every word?”
“That's in summer, Jason, when the days are longer,” I said mildly. I carefully drew a straight line.
“Yeshua, the Sinless, you know why I call you this?” he insisted. “It's because everyone loves you, Yeshua, everyone, and no one can bear to love me.”
“Not so, Jason. I love you. Your uncle loves you. Almost everyone loves you. You're not hard to love. But sometimes you're hard to understand.”
“Why doesn't the Lord send rain?” he demanded.
“Why ask me?” I replied, without looking up.
“Yeshua, there are many things I've never told you, things I didn't think bore repeating.”
“Perhaps they don't.”
“No, I'm not talking about the stupid gossip in this village. I'm talking about other stories, old stories.”
I sighed and sat back on my heels. I stared forward beyond him, beyond his slow pacing in the flickering light. He wore beautiful sandals. His sandals were exquisitely made and studded with what appeared to be gold. The tassels of his robe brushed me as he turned and moved like an anxious animal.
“You know I lived with the Essenes,” he said. “You know I wanted to be an Essene.”
“You've told me,” I said.
“You knew I knew your kinsman John bar Zechariah when I lived with the Essenes,” he went on. He took another drink.
I decided to try to draw another straight line.
“You've told me this many times, Jason,” I said. “Have you had any news from your friends among the Essenes? You'd tell me, wouldn't you, if someone had word of my cousin John.”
“Your cousin John's in the wilderness, that's all anyone ever says, in the wilderness, living off the wild things. Nobody's seen him this year at all. Nobody really saw him last year. A man told another man who told another man perhaps he'd seen your cousin John.”
I started to draw the line.
“But you know, Yeshua, I never told you everything your cousin told me when I was there living with the community.”
“Jason, you have many things on your mind. I scarcely think my cousin John has much to do with it, if he has anything at all.” I was trying to draw the line. The line wasn't straight. I took a rag, knotted it, and rubbed at the mark. I'd cut a little too deep, but I kept at it.
