This Is Why I Came

by Mary Rakow

  “Suffer the children to come to me,” he taught the disciples later, also remembering Legion and all he had overcome. How he had carried the parts of himself inside, alive and waiting to be joined. That those were young voices, held in his body, scared but fierce and obstinate, the chains that could not bind Legion, the fetters that he broke through. That it was those young, desperate voices who first called him “the Christ.”

  WHEN HIS SONS had grown and married, Legion returned to the coast, to the grid of green mounds, and with the sharp stone carved his tombstone, leaving instructions with the new herdsmen to bury him in the green grid along with the swine. The tombstone read,

  “Here lies Legion, being one man

  who was once many.

  Before the Christ came.”

  24

  Joseph Visiting

  KNOWING THAT JESUS was now a young man, Joseph came home bringing hand tools in a leather apron to give to his son, along with small samples of different woods, myrtle, pear wood, sycamore. But Jesus was nowhere to be found and Joseph kept the tools under the table without mentioning them and took them when he left.

  MARY TOLD HIM of the miracles Jesus was performing, the wedding at Cana, the woman with an issue of blood, a man named Legion. But when she slipped and spoke of their son’s “heavenly father,” Joseph regretted coming home. Seeing his sadness, she quickly added, “You’ve shown him what a good father is, too.”

  He remembered that consoling is a part of friendship, so that perhaps they had become friends after all. He appreciated her effort, hugged her on the step and felt a momentary desire to be with her again. In the small things, she could sometimes be wonderful. If he could just have the small things, these acts of kindness and not all the rest. If he could have these small moments without the constant sense that God should have chosen a better man, then he could have stayed.

  She asked if he still had dreams and he said, “Yes, but of different things.” Had he summoned the courage he would have told her he liked to draw the dreams that came. Sunlight falling on roofs, colonnades. Last night he’d dreamt of a different kind of monument, years in the future, twenty centuries at least. It was a place where memory was preserved but there was no Mercy Seat, no animals were led there for slaughter, bull or turtledove. It had a grove of locust trees planted in the sky, like a world turned upside down. And he drew that monument. Light falling on that form that spoke of the great absence of God.

  25

  The Man Blind from Birth

  WHEN JESUS PASSED by a man blind from birth, his disciples asked if the man’s condition was because of his own sins or the sins of his parents, and Jesus, remembering the woman with the issue of blood, said solemnly, “Neither.”

  He sat down next to the man, the two of them whispering to each other in the chamber of their bodies, shutting out all others, even the heat. “You can use this,” the man said, tapping the ground, because he often packed it on his cheeks and neck, letting the clay dry to a mask then peeling it off, which made him feel clean.

  Jesus spat and made clay of his spittle and focused his intention, remembering the power he possessed, to use it wisely. He anointed the man’s eyes with the clay and touched his face tenderly because of Legion, and felt the energy flow out to the blind man through his hands.

  “Go wash in the pool of Siloam,” he instructed and the man went and washed in the pool and received sight.

  NOW THE MAN was questioned by his neighbors how his eyes were opened, and he told them what Jesus had done. When asked where Jesus was, the man said he didn’t know and he repeated the same to the Pharisees. They then called his parents who answered only that, indeed, the man was their son and he was born blind. They added, “But we do not know how he sees,” distancing themselves from him. When pressed further, they said, “He is of age, ask him,” and again, “He shall speak for himself,” never adding that their son was reliable or trustworthy or that he was not prone to exaggeration, which hurt him.

  BEING BLIND ALL of his life, he was a careful listener and careful in his speech so that when he was brought a second time before the Pharisees he was clear about what he knew and what he did not know. Asked whether Jesus was a sinner, he did not know, and stated simply, “I was blind and now I see,” clinging to that certainty.

  IN THE DAYS that followed, he saw that his parents did not love him. He told himself, this is the price of healing, the price of sight. He saw that they did not love him as they loved themselves and remembered that Jesus had asked him three times if he was sure he wanted to see, saying, “Blindness can be a blessing.”

  In the hovel of his parents’ home, he saw what he had often smelled, that it was dirty and disorganized, everything in disrepair. He saw that his father feared his mother, which he’d sensed from a young age, but had not known, until seeing, the tension and fear that marked his father’s face with rivulets where anger gathered and ran down.

  DAILY, HE DREW water from the well, helping his mother, cleaning the house, washing the clothes, the fresh water for drinking. The women and the young girls and boys learned to hesitate, some even learned patience, as he waited for the water’s surface to settle into glass so that he could hold his face over it, staring a long time at his reflection, no matter how recently he had done it, seeing a stranger there.

  He saw his thick black lashes and brows, the scar on his cheek. He saw that he was fair and to his own eyes beautiful, so that he changed his name from the One Blind from Birth to The Believer. And they called it The Believer’s Well, the Well of the Disciple.

  THE BELIEVER LIVED with his parents and cared for them into their old age. He also followed Jesus from a distance, doing small practical things, helping secure the room for the last meal, finding the donkey.

  “I came to bring division” is what Jesus had been preaching, the cutting in of the future and of judgment, the cost of doing the will of God, the closeness of the end times that he and his cousin John both felt, that urgency. But seeing that the man lived peaceably with his parents who did not really love him, Jesus learned that sometimes doing God’s will was gentle and easy and that discipleship could lead to harmony instead of division. A low gate, he thought, not always a knife blade.

  When the crowd of five thousand listening to Jesus grew hungry, it was The Believer who suggested a few loaves and a few fish could feed them all. “The loaves will multiply the way love does,” he told Jesus. “Exponentially.”

  26

  Elizabeth’s Dream

  ELIZABETH SAW A bowl with a lid rolling down behind her and woke shaking. She reached across the bed for Zachariah, forgetting again that he wasn’t there, for years forgetting this. Inside the lidded bowl, the head of someone she knew.

  Was it Zachariah? But no, he’d been murdered with a sword to the heart. The neighbors had answered as best they could. By the time news of his death reached the holy mountain where she and John were sheltered, by the time they were able to walk back, days had passed and her husband’s body was already buried. She’d fled to him, knew that a horse was needed, a mule, her feet sore, her legs giving out. She’d believed her neighbors, too swallowed in grief of their own to hold onto anything but what they’d seen. No, it was not her noble husband.

  She pushed herself up to better see back into the dream and her breath gave way. Her arms grew cold and she knew that the head in the bowl was that of her son.

  27

  The Martyrdom of John the Forerunner

  JESUS SENT HIS disciples to ask for the body of John but they were given the body only and Jesus wept seeing the ragged neck. He wanted that rough, angry voice more than anything else, that mouth.

  He and Elizabeth sat on the low chairs without speaking for seven days and neither left the house. He did not go to the house of Mary and Martha even though word came that Lazarus, whom he loved, was gravely ill. He looked at the toys in John’s room, string, crayons, paper wings, and felt again how much the world hates innocence. He remembered on the bank
s of the Jordan, as they parted, John had said, “They’ll kill me and you, too, dear cousin. I’ll perform no miracles, but you will raise the dead.”

  28

  Lazarus

  JESUS LISTENED TO John, the disciple whom he most loved.

  “Do you think you can do it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You let him die.”

  “I did.”

  “If you raise him from the dead, they will kill you.”

  WHEN LAZARUS APPEARED, Jesus looked at the crowd and at his disciples and thought, one of you will betray me.

  Seeing Jesus’ face, John turned away, saying, “Now you’ve gone too far.”

  29

  Mary Magdalen

  FOR THREE DAYS Mary’s mother had refused to bury her husband. She’d resisted all the habits of burial, making enemies of her friends due to what seemed to them a lack of piety. But to her it was piety. “The Lord would never leave me alone with six children!” she’d said, watching the body, sure that God would bring her husband back to life.

  Mary had joined her mother, prayed for her father’s return, and when it didn’t happen her mother grew angry. Then she grew sullen and bitter and never again visited the house of the Lord.

  On the fourth day she announced, “I keep the Sabbath holy by blaspheming,” brash and unafraid. “I keep the Sabbath holy by taking men into my bed and you will, too.” She fit her daughter with jewelry on her neck and ears, plaiting her hair, and on the fifth day she sent Mary into the streets of Magdala.

  “THEY COME HERE for only one thing,” her mother’s instructions began. “Don’t make friends. Don’t think you are special no matter how often a man returns, no matter how often he says he will leave his wife. They all make promises, they can’t help it. There is only one reason a man comes here and when you give it to him, they leave.” Then she added, “Always take the money first. Count it. And bring it to me.”

  In this way Mary and her mother fed the boys in the family until they were grown.

  Her mother hired other girls. Local ones, foreigners, tall and short, heavy and thin. “For spice,” she said. “Never be boring. Wash yourself. Read. Have things to talk about. Sometimes they just want to talk. But mostly, especially the young ones, they come here for just one thing.”

  AND SO IT began. The brothel flourished and Mary forgot about the love she felt as a child for her father. Forgot what it felt like to love and to be loved, to run toward another who waits.

  The narrow dirt corridor between the rooms, the hand broom she used to sweep off the sheet, the basin under the bed, the green twigs she lit between customers, bringing them to the doorway, the threshold, to purify it, and then stepping outside onto the doormat, lifting one foot, holding the flame under it, then the other, for cleansing. Checking for sores and bruises.

  MARY HEARD OF the raising of Lazarus, heard of threats to the prophet’s life, that he might soon be arrested, and she wanted to meet him while there was still time. “All good men go away,” she told herself but went out in daylight to find him, nonetheless.

  Older, being thirty-eight to his thirty-three years, she could see in his eyes that he wanted wisdom in a hurry. She said she had nothing to give, nothing to offer. “But you do,” he protested.

  She felt most comfortable with men sure to leave. Married men. Soldiers. Even, once, an old man near death. She had, since thirteen, learned to not mourn, to brush her hair afterward, to clean her teeth. “I know how to get past love. I’m older than you are. I’ve had many.” But Jesus argued with her, saying, “That’s not true.”

  “YOU’LL JUST GET hurt,” her mother warned, seeing that she was nervous each time they met. She knew he didn’t want what other men sought in her yet she found herself fearing he wouldn’t return because, with him, she remembered her father and felt again that wound.

  It was her childlike quality Jesus found attractive. That she was tough but also fragile. They made a game of it, Jesus hiding his face behind his hands then popping out, saying, “Hah!” which startled her every single time because, somehow, she thought once gone, gone forever. It startled her even when he did it five times in a row. “I’m coming back,” he told her each time they parted. “You’ll see.”

  “ON THE THIRD day I’m going to rise from the dead,” he said near the end, which angered her because it was specific and he seemed so convinced of it.

  “Of course you are,” she humored him. She’d encountered men with wild visions before. One would be an emperor, another, a general. This was part of her job, to hold these daydreams as if they could happen. It was a form of play, almost sexual, like costumes and masks, whips and ankle cuffs. She obliged men this way as a courtesy, to keep them coming back, and had long ago mastered the expression of seriousness.

  But Jesus was not a customer. They were friends. And she loved him. “Don’t say that,” she rebuked him. She wanted his leaving, if he must leave, to take a simpler form. Without the fantasies, the outlandishness. “I like everything about you but your false promises,” she chided. But then she grew anxious and softened, that this might really be true, and said, “If it’s going to happen as you say, give your mother to John. He will be good to her.”

  JESUS TOOK HER to the river where he and his mother had buried the myrrh. When they walked through the streets men whistled, women turned away and looked down hissing until she passed. He was talking about his death all the time then. Since Lazarus.

  “Bury my body,” he said. “Put me someplace. In a grave. Promise me!”

  They dug in the mud for the jar. On her knees, her dress dampened, dirt in her fingernails.

  “Where did you get this?” she wiped off the jar, lifted the lid. “It’s very costly.”

  “Use it on me,” he said, “when the time comes. Remember me,” he said.

  “You’re always asking me to do that.”

  “When you eat bread think of me. Think of me when you drink from a cup. I mean this,” he pleaded.

  “I will remember you, my prince, for the rest of my life.”

  30

  John the Beloved

  “YOUR END IS coming,” John, the beardless one, said.

  It was painful, holding all of John’s sweetness one last time. “I’m going to prepare a place for you, John.” Seeing that he would be the only Apostle to live into old age, the only one not to be killed for his sake, Jesus then whispered, “Time will be tender toward you.”

  But John wept and wanted none of this.

  “Hold me!” he demanded and could not be consoled.

  31

  The Last Supper/Remember Me

  “IT’S TIME,” JESUS said, feeling that his arrest was near, going to the room The Believer had found for them to share the Passover meal. A rented room where no one felt at home. Splinters in the skin, makeshift arrangements. He needed discomfort as he began to loosen himself, loosen his body, to break himself as if into pieces to be fed to strangers and dogs. His body that didn’t want to turn from the world, custard on the tongue, the love of his family and followers like fragrant leaves.

  JUDAS LUNGED FOR the pitcher of water. O God! Purify!

  Watching him Jesus thought, now the wheel is turning. Judas fled the room.

  HE SAID TO the others, “This meal will be our last.”

  Taking some bread he said, “This is what will happen to my body,” and tore it into pieces.

  “When you eat it,” he pleaded, “remember me.”

  32

  Veronica

  NO ONE ELSE had seen the dove descend over the head of Jesus then fly away or heard the voice that came from the sky saying, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well-pleased,” except the young woman in line with her mother, bored and distracted, who looked away from the River Jordan and into the tree. She’d rolled her eyes when she heard it and thought, not everyone wants the supernatural.

  TAKING WIDE STRIDES, she walked through the crowd to the dye shop. Clean white cotton squares
in her pockets, she and her mother would select the right color for her special dress. Crimson? Violet? They would dye the corners, make samples, take them home. In four weeks her boyfriend would return from the Roman Army, conscripted when they were in sweet time.

  Through the commotion on the street, she saw another condemned man, another cross. Executions had become common, which annoyed her. But this man staggered and she felt sorry for him, sweat like blood falling from his face. “Be careful!” her mother cautioned as she moved closer toward him. Her mother not wanting to be seen in public so close to a criminal. Her husband, a traitor, having been buried outside the walls, and they still lived in the shadow of his shame.

  A soldier whistled, jibed at her beauty. Used to such attention, she gestured obscenely back.

  “We’re late!” her mother scolded, pulling at her daughter’s arm, but the young woman then recognized the man, suffering under the weight of the cross he could barely manage, and, taking one of the rags, she put it against his face then whispered, “I was at the Jordan. I heard that voice. I saw that bird in the tree.”

  THE DYE WOMAN had pigments boiling in pots. One by one, they dipped the rags in, stirring with a stick. Before dropping it in, the daughter gasped, stuffed the rag quickly into her pocket, excused herself and ran to the backyard where the dye woman’s children played. She opened the cloth against her leg. It wasn’t how she’d seen him, sorrowful and bruised. Instead it was the face of a victor. A band of blue and one of orange framed his face. She rubbed the cloth on a stone, the children laughed at her, watched, then returned to their game, but the image was still there.