This Is Why I Came

by Mary Rakow

  The next day she took it to her father’s grave, laid it open, hoping the full-day sun would bleach out the face, but nothing altered.

  Returning home, she saw her mother running out to meet her, waving her arms, calling her name. There was bad news. Her boyfriend had been killed. His hand returned, cut off at the wrist.

  “Come back!” her mother screamed, but the young woman ran out again past the city gate all the way to the death hill. The criminal whom she’d touched was hanging there between two others.

  “It’s not your face I want!” she threw the rag down, stomped it into the sand with her foot. “I don’t want your face! I want his!”

  WOMEN CARRIED HER home. One picked up the rag blown against the stone and fell silent, folded it into her sleeve. In low tones, she spoke solemnly to the young woman’s mother. “We must rename this girl.” She showed the cloth. “From now on we must call her Veronica,” and then explained “verus,” meaning “true,” and “iconicus,” meaning “image.”

  “My daughter? ‘True-Image’?” And then she saw the face on the cloth.

  They mounted it under glass set about with precious stones, candles, flowers, and herbs. Pilgrims came. They called it a holy visage, gave it titles, “The Icon of the Lord on the Cloth,” “The Not-Made-with-Hands,” the “Vericle.”

  VERONICA THOUGHT, THIS has nothing to do with me.

  She did not want a miracle. She wanted her boyfriend to have found her beautiful in her bridal dress.

  33

  The Place of the Skull

  WHEN THE SOLDIER thrust his sword into Jesus’ side and water and blood flowed down, Mary reached to bind the body whole again. But the soldier blocked her and she fell in a swoon, not because she was unprepared for grief but because she had seen it coming for over thirty years and had found no way to stop it.

  John held her and as she fell she thought, looking at the soldier, you made this wound for me, so that I can put all my suffering into the cave of his body, still alive, still warm. O wound! O Holy Door!

  34

  Joseph at Golgatha

  JOSEPH CROUCHED BEHIND a bush and heard words as they moved between the bodies in front of him like a sieve, sifted to brief sentences. “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” And, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” And so it went, words trickling back to him through the crowd, then through the tiny leaves of the bush, the thin, brittle branches, then past the little red birds busy at his face.

  When he came out from behind the bush and stood, he saw his son and thought, he is saving himself, healing himself of all his sorrows.

  From his hands and feet, that last drop of blood.

  35

  Mary Magdalen at Golgotha

  MARY DREW NEAR the cross and again thought, the erotic and the spiritual are one hunger.

  She drew closer and heard, “Your father died and your mother turned you out. But, Mary, look at me and see. It isn’t true that you were never loved.”

  36

  God

  JESUS CRIED OUT to his father, “Why have you forsaken me?”

  And God said to the underworld, “Take him, he’s yours.” Hearing this, Jesus breathed his last.

  GOD HID BEHIND the sun, saying, “It is true, then. I am not merciful.”

  37

  Joseph of Arimathea

  IN HIS AWKWARDNESS, as he took the body down, Joseph of Arimathea was struck by the chaos of mercy and the swiftness of revenge.

  THE CROWD THINNED and Joseph, the father of Jesus, noticed a woman with long brown hair standing off to the side, weeping yet resolute, middle-aged yet graceful, her posture carrying a message of courage. The sun was well behind the hill and the tiny red birds hushed for the night. He had seen his wife collapse, fall to her left, a young man holding her. He saw them finally walk away.

  He wondered if he could have, after all, stayed with the boy and his mother, if they could have found a way to surmount all that life had dealt them. Wondered why, when he’d loved his wife and she had loved him, it became something else, a third body that lived with and between them, so alive and grasping it was finally all that felt real, while love, as a dream, was reeled back from the sky like a kite brought down to a wide windowsill, the ball of twine getting larger, string, the torn paper, all the mess of it on the sill, and then the dream of love contracting further to the size of a nutshell, round and wrinkled and hard, so small that he could hold it in the palm of his hand.

  HE WATCHED HIS son, everyone gone but the tall resolute woman, and then a man he did not know, old and weary, balancing on a short ladder, who took the full weight of his son’s body onto his shoulder like a net heavy with fish. He envied the man yet walked forward to assist.

  “Did you know him?” the stranger asked him before leaving with the body.

  It was a source of shame to watch the stranger take away the body of his only son, to a burial place already secured. To have assistants. To have a burial spot that was his own. Joseph had wanted that, too, a life that could be planned, supplied. It never seemed to be that way for him or for what had been their family and for this he had no way to account, doing his best to stick with what had occurred, to look straight ahead at life. But that never worked either, that straight-ahead look, because it could never take everything in.

  He turned away from the scene, the soldiers dismantling the cross, the body of his son now gone, all three bodies gone, even the resolute woman with her long brown hair gone, and he put the nutshell into the pocket of his coat and walked home.

  38

  Legion, II

  HE WAS THE first to sense it. He heard voices shouting, “Deliverer!” and “Savior!” and thought of the Christ.

  He is freeing the chained, the fettered, the ones who’ve waited, Legion thought. Like he freed me.

  39

  The Descent into Hell

  AS THEY BURIED Jesus in the tomb, God imagined an earlier world, with just the land and sea and heavens and plants, the creatures that had no heart at all. He wondered if he should return things to that state, abandon his project entirely, that long hope.

  But he still wanted what he’d always most wanted, which was to be loved not for his power or his omniscience but for his mercy. And for that, he needed man. The ferns could never know his mercy or be grateful for it. The ferns could never love him or turn away from him as they could turn toward and away from the sun.

  Then he thought, perhaps a revision is in order, and told himself, I should learn to do this to myself, to not need man. Wouldn’t that be almost as good? A paler pleasure but not nothing.

  AS THE SOLDIERS arrived to guard the tomb in which Jesus lay, God opened the drawer of the past and then lifted the veil of the future so that he could see, in one glance, all of time, from its beginning to its end, from what existed before time to what would exist after it, and he held time and all that it contained on his lap, and touched it and turned it over the way a grandparent holds a grandchild and so holds also the parents of the child, past and future, in an inspecting reverence. God held all of time together, and, seeing that he was alone and would cause harm to no one, he let himself feel all of the anger he saw in time, all of his fury, his disappointment at the floundering of man, at the cruelty and arrogance and pride and greed of man.

  GOD HELD ALL of it in his hands and then, from deep within himself, forgave all of it, both in advance and in retrospect, so that his anger and his mercy together poured out like an envelope cut open. And the earth quaked and some of the dead rose from their tombs and the veil of the Temple was torn in two and when his mercy had consumed all of his anger God cried out, “It is finished!”

  WHEN HE OPENED his eyes, God saw a procession without end, Eve at the front, the mother of mankind, all the prophets and holy men and women and children of all times and places, and people he did not know or could not remember. “Rescue us,” he heard them say, “we have been waiting for you.” And God saw Noah and then all those he�
��d slain. That each was waiting for him. That each had forgiven him. And because he had fashioned them in his own image, he saw that then he, too, must be merciful after all.

  As he watched the long pageant, God saw not only the fact of his mercy but the extent of it. That not one was left in Hell, not one refused to forgive him, even Judas, not one.

  And God wept at the beauty of their mercy, which was also his. His great mercy, magnam misericordiam. That it was infinite.

  40

  Mary Magdalen at the Sepulchre

  SHE’D COME TO see him one last time. To lift the linen napkin from his face, to part his lips, to trace her finger along the cracked tooth, the one in front, to press his tongue into submission. She’d wanted to say, “You were good to me.” But his body was not there, though the burial clothes were and they retained the same bound shape, the body removed from them in some inexplicable way. Because even his body was gone, she thought, it’s always like this, even after dying. A person leaves then takes even more.

  Unable to touch his body, she lifted the burial clothes to her face. It didn’t surprise her that they smelled of myrrh. The other women brought spices and she brought the myrrh and they had anointed him in death, raising his arms over his head as he lay between them, rubbing myrrh and balsam onto his wrists and forearms, the silky brown hairs in the pit of his arms.

  But the cloth now also held the sour smell of his perspiration, both metallic and nutty, she was sure of it. As if he’d worked to free himself, to slip through the fabric without disturbing it. As if the body had not been stolen. As if he’d struggled for his own release, which was a fantasy, and she stopped herself from going further with it, stopped herself from dreaming the impossible, as if he were alive and so would come back. She stopped herself from the empty foolishness of her mother.

  Instead, she took the square cloth they’d used to cover his face and folded it in half then in half again and set it apart from the rest to say, “I, Mary the Magdalen was here. You loved me. When you were with me, you were different than all the others.”

  But then she remembered his words and, counting, knew it was now the third day. And, at this, her hands shook.

  41

  Mary Magdalen, Penitent

  AFTER IT HAPPENED she fled to the desert, cut off her hair and spent her nights staring at the candle’s single wick in penance, not because she’d been with many men but because she hadn’t been able to imagine that he would come back. “I came to you first,” he told her when she recognized him in the garden. “Noli me tangere,” he cautioned. Don’t touch me. Not yet.

  She gathered small bones, skeletons, the triangular skull of a garter snake, the thighbone of a squirrel, reminding herself that death is real. But love is stronger. Trying to enter that one thing. The blood that came down so precisely from his palm.

  They called her Mother of Penitents and The First Witness to the Resurrection.

  42

  Zaccheus

  SHE HAD COME to see if Jesus was remembered, as he had so deeply wanted.

  He looked down and saw a woman with cropped brown hair holding small bones, the skull of a snake, a bird wing, leaning on a cane. “Will you tell me about your afternoon with him?” she asked and Zaccheus spoke to her, saying,

  “WE ATE AT my table, oranges, olives.” His voice was slow, infused with a reverie and sadness, as if, for many years, he had wanted to tell this story to someone. “He wasn’t what I expected,” he said then paused. “I could see that he didn’t need me. He didn’t need me to change.

  “Sandwiches and fruit,” he continued, each word a break from silence. “He told me, ‘There’s nothing wrong with your body, Zaccheus,’ when I saw my shadow on the dirt. He said, ‘See how whole it is?’ And I thought maybe he was saying, ‘You can stop feeling like a failure now. You can stop feeling like a failure at love.’

  “Then night fell and the profile of the hill became clear and harsh and then disappeared. I felt lost again, aswim. My body without circumference, without edge.

  “‘Go back to your tree, Zaccheus,’ he said before he left me. ‘It will be paradise for you. Happiness isn’t here, even here with me.’ But his shirt smelled like hammered flax, the honeybee.

  “I wanted him to touch me. I wanted him to give me a new way of thinking.

  “‘You’ll be safe there,’ he told me at the end of lunch, pointing to these leaves. ‘Things are going to get worse for me.’ That made me angry. This tree, this shadow of the leaf across my foot, my hand on the bark.

  “The skin on the backsides of his hands was unusual. And a crack ran through his front tooth. He touched it often with his tongue, telling me a boy hit him in the mouth with a stick. ‘Did I tell you the story of that boy?’ he asked as if we’d been friends a long while. He seemed to have his eye out for that kid, looking away from me several times that afternoon. At the wall, the gate.

  “Salt crusts my eyes. I unwrapped his picture and leaned it against this branch. He stood with his foot on the ledge of my pool when I snapped it. He was smiling, can you see? We’d just gotten back. This picture frame casts a sharp shadow so I use it as a clock. His face inside the frame against the branch. I mark my days this way, dividing them into morning and evening, dividing them into hours.

  “At night when I fold my sash in front of his picture I think, if I could become a man entirely without purpose I could forget him completely. But even now when I say the word ‘purposeless’ my body springs up to resist it. So you see I have my job cut out.

  “Sometimes I say to myself, or to the spider in the cracks of the bark, to the ants, the webbing, I say, ‘It never happened.’ And if I could persuade myself of this, even if only for a few hours, I could begin to say, ‘I have no hunger, I have no thirst.’ But his voice was a low tenor when he sang and he only sang when we walked in my garden. So it’s impossible for me. ‘I feel at home here,’ he said, gesturing to my vines.

  “This rust-brown water in my cupped hands. Nothing special.

  “When he touched my shoulder something covered me like a film. It was a feeling, a sensation. I think I felt pure-hearted.

  “When I scrambled down to show him the way to my house I snagged the toe of my silk slipper. Women laughed at me. The men grabbed the coin purses inside their trousers. I think they worried I’d cheat them again right there, in front of him. At the time, they disgusted me. But now, my toes are covered with black hairs and you can see my feet are like a monkey’s. Now I run along these branches watching for his return. I’ve hung no mirrors. The light turns everything blue. The cart in the far field. The hills that rob the horizon of its purity.

  “Mira set out the sweet dates that afternoon, the wine. She hurried to have things ready. I paid her double. We weren’t accustomed to having houseguests. She made me look good. Kind and generous. I tipped her in front of him so he would see my generosity. His hand on my cheek, his voice that found me behind my mask of leaves.

  “The commerce of these leaves I break against my skin, the sharp edges cutting in, the pungent smell. I hold them in my palms this way to find him but he isn’t here. Sometimes the fragrance takes me to a palace of memory. The corridors are cool and marble. I climb in to find him. A chair, a throne where he should sit, empty, its eagle’s wings carved and gilded. Once I thought I saw him crouching there behind it, his hands covering his head, the blue band of a silver robe fell around him like a lake. But the image disappeared.

  “They ransacked my house. One found the bolt of red silk hidden under my bed, another, my good oil, the dipping spoon, my favorite pillow embroidered with beads. I should have given him the beaded pillow. Feathers flew everywhere. My favorite dresser thrown against this trunk, its delicate inlaid bands of ivory like the fingers of a wife I never had, white and candle-slender, the elongated joints.

  “One by one they hurled what they’d taken against the trunk of this tree, yelling epithets. Their anger was like fire. I thought they’d put a torch to this trunk and bur
n me like a spit goat. But I was lucky. Their voices were truthful. I am not a good man.

  “I was angry. I’d already repaid them double but it didn’t matter. My silk pillow filled with lavender. I said, ‘Go ahead! Take it, you lousy bastards!’ The drawers of the dresser fallen out on each other like stairs, the veneer peeled away. The thin bands of ivory, pried out and stolen. The jar broken, the sweet oil dripping down the dresser, precious oil cured by the sun, dried to a black mark. My silk robe, flung open, ripped. My home is occupied by rats now. I see them come and go.

  “A man’s voice came up through the branches. It was a Friday. His voice was like a crow caw, jeering. ‘Zaccheus, they killed your hero!’ He threw sand up at me then ran. I wept but I didn’t believe him. That was twenty-seven years ago and thirty-two days. This blue light, his hand on the table, his voice in the wind. I keep a jar of water for him, even though he doesn’t come. Sometimes I call him ‘The visitor who doesn’t come.’

  “Every Friday I bind my head with thin branches to honor that rumor, even though I refuse to believe it. I bind my head on Fridays to tell myself the rumor isn’t true. To say the one I love will come back to me. Come back to this tree. I can picture him clearly, walking toward me on stones of forgiveness.

  “Today is the Sabbath. My early days here, a young girl came from Jericho with her widowed mother to cultivate balsam, which they sold in the marketplace. Sticky and resinous, used as a medicine and in making perfume. I knew that much. But the young girl said, ‘It mitigates suffering,’ which caught my attention. When she said balsam is also used to embalm the dead, I grew quiet.