The Ironsmith

by Nicholas Guild

  This did not seem unjust to Noah, who, for his part, was never able to overcome the sense that he had somehow committed a breach of friendship, that Joshua, somehow, had been entitled to be right.

  But now they were men. They no longer enjoyed the child’s luxury of surrendering to imagination.

  * * *

  Very early the next morning a man appeared at Ezra’s tavern. He was thickset, with a massive curly black beard that suggested a certain ferocity. The impression was offset, however, by his eyes, which were constantly glancing down at the ground, as if he were embarrassed. To Noah he introduced himself as Simon, and he was apparently the fisherman in whose house Joshua found a bed.

  “He sent me to fetch you. Perhaps you will take breakfast with us?”

  “It would be a pleasure.”

  Simon actually seemed relieved, and they set off together in the direction of the sea. As they walked, Noah, more out of compassion than interest, tried to draw this shy man out.

  “Have you known Joshua long?”

  “We were both followers of the Baptist.” Simon risked a sidelong glance at him. “Do you think it’s true that they killed him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Some say he ascended bodily into heaven.”

  “Would it were so, but I have never heard of anyone escaping that way from the Tetrarch’s dungeons.”

  They were silent for a long moment as Simon appeared to be adjusting to this new reality. At last he shook his head.

  “Joshua loved the Baptist,” he murmured, giving the impression that he regarded this as a great secret. “He was closer to John than any of us. He says that God will avenge His servant.”

  “Does he say so publicly?”

  “No. Only among those who are closest to him.”

  “It is just as well he does not. Antipas has a long reach.”

  Except for the nets drying beside the door, the fisherman’s house might have been in any village anywhere in Galilee. The walls were of mud brick, painted a dusty white and enclosing two rooms. The floors were of earth, but they were covered with cut reeds.

  In good weather, like today, meals were taken out of doors. Simon’s yard faced the water, and there were perhaps sixty people assembled there. Among the adults, there were more women than men, and there were several children. They all were quiet, even the children.

  It was easy to find Joshua—one merely had to follow everyone else’s gaze. He sat on a stool beside the door, the center of attention. From the way he gestured with his hands, he was obviously explaining something. This was clear even before Noah could distinguish the sound of his voice.

  “… and death will be held in abeyance forever. The mighty shall grieve then, and the poor shall be exalted. Is not God a just God, and shall not the first be made last and the last first? We live in a world ruled by darkness, and shall not the light come? That we find evil everywhere is but a sign that the kingdom of God is near.”

  He glanced up and saw Noah. Then he raised his hand and smiled.

  “Friends,” he announced, “this is my cousin Noah, whom, as he tells me himself, Antipas has sent here to spy on me. Well, Cousin, what say you? Should the Tetrarch have me put in chains?”

  “Oh yes, for you have been talking sedition.”

  “Yet I have not mentioned his name.”

  “You say the world is full of evil.”

  “But is that not the truth?”

  “That it is the truth is what makes it seditious.”

  For an instant Joshua seemed perplexed, and then he threw back his head and laughed. A moment later he was on his feet and the two men embraced.

  “Eat your breakfast,” he said in a low voice. “I have almost finished. Then we can talk.”

  Breakfast consisted of a piece of flatbread wrapped around some fennel.

  Joshua resumed his seat near the door. He buried his face in his hands for a moment and then looked up and smiled.

  “Happy are the destitute, for they shall be exalted. Happy are the children, for their faith is pure. Happy are the children of man, for their father is God. Go in peace.”

  When the crowd had departed, Joshua and Noah walked slowly back down to the shore, where men were pushing their boats into the water in preparation for the day’s fishing. The sun was in their faces, and Joshua had to shade his eyes with his hand in order to watch.

  “I like fishermen,” he said. “I wish I had been born a fisherman and had lived my life in sight of the sea.”

  “If you had been born here, you would be longing to be a carpenter in Nazareth.”

  “That is perhaps so.”

  “I know it is so. You always had too much imagination.” Noah made sweeping gesture with his arm. “One world is not big enough for you.”

  “As it is, this world is not big enough for anyone.”

  “It eases my conscience to hear you say so. Now at least I know I will not be lying when I tell Caleb you are not in your right mind.”

  For the second time that morning, Joshua laughed. It was a good sound, reassuring and human.

  “I am not afraid of him.”

  “Then you are crazy.”

  Joshua started to say something, but Noah waved his hands, commanding silence. Anger was boiling in him, mingled with an odd feeling of shame.

  For a long time they walked along the shore without speaking.

  “Go away, Joshua,” Noah said at last, kicking clumsily at a small stone, which rolled only a few feet and then abruptly stopped, like an old man settling into a chair. “Take a boat and cross over, tonight, into Gaulonitus, and lose yourself. I have enough money with me to keep you for three or four months, and I will send you more. I have reliable friends in the gentile cities. In a year or two, provided only that you keep silent—that you refrain from preaching—Caleb will forget your very name and you can come home.”

  “A year or two?” Joshua smiled, as if in on the joke. “Long before then, Caleb and Antipas will both be swept away.”

  “Do you truly believe that?”

  Joshua turned his head to look at him, as if for a moment he doubted Noah’s sanity.

  “I believe it certain. They are as dead men.”

  “And so soon?”

  “Yes. The time is very close when we shall awaken from this bitter dream.” He smiled and shrugged his shoulders, in apparent helplessness. “And if I do as you suggest, I would go down to destruction with them. God has called me, as He did the Baptist before me, to give notice of His coming, and if I shrink from the task He will not forgive me. So, you see, I cannot run away.

  “Besides, what can they do?”

  “Do? Tell me you are not serious, Joshua. They can put you to death.”

  “They can make me sleep for a while—a very short while—as they have the Baptist. But I doubt they will have time even for that. God grows impatient.”

  “God, or you?”

  Joshua stopped and turned to face Noah, then smiled and reached inside the neck of his tunic to pull out a small leather bag hanging from a string. He opened the bag and pulled out a silver ring with a small red stone.

  “I told you I wouldn’t lose it,” he said, putting it in Noah’s hand. “I gave the money away, and the blue cloak is now in the possession of a beggar in Tiberias. So I am poor again.

  “But I can offer you a better dinner than breakfast. A wealthy woman, a follower of mine, has invited me. Come to Simon’s house at sundown and we will go there together.”

  * * *

  Noah spent the rest of the day with his landlord. Trade, apparently, was always slow until the fishermen came back, so Ezra was perfectly willing to bear his company, especially since the wine they were both drinking came from his own cellar and Noah paid in silver.

  And, once he realized that Noah was not about to take offense at any criticisms of his cousin, he was very willing to talk about “the preacher,” the more so the more he drank.

  “He hates anyone with a little property,” Ezr
a told him, very confidentially, as if it were a secret. “He says God will sweep us away like dust. Now, does that sound reasonable to you? A man builds something up with his own labor and this is a sin, like murder or eating eels? I don’t see the sense in it. I’m a pious man—I pay the Temple tax and contribute to the priests. I don’t see what entitles him to turn my wife against me.”

  “Did he?”

  “Oh yes.” The landlord nodded fiercely. “She came home and said we had to sell everything and give the money to the poor. Can you imagine such nonsense?”

  “Why did he tell her to do that?”

  “Because God is coming, and God hates rich people.”

  “Are you rich?”

  “No.” The idea of his poverty seemed to depress him. “I have this tavern, which I admit pays better than fishing. But according to the preacher a man is rich if he has a house to sleep in and can afford to eat lamb on holy days. If you own more than your loincloth, you’re a sinner.”

  “So, did your wife at last see reason?”

  “What she saw was my fist. I blackened her eye, and since then she’s been quiet.”

  After a while Noah began to tire of the landlord’s conversation and was very glad to hear him complaining that so much wine in the afternoon made him tired.

  “Take a nap.”

  “An excellent idea.” He ducked his head submissively. “You won’t be offended?”

  “Not in the least.”

  Ezra then went inside and Noah found himself agreeably alone. He preferred the company of his own thoughts, at last.

  If there is sadness in recollection, then that sadness can itself be a kind of pleasure. So it was whenever Noah thought about his own wife. He could close his eyes and almost feel her sharp little shoulder blades pressed against his chest as she slept. His memories of her were wordless—the sight of her, the way her body felt beneath his hand, the scent of her hair. The dark beauty of her eyes, with a glance saying all that needed to be said.

  He tried to remember only that, not the way she had died. Her face drenched in sweat, the screams, the bleeding that could not be stopped. That final agony lasted almost a whole day, and the child had been born lifeless.

  The following spring, Joshua’s wife had died the same way.

  Grandfather had once said he feared Joshua’s grief had been too much for him. It was a possibility Noah had no difficulty in understanding. He could easily recall his own state of mind in the long months after Ruth’s death. The sullen resentment, the feeling that all meaning had gone out of existence.

  The worst was his sense of estrangement from God.

  In the end, he and God, like old friends who have endured a deadly quarrel, managed to patch things up. Yet it was never the same—the conviction of living under God’s protection had disappeared.

  One Sabbath evening, as the light died, he had described these feelings to his grandfather, who, to Noah’s surprise, had not been shocked but had merely pointed out that God offered no guarantees in this life, that even God’s love for His children could not save them from the operations of blind chance.

  Thus, over time, Noah had worked out for himself a notion of how it all fit together. There was life in the world, where one had to accept injustice and cruelty and the arbitrary workings of fate, and there was God, who offered the consolations of His Law and His understanding. One could not choose to be safe, for there was no safety, but one could choose to be righteous, which meant living in acceptance of Torah.

  And righteousness opened the possibility of prayer—not prayer as a collection of words, but prayer as an appeal to God for His love. God read the hearts of His children as it was given to man to read the Law. God would forgive weakness and error, but not a turning away from Him. Life was short and uncertain, but one could live in the presence of God, and God was eternal. To live in the presence of God was man’s consolation for having to live in the world.

  But it seemed as if Joshua felt that God’s love implied something more.

  * * *

  Just before sundown, Noah returned to the house of Simon the fisherman, where a little knot of men, with Joshua at its center, was waiting.

  “Good. You came,” Joshua said, with perhaps more emphasis than necessary. “I was afraid you had become disgusted with us and would stay away.”

  “I have grown hardened to your eccentricities, Cousin. Where are we going?”

  “Ah!” Joshua threw his arm over Noah’s shoulders, pushing him gently forward as if he lacked the capacity for independent movement. “The house of a widow. A wealthy widow. She has become a follower and gives much to the poor. She also—and this is more to the point—gives excellent dinners.”

  “Yet I have it on the authority of my landlord that you despise the wealthy, that you consider them sinners.”

  “I despise no one, and my ministry is not to the righteous but to the fallen, who have need of me. Besides, a man would have to be made of stone to despise Deborah. Wait and see.”

  Capernaum was not so vast a place that the great lived more than a few minutes’ walk from the dwellings of the poor. Or perhaps the widow was not really so very rich. After all, Joshua, who had but rarely ventured into cities, did not encompass much in his ideas of wealth. Deborah’s husband, as it turned out, had been a fish salter and merchant, and dead some two years. His house was no larger than Noah’s house in Sepphoris and betrayed few symptoms of grandeur.

  And Deborah, who met them at the door, managed in an instant to confound all Noah’s expectations of her.

  For one thing, she was young, by the look of her only a few years into her twenties, more fitted to be a bride than a widow. More than this, she was beautiful, with large, black, captivating eyes, and there was in them, as she gazed up at her unknown guest, an expression of sympathetic tenderness, which did away with all the awkwardness of first meeting.

  There were sixteen at dinner, some of whom Noah had met earlier in the day and some who were strangers. These, from their appearance, seemed men of means and, from their conversation, outsiders, interested in Joshua’s teachings but as yet unconvinced.

  “Let me introduce you all to my cousin Noah,” he began, after a servant girl had filled everyone’s wine cup. “He is an ironsmith, a man of great skill who has prospered in his craft. He is also learned and devout and, like many of you, skeptical.”

  This was greeted with polite laughter, and Joshua turned to Noah, who occupied the couch on his right, and smiled, as if encouraging him to see the joke.

  “When it is God’s will to overturn the wicked and redeem His children, I believe that Noah shall be among the saved—for all that he is my cousin and thinks me a great fool.” Again there was laughter, but less hesitant. “It is even possible he may be right, for I am neither wiser nor more virtuous than others, and Noah, who has known me since childhood, could doubtless entertain you with many instances of my folly.

  “But fool or not, it has been God’s pleasure to make me His instrument. So disregard the man, who is no different from yourselves, and hearken unto the message, which is from God.”

  He spoke for nearly an hour, and no one, Noah observed, touched either their wine or the bread before them. Even the servant girl listened, shyly standing half concealed behind a curtain.

  It was interesting to watch their faces, to hear the voice that was almost as familiar to Noah as his own, and witness its effect on people who had not grown up with the sound of it in their ears.

  The poor among them, the servant girl and the few friends Joshua had brought with him, seemed in a state of rapture. For them it was a congenial teaching, and Joshua’s words plucked at their hearts like the fingers of a skilled musician playing a harp. They had no doubts.

  “In God’s kingdom, which is near at hand, so that one can almost hear the first murmurs of the storm which shall sweep away injustice, there shall be no distinction between rich and poor. The man who owns two coats shall give one away, simply that the naked might b
e clothed.”

  The others, the men of position and wealth, were troubled. Why shouldn’t they be? They were being asked to give up everything that defined them, that set them apart from and above their fellow men. It was so easy to believe that because you were rich you were better.

  And yet they too were being pulled along by the almost irresistible current of Joshua’s voice. For that moment, at least, they believed. They felt the full weight of his gentle reproach. For perhaps the first time in their lives, they knew shame.

  “And while we wait—and that wait will not be long—we should anticipate God’s will and live our own lives as if the Kingdom were already here. Thus I say to the mighty of the earth, the men who own vast estates accumulated from the farms of those whom they have driven into debt, repent of your sins, give away all that you have, and seek God’s forgiveness.”

  “But, Master, is every man who acquires wealth a sinner? Have we not been taught that prosperity is the sign of God’s favor?”

  The question came from a well-dressed man who, when Joshua’s gaze settled on him, glanced down and began nervously playing with the rings on his fingers.

  “Each man answers that question in his own heart,” Joshua answered. “Each man knows how he came by his wealth and if he has been just in his dealings, if he has shown mercy to the poor, if he has obeyed God’s commandment to love others as we love ourselves. What does God whisper to you in the night?”

  Noah glanced over his shoulder at Joshua, who was smiling. It was a wonderful, understanding, forgiving smile.

  And it was not without its effect, even on Noah. He turned his attention back from the speaker to his audience, and he could see that they felt it as he did.

  In a day or two many would shake off the impression. They would return to their accustomed lives and find comfort in their possessions and the envy of the poor. But for some this would be the defining moment. They might renounce their wealth, or they might not. But they would never see things in the same way again.

  “And now let us break bread, my friends, for if we wait any longer God may forgive me but Deborah’s cook will not.”