The Ironsmith

by Nicholas Guild

  “Noah, tell him to come out,” Little Joseph almost shouted—Little Joseph, the baby of the family, his beard still only half grown in. “You heard him in the prayer house. His wits are turned.”

  “Are they?” Then something occurred to him. “Where is Jacob?”

  “He wouldn’t come,” Miriam answered.

  “And why was that?” Noah asked. He still held her hand in his own, and he could feel her fingers tightening around his thumb. “But I think I can guess. He refused to involve himself. Tell me, Miriam, do you believe your son is troubled in his mind?”

  She could only look down and shake her head. What she was denying was not clear.

  “He talks of the end of all things,” Little Joseph said gloomily. “He says that God will shake the foundations of the world and thousands will be cast into the fire like weeds.”

  “Yes, I have heard him say such things.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  Noah was forced to smile, for Little Joseph, who was the least gifted of Miriam’s sons, actually seemed frightened.

  “I do not know if I believe him,” Noah answered. “Probably I do not. But I am not in the habit of thinking every man I disagree with is possessed by demons.

  “Little Joseph, take your mother home. Nothing is going to be settled here tonight.”

  They left, and Noah returned to the banquet, where dinner was at last being served.

  When it was over, Noah and Joshua left together.

  “Can Uncle Benjamin find room for me tonight?” Joshua asked.

  “I would think so. Why?”

  “I can’t return to my father’s house. I don’t think I can ever return there.” Joshua looked down and shook his head. It was identical to the gesture his mother had used. “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own place and among his own family.”

  33

  The next morning Noah rose early and had breakfast with Joshua and his disciples, who had gathered at Benjamin’s house two hours before dawn.

  “I will never return to this place,” Joshua told him. “I now have no father but God, and no family except these companions.”

  When they were gone, Benjamin came out of his bedroom.

  “You were awake?” Noah asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you join us?”

  “I am too old to enjoy good-byes.” He looked at the remains of breakfast with distaste and poured himself a cup of wine. “They will be on the main road before Joseph realizes that he will never see his eldest son again.”

  “It was all unnecessary.”

  Benjamin seemed not to hear. He sat with his hands cradling the wine cup, his gaze fixed on nothing. Finally he turned to his grandson and smiled.

  “I suspect it was necessary,” he said quietly. “Joshua is preparing himself for whatever destiny God has chosen for him, and God whispers to him that he must face it alone. What is necessity but the will of God?”

  “If it is God’s will.”

  “The point is that he believes it is, and therefore he can do no other.”

  * * *

  The next day Noah claimed his bride, and if, in the ensuing celebration, anyone in Nazareth gave thought to Joshua’s absence, it was not evident.

  Because the bride was a widow, the formal evidence that the marriage had been consummated could be dispensed with. No friend needed to wait outside Benjamin’s door. It was kindly taken for granted that Noah had gone into Deborah and made her his wife. The couple were allowed to remain alone together while the whole village ate and drank and danced and made the customary jokes.

  The next morning, husband and wife quietly slipped away and walked back to Noah’s house in Sepphoris. No one seemed to notice their absence.

  Sarah was staying with her grandfather, to be out of the way, so it was two or three days before either Noah or Deborah had a thought to spare for anyone else.

  However, as the first Sabbath of their marriage approached, and with it the idea of returning, however briefly, to Nazareth, they both began to think about the wider context of their life together. Deborah recalled that her servant Hannah was still waiting.

  “Can you send your apprentice for her?” she asked. “She is alone, and by now she must be feeling like a prisoner in Capernaum. She has no dependence upon anyone except me.”

  They were at breakfast in the kitchen, where there was no window to let in even the faint gray light of dawn, and Noah was thinking how beautiful and mysterious his wife looked in the soft flicker of the oil lamp.

  “I’ll speak to Hiram today. He can leave after the Sabbath. I’ll tell him to bring her down by water to Tiberias. The road from Tiberias is shorter and safer, and the enforced idleness of a boat trip will provide them with an opportunity to become acquainted.”

  Deborah, with a bride’s sensitivity to these things, noticed a sudden change in his expression.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Nothing.” He shrugged and forced himself to smile. “I was just thinking of another prisoner.”

  Then he told her of his conversation with the Lord Eleazar. In the rush of his private concerns, he had almost forgotten about it.

  “A nameless prisoner?” she asked. “How can he expect you to find him out?”

  “I have no idea, but he does.”

  “And why would Caleb, who is so evil a man, release a prisoner?”

  “You are discounting, then, an act of personal clemency?” Noah smiled, a little more willingly. “I would imagine because he needed someone as a spy. Anyone who has been in the Tetrarch’s prisons for any time will emerge a broken man, prepared to do anything if only he can avoid having to go back. Caleb needed someone who feared him.”

  An idea was beginning to form in Deborah’s mind. It seemed incredible, but …

  “How long ago was the prisoner released?” she asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.

  “Two or three months ago—why?”

  “Where does Caleb live?”

  It struck Noah, not for the first time, that he had fallen in love with a very clever woman.

  “Perhaps we could take a walk today,” he said. “You could show me where you saw Judah.”

  * * *

  Once she was in the district around the Tetrarch’s palace, Deborah had no trouble locating the doorway in which she had seen Judah speaking with another man. It was on the western side of the street, which was broader than those in the lower part of the city. There were shops opposite, but they did not seem busy. For the people who lived in these grand houses, it was probably still early in the day.

  At the end of the block, on a corner, there was a tavern where one could sit outside, with a view of the whole street. Noah ordered beer for them both.

  The tavern owner asked if they wanted anything to eat. Noah shook his head and then placed three silver coins on the table. The tavern owner stood looking at them, as if he had never seen so much money together in one place, until Noah invited him to sit down.

  “How long have you been here?” Noah asked. It was a harmless, friendly inquiry, such as one might make to pass the time.

  The tavern owner, who was a shriveled, unhappy-looking man, utterly lacking in the pleasant openness which was usually the hallmark of his profession, held up his right hand, the finger splayed, and then pulled down the little finger and thumb so that the ends touched.

  “Three years,” he said, as if he lamented every hour of it.

  “And is trade good?” Noah took a sip from his cup. “The beer, by the way, is excellent.”

  “My wife makes it.”

  “Then please convey my compliments to your wife. So, you are prospering?”

  “We only just get by.” The tavern owner turned his gaze resentfully to the houses on the opposite side of the street. “People who live hereabouts seem to prefer to eat at home. Of course, they all have their own cooks.”

  “But as I said, the beer is excellent. It seems such a pleasant
spot. There is nothing like beer on a warm day, in the company of one’s friends.”

  “As I said, we get by.”

  “And I suppose you know everyone in the neighborhood.”

  “Nearly everyone. Yes.”

  Noah placed a finger on each of the three silver coins and slowly pushed them across the table toward its owner.

  “I wonder if you could tell me who owns the house just there.” He lifted his hand from the coins and pointed to the doorway Deborah had indicated.

  The tavern owner swept the coins off the table and into his hand.

  “The man who lives there never comes here,” he said, suddenly angry—or perhaps only frightened. “He is a powerful man, a man about whom it is safest not to inquire.”

  “Would you happen to know his name? Surely his name is not dangerous.”

  The tavern owner stood up, and seemed to weigh the silver in his hand.

  “There was a man whom Moses sent into the Promised Land to spy it out. He was one of twelve. Of those twelve, only he and Joshua reported back that God would deliver the land into their hands.”

  “I understand you.”

  As they got up to leave, Noah leaned toward Deborah and whispered in her ear, “The spy’s name was Caleb.”

  * * *

  That evening was the beginning of the Sabbath, so in the middle of the afternoon Noah locked his shop and he and Deborah walked to Nazareth.

  To Noah, Judah was no more than a face and a name, so Deborah had tried to remember every detail of his story. It wasn’t much: he had been rich but lost his money, he had been baptized by John, he came from Tiberias.

  “But he speaks with a Judean accent,” Noah observed. “He is not a Galilean. Perhaps he has never been near Tiberias. How much of his story do you believe?”

  “He was baptized—Joshua remembers him. And I believe he was rich because when he first came to Capernaum his hands were smooth. They were the hands of someone who had never worked. And I believe he has lived in Tiberias.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he talks about it. If he had never lived there he wouldn’t mention it, for fear of making a mistake.”

  “You are a shrewd woman. What are your other impressions of him?”

  “I believe his devotion to Joshua is real. He is not pretending.”

  “Then one wonders what his devotion to Caleb is like.”

  When they were in sight of the village, Noah kissed his wife’s hand and said, “I think it best we say nothing of this to anyone. I will ask Sarah to return with you to Sepphoris, and I will say I am going on to Tiberias. I do business there, so no one will remark on it. I will see what can be found out about our friend. Do you know how much I love you?”

  Deborah smiled, in a way that suggested she knew a secret. “Am I going to find out?”

  There was still an hour before sunset when Noah embraced his grandfather. When the Sabbath began, Benjamin would go into his bedroom to fetch one of the scrolls, and then he would sit outside and listen to Noah reading the Law. It was a ritual enacted almost every Sabbath since he had first taught his grandson how to read.

  But first they all sat down to the dinner Sarah had prepared. It was a chance to catch up on the news.

  “You won’t see Joseph in the prayer house tomorrow,” Benjamin said as he filled their cups with wine. “He is spitting up blood and hasn’t left his bed in two days.”

  “Miriam says he has given up all hope of life,” Sarah added.

  “I suppose this business with Joshua has finished him,” Noah said.

  Benjamin looked at his grandson with surprise, which gradually slipped into something very like amusement. “Or it is simply the time God has set for him to die,” he said. “Men do not die of disappointment. His lungs are not bleeding because of Joshua.”

  “Yet he might have faced death with an easier heart if not for this stupid quarrel.”

  “Or perhaps it makes no difference. Dying usually absorbs a man’s full attention.”

  Noah found himself suddenly eager to change the subject, so he turned to his sister with a teasing grin.

  “I think we had better get you married to Abijah quickly, before he ruins himself by sheer inattention.”

  “It cannot be soon enough for me. I hate this veil.”

  “Yes, aren’t they dreadful?” Deborah agreed.

  And so the last of the day slipped pleasantly away, and at sundown Noah and his grandfather sat outside, an oil lamp hanging from a stand above Noah’s right shoulder as he read.

  “‘You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason with your neighbor, lest you bear sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.’”

  “‘I am the Lord,’” the old man repeated. “I heard a story once of a famous teacher who was approached by a gentile who said he would become his student and embrace Israel if the teacher could tell him the essence of the Law while standing on one foot. The teacher lifted one foot from the ground and said, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.’ And the gentile became his student.”

  “I have heard that story,” Noah replied, smiling as he experienced a surge of love for his grandfather. He hoped Benjamin lived long enough that his own children would have some memory of him. “They tell it of Hillel, and probably others. There are, I suspect, several variations.”

  “There are always stories about men famous for their piety,” Benjamin said. “Some of them one believes, some not. Some, it doesn’t matter if they are true or not.”

  * * *

  The next morning, as Benjamin had predicted, Joseph was not in the prayer house. His sons sat together and were silent during the discussion of the reading. When it was over they returned to their father’s house, without a word to anyone. It was as if Noah and his grandfather were somehow included in their anger against Joshua.

  “‘You shall not hate your brother in your heart,’” Noah repeated, as if to himself.

  “‘I am the Lord,’” his grandfather murmured.

  * * *

  On the following morning, before it was even light, Noah set out for Tiberias. It was late afternoon before he reached the door of his friend Priam.

  “What are you doing here?” Priam asked, forgetting his manners in his surprise. “Usually you write that you are coming.”

  “There was no time. I apologize for the intrusion.”

  “It is not an intrusion, for I am always glad to see you. It is merely unexpected.”

  “For both of us.”

  Then he told Priam about Judah.

  “And what is your interest in this man? Or is it better I do not know?”

  “You do not want to know. Who in Tiberias would have managed his affairs?”

  Priam shrugged and pulled thoughtfully at his beard.

  “It would have to be someone of standing,” he said finally. “In all, perhaps a score of merchants.”

  “Can you give me a list?”

  “I will do better than that. I will go with you. Business is slow, and it will give me something to do.” Looking his friend over from head to foot, Priam shook his head. “But you can’t appear before these men looking like that. You are covered with dust.”

  “An inevitable consequence of walking for ten hours.”

  “Yes, but you must take a bath and have my servants attend to your clothes. There is nothing more to be done today.”

  Noah could only shrug with resignation.

  “Besides,” Priam continued, “you must drink some wine and tell me all your news. Are you married yet? I am eager to hear how this second experiment is turning out.”

  * * *

  Priam was nearing forty, and there were rumors that he had come from Sardis to escape his wife. Whether this was true or not, he lived in Tiberias as a bachelor. His household servants were all women, some very pretty, so probably he did not
lack for amusement.

  He listened to Noah’s praise of his bride with patient cynicism.

  “And yet I notice, since here you are, that her charms could not hold you in place for even a week.”

  “It was an emergency. Trust me when I say I prefer her company even to yours.”

  Priam laughed. “I am insulted.”

  The next morning they began their inquiries. By noon they had been in the counting houses of six of the most prosperous merchant traders in the city, and none of them knew of a rich wastrel named Judah who had lost his money and disappeared. Noah was beginning to believe he was chasing a shadow, that Judah had simply concocted the whole story. He wondered if Judah was even his real name.

  Noah felt horribly exposed, as if he were playing his part upon a stage, in view of the whole world. It was like Damascus all over again.

  Was he being followed? Had Eleazar once again given him a minder?

  It was the middle of the afternoon before they found what they were looking for.

  “Judah bar Isaac? Where has he taken himself off to?”

  The question, in response to Noah’s, was posed by a certain Onesimus, a trader with offices on the Street of the Palms.

  “Sepphoris,” Noah answered, consoling himself with the reflection that it was no less true than a number of other locations he could have cited.

  “Well, what is your interest in him?”

  “He is employed by a relative of mine—in a confidential capacity. I was asked to inquire about him.”

  Onesimus considered this response, probably deciding it was too vague to be quite the truth, but he too was curious.

  “Well,” he replied cautiously, “he didn’t lose his money, I can tell you. He is still on my books, and the profits from his investments have done nothing but increase.”

  “I wonder why he left, then.”

  After glancing about, as if afraid of being overheard, Onesimus leaned forward heavily against his desk.

  “I can hazard a guess,” he said, in a low voice. “He favored a certain prostitute. She was found in her room with her neck neatly broken, and after that no one ever saw Judah again. It might be a coincidence, but he also might have killed her and then fled.”