The Sword of Ruth: The Story of Jesus' Little Sister

by V. M. Franck

Raven

  "I am the little sister of Jesus," said a thirty-year-old man with muddy blonde hair.

  Shivers spread over me. My attention riveted to him as he slouched across the arm of the chair in the crowded sixties-style motel room. It had been a year and a half since I had heard similar words, eighteen debilitating months without Tad.

  "I stared at the picture of Jesus on the wall above the bed and clung to that thought," the man said, as he read from his manuscript. "It was the only way I made it through what my uncle did to me all those years."

  Jesus' little sister was probably tall, definitely thin. Glasses framed his eyes, eyes bearing unobtrusive brilliance. His jeans, tee shirt and windbreaker were of the quality worn by the working class. As he waited for us to react, he appeared nervous.

  Silence. There was no ticking clock, no humming refrigerator, only evidence of quiet breathing.

  "Very insightful," a woman's voice finally said. It came from behind a man with a large sprawling body.

  "A unique take on incest," Barnaby, the workshop leader, said.

  Participants of various ages crammed the suite, seated on chairs, the carpet, standing in corners and next to the sliding glass door. The week-long conference at The Bard Motel in Montecito began in the convention hall the previous night. The motel, a collection of lapboard cottages and two-story structures, formed a quaint village along the beach of the wealthy community.

  Dumbstruck, I clutched my own work and watched the creator, wanting to tell him how I liked his story, how sensitive it was, how he'd slipped into my soul.

  The little sister of Jesus. If I'd had such a big brother, maybe things wouldn't have erupted into such a mess.

  I had come to the conference to expose the story of my own big brother, a story I had struggled to write for years. I hoped to do it without crying. Tad's death resurrected layers of intolerable pain. Maybe attending the conference was a mistake. Maybe doing what I was doing was a mistake. No, I must do this. Repeatedly since the killings Tad had encouraged me to follow the urgings.

  "Do it for me," he had said, the day he died. "If you can't muster enough strength to do it for yourself, do it all for me. Then you will remember why it has to be like this."

  Similar urgings had been with me since I was five when the dreams started. I was too young to understand, to know how to sort them out or what, if anything, to do about them. It was my brother, Demmy, with whom I shared them. He didn't laugh, look impatient or bored like people do when you tell them your dreams. He had listened.

  Chiseled into my brain were images of my brother's blood-coated body. It made me wonder how Jesus' little sister reacted to the blood on his body. Shocked, devastated, felt unsafe everywhere? Like Jesus' sisters, I had been forced to learn way too much about death.

  Once I heard the voice in the community center I incorporated three sisters into the center's paintings, arbitrarily assigning them names--Elizabeth, Ruth and Mary Martha. Members of the church I grew up in denied their existence. Personally, I never understood the importance of sustaining Mary's virginity.

  "True virgins make dull company, add whiskey," Demmy would say, grinning.

  I missed his wit, his defiance of religious elitism. The practiced blindness was one of the reasons I no longer attended church. It created a rift between my minister brother, Avery, and me when I had needed him most.

  "Let's examine why the story about this little girl works," Barnaby said.

  "I like the title," a woman said. "The Little Sister of Jesus is thought provoking."

  "Yes, it is. A title can sell or kill a piece," Barnaby said. A man with gentle, intelligent eyes, a skilled writer and artist, he launched into merits of the story.

  When the morning session ended, several students caught the writer, who claimed to be Jesus' sister, in conversation. I longed to join them but had no energy to insert myself. Heartaches interfered with so many things. Each affliction stacked on the previous ones until the mountain of them toppled. I awaited the toppling. But I could not, must not allow it to happen in front of strangers.

  Drifting fog swept the complex as I stepped out into a grassy courtyard and drew a shallow breath. The air didn't smell polluted. The Santa Barbara area was a different kind of California, not barren or brash. I actually liked it. Still, I hadn't expected fog in June.

  Chilly, wishing I'd worn a jacket, I glanced at the map of the motel grounds and located the Railroad Diner, a coffee shop in a train coach setup near the tennis courts. I picked up a fishwich, fries and a glass of wine, headed between beachfront units and down to the sand. A lone guest, seated at a patio table on the long open deck, read a newspaper. On either side of the motel complex, houses crowded the cove. A hundred yards up the beach a woman walked her dog. Dropping to dry sand twenty feet back from the waves, I sipped wine and wished to be someone else.

  It's not that I minded who I was. I didn't mind the social class I'd been born into, either. I'd never gone without anything I truly needed. While I was growing up my father worked as a foreman at a shipping yard in north Portland and my mother as a waitress at a cafe on Interstate Avenue, formerly part of the highway which connected Oregon to Washington.

  What I minded, what I wanted to escape were the layers of crippling pain.

  I gulped the wine, wishing for a gallon of it, munched the sandwich and fries and tried not to think. Vacations were for dissolving worrisome thoughts, not nursing them. Problem was, I'd brought mine along in a manila envelope.

  Down the beach toward me strolled a slender bare-chested man, wearing short tight cutoffs. Beside him padded an orange cat, stopping when he stopped, starting up when he did. As he got closer, I gasped. He resembled my brother, Demmy, except the stranger's wavy brown hair draped his shoulders. Demmy had kept his rambling curls at collar length.

  The man strode over and plopped onto the sand inches from me. The cat climbed onto his lap.

  "My name's Jessie Asa. This is my cat, Lumpkin. You look like you could use some company, so here we are." He grinned in an almost cocky, definitely teasing kind of way, like Demmy would have done. He had been such a flirt.

  "I'm Raven." I eyed him skeptically.

  "Pleased to meet you, Tulugaukuk, though I'm sure this isn't the first time. I see you chose to present yourself as a woman this time."

  Thinking back to what my Innuit grandmother taught me, I said, "If you were right about who I am, I wouldn't be having these kinds of troubles."

  "Not so," Jessie said. "If you recall, Raven, also known as Tulugaukuk, didn't know who he was at first, either. Born of darkness, small and weak, he didn't even know he had magical powers. They had yet to develop. He didn't realize he was the Creator of all life."

  "That's hardly me."

  "Oh contraire. You're here for the conference?" he said, glancing at my packet.

  "Uh huh. So, you believe in reincarnation. Don't you think it a bit of a stretch for the logical mind?"

  "Logic is just one way to approach reality. There are all kinds. Each one has it's perks. Haven't you noticed that sometimes you meet someone, and you're sure you've known them forever?"

  "Sure, but...."

  "But what? I'd like to think we've met numerous times and had all kinds of relationships. Here we are again with the opportunity to see what happens this time."

  "I have trouble believing that kind of stuff."

  His eyes held a look of interest that attracted me. It also made me want to push him away. The days of being so emotionally needy I ended up in bed with strangers were over. Satisfying the cuddle-need was not worth the aggravations.

  "A thing doesn't need to be believed," he said, "to be true."

  I followed his gaze to the horizon. The fog was thinning to wispy blue. Closer in, a teenage girl in a sailing skiff tried to catch a breeze.

  "I guess not."

  I munched a few fries and checked his profile--a straight nose and
shag-cut hair with brushed-back bangs. His caramel-colored eyes reminded me of ancient times. Demmy's had been hazel, like mine. Up close he didn't look like Demmy at all.

  Lumpkin climbed onto my lap, nuzzled my tee shirt and purred.

  "She likes you. That's a good sign. It's not that she's unfriendly. She's selective."

  "Maybe she recognizes me, too," I said, flippantly, and sighed, a telling sigh I wished I could retrieve.

  "Could be, from the Egyptian lifetime." His eyes captured mine. "I know you think this is a come on. I don't blame you. You must have men falling over you all the time. I promise that's not my motive."

  Surprised by his directness, I said, "Are you here for the conference?"

  I offered fries.

  He took a few and between munches said, "As a matter of fact. I played hooky this morning, though. I got in late, so I slept in. I have a couple of things to present, though I'm not sure to whom, when or how."

  "It is a puzzle," I said and sipped more wine.

  "Don't worry. You'll find your way, at the right time, in the right place, in the right way. Most of my work is for fun--or at least fun as I see it. I consider myself a catalyst. Yours is more significant than you know."

  "Oh really?" I was beginning to feel spooked. I wanted to believe him, but Demmy had made skepticism my middle name.

  "Demmy was right. It's good to be careful."

  "What?" This guy had either invaded my thoughts or had been stalking me, silently investigating me. "How do you know about Demmy?"

  Uneasy, I studied him. Demmy taught me that you couldn't tell if a guy was an axe murderer just by looking at him. He said even the worst criminals could show their compassionate side right before they chopped you into pieces. After what he did there was no doubt.

  "Hell, now I've scared you. I didn't mean to. I never mean to. I've got to learn discretion. Okay, Madame Maria," he said, glancing up at infinity, "give me a clue how to do this. I find it amazing that one could thoroughly learn a lesson in the past, and yet totally forget how to present it next time around."

  "Maybe you didn't really learn it." I was in the company of an eccentric. Still, I wanted to know how he knew what he knew and why. Especially why.

  "That's a discouraging thought."

  "Who's Madame Maria?" I finished the wine, hoping it would give me a buzz.

  "One of my guides. Some call them guardian angels, but that's a whole different group. There are all kinds of beings who look after us. You probably don't know whether to believe in them or not. They help us even when we don't believe. Belief helps, but it's not necessary, Madame Maria is always telling me. Sometimes the lesson is to see what we can learn without being aware of the help." He glanced at his watch. "I'd better get going. I need to get breakfast before the next round of workshops begins. See you later, Tulugaukuk. Come on, Lumpkin."

  He picked up the cat, headed up the sand and disappeared behind the beachfront units.

  The sky had cleared. The girl in the skiff was a dot in the distance. I closed my eyes and tried to meditate the way Demmy had taught me.

  From nearby came a crash. My body went rigid. My eyelids popped open. In back of me a woman sprawled next to a collapsed deck chair. Looking sheepish she picked herself up.

  Again, I closed my eyes and tried to meditate away my anxiety. It didn't work. I returned to the diner for another wine. At 1:30 I headed to the office building, entered a conference room and scooted in next to the dozen other students.

  A friendly-looking woman with short chestnut hair took a seat at the front facing the rest of us.

  "I'm Sue Gerrard," she said and held up a clipboard. "This is a sign up sheet. Starting tomorrow you'll be able to read your work and receive feedback from the group."

  My stomach knotted. This was why I was here. I had to sign up. I clasped my hands over my manuscript and worked on manufacturing courage.

  "I thought I'd start by giving you an idea what I mean by creative nonfiction," Sue said. "That way if you're in the wrong workshop, you can leave and find the right one. Please feel free to do this at any time in any class during the conference. We won't be offended. We want to make sure you find everything you're looking for in this experience."

  Everything I'm looking for. A sensation similar to a caffeine buzz revved my nerves. Trying to steady myself I listened to her presentation and participated in writing exercises.

  When class was over, Sue said, "Don't forget to sign up."

  Yes, sign up. I had to sign up. That was why I was here. I shuffled to the front and hesitated next to the clipboard. I wanted to do it. I had to do it. This was the right place, the right workshop. The sensations, which overtook me when something was right, became strong.

  "Go ahead," said a mystical voice. It sounded like the one I heard in the community center.

  I stiffened.

  Only Sue remained. She was engrossed in gathering her things.

  "Do it," the voice said. This time it came as a quiet inner voice, the kind that psychiatrists said meant you were nuts.

  My heart galloped. My breathing wavered. Stiff legged, I escaped into the hall.

  ~~~***~~~