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But I was interrupted in this thought by the sudden fear that gripped everyone, and the feel of my mother’s fingers closing around my upper arm.
Strangers were in the front room. Little Salome crushed up against me and I hugged her tight as my mother hugged me.
Then the curtain was ripped off the door. I was blinded and blinked, struggling to see. My mother gripped me very tight. No one spoke a word, and no one moved. I knew we were to be quiet and to do nothing. Everyone knew it, even the very littlest ones knew it. The babies cried but it was soft and it had nothing to do with these men who had torn the curtain away.
There were three or four of them, black against the daylight, big rough figures, with rags tied around their legs under the lashings of their sandals. One wore animal skins and another a gleaming helmet. The light hit their swords and their daggers. They had rags around their wrists.
“Well, look here,” said the man with the helmet. He spoke in Greek. “What do we have here? Half the village.”
“Come on, everything!” said another forcing his way towards us. He too spoke Greek. His voice was ugly. “I mean it, every denarius you have, all of you, now. Your gold or your silver. You women, your bracelets, take them off. We’ll cut you open for what you swallowed if you don’t give up what you’ve got!”
No one moved. The women did nothing.
Little Salome began to cry. I held her so tight I must have hurt her. But no one answered the men.
“We’re fighting for freedom for our land,” said one of the men. More Greek. “You stupid fools, don’t you know what’s happening in Israel?”
He stepped towards us and flashed his dagger at us, glaring into the face of Alphaeus, then Simon, then Joseph. But the men said nothing.
No one moved. No one spoke.
“Did you hear me? I’ll cut your throats one by one, starting with the children!” said the man, stepping back.
One of the others kicked at our well-bound bundles, another lifting a blanket and letting it fall.
Very softly in Hebrew, Joseph spoke.
“I can’t understand you. What do you want us to do? We are people of peace. I can’t understand you.”
Very softly in Hebrew, Alphaeus said: “Please do not harm our i
Now it was the turn of the men to be still as stone, and finally one of them turned away.
“Oh, you stupid worthless peasants,” he said in Greek. “You miserable ignorant filth.”
“They’ve never seen any money in their lives,” said the other. “There’s nothing in this place but old clothes and stinking babies. You pitiful wretches. Eat your dirt in peace.”
“Yes, grovel while we fight for your freedom,” said another.
They turned and went out with heavy steps, kicking baskets and bedrolls out of their way.
We waited. I felt my mother’s hands on my shoulders. I could see James, and he looked so much like Joseph, it was a wonder I never saw it before.
Finally the cries and the noise were over.
Joseph spoke. “Remember this,” he said. He looked from James to me and to Little Joses, and to my cousins who stared up at him, and to John who stood beside his mother. “Remember. Never lift your hand to defend yourself or to strike. Be patient. If you must speak, be simple.”
We nodded. We knew what had happened. All of us knew. Little Salome was sniffling. And all at once, my aunt Mary, who had been feeling so sick, broke into crying, and turned and sat down beside Cleopas, who was still staring up as he had been before. He looked like he was already dead. But he wasn’t dead.
All at once we children rushed to the doors of the little house. People were pouring out into the street. They were in a fury against the robbers. Women were chasing after fluttering birds and I saw the body of a man lying in the very middle of all that was going on, and he was staring up at the sky the same way that Cleopas had stared, but with blood streaming from his mouth. He was like our dead man in the Temple.
No soul in him.
People were going around him, and nobody wept for him, and nobody knelt beside him.
Finally two men with a rope came and they looped it over him and under his arms and they dragged him away.
“He was one of them,” said James. “Don’t look at him.”
“But who killed him?” I asked. “And what will they do with him?” In the light of the day it was not so frightening as it had been in the night. But I knew, even at this moment, that the darkness of the night would come. And it would be very frightening again. I knew the fear was waiting. The fear was something new. The fear was terrible. I didn’t feel it but I remembered it, and I knew it would come back. It would never go away.
“They’ll bury him,” said James. “His dead body can’t be left unburied. It’s an offense to the Lord in Heaven. They’ll put him in a cave or in the earth. It doesn’t matter.”
We were told to go inside.
The room had been cleared, the floor swept and beautiful rugs had been put down, rugs covered with flowers woven in the wool. We were told to sit down and be still and listen because Elizabeth wanted to talk to us before we left to go on.
I remembered now that we had been gathered for this purpose before, but the rugs had not been unbound yet when the first horsemen had come.
Now as if nothing had happened, as if no one had died in the street we went on.
We made a big thick, crowded circle. The babies were quiet enough for Elizabeth to be heard. I sat before Joseph, my legs crossed, as were his, and Little Salome was right by me, leaning back against her mother. Cleopas was still in the other room.
“I’ll make my words quick,” Elizabeth said. When I’d awakened this morning, she’d been talking of grandfathers and grandmothers, and who had married who and gone to what village. I couldn’t remember all those names. Both the women and the men had been repeating what she’d been telling, in order to remember it.
Now, she shook her head before she began and she lifted her hands. I saw her gray hairs under the edge of her veil, ru
“This is what I must tell you, what I never put in a letter to you. When I die, which will be soon—and no, don’t say that it won’t. I know that it will. I know the signs. When I die, John will go to live with our kindred among the Essenes.”
All at once there was fussing and crying out. Even Cleopas appeared in the door, huddled over, with his hand around his chest.
“No, why in the world have you made such a decision!” he said. “To send that child to people who don’t even worship in the Temple! And John, the son of a priest! And you married all your life to a priest, and Zechariah, the son of a priest, and before him?”
Cleopas limped, holding his stomach, until he reached the circle and then dropped to his knees, my mother right there to help him and pull his robe free, and straighten it around him. On he went. “And you would send John, whose mother is of the House of David, and whose father is of the House of Aaron, to live with the Essenes? The Essenes? These people who think they know better than all the rest of us what is good and what is bad, and who is righteous and what the Lord demands?”
“And who do you think the Essenes are!” said Elizabeth in a low voice. She was patient but wanted to be understood. “Are they not from the Children of Abraham? Are they not of the House of David and the House of Aaron, and from all the Tribes of Israel? Are they not pious? Are they not zealous for the Law? I’m telling you, they will take him out in the wilderness and there they’ll educate him and care for him. And he, the child himself, wants this and he has reason.”
My cousin John was looking at me. Why? Why not at his mother as everyone else was, when they were not looking at him? His face didn’t show much. He stared at me and I could see only a calmness in him. He didn’t look like a little boy. He looked like a little man. He sat opposite his mother, and he wore a plain white tunic of far better wool than mine, or any of ours, and over that a robe of the same fine weave. And these things I’d seen before but not thought of, and now as I took them in, I felt a great wondering about him, but Cleopas was talking and I had to follow his words.