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“Did you know my mother is dead?”
“I’m sorry for it,” I said.
“And the baby too is dead because the baby was inside her.”
“I’m sorry for it,” I said.
“They already buried her. They put her in the cave.”
I didn’t say anything.
My aunts came in, Salome and Esther, and they made Little Salome drink soup and lie down. Little Salome wouldn’t stop asking about her mother. “Was she covered up?” she asked. “Did she look white?”
They told her to be quiet.
“Did she cry when she died?”
I slept.
When I woke up, the room was still full of children sleeping, and my older cousins were there, sick, too.
It wasn’t until the next morning that I got up.
At first I thought no one was awake in the house.
I went out into the courtyard.
The air was warm, and the leaves on the fig tree were big. There were white flowers all over the vines, and the sky was very blue yet full of clean clouds that didn’t mean rain.
I was so hungry I could have eaten anything. I’d never been so hungry ever that I knew.
There were voices coming from one of the rooms that Cleopas and his family used on the other side of the court. I went in and saw my mother and my uncle seated there on the floor, talking together, before a meal of bread and sauce. The window had only a thin veil. The light fell on their shoulders.
I sat down beside my mother.
“…and I’ll take care of them, I’ll gather them to me, and hold them to me, because I am their mother now, and they are my children.” This is what she was saying to Cleopas. “You understand me? They are my children now. They are the brothers and sisters of Jesus and James. I can care for them. I want you to believe in me. Everyone has always treated me as if I were a girl. I’m not a girl. I’ll care for all of them. We are all one family together.”
Cleopas nodded but he had a faraway look.
He passed the bread to me, and whispered the blessing and I whispered it too. I gobbled the bread.
“No, not so fast,” said my mother. “I mean it. You mustn’t. And drink this.” She gave me water. I wanted the bread.
My mother ran her hand over my hair. She kissed me. “You heard what I said to your uncle?”
“They’re my brothers and sisters,” I said, “as it’s always been.” I ate some more of the bread and sauce.
“That is enough,” said my mother. She took all the bread and the sauce and got up and went out.
I sat there alone with my uncle. I drew up close to him.
His face was calm as if all the crying had gone away and left him empty.
He turned to me. He looked very serious.
“Do you think the Lord in Heaven had to take one of us?” he asked. “And when I was spared, he took her in my place?”
I was so surprised I could hardly breathe. I remembered all at once my prayer for him to live when he’d been praying in the Jordan River. I remember the power going out of me into him when I laid my hand on him as he sang in the river, and he hadn’t even known.
I tried to say something but no words would come out.
What could I do but cry?
He gathered me in his arms, and rocked me. “Ah, my own,” he said under his breath to me.
“O Lord of All Creation,” he prayed, “you’ve restored me. It must have been for my good that I’ve known such bitterness …we who live thank you, as I do now, the father will tell the children of your faithfulness.”
For weeks we didn’t go outside the courtyard.
My eyes hurt in the light. Cleopas and I painted some of the rooms with fresh whitewash. But those who had to work in Sepphoris went to work.
Finally all had recovered from the illness, even Little Esther for whom we’d feared the worst just because she was little. But I knew she was all right because she was screaming her lungs out.
Rabbi Sherebiah, the priest with the wooden leg, came into our house with the Water of Purification so that we could be sprinkled one time and then again in the following days. This water he made up with the ashes of the red heifer, which had been slain and burnt at the Temple in accordance with the Law to make the ashes for this, and with the living water from the stream beyond the synagogue at the end of the village.
With this Water of Purification, not only were we sprinkled but also the entire house, and all the cooking vessels and the jars that held food or water or wine. Everything was sprinkled. The mikvah was sprinkled.
We bathed in the mikvah after each sprinkling; and after sundown on the last day of the sprinkling all of us and our house were clean.
This was from the impurity we had taken on from the death of our aunt Mary under our roof. And it was a solemn thing to us, especially to Cleopas, who had recited the passage from the Book of Numbers which told of this cleansing and how it was to be done.
My mind was much captured by this ritual; I made up my mind that I wanted to see the slaughter of the red heifer with my own eyes someday in Jerusalem.
Not now, when there was fighting, no. But someday when it would be peaceful and we could go there. The slaughter of the red heifer and the burning of the heifer, along with her skin and her flesh and her blood and her dung, to make these ashes of purification—what a sight it must be, I thought. There was so much to see at the Temple. And the Temple was now in the midst of fighting.
That was the only way I could remember it, full of dead bodies and people screaming, and that man killed before my eyes, and that soldier who on his horse had come in my memory to look like a horse and a man put together, with his long spear full of blood. That and then the fiery battle I’d seen in the dream, the strange dream. However could I have dreamed such a dream?
But that was far away, all of that.
It was peaceful here as we went through the purification.
Never in Alexandria could I remember such a thing being done, this sprinkling, and only dimly did I remember the death of a little child there, the infant son of my uncle Alphaeus. But here in the Land, it was the custom to do these things according to the Law. And everyone was happy to do it.
But I knew that my uncles had not waited on this ritual to go to work in Sepphoris. They could not have done that. Some of them had been working there all during the time of illness. And the women had been going out to the vegetable garden when they had to do it. I didn’t ask any questions about it. I knew that we did what we could. And I trusted in what my uncles and Joseph said to do. People did what they could do.
Now, after that time, and not very long after at all, before I was even going out of the house yet, my uncles got into a big dispute.
There was so much work in Sepphoris that they could choose among the hardest jobs, and the jobs they most liked, and the jobs which most used all the skills of the family. But Joseph, upon whom everyone relied, would not charge any different for any one job over another. The uncles didn’t think that was right, and neither did some of the other carpenters in Sepphoris. The uncles wanted double for the jobs of skill, and the other carpenters were for this, and Joseph would not charge this.
Finally, all of them went up the hill to Rabbi Berekhaiah, even though they wanted to see Rabbi Jacimus, the strictest Pharisee.
“We need a Pharisee to settle this,” my uncle Cleopas had said. And everyone had agreed. Even Joseph. But no one was going to ask the younger Rabbi before asking the older Rabbi.
Rabbi Berekhaiah at once said to go to Rabbi Jacimus, the Pharisee, and do what he said to do.
We little boys couldn’t crowd in and as it grew warmer and warmer outside, we went on home.
They were gone a long time, and when they came down they were all in good spirits. It seemed that Rabbi Jacimus had won the day with this argument: that if they charged double for the skilled jobs, they could let the boys go to school for a full half day. And Joseph had agreed to this!