Mary slung the baby to her hip, kneeled in front of her son, and quoted Isaiah: “‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’s den.’”
James, Judah, and Elizabeth cowered in the corner, too frightened to cry. I stood outside the doorway watching.
The snake swayed behind Joshua as if preparing to strike. “Her name is Sarah.”
“They were cobras, not asps,” I said. “A whole pile of cobras.”
“Can we keep her?” Joshua asked. “I’ll catch rats for her, and make a bed for her next to Elizabeth’s.”
“Definitely not asps. I’d know an asp if I saw one. Probably not a cockatrice either. I’d say a cobra.” (Actually, I didn’t know an asp from a hole in the ground.)
“Shush, Biff,” Mary said. My heart broke with the harshness in my love’s voice.
Just then Joseph rounded the corner and went through the door before I could catch him. No worry, he was back outside in an instant. “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!”
I checked to see if Joseph’s heart had failed, having quickly decided that once Mary and I were married the snake would have to go, or at least sleep outside, but the burly carpenter seemed only shaken, and a little dusty from his backward dive through the door.
“Not an asp, right?” I asked. “Asps are made small to fit the breasts of Egyptian queens, right?”
Joseph ignored me. “Back away slowly, son. I’ll get a knife from my workshop.”
“She won’t hurt us,” Joshua said. “Her name is Sarah. She’s from Isaiah.”
“It is in the prophecy, Joseph,” Mary said.
I could see Joseph searching his memory for the passage. Although only a layman, he knew his scripture as well as anyone. “I don’t remember the part about Sarah.”
“I don’t think it’s prophecy,” I offered. “It says asps, and that is definitely not an asp. I’d say she’s going to bite Joshua’s ass off if you don’t grab her, Joseph.” (A guy has to try.)
“Can I keep her?” Joshua asked.
Joseph had regained his composure by now. Evidently, once you accept that your wife slept with God, extraordinary events seem sort of commonplace.
“Take her back where you found her, Joshua, the prophecy has been fulfilled now.”
“But I want to keep her.”
“No, Joshua.”
“You’re not the boss of me.”
I suspected that Joseph had heard that before. “Just so,” he said, “please take Sarah back where you found her.”
Joshua stormed out of the house, his snake following close behind. Joseph and I gave them a wide berth. “Try not to let anyone see you,” Joseph said. “They won’t understand.”
He was right, of course. On our way out of the village we ran into a gang of older boys, led by Jakan, the son of Iban the Pharisee. They did not understand.
There were perhaps a dozen Pharisees in Nazareth: learned men, working-class teachers, who spent much of their time at the synagogue debating the Law. They were often hired as judges and scribes, and this gave them great influence over the people of the village. So much influence, in fact, that the Romans often used them as mouthpieces to our people. With influence comes power, with power, abuse. Jakan was only the son of a Pharisee. He was only two years older than Joshua and me, but he was well on his way to mastering cruelty. If there is a single joy in having everyone you have ever known two thousand years dead, it is that Jakan is one of them. May his fat crackle in the fires of hell for eternity!
Joshua taught us that we should not hate—a lesson that I was never able to master, along with geometry. Blame Jakan for the former, Euclid for the latter.
Joshua ran behind the houses and shops of the village, the snake behind him by ten steps, and me behind her ten steps more. As he rounded the corner by the smith’s shop, Joshua ran into Jakan, knocking him to the ground.
“You idiot!” Jakan shouted, rising and dusting himself off. His three friends laughed and he spun on them like an angry tiger. “This one needs to have his face washed in dung. Hold him.”
The boys turned their focus on Joshua, two grabbing his arms while the third punched him in the stomach. Jakan turned to look for a pile to rub Joshua’s face in. Sarah slithered around the corner and reared up behind Joshua, spreading her glorious hood wide above our heads.
“Hey,” I called as I rounded the corner. “You guys think this is an asp?” My fear of the snake had changed into a sort of wary affection. She seemed to be smiling. I know I was. Sarah swayed from side to side like a wheat stalk in the wind. The boys dropped Joshua’s arms and ran to Jakan, who had turned and slowly backed away.
“Joshua was talking about asps,” I continued, “but I’d have to say that this here is a cobra.”
Joshua was bent over, still trying to catch his breath, but he looked back at me and grinned.
“Of course, I’m not the son of a Pharisee, but—”
“He’s in league with the serpent!” Jakan screamed. “He consorts with demons!”
“Demons!” the other boys shouted, trying to crowd behind their fat friend.
“I will tell my father of this and you’ll be stoned.”
A voice from behind Jakan said, “What is all this shouting?” And a sweet voice it was.
She came out of the house by the smith’s shop. Her skin shone like copper and she had the light blue eyes of the northern desert people. Wisps of reddish-brown hair showed at the edges of her purple shawl. She couldn’t have been more than nine or ten, but there was something very old in her eyes. I stopped breathing when I saw her.
Jakan puffed up like a toad. “Stay back. These two are consorting with a demon. I will tell the elders and they will be judged.”
She spit at his feet. I had never seen a girl spit before. It was charming. “It looks like a cobra to me.”
“See there, I told you.”
She walked up to Sarah as if she were approaching a fig tree looking for fruit, not a hint of fear, only interest. “You think this is a demon?” she said, without looking back at Jakan. “Won’t you be embarrassed when the elders find that you mistook a common snake of the field for a demon?”
“It is a demon.”
The girl reached her hand up, and the snake made as if to strike, then lowered its head until its forked tongue was brushing the girl’s fingers. “This is definitely a cobra, little boy. And these two were probably leading it back to the fields where it would help the farmers by eating rats.”
“Yep, that’s what we were doing,” I said.
“Absolutely,” Joshua said.
The girl turned to Jakan and his friends. “A demon?”
Jakan stomped like an angry donkey. “You are in league with them.”
“Don’t be silly, my family has only just arrived from Magdala, I’ve never seen these two before, but it’s obvious what they were doing. We do it all the time in Magdala. But then, this is a backwater village.”
“We do it here too,” Jakan said. “I was—well—these two make trouble.”
“Trouble,” his friends said.
“Why don’t we let them get on with what they were doing.”
Jakan, his eyes bouncing from the girl to the snake to the girl again, began to lead his friends away. “I will deal with you two another time.”
As soon as they were around the corner, the girl jumped back from the snake and ran toward the door of her house.
“Wait,” Joshua called.
“I have to go.”
“What is your name?”
“I’m Mary of Magdala, daughter of Isaac,” she said. “Call me Maggie.”
“Come with us, Maggie.”
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sp; “I can’t, I have to go.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve peed myself.”
She disappeared through the door.
Miracles.
Once we were back in the wheat field Sarah headed for her den. We watched from a distance as she slid down the hole.
“Josh. How did you do that?”
“I have no idea.”
“Is this kind of thing going to keep happening?”
“Probably.”
“We are going to get into a lot of trouble, aren’t we?”
“What am I, a prophet?”
“I asked you first.”
Joshua stared into the sky like a man in a trance. “Did you see her? She’s afraid of nothing.”
“She’s a giant snake, what’s to be afraid of?”
Joshua frowned. “Don’t pretend to be simple, Biff. We were saved by a serpent and a girl, I don’t know what to think about that.”
“Why think about it at all? It just happened.”
“Nothing happens but by God’s will,” Joshua said. “It doesn’t fit with the testament of Moses.”
“Maybe it’s a new testament,” I said.
“You aren’t pretending, are you?” Joshua said. “You really are simple.”
“I think she likes you better than she likes me,” I said.
“The snake?”
“Right, I’m the simple one.”
I don’t know if now, having lived and died the life of a man, I can write about little-boy love, but remembering it now, it seems the cleanest pain I’ve known. Love without desire, or conditions, or limits—a pure and radiant glow in the heart that could make me giddy and sad and glorious all at once. Where does it go? Why, in all their experiments, did the Magi never try to capture that purity in a bottle? Perhaps they couldn’t. Perhaps it is lost to us when we become sexual creatures, and no magic can bring it back. Perhaps I only remember it because I spent so long trying to understand the love that Joshua felt for everyone.
In the East they taught us that all suffering comes from desire, and that rough beast would stalk me through my life, but on that afternoon, and for a time after, I touched grace. At night I would lie awake, listening to my brothers’ breathing against the silence of the house, and in my mind’s eye I could see her eyes like blue fire in the dark. Exquisite torture. I wonder now if Joshua didn’t make her whole life like that. Maggie, she was the strongest of us all.
After the miracle of the serpent, Joshua and I made up excuses to pass by the smith’s shop where we might run into Maggie. Every morning we would rise early and go to Joseph, volunteering to run to the smith for some nails or the repair of a tool. Poor Joseph took this as enthusiasm for carpentry.
“Would you boys like to come to Sepphoris with me tomorrow?” Joseph asked us one day when we were badgering him about fetching nails. “Biff, would your father let you start learning the work of a carpenter?”
I was mortified. At ten a boy was expected to start learning his father’s trade, but that was a year away—forever when you’re nine. “I–I am still thinking about what I will do when I grow up,” I said. My own father had made a similar offer to Joshua the day before.
“So you won’t become a stonecutter?”
“I was thinking about becoming the village idiot, if my father will allow it.”
“He has a God-given talent,” Joshua said.
“I’ve been talking to Bartholomew the idiot,” I said. “He’s going to teach me to fling my own dung and run headlong into walls.”
Joseph scowled at me. “Perhaps you two are yet too young. Next year.”
“Yes,” Joshua said, “next year. May we go now, Joseph? Biff is meeting Bartholomew for his lesson.”
Joseph nodded and we were off before he inflicted more kindness upon us. We actually had befriended Bartholomew, the village idiot. He was foul and drooled a lot, but he was large, and offered some protection against Jakan and his bullies. Bart also spent most of his time begging near the town square, where the women came to fetch water from the well. From time to time we caught a glimpse of Maggie as she passed, a water jar balanced on her head.
“You know, we are going to have to start working soon,” Joshua said. “I won’t see you, once I’m working with my father.”
“Joshua, look around you, do you see any trees?”
“No.”
“And the trees we do have, olive trees—twisted, gnarly, knotty things, right?”
“Right.”
“But you’re going to be a carpenter like your father?”
“There’s a chance of it.”
“One word, Josh: rocks.”
“Rocks?”
“Look around. Rocks as far as the eye can see. Galilee is nothing but rocks, dirt, and more rocks. Be a stonemason like me and my father. We can build cities for the Romans.”
“Actually, I was thinking about saving mankind.”
“Forget that nonsense, Josh. Rocks, I tell you.”
Chapter 3
The angel will tell me nothing of what happened to my friends, of the twelve, of Maggie. All he’ll say is that they are dead and that I have to write my own version of the story. Oh, he’ll tell me useless angel stories—of how Gabriel disappeared once for sixty years and they found him on earth hiding in the body of a man named Miles Davis, or how Raphael snuck out of heaven to visit Satan and returned with something called a cell phone. (Evidently everyone has them in hell now.) He watches the television and when they show an earthquake or a tornado he’ll say, “I destroyed a city with one of those once. Mine was better.” I am awash in useless angel prattle, but about my own time I know nothing but what I saw. And when the television makes mention of Joshua, calling him by his Greek name, Raziel changes the channel before I can learn anything.
He never sleeps. He just watches me, watches the television, and eats. He never leaves the room.
Today, while searching for extra towels, I opened one of the drawers and there, beneath a plastic bag meant for laundry, I found a book: Holy Bible, it said on the cover. Thank the Lord I did not take the book from the drawer, but opened it with my back to the angel. There are chapters there that were in no Bible I know. I saw the names of Matthew and John, I saw Romans and Galatians—this is a book of my time.
“What are you doing?” the angel asked.
I covered the Bible and closed the drawer. “Looking for towels. I need to bathe.”
“You bathed yesterday.”
“Cleanliness is important to my people.”
“I know that. What, you think I don’t know that?”
“You’re not exactly the brightest halo in the bunch.”
“Then bathe. And stand away from the television.”
“Why don’t you go get me some towels?”
“I’ll call down to the desk.”
And he did. If I am to get a look at that book, I must get the angel to leave the room.
It came to pass that in the village of Japhia, the sister village of Nazareth, that Esther, the mother of one of the priests of the Temple, died of bad air. The Levite priests, or Sadducees, were rich from the tributes we paid to the Temple, and mourners were hired from all the surrounding villages. The families of Nazareth made the journey to the next hill for the funeral, and for the first time, Joshua and I were able to spend time with Maggie as we walked along the road.
“So,” she said without looking at us, “have you two been playing with any snakes lately?”
“We’ve been waiting for the lion to lay down with the lamb,” Joshua said. “That’s the next part of the prophecy.”
“What prophecy?”
“Never mind,” I said. “Snakes are for boys. We are almost men. We will begin work after the Feast of Tabernacles. In Sepphoris.” I was trying to sound worldly. Maggie seemed unimpressed.
“And you will learn to be a carpenter?” she asked Joshua.
“I will do the work of my father, eventually, yes.”
&
nbsp; “And you?” she asked me.
“I’m thinking of being a professional mourner. How hard can it be? Tear at your hair, sing a dirge or two, take the rest of the week off.”
“His father is a stonemason,” Joshua said. “We may both learn that skill.” At my urging, my father had offered to take Joshua on as an apprentice if Joseph approved.
“Or a shepherd,” I added quickly. “Being a shepherd seems easy. I went with Kaliel last week to tend his flock. The Law says that two must go with the flock to keep an abomination from happening. I can spot an abomination from fifty paces.”
Maggie smiled. “And did you prevent any abominations?”
“Oh yes, I kept all of the abominations at bay while Kaliel played with his favorite sheep behind the bushes.”
“Biff,” Joshua said gravely, “that was the abomination you were supposed to prevent.”
“It was?”
“Yes.”
“Whoops. Oh well, I think I would make an excellent mourner. Do you know the words to any dirges, Maggie? I’m going to need to learn some dirges.”
“I think that when I grow up,” Maggie announced, “I shall go back to Magdala and become a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee.”
I laughed, “Don’t be silly, you are a girl. You can’t be a fisherman.”
“Yes I can.”
“No, you can’t. You have to marry and have sons. Are you betrothed, by the way?”
Joshua said: “Come with me, Maggie, and I will make you a fisher of men.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Maggie asked.
I grabbed Joshua by the back of his robe and began to drag him away. “Don’t pay any attention to him. He’s mad. He gets it from his mother. Lovely woman, but a loony. Come now, Josh, let’s sing a dirge.”
I began improvising what I thought was a good funeral song.
“La-la-la. Oh, we are really, really sad that your mom is dead. Too bad you’re a Sadducee and don’t believe in an afterlife and your mom is just going to be worm food, la-la. Makes you think that you might want to reconsider, huh? Fa-la-la-la-la-la-wacka-wacka.” (It sounded great in Aramaic. Really.)
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal Page 3