The Jesse Tree

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “Jesus’ uncle Zechariah wasn’t allowed in there, even though he worked in the Temple. Zechariah loved his work, loved his wife Elizabeth, and loved living in Jerusalem. He was a man at peace – except that he had no children, and more than anything, Zechariah wanted a son.” Mr Butterfield broke off.

  “He was like you, you mean,” said the boy. “Go on.”

  Zechariah loved the Temple: its soft gloom, its starry candle flames, its heady scent of incense, the quiet babble of voices discussing the Scriptures. There were things in there so precious and so ancient that they crammed him topful of wonder. But when Zechariah first saw the figure standing beside the altar of incense, he was taken aback.

  “Greetings, Zechariah,” said the stranger with the candlelit face. “Congratulations. You are about to become a father.”

  Zechariah almost laughed, almost wept. All his life, he and Elizabeth had longed for a child. Now it was far too late. “Don’t make fun of me. I’m old! How could…?”

  But the figure cloaked in sweet-smelling smoke held up a hand. “You must call him John. He will herald the coming of the Messiah, the Saviour. He will be a voice shouting in the wilderness!”

  At that, Zechariah put a hand to his throat, another to his heart, his aching, thundering heart…

  The handful of people praying in the Temple looked up as Zechariah stumbled forward. His eyes were full of candlelight. His hands fluttered like doves. His mouth opening as if to speak… but no words came out. Zechariah had been struck dumb.

  Even when his wife, Elizabeth, half amazed, half terrified, whispered to her husband that she was expecting a child, Zechariah could only grin and nod and scratch his joy on a wax tablet using a stylus. His writing looked like angels flying across the white wax.

  “So who was the stranger?” asked the boy.

  “Well, bless me, an angel of course! The Angel Gabriel, at a guess. God’s postman: that’s how I like to think of Gabriel. I picture him, breaking the news to Zechariah, then strolling down the road to Nazareth – taking weeks about it, but whistling all the way – to speak to Mary!”

  “So why didn’t the angel just tell everyone? He could have saved himself lots of tramping about. Why didn’t Angel Gabriel just roll back the sky and shout, ‘HE’S COMING! THE RESCUER! YOUR SUPERHERO!’”

  Mr Butterfield scratched his chin with his chisel thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s not everyone who can see angels. Maybe it’s only certain people.”

  “You could be right,” said the boy with an odd smile, which he seemed to brush off with one hand and slip into his shirt pocket along with the sawdust.

  MARY

  “I can see it all in my head,” said Mr Butterfield suddenly. “I have to work while I can picture it.” As he worked, Mr Butterfield went on with the story, even though no one had asked him to.

  Mary was a good girl. Everyone said so. In fact, people probably never spoke about her at all, because gossips are only interested in people’s faults and mistakes, and Mary did nothing wrong. She was promised in marriage to the local carpenter, Joseph. The idea pleased her, because it pleased everyone else, and happiness made Mary happy.

  It was a warm day, a low sun. The olive trees wore capes of light. The herbs between her fingers gave off a dizzying fragrance. The figure in white, striding along the roadway, reflected the sun so brightly as to dazzle Mary.

  “Greetings, Mary,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. God holds you in his mind and in his heart. I have news for you.”

  Mary did not jump up or run into the house. She simply greeted the stranger.

  “The Lord God has chosen you, Mary, to give birth to a son. You must call him Jesus.”

  Mary did not faint or laugh, though her face grew paler. “How can that be? I’m not even married!”

  “Mary, you’re the most blessed woman alive. God’s Spirit will overshadow you. He will entrust you with his own Son,” said the angel. “If you are willing.”

  Mary did not protest or cry. She did not speak of the shame her family would feel, the things Joseph would say. She simply lowered her head. “Let it be as God wishes,” was all she said.

  Then the angel was gone, and so was Mary’s good name.

  “What’s wrong with the name Mary?” asked the boy. “It’s a perfectly good name.”

  “Her reputation, I mean,” said Mr Butterfield. “Mary’s reputation was gone. After all, who’s going to marry a girl who is already expecting someone else’s baby? And who’s going to believe a girl who says she’s been talking to an angel?”

  “Joseph must’ve,” suggested the boy.

  “Must he indeed? Must he?” said Mr Butterfield with an I-know-better sort of look. “If you think that, you’re quite mistaken.”

  Expecting a child?

  Joseph was appalled. That spotless, devout, modest young girl everyone spoke so well of was expecting a child? The girl he was supposed to marry? Well, not any more. Joseph’s chisel dug into the wood he was carving as if he were cutting Mary out of his heart. No marriage for him.

  “A wife like that you can do without!” said his mother that evening, wagging her head, wagging her hands.

  Then Joseph dreamed a dream. It cut into his sleep like the teeth of a saw, it was so real. It burnt through his closed eyelids and blinded him, it was so bright.

  “Don’t be afraid to marry Mary,” said the angel in his dream. “She has done nothing wrong. The child inside her was placed there by God. He trusts her; so should you. Marry Mary.”

  The dream trickled out of Joseph’s head like sawdust from a lathe. But the joy and the fear remained. Joseph lay on his bed staring at the ceiling. He would marry Mary: a woman more perfect than even he had realized. But now, of course, she would never be entirely his for, first and foremost, she and the child inside her belonged to God.

  And what a responsibility! To raise and clothe and feed and educate the Son of God? A tall order for a simple village carpenter. Joseph was late opening his workshop that morning.

  “So he was a carpenter, just like you!” said the boy.

  “Oh no, lad,” said Mr Butterfield with a sad little smile. “Nothing like me. For one thing, he had a son to look after, didn’t he?”

  JUMPING FOR JOY

  The boy pinched up some sawdust from the floor and trickled it into his shirt pocket.

  “Your mother won’t thank you for that when it comes to washday,” said Mr Butterfield.

  “She won’t mind. She’ll think it’s sand. She says it’s like the souvenir of the holiday: the sand in the suitcase… If you met an angel, Mr Butterfield, would you be happy or scared?”

  “A bit of both, I suppose. A bit of each. Like Mary.” And on he went with his story.

  Mary went to visit her cousin Elizabeth – two women, both expecting a baby, both with extraordinary stories to tell. Anyway, pregnant women always have things to talk about: names and worries, clothes and hopes, feeding and fears, sickness, birth and happiness… But even before they met – even as Elizabeth walked up the path to Mary’s door – their children were already in touch.

  The first Elizabeth knew of her cousin’s visit was a riot of joy inside her. Her baby seemed to be leaping and kicking, like King David when he danced before the Lord! Elizabeth hurried outside into the garden, puzzled but laughing and clutching her sides. And there stood her cousin Mary, smiling.

  “He knows! My baby knows! He sensed it!” Elizabeth gasped. “Mary! Mary! Blessings on you! The blessings of every mother in the world are on you now and on your unborn baby! Feel! Feel! As you came near, the baby inside me turned somersaults for pure joy!”

  Mary laid her hands on her cousin’s stomach. (Her own baby’s movements were still too tiny to be felt.) It was like a magnet turning towards north. It was like a weathercock turning in the wind. It was like the oceans being tugged to and fro by the moon. The child in Elizabeth’s womb, sensing the closeness of Mary’s baby, turned in his watery world and reached out a hand. This other child
was why he would struggle into the light of day. Here was his reason to live.

  “Oh, Mary!” cried Elizabeth. “My baby is jumping for joy!”

  “That’s John,” said the boy. “The baby who’s leaping for joy? That’s the baby who has to be called John, right? Angel’s orders.”

  “Angel’s orders,” Mr Butterfield agreed. “But nobody knows that yet. Remember: old Zechariah hasn’t been able to speak a word ever since that shock in the Temple…”

  “Scary,” said the boy, and waited.

  “People fret about you when you get older,” said Mr Butterfield a few minutes later. “I dare say they fretted about Zechariah.”

  “Because he wouldn’t speak?”

  “Yes, and because he was behaving oddly, too, I suppose. I’m only guessing, mind.”

  “It would make you behave oddly,” the boy agreed. “A thing like that.”

  Zechariah’s family fretted about him, for he was old and frail. For nine months now, he had been unable to speak. They just prayed God would spare him long enough to see his son born.

  But Zechariah was not sick. He had lost the power of speech, it is true, but illness had not taken it from him. God had silenced him – but he had given him something far more wonderful in return: a son.

  The time came for the child to be named. The neighbours expected him to bear his father’s name, but Zechariah wrote wildly on the air.

  “Look!” said the neighbours. “He wants to say something! Fetch the wax tablet and the stylus.”

  Then Zechariah wrote, “His name is John.”

  Like the Red Sea splashing back onto its dry seabed, words spilled back into Zechariah’s throat. “His name is John,” he said, again and again. “His name is John. His name is John! His name is John!!” Then he ran to the window and bellowed it into the street, so that a whole flock of doves flew up from the roof opposite: “HIS NAME IS JOHN!”

  The church rang with noise. A starling fluttered about in the organ loft. The death-watch beetles fell silent. Mr Butterfield’s chisel began to peck away at the Jesse tree like a spring woodpecker. Suddenly he could picture exactly in his mind how the bough should look…

  “That’s my name,” said the boy. “John.”

  “Is that a fact?” said the old man, but he was paying such attention to his work that it was hard to say if he had heard or not. Tongues of wood curled from under the tip of his chisel, as if they were shaping themselves into words. He worked on, rounding foreheads, creasing robes into pleats and folds. He worked like a man inspired. He did not notice when the boy slipped away, seeing as he did only the grain of the wood and the wood shavings falling to the ground like the moulted feathers of angels.

  THE WORST OF ALL POSSIBLE TIMES

  “Seems funny,” said the boy, appearing as if from nowhere. “You doing Christmas at this time of year.”

  Outside the church, the sun was fiercely bright. The stained-glass windows blazed blue and red and yellow, as colourful as beach huts. Fairground music floated in at the open door. “That is the next story, isn’t it? Christmas?”

  “It is,” said the carpenter. “Daresay you don’t need me to tell you any more. Everyone knows the Christmas story.”

  “Tell it anyway,” said John, and Mr Butterfield did not put up much of a fight.

  The road was rough, the light was failing. More than once, the donkey stumbled over a rut in the ground. “God will take care of everything,” said Mary, but Joseph was not so sure. The journey could not have come at a worse time. Mary’s baby might be born at any time; she ought to be resting at home, not clinging to the lurching back of a donkey mile after tiring mile.

  But the Romans (who had recently made Israel part of their empire) wanted to count the exact number of people in their newly conquered territory. So they had ordered everyone to travel to their home town and register their names. For Joseph and Mary, that meant travelling to Bethlehem, a small town not far from Jerusalem.

  The donkey pitched and rolled. As the roofs of Bethlehem came into sight, the unborn baby flexed his muscles. “It’s almost time,” said Mary, biting her lip.

  A bed. A bed. Joseph must find somewhere for his wife to rest! But the crowds pushed past like a river breaking round an island. The town was full to bursting! Inside the clattering inn, Joseph had to shout to make himself heard. “A bed? Do you have a bed for my wife?”

  “You are joking, aren’t you?” said the innkeeper. “Not so much as a shelf! The whole tribe of David is in Bethlehem tonight.”

  Joseph’s panic rose. If God really was taking care of everything, he did not seem to be making a very good job of it. “But her child! The baby! It’s coming!”

  The innkeeper glanced outside at the woman crouched on the ground beside her donkey. “There’s always the stable, I suppose… It’s not much, but it’s shelter. May God be good to you both, my friend. Your baby picked a bad time to be born.”

  Across the yard the noise from the inn died down; its lamps went out. The only light in the stable came from a wick floating in a bowl of oil. Its flame danced in the eyes of the animals as they watched Joseph rake together a bed of straw. Their ears tilted; the flies settled on their nostrils, but they went on watching, motionless. For the woman was giving birth, and all animals understand the wonder of that.

  “No snow, then,” said the boy. “There’s always snow in the pictures.”

  “Probably more flies than snow in that part of the world. Flies on the cattle, flies on the donkeys, flies on the dirty straw. People mostly paint it all cosy-looking, with a row of cuddly animals. But that was the whole point, wasn’t it? That the Son of God would be born in an ordinary down-to-earth place. That the Maker of the universe would squeeze himself into one, tiny, frail, ordinary, flesh-and-blood human being!

  “Must’ve been a happy time, though. I picture the stars pulsing overhead, and the planets spinning like Catherine wheels, and the moon grinning, while the constellations did somersaults across the dark sky!”

  The old man and the boy looked at one another. Both of them smiled.

  “Flies have thousands of lenses in their eyes,” said the boy. “They see everything thousands of times over. If there were all those flies… imagine what the flies saw, Mr Butterfield. Imagine!”

  WONDERFUL NEWS

  “So there was a sheep in the stable, too, was there?” said the boy. “You’ve carved a sheep.”

  Mr Butterfield held a finger against the side of his nose and winked. “Ah! You don’t put sheep in a stable. This sheep was out of doors,” he said.

  Just up the way – outside town, beyond a fold or two of hills – some shepherds were sitting on a hillside, all huddled up in their cloaks against the midnight cold. They nodded and dozed.

  Then all of a sudden, a light fell through the sky: a shooting star – that’s what they thought. But the light grew bigger, formed itself into a shape, hurtled down on them, closer and closer. An eagle after the sheep! one thought, and fumbled for his slingshot.

  Then the light washed over them, and the sheep glowed snowy white in the brightness, and the shepherds folded their arms over their heads and fell on their faces.

  “Don’t be afraid,” called the figure hanging in mid-air on outstretched wings. “Wonderful news! Wonderful! The Saviour of the world is born!” The shepherds lifted first one eyelid, then two. The sheep were gazing upwards, too, yellow eyes changed to gold. “Over there! In Bethlehem! Lying in a cattle manger!” cried the angel. “Go and see for yourselves!” Within a single beat of his outspread wings, the angel was no longer alone. Others, as numberless as starlings at dusk, were there with him, hovering, silvery and singing, high over the sheepy hill: “GLORY TO GOD! PEACE TO HIS PEOPLE ON EARTH!” The singing was as loud as cheering, and there was a kind of music, too, as if someone was using the moon for a gong and was jangling all the stars.

  Higher and higher the angel flock flew, shrinking to the size and brightness of fireflies. Darkness washed back again over
the landscape in a flood. The sheep shuddered.

  But the shepherds were already leaping and loping downhill, stumbling into rabbit holes, laughing and shouting out to one another, “Let’s go and see!”

  “Wait till I tell the wife!”

  “Wait till I tell my children!”

  Mr Butterfield rested his hand on his carving of the manger. “They say the animals spoke on the night Jesus was born. But if they did, they spoke very softly: there was the baby to think of, after all…”

  Joseph had stuffed clean straw into the animals’ feed box, and laid the newborn child in that, for a makeshift cradle. Mary was exhausted, but she didn’t get much sleep that night. The baby had just been laid in the manger when the shepherds arrived. Sandals slapping in the yard, eyes still full of light, they bundled inside, noisy with excitement – then suddenly clapped their hands over their mouths, dumbstruck.

  They hadn’t realized it would be like this: a mucky stable, an ordinary family caught in a crisis – people just like them. The baby looked as small and as feeble as any newborn lamb. And yet for this, those angelic hosts, those creatures of light, those heavenly messengers had sung and danced across the sky, dazzling the dark!

  Shyly the shepherds explained themselves, twisting their fingers into nervous knots, apologizing. Then they knelt down, before their trembling knees could give way. And their eyes and minds drank in the wonder of it – that they had been fetched by angels to see this newborn baby king.

  “You tell it as if you were there,” said the boy.

  “While I’m carving this shepherd and his sheep, I am there. That’s why it’s such a treat and a blessing, my line of work.”

  “But your shepherd wasn’t a relation. Jesus wasn’t related to any shepherd – unless you count King David.”