Poisoned Honey

by Beatrice Gormley

  Tobias flushed, but he kept his tone even. “I see your point. I’ll pay the Romans’ portion, but if you could see your way to letting me defer your cut … I can pay you just as soon as my buyer in Sepphoris pays me for the last shipment.”

  Alphaeus shook his head and folded his arms. Tobias hesitated, then drew out his money pouch and counted the full amount of coins into the tax collector’s hand.

  As the sardine packer left, followed by dockworkers carrying his salt, Alphaeus turned to Matthew. “What did you learn just now, son?”

  Matthew said slowly, “I learned not to pay attention when they try to make you feel sorry for them.”

  “Good boy!” His father beamed and rumpled his hair. “They’ll tell you anything to try to get out of paying.” Matthew said nothing, but he wondered: Was the sardine packer just trying to get out of paying the harbor tax? Or was he really short on money because he was helping his fishermen’s families?

  “Another thing you should understand,” continued Alphaeus, “is that the Romans rule the world. All the lands around the Great Sea, from the Pillars of Hercules to Damascus. That’s the one big fact you have to know in this life: keep on the good side of the Romans.”

  “What about Herod Antipas?” asked Matthew.

  His father nodded. “Herod Antipas … oh, we have to give him all due respect. The Romans let him rule over Galilee like a rooster on a dung heap and peck the maggots out of it. But he’ll go too far one of these days, and then …” Alphaeus made a gesture of wringing a rooster’s neck.

  Matthew didn’t like to think of Galilee—their homeland—as a dung heap, but he didn’t protest.

  While Matthew worked hard to learn Alphaeus’s business, his younger brother, James, was a disappointment to their father. James would rather hang around the rabbi’s house, reading and talking to the teacher, than learn how to collect taxes. In fact, James began to quote Scripture that criticized Alphaeus’s teachings. One day he recited to his father, “It is you who have devoured the vineyard, the spoil of the poor is in your houses. ‘What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor?’ says the Lord God of hosts.”

  Matthew, amazed and horrified, thought their father might throttle his brother. But Alphaeus only cuffed James on the side of the head. “Don’t you quote Scripture at me! Who do you think paid for you to take lessons, you insolent brat?”

  James sullenly learned to do the accounts for Alphaeus, but he never learned to stomach the tax collector’s business. Alphaeus hoped James would come around sooner or later, but Matthew knew he wouldn’t. James was stubborn as a donkey. He told Matthew, “I’d rather be a common laborer than a tax collector. Haven’t you noticed the way people shun us?”

  “You mean the holier-than-thou folk in the synagogue?” said Matthew.

  “I mean righteous Jews, like Elder Thomas and the rest of the council,” said James. “They’d rather welcome lepers into the congregation than someone who helps the Romans to oppress us.”

  “Abba says the Romans have the right to collect a harbor tax because they’re the ones who built the lighthouse,” argued Matthew.

  “Yes—they built it by forcing our people to do the construction work,” said James. “And where do you think the fuel for the beacon comes from? They make the peasants on Mount Arbel take time out from tending their vineyards to deliver wood. Better for all the harbors in Galilee to be dark than to be lit by Roman fires!”

  Matthew could see, without James’s pointing it out, how the Jews of Magdala felt about Alphaeus and his sons. At the Sabbath meetings, Elder Thomas was more gracious to the Gentiles who came to listen, standing respectfully in the back of the hall, than he was to the tax collector. Other members of the congregation would glance at Alphaeus, then pointedly turn away. Once, as Matthew, James, and their father walked into the meeting hall, Matthew heard someone mutter a line from Scripture at their backs: “‘If one turns his ear away from hearing the law, even his prayer is an abomination.’”

  One day, when Matthew was eighteen and James was sixteen, news came from Tiberias that Herod Antipas had executed a popular traveling preacher, John the Baptizer. At dinner, James was trembling with outrage. “John only spoke the truth: Antipas should not have divorced his wife to marry his brother’s wife. It’s against the Law.”

  “It’s not our concern, is it?” asked Matthew in surprise. “We don’t live in Tiberias.”

  “But we’re all Jews,” exclaimed James. His eyes were blazing. “Either we’re a faithful nation or we aren’t.”

  Alphaeus waved his hand, dismissing the question. “A wandering preacher has no right telling our ruler what to do. He should have left that up to the Jewish council of Tiberias. Insulting the ruler and his wife is … why, it’s close to treason.” He dipped bread into the dish of stew and chewed.

  “How can you eat, Father?” James burst out. “It’s a day for fasting and mourning. Our ruler has murdered a holy man. As it is written, ‘How the faithful city is become a harlot, she that was full of justice! Righteousness lodged in her, but now murderers.’”

  Matthew laughed, almost choking on a mouthful of food. “Are you calling Tiberias, Herod Antipas’s capital, a faithful city?”

  “The ‘faithful city’ is a poetic symbol for the Jewish people, as you’d know if you paid any attention to the rabbi,” said his brother. Matthew had never seen James so grim; it was frightening.

  Alphaeus scowled. “James, eat. There’s no reason to mourn the death of a fool. What did this John expect? Herod Antipas is always on edge about rebels. John talked like a rebel, and he got crowds of people to follow him. Antipas had to have him killed. Even if the tetrarch wasn’t personally offended by John’s insults, he had to show the Romans that he was in control.”

  That made sense to Matthew, but he could see that James wasn’t listening. Under his father’s eye, James pretended to eat a little, but he sat through dinner staring at the carpet. In the morning, he had disappeared.

  James left a note on his bed, scribbled on a piece of broken clay pot. Matthew had never learned to read as well as James, but he could make out that his brother was quoting the prophet Ezekiel. And the message was simple enough: “‘The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father.’”

  Alphaeus stormed into the synagogue and complained to the elders, accusing the rabbi of turning James against him. He demanded to know where James had gone. The elders questioned the rabbi, a quiet, scholarly man; he was distressed but claimed to know nothing. When Alphaeus began to shout, Elder Thomas called the guards and ordered him to leave.

  Later, they heard that James had made his way south to the Dead Sea and joined a religious sect. Alphaeus ordered that his name never be mentioned again. Matthew could see that his father was more hurt than angry, but that made Matthew all the angrier at James. He wanted to shout at his absent brother, “If you’re so fond of Scripture, why didn’t you remember ‘Honor your father’?”

  Alphaeus stopped attending Sabbath prayer meeting at the synagogue, and so of course, Matthew didn’t attend, either. He was relieved not to have to walk into that hall full of unfriendly faces anymore, but he missed hearing the Sabbath readings. Sometimes on a weekday, he’d stop by the synagogue and listen to the scholars who gathered on the porch to debate points of Scripture. He’d wonder, What would James say about that prophecy? or How would James interpret that law?

  One morning several months after James disappeared, Matthew started to leave the house for his father’s tax office. Opening the courtyard door, he noticed several wet globs on the doorstep. He just had time to recognize them as spit when he saw the two girls on a donkey paused in front of the house. The girl in front, about thirteen, was leaning over, but she raised her head and looked straight at him for an instant.

  Before the girl could also spit on his doorstep, Matthew slammed the door shut. Somehow, the scorn of this maiden, with her fresh, passionate face, upset him more than censure from Eld
er Thomas. Matthew admitted to himself a shameful secret: he wished he were not the son of Alphaeus the tax collector.

  FOUR

  LIKE RACHEL AND JACOB

  At first, I thought often about the night Miryam appeared to me. It seemed urgent to honor the vision, but what was the path that no one could choose for me? How should I follow it?

  It must have to do with the way I saw and heard things differently from others. Miryam had found a well in the desert for her people, water that they needed but couldn’t find for themselves. So maybe I, too, could find something precious for others—with the eyes and ears of my soul.

  Meanwhile, to my relief, my father did refuse old Eleazar’s offer for me. I heard my uncle reproach Abba for losing the profitable sardine business with the palace in Tiberias. Evidently, that would have been part of Eleazar’s offer, or at least Uncle Reuben thought so.

  My mother had no doubt about the path I should follow, or that it was her duty to push me along it. Now that I was old enough to marry, she watched me all the time. I’d always been a fairly well-behaved girl, except for flights of imagination, and I wasn’t used to being scolded.

  But these days, it seemed, my mother’s eyebrows drew together every time she caught sight of me. “Don’t run up the steps, Mariamne. Walk.” Or “When you speak to your father, don’t meet his gaze but cast your eyes down. Likewise with Alexandros.”

  “Alexandros?” I said in disbelief. “He’s my brother, and he’s only three years older than I am.” With growing indignation, I added, “Why should I respect him, when he never even learned his lessons properly?”

  “But Alexandros is a man,” said my mother sharply. “And you are a maiden. You need to get in the habit of being more modest with any man.”

  One afternoon, after my mother had corrected me six times in a row, I ran to my grandmother to complain. “Imma hates me! Nothing I do is right!” I paced in front of her with clenched hands. “Why should I treat my brother like a prince? He doesn’t deserve it.”

  “Soften your voice, Mari dear!” My grandmother caught one hand and straightened my fingers, stroking them. “Tabitha is only worried for your sake. You know your father is looking for a suitable match for you, don’t you? When he finds one—before long—there will be a meeting of the families. The groom’s family will watch your every movement, and if your behavior isn’t perfect, they may call the match off. You have to do your part, you know. You can’t do just as you please and expect to get a good husband.”

  This was a sobering thought. I was quiet for a moment. Then I said, “If I could choose a husband myself—”

  “Hush!” exclaimed my grandmother. “You must put that thought out of your mind, Mariamne. Put it right out.” She sounded almost as stern as my mother. “You’ll make yourself miserable, thinking that way.”

  “I was only going to say, I would choose a man like Abba, but young.”

  “Ah, well.” Safta’s face mellowed. “My son Tobias is a dear man. The Lord blessed me when he gave me such a son. Tobias is not at all like his father, may the man rest in peace. Or like your uncle Reuben.”

  “Or like Alexandros,” I added. It was true—my brother was more like our uncle than like our father.

  My grandmother’s advice made sense, so I tried my best to behave even more modestly. It wasn’t easy. The very next day, my cousin Susannah sent a servant to invite us to meet a visitor. And what a visitor! She was a foreigner, a wise woman named Ramla of Alexandria, Susannah’s servant told my mother.

  Overhearing from the rooftop, I ran down the stairs to join my mother at the courtyard gate. Alexandria was in Egypt. I’d heard things about Egypt that were hard to believe. Egypt was a vast land, they said, with a single enormous river, as wide as our lake and so long that no one knew where it began. At the mouth of the river, where it met the Great Sea, they said there was a lighthouse ten times as tall as the one at Magdala, with a beacon brighter than the sun. The Egyptian kings had tombs the size of Mount Arbel.

  Not only that, but the people worshiped outlandish gods, stranger than those of the Greeks and Romans. One god had a jackal’s head. One goddess had the form of a hippopotamus. All this made me wildly curious to meet Ramla of Alexandria.

  But my mother sent the servant back with a polite refusal. “Of course we can’t go,” said Imma. “It isn’t seemly for Jewish maidens to show interest in Gentiles. Especially a Gentile who trafficks with the occult.”

  “Oh, surely not the occult, Tabitha,” protested my grandmother. “Our Susannah is a good, pious young woman, and she’s receiving the Egyptian in her home.”

  “Still, Susannah is a married woman, and she doesn’t have to be as careful as a maiden. We can’t have it rumored that Mariamne’s family is careless about the company she keeps.”

  Ordinarily, I would have begged my mother to reconsider, and even burst into tears from disappointment. But with an effort, I turned and walked quietly back up the stairs. I was proud of my self-control, and that almost made up for missing the Egyptian wise woman.

  A few weeks later, my family decided on a match for me. He was a young man named Nicolaos, of a family of dyers like Susannah’s husband, Silas. On the next Sabbath, Imma pointed him out to me in the synagogue.

  I could hardly believe my luck! Of all the young men I’d noticed, I liked the way Nicolaos looked the best. He had fine dark eyebrows that met in the middle, and curly dark hair with a short beard to match. Watching him talking with his older brother, I noticed that an endearing crease appeared in his cheek when he smiled.

  Since I’d been on my best behavior lately, my mother was more relaxed with me. She chatted on, pointing out a woman sitting with Eleazar bar Yohannes. “That’s Chava, Eleazar’s widowed daughter-in-law. She must be glad that we didn’t accept Eleazar’s offer. Everyone knows that Chava wants him to marry her niece, that girl beside her.”

  I peered over at Chava, whose long face reminded me of a sheep’s. Her niece, a girl about my age, looked like a younger version of Chava. Maybe that girl wouldn’t mind marrying old Eleazar. “Why doesn’t he offer for her, then?”

  “She has only a small dowry. Our family can afford much more, and of course, our sardine business would have been a profitable connection. And the girl herself is no great beauty.” My mother gave me a glance, hesitated, and finally spoke again. “I shouldn’t say this to you, and I don’t want you to let it go to your head. Nicolaos’s older brother told our people that Nicolaos thought you were quite pleasing to behold.”

  “Imma!” I hugged her, dizzy with excitement. This was such a new idea to me, that I was a maiden that a young man could be pleased—quite pleased—to behold.

  “There, now.” My mother seemed glad, but she disentangled herself and said, “As the proverb goes, ‘Like a gold ring in a swine’s snout is a beautiful woman without discretion.’”

  If I hadn’t been so excited, I might have resented that proverb. Pigs were disgusting, filthy animals. Gentiles like the Romans raised them and ate them, but Jews would have nothing to do with them. Pigs stank. They snuffled and rooted through garbage with their snouts.

  Imma straightened her head scarf, then mine. “Shh. The lector’s going to read.”

  I folded my hands in my lap and tried to listen while the lector read from the Scripture scroll in Hebrew. But my skin tingled all over; my head buzzed. I could hardly pay attention, even when the lector translated the passage into Aramaic so that the congregation could understand.

  Then a verse of a psalm sounded faintly through the buzzing in my head: “The earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.” That was important. I needed to pay attention.

  Gazing around the congregation, I was sure that most of them were not paying attention, either. They looked discontented, or worried, or even bored. I wanted to shout, “Listen! The earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord!”

  Of course, if I did shout out this good news, I would only disgrace myself and my family. Nico
laos’s family would surely not want me for his bride. Nicolaos … Nicolaos thought I was quite pleasing to behold. The tingling crept over my skin again.

  Soon after that Sabbath, a first meeting between Nicolaos’s family and my family was arranged. One afternoon, we put on our best robes, as if we were going to the synagogue, and Imma carefully chose earrings for me and draped my shawl. We walked up the main avenue and through a maze of lanes to the dyers’ neighborhood.

  As Nicolaos’s family welcomed us to their rooftop and seated us under the awning, I noted Nicolaos from the corner of my eye. I dared not look straight at him; I had to keep on behaving modestly, at least until we were betrothed. Nicolaos’s mother sat down beside me and struck up a conversation. I tried to pay attention, although everyone else on the rooftop seemed small and far away compared with Nicolaos.

  Across the rooftop, my father and uncle were talking to Nicolaos and his older brother, Thaddaios. Nicolaos seemed to be paying as little attention to them as I was to his mother. I was aware of him looking at me, then quickly looking away again.

  I really have no idea what I said to Nicolaos’s mother that afternoon, and no one told me what Nicolaos said to Abba and Uncle Reuben, either. But both sides must have been satisfied because the next day the marriage contract was drawn up, and shortly after that, we celebrated the betrothal. If I thought it was exciting just to be in the same room with Nicolaos … well, to stand right next to him! His eyes were hazel, I discovered, with long lashes. To look into those eyes … to drink from the same cup as we pledged our troth!

  I felt my body glowing, so that I was afraid everyone in the room could see. Nicolaos’s hand shook, and he sounded breathless as he pronounced the words. For just an instant, I noticed my brother’s eyes on me, and I wished I didn’t have to share this private moment of my life with him.