This Is Why I Came

by Mary Rakow

  In that profession of Elizabeth, whom she loved, the rocking boat in which Mary found herself began to settle.

  “My soul magnifies the Lord,” Mary began, testing how it felt, “and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. . . .” The more she spoke, the more her own words lifted her up from fear. “Behold, all generations will call me blessed because he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name.” She spoke as if almost knowing that the voice she had so often heard was not dangerous but was God’s voice.

  WHEN THEY TOLD Zachariah what they had come to believe, he withdrew to his room and when he emerged, still struck with muteness, he wrote questions for Mary. “Is this true?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  He scribbled the words faster. “You have not been with Joseph?”

  “I haven’t been with any man.”

  A firm silence fell over the room, sober and dark. They were all thinking the same thing. “If Joseph doesn’t believe and marry me, I will be killed,” she said.

  Zachariah looked down at the bony white knuckles of his hands and wrote, slowly, with great care, “I will protect you.”

  “Go home now and tell Joseph,” Elizabeth said. “Prepare him.”

  THROUGH THE HILLS Mary walked slowly this time, to cleave to what Elizabeth and Zachariah had given her. That armor.

  By the time she reached home, Elizabeth’s child had been born, and, as foretold, it was a boy. In obedience they named him John and speech returned to Zachariah.

  Things beyond nature were everywhere happening. Courage would now be the new demand. In this she felt united with holy women everywhere. She heard a woman singing from the future,

  O most steadfast path.

  O mail-coat of hope.

  O sword-belt of honesty.

  She called bravely to the Angel Gabriel who came in haste. “See before you,” she instructed, as one raising her shield, “the handmaid of the Lord.”

  4

  Joseph’s Decision

  HE’D MISSED HER. Gone three months and no word. He groomed his hair, his fingernails. “She’s coming to me,” he told himself, “the Queen of Galilee.”

  But she was pregnant when she returned from the hill country and the only thing he knew for certain was that he was not the father.

  It was God’s child? She was talking to angels now? Even the details didn’t make sense. She went without saying good-bye, didn’t tell him or her parents but had just run away.

  “Look at my hands, my feet,” he exclaimed. “I’m a practical man! What am I to do?”

  It felt new to call himself “a practical man,” new to call himself a man at all. His father had been encouraging him to become more independent, stronger, more reliable, and he had tried to grow into this for his father’s sake. He was engaged, he and Mary would have many children, he would stop drifting and apply himself to his trade. He would build a large family table with many leaves and Mary would learn to cook, making large pots of lentils, soups and stews. He could picture it. Mary would even teach him to read and teach their children to read, one by one. He would make beautiful, useful objects of wood, writing desks, fine cases, and his business would prosper. Knowing well the various trees and their distinct properties, the work of his life would glorify God and bring honor to his family. But he was not prepared for this.

  He unfolded the drawing his father had made for him, of a boy his own age, also sixteen, saying, “He’s just like you.” Joseph held the picture and practiced standing in front of the mirror being that boy, David with Goliath, his hand on his hip, as if he had no fear. He practiced the boy’s cocky pose, the slingshot, the soft boots, the sword, and stood a long time until he could really feel the doubts fall at his feet. His father had drawn the slingshot but also a sword, explaining, “Just in case the stone misses its mark.” Then added, “Courage is required for every other virtue, Joseph. Remember that.”

  For many nights he kept to himself and Mary was shaken by it, her life in the balance and the baby’s life, too. But she knew it was his habit to make difficult decisions in sleep and silence, waiting for the authoritative voice that was not his own, the familiar voice that had never done him ill. Living on the film of his dreams.

  As he stood practicing bravery, Joseph began to feel supported as if by a sturdy platform made of wood. The platform lifted him and Mary over this difficult time and into another, where they were a bit older, he maybe twenty and Mary nineteen. Mary was again like a dream to him, his queen, alive and real. All the confusion fell away. In fact, everything fell away except that he loved her. And she desperately needed to be believed.

  And he came out of his room and returned to her. Not twenty and nineteen but sixteen and fifteen. It didn’t matter. They held each other and, girded with gladness, flew out of the familiar into the great unknown.

  5

  The Nativity of Jesus

  JOSEPH SAT APART, in a corner. Not because the midwives wanted him out of the way, he’d found them past midnight, frantically knocking on doors, and they’d come quickly, but because doubt had returned and he wasn’t ready for it. The journey had been difficult, then shepherds came saying angels were singing in the sky. Nothing was simple, nothing within the reach of his understanding.

  He’d called the day they married Bright Friday. It was his favorite day of the week, then Bright Saturday, Bright Sunday. He reasoned, she sees behind a membrane and I don’t. I see what’s in front of me. She sees the transparent structure of the world and I can’t see it. Maybe that’s why we’re perfect for each other. Besides, we love the same God. That will be enough.

  But now the room smelled foul even though he’d washed everything down with buckets of clean water. He’d wanted cleanliness. Then privacy. Now he wanted Mary to look stronger than she did, more able to bring other children into the world. He wished her hips were wider, her breasts more full. Birth from a virgin is not possible, and he wondered when the true father would show up. It could be one of the shepherds for all he knew. Maybe they mocked him.

  If God gives us love, why not the necessary courage to sustain it? If God gives courage, why isn’t it permanent?

  HE STARED AT his knees and did not see Mary, who looked away from the baby and across to him. She felt the presence of his doubts and their power. Afraid, she wondered, are we no longer us? In a brief moment of sleep, Joseph walked toward her. He was an old man and as he walked white powder fell from his elbows and knees. She woke with a jolt. The baby was crying. Something is disintegrating, she thought. He is leaving us.

  6

  Mary Loving-kindness

  WHEN SHE HELD Jesus on her knee and he reached his arm around her neck, Mary felt flooded with melancholy she could not account for, a profound foreknowledge of sorrow for which she had no empirical evidence. She saw that what she’d given her son by giving him her body was suffering. And she grieved not only for herself, her son and husband, but for all of creation, the cat outside, the cucumbers sliced in the bowl, the great fish in the sea, vulture and crow, for every person, for lovers, for every child born and yet to come. Grieved for the entire world in all its soiled history and crippled future because suffering was an inalienable element of the world’s order and because it was incurable.

  From that day on, she resolved to pray hourly for all of creation, the reptiles and insects, the flowers and birds, for those she loved and for those she did not love.

  IN TIME A startling vision came to her that was unlike anything she’d ever seen with her eyes. Two hands very near each other. Hers and her son’s. And she could not reach him.

  THE VISION CAME often so she began to pray for those who would hurt her son and for the enemies of truth. Eventually she was able to pray that her son’s enemies, sure that he would have them, would also be preserved and be shown mercy.

  She prepared herself, and she would also prepare him.

  “What is the price of salvation?” she asked Jesus as he grew, until one day he answered,
“Death.”

  And she said, “Yes.”

  7

  Epiphany

  SHE WAS AFRAID when she heard the commotion outside, looked through the latch, and waited. Joseph gone, the moon too bright and, opening the door, she saw that there was no moon.

  “My husband will be home any minute,” she said. The men looked wise and exotic so she added, “He’s a dreamer,” hoping they would think more highly of him, and then invited them in. They brought fruitcakes, berries, sweet wine in bottles, gold coins, incense, a bracelet for her. The myrrh she refused.

  “No, take it to anoint the dead,” one said.

  “I know what it’s for,” she snapped, remembering how she’d anointed her mother.

  “No,” he insisted, pointing to the boy on the floor surrounded by the new toys, a wooden sword, a ball, a kite. He set it on the table anyway. She would remove it the next day, take it to the riverbank, bury it in the mud.

  “IT WAS A miracle,” she told Joseph. “They came from so far away!”

  He lay down. “What did they want? The neighbors said they were wealthy. Like kings.” When he looked at her bracelet, she realized they’d brought nothing for him. “I wish I’d been home,” he offered.

  She wanted him to decipher the meaning of the visit for her. “Is it a warning?” He shook his head. “I don’t know. Did they have wives? Families?”

  “They didn’t say.”

  “And they knew you?”

  “They were looking for him,” she pointed to the young boy.

  He has my co-ordination, Joseph thought, seeing how skillfully their son held the ball. It was a small idea but that’s why he liked it, a resting place in what had become another conversation he did not understand.

  To be an accessory was not a new feeling. He’d felt it when they took Jesus to the temple as an infant. Mary walked ahead holding their baby as if he were hers only, and he followed with nothing but the turtledoves.

  From the day the wealthy men came, Joseph oscillated between two interpretations of his life which could not both be true at the same time. And there was no third position. Either the God of Abraham and Isaac had somehow joined himself to the body of his son, his loveable son, or his wife had an imagination that was possibly dangerous. Dangerous for a small boy, putting ridiculous ideas in his head. A woman from whom he should protect his son.

  He watched as Mary bathed the boy and dressed him for bed, the cloth tiger, the sword, the puppets, the clutter of it a comfort and in the clutter of objects he tried to find peace. In the smoothness of Mary’s arms, her thin waist, she seemed, again, too frail and good to abandon. Tonight he would not go away to think. He would stay home, with them.

  He and Mary fell asleep in each other’s arms. But Joseph woke shaking. His dream was full of wailing, galloping horses and blood.

  8

  The Slaying of Infants

  TRASH CANS KICKED over, a door slammed, screaming. Then another voice, one she recognized. The woman with twins. Mary lit the candle, opened the door. A third scream from the butcher’s house. Soldiers on horseback. Blood in the street. Lamps coming on all down the block. Screams from the house behind. The slap of leather on flesh. Shadows of horses running across the sides of the houses. And then they were gone. Like horses of the apocalypse, Mary thought.

  In daylight all was still. Men and women and children, as if frozen, stared at the street. No blood on the lintels. None on the doors. It wasn’t the angel of death. They were soldiers with blankets under their saddles and shields. No one spoke. No one ate. No one moved into action. For days blood lay unanswered in the street.

  In almost every house, a dead child and a living one. And all the dead children were boys. All of them young. Older brothers and sisters sleepwalking, dazed, one boy laughed uncontrollably, holding his pet mouse, stroking it.

  A WEEK LATER she woke in a pool of blood. It was true, then, she had been with child. Glistening and motionless, she held it in the palm of her hand. It would have been a brother.

  It was weeks, when a skin of normalcy returned, that the smart girl did the calculations. Only boys were murdered and only those two years old or younger. The age Jesus had been. By rumor and calculation, pieces were assembled. The order had come down from Herod himself.

  “IT WASN’T OUR fault,” Joseph repeated.

  “But our son was saved and none of the others his age. We were lucky. You had that dream.”

  Joseph tried to be patient but she’d spoken this way for months, demanding that he console her, demanding that he say again, “It had nothing to do with us.” But it didn’t help. She would say, “It’s because of us,” whenever the temperature dropped and the air felt like that night’s air. Or the jasmine smelled outside the window as it had that night. Or the stars aligned in the same way.

  The families who lost one son and those who lost two threw rocks at their door. At the well, women locked arms forming a barricade so that she fetched water at noon in the sweltering sun when no one was there.

  Their outrage did not fade. “We saw our sons murdered and you miscarried!” the women taunted her. “We’ve all miscarried plenty!” In this the older women chimed in, even the grandmothers, drawing on memory.

  Some days Mary wanted neither marriage nor motherhood. Thought, if this is holiness, I don’t want any part of it. Unable to feel compassion, unable to forgive, she called out to Joseph, “I don’t want to be here anymore!” and Joseph thought, I have nothing left to give you.

  “WHY DIDN’T YOU warn us?” the men boycotted his workshop, no customers came so there was, suddenly, no income, just what was left of the gold.

  Shunned in public, forbidden to attend the funerals of the slain, Joseph took his goods to other villages where he was not known, but his business did not grow. He found work making small repairs, a stuck drawer, a weakened table leg, a broken gate.

  FROM THE CABINET behind the stove she took some of the gold and traveled to Jerusalem where she bought a costly garment. She put it on and stood in front of the mirror. It changed nothing. She wanted to feel innocent and could not.

  There would be no more pregnancies. She and Joseph felt unable to be sexual, unable to risk more unhappiness, unable to find in the body of the other either pleasure or solace. The table he built lay almost empty and more children would not come. Over the years he would take the leaves and chop them to kindling.

  9

  The Murder of Zachariah

  WORD CAME FROM the hill country. On the same night that Jesus was spared, soldiers had gone to the house of Elizabeth and Zachariah seeking their child, to slay him. But Zachariah had hidden his wife and son in the wilderness, in a mountain that opened its bosom to them. And when the soldier asked the whereabouts of the child, Zachariah refused to divulge their hiding place and for this was slain along with the infants.

  10

  Holy Family

  FIVE YEARS PASSED and Jesus was seven. Mary set the table and Joseph planned games. She’d made a cake fashioning animals of almond paste for the top, sheep, camels, rabbits, one for each guest, eighteen in all. She felt that they were help mates again, she and Joseph doing the party together. But no children came. Not the older boys, not any of the girls, except, finally, one, the Gentile girl who came with her cat, but seeing the large cake and none of her friends, set down her present and left.

  The plates around the table, the favors and party hats, Joseph, Mary, and Jesus held hands. Looking at his wife to make a point, that she not forget it, Joseph said, “We are a holy family.” She lit the candles and, seeing her husband through them, that he was a person of discernment, a provider of sound judgment, she wondered, is it true? Are we a holy family after all?

  As she cut the cake she could almost feel again that surprise when the angel addressed her as an innocent. How at one point he’d looked right into her eyes and she’d looked right into his and consented to what she did not understand because everything he was saying felt both real and good.r />
  JOSEPH SAID THOSE words but did not believe them. I, too, have eaten ashes like bread. He thought of his father’s favorite psalm, 137, “They who carried us away required myth of us,” and he tried to do this. Then, “If I make my bed in Hell, thou art there.” He’d memorized all one hundred and fifty psalms by the time he was his son’s age, his father punctuating speech with a psalm day and night, phrases for every mood, happy, dejected, fatigued, energetic.

  But he was stretching, to be a holding net, to keep the family together in a claim of innocence that none of them felt. Not Mary, not himself, not their son who’d grown up with the anniversaries, the torchlight processions, the weeping, portraits drawn on the walls in chalk. Families had moved away, many decided they would bring no more children into the world, others divorced, siblings developed strange illnesses. Most no longer observed the Sabbath. “We’ve sacrificed enough,” the boy read on their faces scarred with grief.

  Joseph looked at his son and wife and hid his thoughts because, again, he was calculating. The logic came to him often. If he hadn’t been a dreamer, if he hadn’t obeyed the voice in his dreams, if he hadn’t married Mary, she would have been dead seven years now, a thought he despised, as well as their son. But all the other boys would still be alive. Hundreds of them. And Zachariah, too. He said, “We are a holy family,” because he said it to himself often, when the calculating came like a fiendish animal circling the bedpost, the front door, his work bench, and he was ashamed.