by Mary Rakow
“The first time, she tied food in a scarf and raised it into my branches by a rope: palm cake, coconut butter, skewered bits of lamb, a small grilled fish, dried peas. ‘Go away!’ I yelled down at her. ‘Never come back!’ The next time, three dates in a muslin bag. They dangled in the air for weeks. Her kindness was unbearable. I buried the sweet things up high in the trunk.
“Then she put a flask of water to the end of the rope. I threw it down so it crashed against the ground. Then she went to the river for brackish water. Between the reeds, the green moss floating the way it does, on the surface. ‘It’s unclean,’ she called up to me, so I took it, jerking the jug up quickly and disappearing with it into my leaves.
“The next day I saw her approaching from a distance. She balanced her weight on the dresser drawers, with a hot bowl of lentils and coriander, holding it level as she climbed. ‘Hello,’ she said and I moved downward, toward her. ‘I see you behind those leaves.’ Hunched in the crook of the tree, her bowl of lentils against my bruised and hairy knees. I’d come down from the high branches.
“She gave me lentils in a bowl. Her mother warned her that I was hated and dangerous, but she visited me anyway. ‘He’s an animal, don’t take so much,’ she waved her spoon in the air over the pot. ‘Let him stay in that tree forever, like a prison.’ When she told me this I felt a blankness between them where love could have been. On her sleeve there was a leaf pattern, the beads from my embroidered pillow sewn there. I wondered if she knew where the beads came from.
“Eventually, I moved further out to another sycamore. Past Jericho, past Joshua’s horn. I soaked palm leaves, wove them into mats, offered them to visitors. It was a new generation. People came. I didn’t know what they wanted. It perplexed me at first. They built hermitages. One planted an herb garden with stakes and string. They called their gathering Cellia, the cells. Called themselves monks. One told me they numbered over two hundred, circling my tree. Then there were more. Some stayed a few days, some never left. ‘But what’s here?’ I ask myself. Mats. Leaves. Memories. Emptiness.
“The heart hungers for what is absolute, for a cause worthy of itself, and actual. You know this, Mary of Magdala. Christ on the throne, those Byzantine eyes. I’ve heard how they follow you around a room. That’s what we want, isn’t it? To be seen. That’s what I tell them. My fingers drag a small wake in the dust on this leaf.
“Sometimes I yell at the monks, ‘What was the color of his hair? Tell me the color of his hair! I’m forgetting!’ I scream down at them and they fall silent, pity on their faces. But they didn’t know him. Most of them were too young. Forced to live on stories of him as if it were bread. It’s not the same. This tree emptied of sap, only the fibrous wood of the hours, one after the other and no shape to them. I’m on the lookout just to keep myself from bitterness.
“I have my knife and pen and kite. This small gold bowl. This ring. The water in the marsh will turn blue again. My memory of him, the everlasting sun.
“I think of that young girl and her mother. I don’t know what happened to them. One night in my imagination I traveled to find her, to find what was good between them. I went for the young girl’s sake.”
THE REST OF the story was told in the Annals of the community, which Mary later read. The record indicated this:
ZACCHEUS CRIED FOR the young girl and her mother. He cried for himself and those he robbed. Most of all he cried for the One who didn’t come back, the One he looked for in the breaking of the leaves. He cried all night. Contrition ran down the bark, stripping away the leaves. Salt joined salt. Sorrow in the gashes.
IN THE MORNING, after his night of weeping, a new monk brought Zaccheus food. Expecting to raise it on a rope thrown over the branches, he found the tree bare of leaves.
“Holy Father, Zaccheus!” he called out. When there was no answer, he ventured to the first branch, the second. Found Zaccheus resting high in the crook of the tree. His arms and legs were folded up against his narrow chest, his grey beard stiff, his skin dry, his fingers clamped around a jar of fresh water, a wreath of leaves on his head. Putting his ear to the chest and then the mouth, confirming what he feared, the new monk scrambled down, ran back to his cell, returned with a bolt of red silk, dusty and fraying.
At the same time, the young girl, now married and with children of her own, sat counting the week’s earnings. Her reputation for balsam had grown so that she’d made her husband wealthy and her three sons. Setting coin on top of coin she stopped suddenly, her fingers draping the pile of coins, her mind caught in a day vision of a man crouching behind a throne, wearing a silver robe with blue banding. Leaving the counting table she walked past the river to the sycamore tree where he used to live, seeing, again, the heap of broken things, jagged bits of wood, clay, tattered silks. Her youngest son on her hip, she noted that it was his hunger for righteousness that drew her to him. The hunger to change his life. She had the same hunger. This is a day of turning, she told herself. If I cleave, cleave.
HEARING THE NEWS, two thousand monks gathered at the base of the sycamore tree. Carefully they lifted Zaccheus down, wrapped his body in the red cloth. Buried him, with the jug of water, in the new church, beside the high altar.
Among themselves the monks spoke of the purity of his heart. They elected him one of the original twelve, replacing Judas Iscariot. After a period of mourning, they opened the large book and entered the day of his death, listing it as his birth date, to be observed like the feast day of a saint. They spoke of his confidence that the Messiah would return, while noting that he never used the word “Messiah” or any other title, but spoke only of the visitor, using tender nicknames, if he spoke at all.
That night all two thousand monks had the same dream. They learned this the next morning, comparing notes. The details varied somewhat, but each found himself standing in a long marble corridor, a palace of memory, where there was, in the distance, an empty throne. They saw Father Zaccheus crouching behind it in a silver robe, the blue trim of the garment spread around him like a lake.
43
John on Patmos
EXILED, NO ONE to talk to, no one to listen, his hair in knots, infested with lice, John cast out his net of words, hoping to catch himself like a fish.
Touching the trunk of a palm, its segmented layers like playing cards but rough against his hands, he whispered, “Wasn’t I the one he loved? Wasn’t I the one who rested on his breast?”
The trunk mute, the fronds silent above. He poked a sea anemone with a stick. “You there! Speak up. That last night with the tearing of the bread, didn’t he say he loved me?” The anemone closed in, withdrawing its soft, mushy green.
Each night he recited a litany to the fire. “I, John, was there when he raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead. I was there on the holy mountain when he became like light. Peter and James were with me. They are my witnesses. They would say, ‘It happened.’ And I was the one he loved.”
When the driftwood turned from red to white he told himself, “This is corroboration.”
He did not take shelter from the sun. His eyebrows whitened. His lashes grew thick and interwoven. His skin gathered to itself a calcium casing of sea salts. Sand crabs made their home on the top sides of his feet. His hair grew long, he wrapped it around his waist like a belt.
After one hundred days he no longer remembered the house of Jairus. Or Moses and Elijah on the holy mountain, how they stood in the flagrant light. Instead he heard tambourines and the small sound of finger drums in the night. Trumpets. He saw stars falling like candlesticks. He dreamt of locusts shaped like horses, wearing crowns of gold, their tails like scorpions with deadly sting.
He heard strange words, Gog and Magog, in his sleep. Waking he thought, now it is happening. I am going mad.
He called the sand “Whoremonger!” The sea anemone “Sorcerer!” He cursed them all into a lake of fire. He no longer wanted someone to say, “It happened, John. Jairus, the holy mountain, leaning on his breast. It is you
r history. It all belongs to you.”
Instead he told himself, “I am a sea urchin with purple spines. I have no memory, no feelings, no thought at all.”
Still the visions came.
An earth scorched by fire. Sea, black as sackcloth. The moon, blood. He cursed memory, called it the “Mother of Harlots,” “Babylon.” He sat as still as stone. Told himself, “I am no longer a sea urchin with purple spines. I am not here at all.”
A SILVER FISH landed on the shore. Large, like none he’d seen before. He smelled it and thought, the pelican must have left this for me. Even though he had never seen the pelican. He did not eat the fish. He refused to believe in miracles.
He felt a pecking on his cheek. With his fingers, he pulled apart his lids. Salt crumbled in his fingertips. On his shoulder, a black crow sat with its narrow yellow beak. He knew it was not an island bird.
He heard voices. Soldiers lifted him to their boat. They said, “We have a new Emperor. Your exile is revoked.”
IN THE ROCKING of the boat he heard the voice of the one he once loved, saying, “John, I come quickly!” In the sky he saw a woman clothed with the sun.
He saw the distant coastline, white roofs of houses, and thought, they are taking me to the Holy City. I see its foundation laid with jasper and chalcedony. He called to the soldiers, “Look! We are going to Paradise!”
JOHN’S WORDS CROSSED the Aegean.
New Christians found themselves caught in his net.
So many silver fish, they canonized him.
They didn’t call him John the Raving or John the Lunatic.
They called him John the Theologian, John the Divine.
They gathered his nightmares into a book and called it Revelation.
44
Mary the Mother of Jesus, Later in Life
AS SHE AGED and death approached, Mary tried to read the book of her life.
In silence and modesty, in the absence of things most powerful.
She had intended to paint the glorious mysteries of her son’s life. When he walked on water, when he left the tomb, when he appeared to the disciples on the shore after his death. To paint him in his glory and around him scenes of his life, but instead she painted humbler ones. When Joseph lifted her onto the donkey. When they stopped for shade and he brought grapes from a basket, when they ate together under a tree, gathering wildflowers and berries. Joseph in his first workshop building a large table they never used. The birthday party when he reminded her they were a holy family. She painted her husband at Golgatha, even though she hadn’t seen him there and had heard nothing from him in years. And on his head, she painted a nimbus.
What survives? she wondered. Love and the memory of grapes.
45
Joseph the Dreamer
JOSEPH SAW THE followers of his son increase rapidly and dreamt that they would continue to increase until time came to an end. He saw that experience would be put into words and heard a creed that was starting to form, followers calling Jesus, “God from God, Light from Light, begotten not made, one in being the Father.”
He lay in his room, just his donkey outside in the courtyard, the arbor with its dormant vine. It seemed he was dying, but he wasn’t quite sure. Though he still didn’t want them, dreams came, and he remembered his cousins saying when he was young, “Here comes the dreamer!”
Sliding in and out of sleep, he saw a future in which some men and women would be reverenced after their deaths like his son already was, and some would be given patronages. He, too, would become such a patron, attached to the well-being of cabinetmakers, carpenters, confectioners, dying people, and engineers. But he would also be the patron saint “against doubt,” which saddened him.
Some would believe that he and Mary never married but remained betrothed only. Some, that he was old when they met, she a child and he a mere guardian. For many, that they had never had sex, much less enjoyed and then missed it, a castrating thought. Worst, to a few, he would be seen as a willing cuckold, letting others devotedly love his wife more intimately than he had and this hurt the most.
It was all awkward like so much else had been. Stepping off a cliff into the still, dark night.
“No one will quote me,” he told himself when the mood came most heavily, seeing again that everything rolled out toward another glory.
And it was true. He would nowhere be quoted in the scriptures Christians collected and formalized, and would not be the object of any special devotion for more than one thousand years.
Outside, the finches and hollyhocks.
MOVING IN AND out of visions and dreams, he saw an ornate city with a central square guarded by a quadragga of life-sized gilded bronze horses. Orphans and unwanted babies were placed in baskets and left there in the portico of a hospital run by nuns who fed, clothed and educated them as they grew. The girls were taught music, the boys trades and the hospital treated people with syphilis and other incurable diseases, the church being named the Incurabili. Joseph liked that odd combination of syphilis, orphans and polyphonic music. That there was compassion where there was little hope. He liked that the church was modest and well-made.
He thought of the Slain Infants, that night that still cut like a ravine, and saw that the church of his son was built on pain that was ancient, unchanging, and inescapable. He recalled that Mary told him she was feeling this when Jesus was just an infant and he regretted having dismissed her at the time, because she was right.
The older he became, the less he understood. The old drawings of the bull tacked to the wall, those years when he hoped to understand his life by simplifying it, were ragged and yellow with age.
He wondered if any of the brothers or sisters of those who were slain became followers of his son. He wondered if any of the Incurabili orphans did. How would faith be possible for them? He had no answer. A breeze through the window, another drawing fell to the floor, and he realized he was an expert in doubt after all.
What he did know, however, he would tell anyone who asked. He would say that there is loneliness in doubting because doubt misses its twin, which is wonder. And there is loneliness in skepticism because it misses its twin, which is awe.
The Angelus sounded in the clay bell down the street.
“Come, my good Master,” the donkey said. “I am taking you to glory.”
46
The Dormition of the Virgin
MARY LAY ON a litter surrounded by people she knew and loved, some having come from great distances, Rome, Macedonia and Greece.
She heard them whispering phrases to each other, giving her titles, the words afloat in the air above her bed, “Anchor,” “Mother of Sorrows,” “Our Lady of the Sign.” But she said to herself, “I am a bulrush that grew in the mud. I’m neither Moses nor Pharaoh. I am the wet, muddy reed.” Had she the energy, she might have corrected them, saying, “Call me ‘Mary of the Bulrushes,’ ‘The Woven Cradle,’ ‘Mother of the Grassy Marsh.’”
SHE’D WONDERED SINCE she first heard the words, what it meant to be “blessed among women” and had performed an examination since she was young. She’d wanted to say then, “O yes, this is who I am, blessed among women.” But she could not say those words either then or now. As a girl she’d had her childish ways. She’d engaged in small deceptions, had been sarcastic at times and impatient, which she’d worked on with modest success when she first met Joseph. And she’d regularly neglected the sick.
SHE COULD HEAR them starting to pray, heard the sound of bread being set down on a plate, a cup being filled with wine. They were gathering around her table, the sound of their feet on the floor, slow motion, bodies adjusting to her small space, fabric touching fabric, that hush, a cough, the words murmured quietly in unison, words of consecration and remembrance, and she hungered with a heated, impatient desire to see her son again face to face. She knew that it was the magnitude of God’s intention in his son, through her, that made her unlike other women, made her graced condition so full and nothing else.
/> WHEN THEY WERE finished, and the silence that followed also reached its end, she heard more titles, “She Who Shows the Way,” “Throne of Wisdom.” She turned her head toward the window. The words now seemed to come from outside, from beyond her room, from beyond the tree and garden wall. She didn’t understand all of them. “Mother of the Poor,” “Joy of the Just,” “Our Lady of Lebanon,” and then from across the sea, “Our Lady of Mt. Carmel,” “Notre Dame.” In the high mountains, “Ark of the Covenant,” “Tower of David,” “Queen of Peace.”
She felt as she had when she was fifteen and Joseph a year older and the machinery working through their lives had no precedent. They will make their own versions of me, putting themselves here, she realized, it is happening already. She again felt that she should surrender. She didn’t hear, “Mother of the Bulrushes” and “Mary of Wet Feet,” she heard, “Theotokos” and “Mother of God.”
She should surrender so others could make of her life what they needed to make. Hadn’t the bulrushes consented to not only preserve Moses but also to be home to tadpoles and small fishes, while to the egrets and plovers, a hunting ground?
THEY WERE COMING back to her bed now, some weeping, some touching her feet through the blanket. She saw that she would be both glorious and, to others, to most, nameless.
The candles were burning.
Where is the holy?
SHE SAW THE future as if it were already past and watched as a woman took two palm fronds and folded them to make a cross. It was Palm Sunday. Leaving Church, she took the cross home and fastened it to a plaster figure she called “The Blessed Virgin” that stood in the corner of her front yard. Chain-link fence, pick-up trucks, the statue in a blue robe. Over the statue, the woman had propped an umbrella for protection against rain and to the scalloped edge of the umbrella she’d attached a string of Christmas lights.