The Everlasting

by Katy Simpson Smith

  “The martyrs,” the bearded man said, “are our warriors. They’re his most beloved.”

  Her chin was in her hands, and the danciness in their eyes began to infect her too. Yes, she saw. A lion was needed to defend the lambs. Someone braver, who understood.

  “What can I do?”

  “Do you feel him?” the bearded man asked. “Truly, in your heart?”

  She was hungry, and she was tenderhearted, and she was a sparrow—the least of them.

  Jesus, son of a father, who was the daughter? Is that you too? Jesus, shepherd of the lost, who found you? Christ Almighty, when no one listened, did you put your hands on your ears and scream a bloody pox? Did you claw at the moneylenders, did you vomit on Pilate? Were you only meek after you were mad?

  Jesus, young lord, lord closest to my age but Cupid, hear my confession: I’m not loud enough. I’m not bad, except in small ways, but my goodness is awfully quiet. Does that count as a sin? Will you make me thunder-loud? Will you use my voice to wallop my parents and impale my frog-mouthed brother? Is that what you meant by lifting the weak? I’m not a slave, I’m not a dead man waiting to be reborn, I’m not a leper or a whore. But let me tell you, sometimes being a little girl feels worse.

  “Stop being poky.” Her mother swatted her away from the shrine.

  “What’s in the basket?”

  Prisca reached up to open the lid, but one quick hip from her mother displaced her again. So she sat in the corner while her mother said prayers, her forehead against the marble wall, her eyes searching out the window for signs of life, for a tall man to walk by. She reached in her robes to find the hook, forgetting she’d left it on a shelf in her room, next to a bird’s nest that was nearly a foot tall and had only the shallowest dip in the top where eggs might have gone. At first she’d put the hook in the nest, but it had looked wrong, the metal on that straw. She should’ve given it right back—it wasn’t hers—but she hadn’t been able to keep the eel, and she wanted to be reminded of the feeling.

  The mysteries her mother spoke of—the story of Proserpine and Ceres and the earth waking itself up each spring—these had always delighted her because their truth was clear. Each year the calves appeared, and the buttercups, and swimming weather, and by the time its thread was run to the end, the leaves had dropped, and the frost licked everything to sleep, and she herself was put into woolens by a mother who promised they would both live to see the spring again. She and the boys would pretend the pond was the underworld, and Dis would hold Proserpine down in the reeds until her mother could find her, or until Proserpine ran out of air and started punching.

  After the shuffling and arranging of the spray of wheat and the dish of seeds and the candle and the cloth, and the clanging of the bronze sistrums Prisca was never allowed to play, her mother sat back on her haunches and began her hum. Her voice with the same thin tone as the slave for sale. Her mother snuffed the candle, wafted the smoke around with one hand like a scoop: up to the heavens, down to the underworld, around her head like a shawl. Fruits of the dirt, praise to the emperor, warmth for my children, death in its place—all of it made too much sense for Prisca to find the germ of the heretic. Rain, rain, rain.

  “May I light the candle tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Where under heaven have you been dragging your robe? Did you play hide-and-seek with the pigs? Go fix yourself.” She threw a veil over the rest of the shrine; one edge slipped into the bowl of water. Seeing it made Prisca thirsty. “No ears for listening,” her mother continued to mutter as Prisca left, embarrassed. “No brain at all.”

  Outside, Prisca put her shaking hands on her waist, squeezed tightly, feeling at her ribs. Only flesh, to be mortified. Only flesh, to be risen. The message was the same: the earth and its doll-sized people conducted by a body invisible—half love, half wrath—and another body manifest who dies and un-dies, suggesting some version of hope, and a spirit that insinuates into everything, watching, so that you won’t accidentally be bad. But in some rooms Prisca was shut out, and in some she was welcomed, and in the mystery of Christ, she’d been told that her very innocence was a weapon.

  At the next night meeting, she was allowed up front. Her mother had sworn at her father and the bearded man at dinner, said they were being reckless, not to mention profane. The new religion gave the emperor a bad taste in his mouth, and it wasn’t so long ago that those piles of people were burned to make up for Nero’s fire. But the proximity to death was part of the urgency. The wheat was dying anyway.

  The bearded man told one of her favorite stories to the visitors. A man was sick and someone ran to tell Jesus—“Come help, he needs you”—and Jesus laughed and said, “Let him die!” So everyone waited in Nazareth or Jerusalem or wherever Jesus lived, and the sisters wept and wailed and watched their dear brother’s blood creep back to the far innards of his body, so that his skin was perfectly pale, ice-like, and surely, though the Gospel didn’t say so, they whispered curses at the so-called Christ. And when the man was good and dead, they wrapped him in strips like a mummy and stuffed him in a tomb, and then all of a sudden Jesus showed up on the horizon with his henchmen in tow. “Take me to the tomb,” he commanded, and the sisters, surely still cursing, walked him through the rocks and scrub to the hole in the mountain, and though they warned it would smell like the Devil, Jesus didn’t mind; they rolled back the stone—like if you weren’t buried behind a rollable stone you weren’t worth resurrecting—and lo and behold! the mummy came stumbling out of the cave, and everyone cheered. Jesus didn’t care; he let a man die just to show off his own muscles. He needed believers; he needed proofs. Was it a coincidence that Jesus was the youngest sibling? [Sometimes you terrify me.]

  When her mother came to tuck her in that night, she sniffed at Prisca’s hair. “You smell like smoke,” she said.

  “You should join us sometime. They have good songs.”

  Prisca’s basket was full up with small almonds. She dragged it behind her, bent over and dramatically groaning. Her father said they’d sucked the scarce water from the wheat; Prisca, alert to justice, felt the nuts were being unfairly punished with a premature harvest.

  “Give me half,” Crispus said.

  “I’m a pacifist,” she said.

  Servius was trying to lasso a rope over a high poplar branch, jumping with the effort.

  “That’s not what that word means,” Crispus said.

  “Don’t listen to her.” Her brother finally caught one end of the rope in a tangle of limbs. His basket was empty.

  “You haven’t told me any jokes lately.”

  “I stopped finding your face funny,” she replied.

  He reached out a hand toward her load. “Come on. Don’t be stubborn. Where’s the old Prisca who’d beg for a ride on my back?”

  “Look to your own nuts.”

  “Ask her about Jesus,” Servius called out. He’d dragged down a nest from the tree and was picking through the flakes of old eggshells. “If you really want to talk to her.”

  “Another god?” He had his hands in her basket and was redistributing the almonds, which looked like little wooden hearts that someone had stabbed repeatedly with a needle. His long lashes an invitation to stare. His cheeks.

  “She’s got a new crush,” Servius said. He’d put the eggs in a fold in his tunic and was striding ahead, beating his lasso into the bushes to scare up partridge.

  So what, her body had become the vessel for a new fervor. She wanted more, she wanted it faster, she wanted to be wanted.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” she said.

  “My father says it’s foolishness,” Crispus said.

  She kicked at the dust on the path that spiraled through the almond grove. Far off, something went skittering through the brush. A hare.

  “Come over sometime and convince him yourself,” he said.

  With the sun behind him, Crispus was angelic, exactly the form the Devil takes. His chin had the start of a scruff. Would her little fingers
fit there below his mouth? [Ordinarily, I’d say yes, that’s exactly where they go, but with you I can’t tell what the real danger is. Love him if you want to love him, but trust is the road to betrayal. My home is carpeted with lovers—I use their cherub-curled heads as stepping-stones to the breakfast table, and I’ll tell you the secret: most are happier there, my heel on their temples, their hands in one another’s business, than they’d ever be in that sky meadow where the body is immaculate. The body is violable. This is good, and this is pain.]

  She’d never felt innocent, not the way her father and his god imagined.

  “He just wants to nab your almonds,” Servius yelled. “Don’t let him! Run!” He took off across the trembling heat of September like a leggy deer, and after an inscrutable look back at her, Crispus took up the chase. Boys. She was once again left behind.

  She woke one day to achy feet. She tried to remember where she’d walked the day before, whether she’d run without sandals in the back fields, or climbed one of the steep hills to the city market or the temple. She checked her soles for spider bites. Anna rubbed them for her, but the next morning they ached still, and a week went by with this low coming and going of pain. Her mother said she was growing and looked at the pantry, at the dwindling pots of pickled beans. Prisca still misjudged where the door frames were and shuddered into corners by turning too soon. She cut herself with a knife while chopping an artichoke because her fingers no longer held a familiar relationship with the rest of her hand. It wasn’t possible to point to a part of herself and say with confidence, This is Prisca.

  The sore feet she wasn’t prepared for; the breasts she was. A girl she sometimes went to lessons with got hers the year before—they came bubbling out of her chest like spring fungus, and the boys could look at nothing else. This intrusion seemed like an intentional way to push girls further off balance. Surely it would be harder to stand straight with those things. Hers came in small, and she assiduously crossed her arms against her chest morning and afternoon to prevent them from ballooning any more. She lay on her stomach at night to tamp them down, though the pressure on them hurt. It was possible they were sentient, little chicks she was suffocating, and she sometimes felt like a bad mother to her body. But mostly her body felt like a bad friend to her.

  Servius, aware of the arm-crossing, would give her a quick punch in the chest when their mother’s back was turned. Fine; she would grind mustard powder into his wine.

  And after the achy feet and the stretching limbs and the tiny mushroom breasts and the rounding hips and the dark hairs replacing all the light hairs, straw where there was silk, one morning she crawled out of bed and left behind a little rose where her bottom had been. She knew—there was no way not to know, on this farm, with these half-dozen women, with prayers made daily to the spirits of fertility, Ceres, Isis, Bona Dea—but she nonetheless felt a shock, as would any witness at the scene of a death.

  It occurred to her that the blood she issued was a phenomenon that Jesus, and probably even God, had never experienced.

  “The Lord created all things, including the cycles, and so has knowledge of all things,” the bearded man said.

  “But it hasn’t come out of him,” she said.

  “In the sense that all things emerge from the Lord—”

  “But he’s a man.”

  “He is all things.”

  “You call him a he. Does he have a pipinna?” She waggled her finger near her crotch.

  The bearded man was looking less patient. “He has no form.”

  “But Jesus did. A pipinna.”

  He set down the linens he’d been folding. These were part of the weekly rituals, the sacraments, and so the house servants were not allowed to fuss with them. Or rather, he sent them to the kitchen in a bag to be washed, separate from the house laundry, and when they were sent back to him in neat stacks, he flicked them open again, sprinkled them with water from a little glass ewer, and refolded them so his hands would be the last thing the linens had touched before being put into the Lord’s service. Prisca found this suspicious. God surely knew women did the bulk of the work.

  “Anatomy is not particularly relevant.”

  “It’s relevant to me,” she said, unconvinced that God’s knowledge of the menses was equal to her own.

  “Do you spend as much time thinking about your soul?”

  She did, to be honest. But what set Christianity apart from the religions of her childhood was its very humanness. God in flesh and blood. And the blood—its suffering, its sacrifice, its poofing into wine—seemed like a key she’d recently been granted a copy of. The bearded man’s fastidiousness about the linens was hypocritical. Let’s bathe in the wine instead; let’s put his blood in our mouths and roll it around our tongues so we can taste the copper of his veins.

  She left him to his snapping and folding and took a candle up to her dark room, where she stood by the window so the moon could watch her untie the linen bandage around her central fork. The pattern of blood resembled a grand dark continent with strands of brighter islands sprinkling outward. Red people lived on these islands, and they said rich, red things. They took red rowboats to the continent and trekked to the high volcano at the center, which was brown as earth. It still had a sheen to it. She pressed her finger on the heart of this, and, held up under the whitish flame, it would be impossible to tell whether the blood on her hand was her own, or a goat’s, or God’s. She tasted it.

  Her holiness moved in cycles through her: from the bottom of her to her mouth, down through her innards, back to the bottom of her. And like the wine they drank at the eucharist, there was no telling when it might be ordinary and when it might be divine.

  The barn was making strange noises. Prisca cracked the door to see if the pregnant mare had begun her labors, but it was her father, not on his knees but leaning into a corner, his body pressed against the wood as if it would camouflage, crying. The night too made ticky sounds—grasshoppers testing their legs, the wind snapping through the vines, the dirt exhaling its heat. When grown-ups cried, it looked like they were tasting poison. She’d found her mother tilted against Anna the other day, cheeks wet, talking about the weather.

  She slipped past the stalls, her bare toes leaving olive-shaped prints, and tossed a stone at the hay bales so her father would start. He snuffled and turned, just another animal in the dark.

  “Servius?” he said.

  “Me.”

  He put his hands over his face and inhaled deep, with one shudder to break the breath. “Do you believe in everlasting life?”

  It sounded like the catechism, and also like a trap. Her heart tripped.

  “I believe in suffering,” she said, “and redemption.” What she really believed was that life was unfair and she was secretly important and most of the good in other people was a façade over selfishness and she wouldn’t mind using a flaming whip to unmask the pretenders and save the weak, the wounded, the children like her, the slaves, the fish that are stolen from the waters, the water leaching away into the ground.

  A cloud passed. “They took Hierax.”

  “Who?” she said.

  “The emperor found the writings and took them. Justin and Chariton and Euelpistus. He didn’t write it—Hierax. He was here the whole time. The meetings were just conversation. We were coming up with a way to talk about the invisible. You heard. We were just talking.”

  The bearded man.

  Imagine being pulled into the emperor’s palace! In chains! Would he remember how to profess his faith, or would he get so scared that the words would run right through him, like his own piss? Would a soldier give him a blink of solidarity, toss him a skeleton key to unlock his cuffs? Would God appear in a shaft of light, or Michael? Who came for the martyrs? [Most sacrifice is a pact between virtue and ego. Don’t mistake death for salvation. I want you to chase your own pleasure like a hound at a hind, but may I gently steer you away from this insistent holiness?]

  “They’ll ask him about th
e meetings. They want to find us all.” He had stopped crying, but his eyes were long and vacant and the hand under his chin kept pressing at his throat like he was trying to hold something in. “Swear you won’t reveal us.”

  The candle he’d put on the barrel was smoking; someone had made a poor wick, probably Prisca. One horse was still awake, chomping dryly at the hay; the low rustle and the candle smoke made the moment seem less fraught, more domestic. “Should we rescue him?” she said.

  It would be happening now. The good soldiers were being called to battle. Somewhere, someone was asking another someone about his most intimate thoughts, his beliefs—which aren’t tangible things at all and aren’t even words always but mostly just a stirring feeling that comes over you when you hear about hope—and depending on what that other someone said, in the morning there’d be an execution.

  Christ came to her in a dream and laid beside her in bed, running his fingers through her tangled hair. The blood from his stigmata, like a fine oil, loosened all the knots. She reached up to touch his hand, and he swatted her away. “Shh,” he whispered goldenly. So she closed her eyes and tucked into him like a kitten and let him sing to her in Aramaic, which she didn’t understand but felt she got the gist of. She was his own sweet angel, sweet angel.

  She wanted her transverberation. She wanted the Lord to come at her with arrows of light, and she wanted to be brave enough, embodied enough, to swallow those shafts into her very soul with no outward injury. She wanted to be bloodless, immaculate, one of the clean ones. Please, Lord, no eye-gouging. Give me a fire instead of the blade. Let my mother remember me whole.

  New men appeared at the farm in the morning, and everyone looked like they were foxes and the hunter’s horn was sounding around the bend. Turning yourself in was the clear moral high road, but even Christians were men, and scared. Prisca was not impressed. She asked her mother whether she should fetch the extra table linens from the upstairs trunk, but her mother said the men would not be staying long enough to eat.