The Brother's Keeper

by Tracy Groot

  He quivered with rage. It came in waves from his feet; it colored his vision with red and black sparks. The rage, the language, the pain in his gut . . . all things acquired since his brother became the Prophet of Peace.

  He grabbed the nearest tool from Joses’ bench and hurled it across the room. It struck the wall near his own bench and sent chips of plaster flying. “I hate what he has done!”

  Dimly, he was glad his mother and sister were at the well. They did not need this; they had to be kept from it. He stood still until the rage sparkles began to fade; he deliberately slowed his breathing. As ever, after one of these tirades, came guilt. He went to where the tool lay on the floor and picked it up.

  “It isn’t broken,” he muttered, loudly enough for Jude to hear.

  “How did you hear about Raziel from Kerioth?” Judas asked.

  It was a fair question, and James understood his puzzlement. Jude knew he did not leave the workroom, except for visits to the brush and to haul in wood or stone stacked around the back of the house. He sometimes went to the rooftop but only after the sun had set.

  “Oh, bits and pieces from the people who come here. I got an earful from Annika last week. She would think this Raziel was the latest savior of Israel if she did not think it of someone else first.” Bitterly he added, “And of course, Keturah with her tour.” He rubbed off the tool and took it back to Joses’ bench. “Same old drivel. Nothing new around here.”

  Jude picked up the mallet and chisel again. “So Keturah was here.”

  “Do not worry; I’m over her. Besides, you know which of us she would have chosen. She did not ask me to teach her to carve.”

  “That’s only because Jesus and Simon are the best. I have seen the way she looks at you.”

  Judas was trying to make up for James’ fit of temper, which only made James feel more disgusted with himself. He strode to his bench and tried to busy himself with something before he made Jude’s homecoming even more unpleasant.

  Judas resumed tapping. James rubbed the back of his head, trying to order his thoughts to the day and the work before him. He wanted to work; he wanted to ignore the world and just work. With Jude back, he was stronger. Two against the rest of the world on the other side of the mezuzah. Two, much better than one. And when his other brothers came home, they would be four strong. He drew a long, slow breath and took his stool. He reached for the small jar of flint filings on his shelf and settled down to scrape the rust off the nails with the filings and a rag.

  He remembered when Father taught him to scrape the nails, before James’ fingers were work-roughened. Filings would work into his fingertips from the rags, making them sore, sometimes making them bleed. But, oh, the joy of working next to Father, the joy of finally being old enough to join Father and Jesus in the workroom. He never spoke of the pain for fear Mother would think him too young to begin the trade.

  Father’s bench was where each of them started, before they were skilled enough to earn benches of their own. The day came when a brother would come into the shop and find a brand-new bench, secretly made by Father . . . what a grand day it was. Each boy could organize his bench the way he wanted; Father never interfered with that. Over the years, tools accumulated on the pegs above the benches, tools perfected to each individual hand. And on a special shelf above each bench, every boy kept his nails and his treasures.

  James glanced at his shelf. Four pots of nails on one side of the shelf, and the treasures of his twenty-nine-year lifetime on the other. A rock he found in a stream when he was nine, veined with gold. An exquisitely made wooden box, his own personal money box, the top of the lid carved in whorls and intricate convolutions. The lid was edged in carved braid work, as smooth as three thin snakes. A square in each corner had decorative crosscuts. Jesus made it for James’ fifteenth birthday.

  A ball-in-a-cage puzzle sat next to the box. After each son learned the rudiments, it was Father’s first lesson in carving, an agonizing project. A carved wooden ball rolled between four slim bars, which ended on each side in a rounded, decorated knob. James could not remember how many times he had to start over because too strong a cut severed a slim bar.

  Simon made his first ball-in-a-cage at the age of six with three balls instead of one—and not once did he sever a bar. It was the first sign of his gift, a gift Father made sure was brought to its fullest by introducing Simon to master carvers throughout Galilee, and some from Judea. Over the years some visited the shop just to see his work.

  “How is Mother?” Jude asked. “I saw her at the well. She seemed good, but . . .”

  “She has been—” James frowned at the nail he was scraping. “She speaks of joining the entourage of you-know-who to serve him and his followers.”

  The tapping stopped. When it resumed, the raps on the nail were harder.

  James twisted to look at Judas. “Well? What do you think of that?”

  “Does it matter what I think? When has it ever mattered what I think? When does what I think change anything around here?”

  James set the nail aside and took another. He moistened the rag in the water pot, squeezed out the excess, and dipped it into the flint filings. The rust came off in dark amber, file-peppered smears on the rag.

  “I will wager you-know-who asked her to do it himself,” James muttered.

  “You can say his name, James,” Judas snapped. “He is still our brother.”

  “Barely! He prefers the company of strangers to that of his own family. You remember what he said, Judas, you heard it yourself. He disowned us, right in front of all those people. ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers? Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my mother and my brothers.’”

  James could barely utter the shameful words. They cut him more deeply than anyone could know. Only Joses and Simon and Judas could understand. They alone knew the shock, the humiliation, and worse, the finality of those words. With those words Jesus cut himself loose from his family, as if he had severed a mooring line. Didn’t James have nightmares of watching his brother drift away into a tumultuous sea while his family stayed on the shore?

  “We only wanted to talk to him. We only went to see if it was all true. He owed us that much,” James muttered.

  A storm, stilled. A blind man, seeing. A person mad with demons, made of sound mind again. The thought even now raised the skin on James’ arm. All the crazy rumors that found their way into the shop were enough to make them pack a few sacks and fill a few skins and seek Jesus out to see if it were true. Healing a leper? It was not even lawful to touch one. Forgiving sins, sins not made against Jesus himself? Was this their own Jesus? Many bore the name of Jesus, as common a name as Judas. They had to know for themselves if this Jesus was their own. And they soon learned what Jesus thought of his own family.

  Not long after came the gut pain.

  “I do not want Mother trotting all over the countryside,” James declared as he gave a nail a vicious swipe. “He should not expect that of her. It is his madness and none of her own. I wish . . . I wish Father . . .”

  “So do I,” Judas murmured.

  “Why can’t he heal the sick here?”

  The brothers worked in silence, until James finally gave voice to what all the events demanded. It was hard; the words wanted to stay in his throat. But the time had come. “Judas . . . something has to be done about Jesus.”

  Jude did not answer.

  Forget that Jesus left without so much as a good-bye. Forget that he never told anyone his plans, especially James, his traveling partner, his . . . friend. One day James came into the shop and found he was gone. James never knew, on that day, that his life would be forever changed. Never knew that everything familiar would begin to alter like warping wood.

  It was hard enough to lose Father. Oh, God, it was hard, Father gone. Hard to come into the workroom, day after day, and hear the painful silence from the bench nearest the curtain flap. He thought he had had his fill of sorrow.

  James rem
embered the way it used to be, Joseph the carpenter and his boys. Even after Joses married and built a room onto the home of his in-laws, it was still Joseph and his four sons. Joses, the first to marry though he was the third born, came to the shop every morning at dawn; nothing much changed, except for where he ate and slept. His new in-laws were Tobias and Sarah, who lived just over the hill past their land. The strip of land belonging to Tobias was one terrace up from their own; his daughter Abigail had grown up with Joses.

  Joses and Abigail had their first child, a sweet-faced baby boy named Benjamin, Father’s first grandson. Oh, how Father loved that child, and Ben adored Joseph. “Babba, Babba,” Ben would call him. Joses was Abba, and Joseph, Babba. Ben was two when his grandfather died. Even now, four years later, the bench near the flap was “Babba’s bench.”

  It was Benjamin who first brooked the question, upon hearing of all the wondrous things his uncle had done in places far from Nazareth.

  “Why didn’t Uncle fix Babba?”

  “Did you hear what I said?” James irritably tossed the cleaned nail into a jar and took another. “We need to do something about Jesus. We cannot ignore it anymore.”

  “And what do you suggest?”

  James chose to ignore that tone, soaked in sarcasm, and told his brother the ideas he had thought on since Judas had been gone.

  “The countryside. We could take Jesus away to the country. We could stay with him, talk him out of this madness, hold vigils of fasting and prayer for him. When we are sure he has his senses again, he can come back to work. All the fervor will die down; they will all forget about him—eventually. We would have to put up with a few Zealots like Avi, sure, but we could do it, Judas.” James set down his rag and nail. It was a tiny dream that often gave him a scraping of hope. It could happen; the brothers could do it. They would show mitzvah for their own kin, to their own hurt. They would restore Jesus no matter what it cost them.

  “At the least we could take him to Qumran, place him with the Essenes. He could work out whatever fervor he is consumed with there, where he could do no harm.” James glanced at Jude to see what he thought, but Jude’s back was to him.

  They would remind Jesus of the times they had had, of who he used to be when he was with them. The laughter, the joking. The friendship. James would remind him of the talks he and Jesus had on the trips down to Gaza, when it was just the two of them going for supplies. When they would camp together under the stars, lie side by side gazing into the sparkling blackness, talk of the wonder of the universe, talk of girls, talk of anything at all. Nobody heard James better than Jesus.

  “We could make things the way they used to be,” James told Judas.

  “She asks about you in the marketplace now and then.”

  James blinked. “Who—what are you talking about?”

  “Keturah. You cannot tell me she does not think about you.”

  James left his bench to stand next to Judas. “Have you not heard a word? Jude, answer me! What do you think of my plan?”

  Jude would not answer, not right away. He was tapping nails into a new wooden tool rack. James was about to ask again when Jude turned cold eyes on him. In a tone to match his eyes, he said, “What do I think of your plan? I think it’s too late. And I do not want to talk about it anymore.”

  James stood a moment, clenching his teeth, torn between agreeing with him and grabbing his neck to shake him senseless.

  He growled and turned his back. So Jude did not want to talk about it now. Well and good. They would certainly talk when Joses and Simon returned. Jude could not ignore it anymore; none of them could. James had a strange, restless feeling that something was stirring. A feeling he could neither define nor ignore.

  “What do you think of Keturah?” Jude said in a light tone that utterly dismissed their former conversation. “Did you get a chance to talk to her when she came with those seekers?”

  “Why do you talk so much about her? Are you interested?”

  “No. Her father spoke to me before I left.”

  James glared at Jude. “About what?”

  “What do you think, sawdust-for-brains?”

  James rubbed his thumb on a nail head, then noticed the crook in the nail. He took his hammer to try to make it straighter but gave up after a few blows. It would need the forge. True, Keturah and her father were among the few who did not look the other way at the sight of one of Joseph’s tribe. He smiled in spite of himself when he remembered the look Keturah had given them before she lit out after her thieving cheats. It was a look of coconspiracy, us against them, the people of Nazareth against all the crazies out there who come only to fetch sawdust for their pockets. A rare glimmer of kinship in the Nazareth notoriety.

  Judas mistook his smile. “Eh, you know it too. She likes you.”

  “That’s not why I am smiling. You missed out on the best day of my life a few days ago.”

  James told him the whole story, from the way Nathanael swung his adze so that Avi had to jump, to the way he and his friend streamed out of the workshop like pigs on fire. Judas got to laughing, a rich sound indeed, until he finally settled down to ask, “Well, where is he? Our new apprentice?”

  “He stays with Annika.”

  “One of her strays?”

  “Something like that. I have learned he does not take to mornings so well. Stays out late with his new friends.”

  Judas frowned. “What sort of character is he? Father would have never put up with—”

  “Oh, you will like him. Besides, we cannot afford to pick and choose these days.”

  “And what of . . . our reputation?”

  “You know, I think he actually enjoys it. He takes it as a personal responsibility to show the door to anyone who does not have business here.” James chuckled. “He does it differently every time. Quite an imagination the lad has. I almost look forward to the intrusions now, just to see what Nathanael’s going to do.”

  “How long has he been here?”

  “A week. He came the day after you left.”

  “Where did you put him?”

  James dipped his rag, squeezed out the water. He smudged up more filings and applied them to the nail. “Corner bench.”

  From the corner of his eye, he could see Jude pause at his work and look at him.

  Presently Judas said, “Cypress table done?”

  “Nathanael finished it first day.”

  “How is his work?”

  “Good. He is a hard worker. He has much to learn, but show him once, and he’s on his way. Talks too much, but he has a quick wit.”

  Judas mounted the new tool rack on the wall pegs. He arranged the new tools on the rack and stood back to make sure they were aligned. “Why Simon, with his gift for carving, wants to be a scribe is between him and God only.” He looked at James. “Why haven’t they returned? A journey to Gaza has never taken this long.”

  “Mother is worried,” James replied.

  A form filled the entrance, the movement enough to make both brothers look. James started to grin, expecting to see Nathanael. But the one who filled the doorway was not the apprentice. James’ smile disappeared. The way the man’s eyes appraised the shop, the look on his face . . . he was no customer.

  His eyes lit on James, and he began to smile. James looked away, scraping the nail with deliberate strokes.

  With not much enthusiasm, Judas said, “Good morning.”

  “Good morning! This is the home of the Nazarene?”

  “We are all Nazarenes,” James muttered without looking up. He wished Nathanael were here. He would be laughing already.

  The man nodded, fingering his gray-salted beard. “So you are. Forgive my imposition. You must receive many, ah, visitors.”

  James glanced at him. “We do.”

  The man had a rueful twist to his mouth. “I hate to class myself with them, though by showing up at your door I do just that. They come to my home and expect my Miriam to offer them a bowl for their feet. Perhaps eve
n wine and bread.”

  James sat back on his stool. He and Jude exchanged a look.

  “And forget about getting an honest day’s work done,” the man went on. He kissed his fingertips and touched them to the mezuzah set into the doorjamb, though he did not yet cross the threshold. The seekers were not this polite. They would stroll in as if they had the mitzvah to do so. “I had to go into seclusion just to finish one jar. Miriam took to what she called ‘artful evasion’ to keep them away from me. ‘No, my husband is not here right now’—meaning I was not right there—‘I will tell him you called.’” The man smiled a crinkly eyed smile.

  But James was not ready to smile back.

  “Tell me . . . do they take tokens here?” the man asked.

  James blinked, then looked at Jude again. But Jude was staring at the man and nodding. “They do.”

  The man shook his head. “Odd, is it not? Miriam would get so irritated when they would make off with the silliest things.”

  “They take sawdust,” James blurted.

  “Pottery shards, at my place. As if . . .”

  “As if their lives would be changed by cast-off wood shavings.”

  The man chuckled; then he shrugged and lifted his hands. “Ah, can you blame them? Belief and hope are in meager supply these days. We must not begrudge them a bit of sawdust. No harm in it.”

  James laid down his rag. He had not thought of it that way.

  “I tell my Miriam, ‘Where is the wrong done? These are hearts in need, hearts long encumbered, else they would not have troubled themselves to come to my place. If a bit of clay gives comfort or hope . . .’” He lifted his hands again. “Eh, let them have their tokens, and God bless them for it.”

  James rose from his stool involuntarily, the action nearly embarrassing him. He pretended to have to reach for the nail container on the shelf.

  He nearly went to give the man welcome, as he would have a few years ago. Already he was drawn to the kindness he saw in the stranger’s eyes. Drawn to the understanding. Something foreign these days, in these parts.