The Brother's Keeper

by Tracy Groot

“I will.”

  Simon clicked his tongue, the cart lurched forward, and the brothers and the sister began the journey back to Nazareth. The small group at Bethany’s gate watched them leave. Two couples with arms about each other and a girl who stood apart from the rest, in a lavender tunic that fluttered in the breeze. They stayed until the traveling party could no longer be seen on the road; then they turned, one by one, into the city.

  25

  THE CLOSER THEY CAME to Shechem, the more the strange thoughts came. They were wild-eyed thoughts, giddy and foolish thoughts, but had he not a right to a little foolishness? Simon did not care to see the inside of their workroom ever again. His chances to become a scribe had long since vanished, but the thought of a carving knife . . . the thought of his bench sent invisible fingers to his throat.

  Why not explore the possibilities? Why not see what was out there? Normally he kept such reckless ideas in tight rein. This time he sent them on a gallop.

  The crazy odd notion to visit Kardus . . . well, and why not? Did not Simon have a right to a time apart from it all? He did not even know what Kardus did to earn his living. It would be interesting to find out. He lived in a mostly pagan territory, with Jewish pockets here and there, and that was a comfort—but Simon was ready for a change of landscape. He ducked his head to hide a smile. Pagan territory, a change of landscape?

  When they came upon Shechem, upon its outskirts, the thoughts agitated him even more. This road led to Nazareth. What was he doing going back to Nazareth? He could not go back. He could not.

  “What ails you, Simon?” Judas asked, with more than small irritation. He walked beside him, eyes ever on the hillsides. He carried a length of grimy burlap he had picked up, snapping it at things on the road.

  Judas had noticed? Well, it wouldn’t be James who would. “I don’t know.” Simon kept his eyes averted.

  Jude snapped the burlap at a gecko on a rock. The gecko skittered away. “He brings change.”

  Simon ignored that and, keeping his voice low, said, “What do you think about Jorah?”

  Jorah and James trailed not far behind the cart. They walked together, but in silence. Simon had not heard them speak all day, not since leaving Bethany. Nor had James eaten anything. They had stopped twice for refreshment, and James did not have a crumb. Simon shrugged. Not that he fretted about it. James could take care of himself.

  But Jorah . . . How he longed for her to skip up to him with a palmful of rocks. How he wished she would fix a posy in the donkey’s bridle, giggling as she did so. He glanced over his shoulder at her. It wasn’t only sorrow that kept Jorah silent. Her face was as dark as the cloud wrapped around her. And it bothered him that she wore Nathanael’s tefillin.

  He first noticed it when he glanced at her as she was adjusting her head covering. Her tunic sleeve slipped to her elbow, exposing the straps wound about her arm. It was a dark shock. Women did not wear the tefillin. There was probably a law against it, written or oral. Worse, it seemed wrong to see them there. What was in that act? A defiance. A rebellion. Against whom, Simon did not know.

  He could see on her face the despair he felt. But he felt something more, something so tenuous and vague it was almost not there.

  Jude glanced over his shoulder. “Give her time,” he murmured. “We will all need it.”

  They walked for a while, until Simon said, “He brought change.”

  “What?”

  “You said he brings change. He is gone, Judas. He brought change. For us, anyway.”

  “Yes . . . of course. That is what I meant.”

  “And I am not going back to Nazareth.” Simon stopped the cart. Jude walked a few steps more, then stopped. He kept his back to Simon. Then he dropped the piece of burlap and put his hands on his hips, gazing somewhere ahead.

  “What am I to do with that, Simon?”

  James and Jorah must have figured this for the stopping place. Jorah went to the side of the road, selecting a boulder to settle upon. James went off to visit the brush. Well, it was nearly time to make camp anyway. Simon leaned against the cart and pulled off a sandal. He turned it over and went to work on an embedded pebble. “Do whatever you want with it. But I can’t go back. I can’t breathe for the thought.”

  “Of all people . . .”

  “I know. But I’m not going back.”

  Jude turned, and his face was cold and blank—viciously neutral. Shaking his head, he stalked off for the brush, muttering, “You’re all mad. The lot of you. At least I still have my wits.”

  Simon watched him go. Clouds without water? Trees without fruit? “That’s what you think!” he shouted after him.

  Jude half-turned, only to wave dismissively and keep stalking.

  Simon led the donkey to the side of the road and began to unharness it. He unhooked the cart pole on one side, went around to unhook the other, and stopped, pole in hand. He felt giddiness, as though he stood on the edge of a promontory, gazing at a great lethal depth. Not going back to Nazareth? Was he Simon? What was he thinking? He had with him his writing tools, his prayer shawl, and his tefillin. A change of clothing and a bedroll. That was all. No money. Certainly none of the sense he was born with.

  “I’m not going back,” he whispered in wonder. He lifted his head and looked to the purple hill crests in the northeast, to the province of Decapolis.

  What would Kardus think when he showed up on his doorstep again? What would he think to learn the one who had driven off the demons was dead? Was that why Simon needed to go? To tell him? It’s what he would tell himself for now.

  Judas sought to prove his disgust with Simon by not helping to unload the supplies. That was his reason for being gone an hour now. James did not have a reason.

  Twilight came fast. Jorah began to pace the length of the campsite, hands on her hips, looking to the hills flanking the road. “Where are they? What are they thinking to take a walk at this time? In this place?”

  Simon avoided her eyes. He knew why Jude had not returned but could not tell her. Not yet. “Maybe they needed some time alone.”

  “In Samaria?”

  “It isn’t bad here,” Simon assured her, glancing up the road. “Not in Shechem.”

  “Shechem,” Jorah said bitterly. “The place of promise.” She dropped down next to Simon. She pulled off her sandals and began to clean out the sand from between her toes. He deliberately kept his eyes off the tefillin.

  Simon adjusted the metal pan set on the tripod above the campfire. The pan held only bread for the warming; there was dried fish in their supplies, but no one was eating much lately. He reached into the pan and turned the pieces of bread over, then settled back on his heels, his gaze straying once again to the northeast. Jorah, I’m not going back. I’m off to see a man who had touched something so strong it drove away a legion of demons. Maybe I want to see if the miracle held. See if the death of Jesus did not erase all the good he did while he lived.

  “You’re always saying I’m the coward.” James stood on the other side of the campfire, Jude right behind him. “Just who is the coward, Simon?”

  Jorah lowered her sandal. “Where have you been?” she demanded.

  Simon poked the bread about in the pan. “So Jude told you.”

  Darkness from twilight cascaded down James’ face while firelight lit it from below. The effect was not pleasant, not with that pinched snarl in the thin face. “You of all people,” he sneered.

  “Funny, that’s what Jude said.” Simon took a cloth and wrapped it around the pan handle. He removed the pan and set it on the ground, then rose to look at James across the campfire.

  “What are you talking about?” Jorah said uncertainly.

  “I am going to Decapolis,” Simon said without taking his eyes from James.

  “You’re what?”

  Simon thought he had no more weeping left. He had cried himself dry, soul and spirit, cried himself hollow for his gentle brother and that cocky apprentice, for his mother and his brothers, for
his sisters and for himself. Cried until he thought it was enough, but looking at James, new grief came.

  Where was the old James he knew? He began to fade the day Jesus left. Who was this standing before him? James, the old James, had contentment of life, had a sense of humor and a wonderful laugh. Simon loved to hear it, that old laugh.

  This pale, thin man with hatred on his face was not the brother he grew up with. James might as well be dead, right along with Jesus.

  “I am sorry, James,” Simon said sadly. “Sorry that we were not strong enough for it, none of us. He had to be somebody’s brother.”

  Jude folded his arms. His face matched that of James. There would be no understanding from either of them, and Simon did not expect it. Did not deserve it. “When are you leaving?” Jude asked.

  “You mean it?” Jorah gasped, coming beside Simon.

  He could leave in the morning. They were just past the road that had broken north for Beth Shean. But he didn’t want them to travel the Samaritan route without him. He owed them at least that. “I’ll stay with you until we reach Kfar Otnai. You’ll be fine after that. Then I’ll take the east road to Beth Shean.”

  James said he was a coward. Perhaps it was so. There were many reasons he was going to Decapolis; there was only one reason he could not return to Nazareth. It was why Jude and James glowered at him; they were in sick dread of it too.

  “But why, Simon?” Jorah cried, grasping his tunic. He pulled her in with both arms and held her tight. Her cries were muffled against his chest. Had he any weeping left, he would cry with her.

  He rested his cheek against her head. “Because I cannot walk into that workroom, knowing all hope of his return is lost.”

  26

  JAMES WAS ALREADY as a hollowed-out bowl, thin as it could get without complete ruin, yet the adze chipped again.

  He had not said good-bye to Simon but watched him go. He had left with a small sack over one shoulder, bedroll over the other. The lord of the tack mallet had one sandal flapping and didn’t seem to notice. He had a waterskin dangling at his side and two loaves of bread in his tunic pocket. Jude had forced him to take a dinar and several copper prutas.

  James sat with his back against the olive tree. Someone had been here, a child most likely, maybe one of Eli’s grandchildren; a small pile of pebbles lay nearby. The white stones ringed about the tree were all in order. He looked up into the branches, thick with slender green-gray leaves. It still bore fruit, this most ancient of trees, the oldest olive tree around. Joseph had once taken an expert in husbandry to this ridge to show him the tree. The man had been delighted, and confirmed what Joseph had known, that it was at least a thousand years old. The man had gone to bring others to see the tree. They had taken away cuttings from it. It had greatly pleased Joseph.

  Come harvesttime they would clean it of the fruit and bring the olives to the press in the village. They would filter the oil, draining it through sieve after sieve. They would fill crocks and amphoras, sell some of it, store most of it. They would cure some of the harvest in brine. It had been so year after year since Joseph came to Nazareth, over thirty years ago.

  It was a week now since the party of five to Jerusalem had returned a party of three. James wanted to tell Simon it wasn’t so bad, that first day back in Nazareth—the first day back in the workroom. Perhaps the dread of it was finished on the road home. Unlocking the workroom door, pushing it open. The kiss on the mezuzah.

  The corner bench was doubly empty now. Nathanael had left a few tools out, and James felt dull pain as he watched Jude slowly put them away. Once when Jorah was busy with laundry in the back, and Jude was at market fetching items for her, James was alone in the workroom. He paused at his workbench and set down his nail jar, then looked over his shoulder to take in the shop. He went to the center of the room and stood beneath the awning. He lifted his chin—listening. Birds from outside. The muted slop of the laundry tub in the back. A distant shout of a child, one of Eli’s grandchildren. He did not hear what he listened for, and what that was he did not know.

  He wasn’t the only one. He’d seen Jude pause at his hunk of white stone, caught him glancing over his shoulder.

  “Feels different in here,” Jude had said quietly. “You feel that?”

  James had nodded, glancing too, but the conversation went no further.

  It wasn’t the absence of Jesus and Nathanael. It wasn’t the absence of Simon. It was a different sort of emptiness. A very large emptiness. It made Judas work the stone roller outside, and it made James come daily to the ridge. It was restlessness.

  He drew his knees up and rested his wrists on them. A week ago he could barely leave the workroom. Now he couldn’t stay. He wondered how Simon was, if he—

  Consider it all JOY!

  His heart stopped, then started again. He sat up and with eyes huge in fear, looked to the left and right, expecting to see the indigo-clad madman from the East. He looked behind him. Where did that come from? Was it a shout? Did he hear it; did he imagine it? There was no one around, but he could feel the echo. His skin still stood out an inch! God of Israel, was he going mad? He didn’t mind dabbling in madness if only it didn’t make his heart seize.

  Once his breathing settled down, he rested against the tree again, warily scanning the places he had already looked. He had not thought on that crazy notion for a long while. It sounded like what it was, an empty new philosophy, this time not born in Greece but in the East. Consider it all joy. Surely a bizarre new philosophy, because you had to bend God-given logic for it.

  James could not consider a trial joy unless he could see something on the other side of it. Something worth the trial. The ball-in-a-cage puzzle when he was seven—how many times did the frustration of that project bring him to furious tears? But the joy when he presented it to Joseph. Or what about a mother giving birth? Consider those trials joy, sure, because there was something on the other side. Something worth it. He thought of one of his father’s favorite psalms: “We went through fire and through water, yet you have brought us out to a place of abundance.”

  Pain isn’t such a bad thing, Son, Joseph had told him long ago, if it takes you where you want to go. Well. There it was, the reason misery could eat him whole, because this pain didn’t go anywhere. It never had, for three long years. Pain with nothing on the other side. Why consider this joy? Why not take a hammer and pound his toes for no good reason? Where was the God-given logic?

  He got up from the tree. He went and stood on the crest of the ridge and looked to where the hill tumbled down to the rocky expanse below. His gaze followed the bottom of the ravine to the hills opposite him, followed the line of those hills south toward Megiddo. Looked beyond Megiddo to Samaria. Looked past Samaria to Jerusalem, where they crucified his brother.

  “Nathanael is the only one who had it right,” he said to the ever-silent God.

  It only makes sense, James. Love the Lord your God? With all your heart? That, James, is much to ask.

  “Much to ask, Nathanael?” James whispered. “It’s impossible.”

  You were the only one honest enough to say it. He once said he didn’t come to abolish but fulfill. I asked myself, Nathanael, what was not fulfilled that he came to fulfill it? I wish I knew the answer to that. I wish I knew what he was thinking. I wonder if it’s wadded up with the Shema. I wonder if, by saying what he said, that . . .

  He knew it was impossible too.

  James tilted his head to the side, gazing toward Jerusalem. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might? Why do you ask such hard things?

  Do you love God, Nathanael?

  “I do not know him well enough to love him.”

  We’re just little humans. Is it fair for you to ask humans such a thing? Nathanael was the only one I knew who had the guts to bare that wide. I never thought about how big the Shema was. Well, you know what? I think I learned a little about honesty from Nathanael. I think I’m ready to say tha
t I’m not sure I ever loved you. Really loved. Jesus I loved. But you? I don’t even know you.

  Do you want to know something? It’s hard to be a Jew in this world. Hard on the outside and harder on the inside.

  James lay down on the ridge on his side. He laid his head on his arm and his Jerusalem gaze drifted to the hazy blue sky.

  Is this the way it’s supposed to be?

  I don’t know why you made me.

  Look at me. If I am made in your image, what a poor Ruler of the universe you must be. Made in your image; that’s as hard as the Shema. Jews in your image. Gentiles in your image.

  If I believed that, it would change everything.

  It would make you my Father. And it would make you their Father.

  Stop making my Father’s house a house of merchandise.

  Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?

  My Father . . .

  They say you have risen. If I believed that, it would change everything.

  A tear rolled to the edge of his nose and dripped off.

  It all comes down to belief. Belief is a hard thing, God. I stand up in the surf only to get slammed down again. I pray and get a portion of hell as my answer. There’s a pattern in it all, Joses said. I can’t see it, God. I can’t see why he came. Belief is too hard for me. Faith is too hard. I will go mad trying to figure it out.

  Why does it seem that Nathanael died knowing something so good? What have I missed? I grew up in it all; I grew up with everything centered about you. I had good parents. I went faithfully to synagogue. He was the son of a whore. He was abused by his own mother. It should have poisoned him. But he died in peace.

  What did Nathanael believe?

  You know what? There’s only one thing I believe. One thing I know: I know who I was when he was here. And I liked that person better.

  “Jesus . . . ,” James whispered.

  “James.”

  Slowly, James lifted his head.