“I need a bath,” James proclaimed as they returned to the house of Flotillus.
“Many just bathe in the river,” John said.
“In the river! With no shame?”
“Why should there be shame in the body God made?” Jesus wondered.
Jude, who laughed and played his harp more than he spoke, this time said, “If God had made our bodies alike it might be different, but God made some of us better than others.”
Jesus ignored this, because he knew what Jude was implying, He and John were called the lovely twins, Jesus who ran to darkness and curling hair, flashing teeth and black eyes and John, who was long limbed and moved like a deer, black haired with thick black lashes almost lik a girl’s and pale eyes.
“Is Flotillus like a rich Roman?” Jude asked. “With baths in his house?”
“Flotillus is a rich Roman,” John said, “with water for washing in his house and the sense to go to the baths.”
“You’ve been in the baths?” James marveled.
“How provincial you are!” Jude exclaimed.
“We come from a province,” James countered. “And you are from the same place as me.”
“Aye,” Jude agreed. “But I don’t let it limit me. You glory in it!”
“Isn’t this the place” John said, linking arms with his older cousin, and leaning against him, “Where you say, brothers, brothers, peace!”
Jesus shook his head, grinning, tired, still a little drunk.
“Not tonight,” he said.
The house of Flotillus was built of heavy old stones, and Jesus ran his hands over them in admiration, the way only a builder would. The well made door with its bronze filigree and bolts was still open and to a lamp lit courtyard, full of good green plants and sound of the trickling fountain.
“Are you sure you want to go back with us?” Jesus grinned at John who shook his head and said, “If I can leave I can come back, right?”
Inside the house proper, Flotillus was heading to bed and he said, “I was ashamed of being a poor host, but I see you all have been entertaining yourselves. This is Topharos. He will show you to your rooms.”
“Rooms?” James marveled at such wealth for, even having grown up well, he expected them to share a space.
Benjamin was small and silent, and he only smiled before leading them through the lower level of the house, leaving Jude and James in a great room and saying, “Master said you would stay with John,” to Jesus, who nodded and said, “Yes.”
“Unless you’d rather the room upstairs,” John said.
“No,” Jesus said. “No.”
“I know Mother sent us to bring you back,” Jesus said, looking around, his face slightly amused. “But maybe it’s we who should stay.”
This stone room was lush with rich thick carpets and hung with expensive tapestries, a great low bed piled with cushions and furs under a high window from that let in a jasmine scented breeze.
John whisper sang in his high tenor.
“I have come to my garden, my sister, my bride;
I have gathered my myrrh with my spice.
I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey;
I have drunk my wine with my milk.”
And grinning, Jesus returned,
“Eat, O friends, and drink;
drink freely, O beloved!”
“Sit,” John said, and Jesus obeyed. John poured water from the ewer into the ornate bowl, and he poured myrrh in it as well, remembering the lusty tale of the princess crammed with her father’s seed. He knelt before Jesus and John tenderly took his long, calloused foot. Jesus almost grimaced, embarrassed by the dirt and the days caked on his soles, and John set them in the water, kneeling over the basin, contemplating his feet as if he was praying. He took off the copper bangles and laid them on the carpet beside him. He heard Jesus removing his bangles too. Neither of them spoke, and then John took a cloth and began scrubbing those long feet clean. He noted that the big toe could be trimmed. They all could be trimmed. Jon had grown up with a few servants, one of two children. Jesus was the kind of person to let these things go. Tomorrow night, when this was more ceremonial and less necessary, when the water did not go from sudsy to brown so quickly, he would attend to these toes. How beautiful the foot of the beloved was, the instep, the arch, the veins that ran to the toes, and how beautiful these feet which had come so far for him were.
John took the dirty water, left and came back with new water, warm and fragrant, and he took one of Jesus’s feet and then the other, and began to wash them again, to massage the pain of the days away, and as he did, Jesus sighed and lifting his head without opening his eyes.
“There was a man who had two sons,” Jesus began.
“The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them….”
“What?” Jon said.
“Nothing,” Jesus waved it away, eyes closed. “It is only… We are so far from home… An idea. Only idea.”
“You have so many ideas,” John said as he lifted Jesus’s feet and began to dry them with the softest cloth either of them had ever felt. “So many,” he began to massage them with oil.
“Only…. Not so many of late.”
“Things changed when Father died.”
John had felt something was about to happen. What the something was he could not say It was as if all their dull lives were on the edge of something, and then Joseph had died and the whole family had been cast into darkness. A shadow had come over his oldest son.
He sang.
“I sleep, but my heart is awake.
A sound! My beloved is knocking:
‘Open to me, my sister, my darling,
my dove, my flawless one.
My head is drenched with dew,
my hair with the dampness of the night.’
“Give me your robe,” John said.
Jesus obeyed and John said, “Did you bring another?”
“You know Mother. You know Grandmother.”
John nodded.
“But I wasn’t going to change into them on the road.”
“Wise,” John noted.
He took the great soiled robe, more road dirt and funk than fabric now, and said, “I’ll have this washed in the morning. You go to that tub.”
And Jesus thought it was pleasant to be bossed about by his slender little cousin, pleasant to be made much of after the long journey, and he stood in the copper tub waiting for him to return.
Jesus sang:
“I have taken off my robe—
must I put it back on?
I have washed my feet—
must I soil them again?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” John said softly. “Give me this too.”
And wordlessly Jesus unwounded the breechclout from around his loins. On an ordinary day there might not be one at all, but in the midst of all this travel it was necessary. There was reaching behind and around for the elaborate swaddling, and then it fell loose in his hands and John took it, and John said, “Sit you down.”
And he poured warm water down on Jesus’s head, the wild tendrils of his hair, tamed by the scented water, and Jesus gave way to the baptism, his tight set shoulders relaxed while John moved his fingers through his hair, untangling it, working his miracle with an old ivory comb, running water down his back and scrubbing it of dust and dirt and the days of travel.
“There are so many knots in you,” John frowned as he rubbed them out and Jesus moaned with relief.
John hummed while he poured perfumed water over him, and then he sang while the room filled with the heavy scent of the myrrh in the oil he poured on his cousin’s head and he said, “Stand up.”
“I don’t need you for this.”
“Stand up,” John said in the voice that, in childhood had belonged to the youngest most beautiful most catered child of the clan, but which now was that of a young man who expected to be obeyed, and Jesus found it a pleasure to obey him. He stood up and the water ran down him, and John lowered his eyes and then raised them. For a moment he made a small noise like weeping, and Jesus said, “Jonni, little, little John.”
His eyes swept over Jesus, over his broad chest and the black hair that grew lightly on it, down the trail that went past his navel, past his solid stomach, down to the land of his sex, penis like a copper rod coming from the black hair touched with the same copper in this lamplight. He beheld the strong tree trunks of thighs on muscled and scarred legs and stood to wash him all. Like one at a coronation, John stood behind Jesus, ministering to him as if he was a servant and this was the king. He rinsed his back and descended lower. He loved all of this man’s body. He lavished his chest with water till he gleamed like precious metal, and John fell to his knees before Jesus, washing his thighs, his legs, his sex, washing him until Jesus cried out. Jesus lifted his head and said nothing while John, kneeling before him, took all of him in his mouth. They stood like this, Jesus in the pool, John before it, his hands reverently on his cousin’s hips, and then cupping his round buttocks. They remained like that, Jesus’s mouth open in silence.
Jesus pulled John closer, cramming his mouth slowly, and he heard a rustling of fabric, then John had stopped, and Jesus saw him lift his own white robe, and he was naked underneath, and he went back to sucking him, to kneading him, to the moment where fingers slipped into the warm cleft of his buttocks and pressed down as they thrust inside.
“Ohhhh Gods!” he groaned, and then he pulled John up and kissed him hard on the mouth, stepping out of the tub until they were a tall man and a taller man, face to face.
John kissed him back, and he wrapped one towel about his shoulders and with the other towel, like a precious thing, he dried him,
When John sank to his knees, he took him in his mouth again, and when he finally rose, he dried his legs, singing:
“His legs are pillars of marble
set on bases of pure gold.
His appearance is like Lebanon,
as majestic as the cedars.”
Jesus raised him and murmured:
“His mouth is most sweet;
he is altogether lovely.
This is my beloved, and this is my friend,
O daughters of Jerusalem.”
John echoed: “O daughters of Jerusalem.”
“Come,” Jesus said, holding out his hand out, and looking to the bed.
As Jesus lay John down, the hand at the back of his head becoming the hand that caressed his cheek, Jesus lowered himself on the bed over John, running his hand over his breast, delighting in his coral nipples, then descended to his stomach, and John placed his hands in the thick tangles of Jesus’s hair, thrust his fingers in their locks while his contentment became a humming and the humming climaxed in a shout.
