In the night, John dreams. His aunt Mary makes a startled noise, says. “No No. Don’t do that. Set it back!”
Jesus is, according to body and the Law, a man, but still a boy, and he looks startled too. He laughs and says, “But it is already done. It would be a crime to undo it.”
He always has such a way of reasoning with his mother. Mary says, with a heavy sigh, “Well, try not to…. No, do not do it again.”
“Yes, Mother,” Jesus says.
There is a reprimand in her voice and there is sullenness in his and yet, even as a little, little boy, John hears laughter underneath both of their tones. A game. There is always a private language between Mary and her oldest, and Joseph never seems to mind. The mother and the son are included in something that Joseph and the rest of the children and not and, oddly enough, Joseph adores them, adores them both. The thing about Mary is that to see her is to see her son. If she had been a boy, she would have looked like Jesus. There is nothing of Joseph in him. This has caused the occasional rumor which has landed the speaker with a slap on the mouth and a cuff on the head, but if he doesn’t like Joseph, Jesus doesn’t look like any other man.
And then there is the thing that Jesus is devoted to Joseph. He is like his mother, damn it, he is his mother! But he adores Joseph, and the man adores him. Later, much later, there will be stories about how Joseph was an old man. Even a song with the very idea in the first line. There will be tales of a cherry tree. But Joseph was a young man. There was the tragedy. Joseph was all of eighteen when Jesus was born, and he never seem to age except for some silver at his temples that made him all the more handsome. And it wasn’t right to say the two of them didn’t look alike, because they were both tall and rangy with lose long limbs and dark curling hair. Joseph taught Jesus the adze and the lathe and the art of woodworking and the cutting of stone. By the time Jesus was fourteen he was in the mason’s guild. Then Joseph sent him to school in Sepphoris and then down to Jerusalem. He was gone a while.
Later, much later, when people who did not understand their world spoke of it, they would say things that took John’s breath away, that Jesus and his family and his friends, John even, were illiterate and simple tradesmen, because to them working made one a tradesperson and it made one ignorant. Because they had no idea that all Jewish men read. You had to read Torah. Israel was a land of scholars and rabbis. And it had always been a land of working men with dirt under their fingernails. Of course, some had a little less dirt than others, and Joseph had already seen to it that Jesus would be one of those.
“The shop is for Joses,” Joseph said of his second child.
Mary nodded, almost in disinterest while she and her sister mended old clothes.
“Because Joses thinks of nothing beyond shops,” Mary had clarified.
“He’s a very… concrete boy,” Joseph added.
Salome, Mary’s younger sister, had laughed cruelly in her bell like voice.
“Sounds like you’re trying to call your son stupid.”
“Joses is not a thinker,” Mary said. “Not all men are.”
And then she added, “Or all women.”
“Oh!” Salome had given a sharp intake of breath at the barb.
“And,” Mary had added, “when I want to call someone stupid, you’ll know it, because I will say it.”
Then Joseph had laughed that rich laugh of his, and soon Mary had laughed and soon Salome did do. There was no malice in any of them, and Joseph loved his wife because she was a beauty, yes, but because she had a wicked tongue and a devastating humor. Long into the nights the two of them spoke of Torah, or of politics, especially what was going on in Jerusalem, and when Jesus could come back with bits of Plato and Aristotle, or when a lecturer came into the towns from up north in Syria, they sat on either side of the little fire they kept on the roof, discussing it long into the night, their speech like foreplay, the light of the fire in Joseph’s eyes clearly displaying his desire for his brilliant and often argumentative wife. Not with him, for he knew better than to argue, but unlike many women she was quick to state her opinion with a man. Until the day Joseph had come, Anne had labeled her daughter—though quietly—unmarriageable.
In his sleep, in the jasmine scented room, John woke, stretching himself along the body of his cousin and pressing close to him so that, half asleep, Jesus turned to him,draping his long, strong leg over John’s and hooking him in, and John pressed his face to the soft fur of his chest.
“No No,” he dreams of his Aunt Mary again.
“Don’t do that. Set it back!”
“But it is already done. It would be a crime to undo it.”
“Well, try not to…. No, do not do it again.”
“Yes, Mother,” Jesus says.
Why can he not remember the rest of it?
They are on Lake Genessaret. On the sea of Galilee. Jude has informed them that it is not a true sea, it is a freshwater lake. You can see clear across to the other side of it from any angle. John wants to hit him for this. It’s the only sea he’s ever known.
“There is a true sea out there. The Great Sea. It is salty and filled with water creatures. You can’t see to the end of it. That’s true water.”
“Have you seen it?” John says.
“You know I haven’t.”
“Then you needn’t feel so superior.”
They are squabbling again, as siblings and cousins do, and then adults are laughing because they do not care, and because John, though the littlest, is also the cleverest. Where is Jesus? And where is he in this, and what in the world does he have to do with this moment?
Night settles over the lake. The moon rises, and it shines in ripples over the water. The women are with family and it is night. They wear no hair covering, Mary’s long crinkly hair, with a great life of its own, hangs down her back, and she raises her hands till it seems like she cups the moon in them. John remembers Magdalene is there, Magdalene with her serious ways and her long black hair. She is Jesus’s age and once someone said she would marry him and the room went silent. Magdalene only laughed.
Now she raises her head and sings.
“Precious lady, beloved by El,
The depth of your heart, none can tell
may it be assuaged on my behalf!
Beloved spouse of the Nameless Lord,
you are the great Lady of the horizon and
zenith of the heavens.
The Holy Ones
Have submitted to you
Gods above and below
have submitted to you.
From birth you were the destined Queen:
how supreme you are now over the all spirits,
over all the great gods!”
It was not that he wasn’t supposed to hear this. He knew that if he were truly forbidden from this, the women would have taken greater care. They shared out wine and raisin cake and he wanted to come closer, because he loved raisin cake.
“There he is,” Magdalene had pointed, smiling. “There is Yochanon. Come here, Jonni, come.”
He did. She gave him wine and cake and said, “Sleep here, on my lap,” and he accespted, and while he fell into sleep, Magdalene said, “It is the way of women. The men are Beni Ysrael, the Sons of Israel, and they worship the One you hear of in the synagogues, who they burn animals to in the Temple. But he is full of rage, full of war. You have read the holy books, heard the God in his unending rage, his contests with Baal. For God made men in his image and they returned the favor.
“But,” Mary chimed in,and the women’s voices were more like lullabies than lectures, “we are the daughters of Leah, of Rachel, of Zilpah, of Bilhah…”
“Tamar…”
“Rahab.”
“Sarah and Rebecca.”
“Hagar… “
“We worship the Mother who is not seen, and the Father who is not known.”
“For salvation is of them.”
“A boy child is among us tonight.”
More raisin cake slipped into John’s mouth.
“Only when the man comes where the man has never been, and the woman is embraced in the place where she was forbidden will God be known.”
“God be known…”
He sleeps.
In the middle of the night, Jesus takes his face and kisses John so deeply. They move like serpents and John takes the oil. He slips it into himself. For a while Jesus kneels above him while John takes the oil and polishes his penis, watching it stretch likr the seraph serpent, watching it grow and arch like the penis on the little idols of El they still find in the gaves and the ruins of old houses. Jesus relents. John presses him down on his back, stretches out his arms. He mounts him, slowly, and both of their mouths open at the tightness of entry. John stops, his eyes wide with the pain. It’s been so long, so long, so… he settles onto him, impales himself, rocks himself slowly, slowly, closing his eyes on the pleasure of Jesus inside him.
