THE LADY AND THE LION
As a child, John took to sleeping in boats, under the tarp. He loved the gentle rocking of the lake and, probably, he loved the privacy. At first his mother came after him, calling his name over again and dragging him back to the house. Zebedee, his father, seemed undisturbed and when the fisherman came out at night for their work, Zebedee would simply take off the tarp, climb in with his men and tell John to get to work.
When he was twelve, he woke in the Sabbath when there was no work, and lifting his head from the tarp, squinted his eyes to see under the pier two men. one bent over the other who was on his hands and knees.
“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”
But why would it be whispered or written if it wasn’t a thing? John watched, watched muscles bunched against muscles, watched the surrender as the kneeling man went flat in the watery sand and the other one mounted him fully. He has seen men and women by now, his mother and father in late night embraces. This was nothing like lying with a woman. He couldn’t stop watching. He watched the first man’s face change. Watched as he was pummeled, as bodies bucked and the man on top of the other’s face changed too, something wrung from him. In the gentle rocking boat, he watched the two of them lying together before they both went their separate ways.
On his hands and knees, pressing back, pressing back to take him, John’s eyes roll back, and his mouth opens in something that is beyond pleasure or pain as he feel’s Jesus’s hands on his hips as he rejoices in something that is beyond the angels or the animals. Animals do not know this bliss. He’s seen mating. Animals barely know what they’re doing and it is soon over. Only humans give themselves up to this in the dark, this thing beyond words and intellect, this connection beyond community or contract, this…. Fucking… He heard the word from a whore and it sounds right, sounds just like what it was, feeling the drops of sweat from Jesus’s face fall on his back, make a wet line down his spine. They move like one of those Greek engines, or like mortal and pestle, pressing and back pressing back. John’s breath is ragged, ragged, he hears Jesus cry out, a shout that fills the house and gives everything away if anyone was bothering to listen.
“Ahhhhhh,” Jesus opens his mouth. “Ahhh….” It is as if he had something to say, but is beyond words. They stay like that, rocking back and forth, John still on hands and knees, Jesus still firmly inside him.
Later there will be legends. In the legends, the Galilee is a huge, barren place. Or its all peasants. But that was never true. The Galilee is cities and towns and more towns, some not very big at all, all surrounding that huge lake that some have dared to call a sea, and since John has seen those two men under the dock, now he often lies in the boat hoping to see them again. Often he sees other things. On the roof at night, or in a private shed with a bottle of oil, he mimics what he’s seen, touching himself, and one day he screams in horror and exultation as a hot rope of liquid shoots from him. One day when James catches him, his older brother bursts out laughing. John is crimson with guilt, but James says, “No, no. Let me show you.”
He sits beside his brother and takes up his tunic and James is large, and his comes up from a cloud of dark black hair and John works his own, watching his brother. He wants to touch it, but when he tries, with a light hand James pushes his hand away and keeps attending to himself. He has never thought much of his older brother, but right now he is beautiful, the way his face changes, the way his Adam’s apple quivers and his mouth opens as his neck arches and, finally, he is shooting, shooting, shooting far more seed onto the shed floor than John ever has.
Panting, James says, “It’s natural. It’s the most natural thing in the world.”
It’s strange because his brother is his brother, annoying, superior, quick with orders, but John looks forward to this. It doesn’t happen every day. It feels so good, awakens so many feelings, and John knows his brother won’t let him touch it. Won’t let his hand stray, but suddenly, without much thought, he gets off of his bottom, turns, kneels and suddenly James cries out when John begins to suck him. James doesn’t say anything, doesn’t say don’t do this. He just grits his teeth and swears before a growl comes from clenched teeth. When he opens his mouth to shout and presses John’s head full down on him, John gags and his cheeks balloon. Semen fills his mouth and spills down his chin.
After this James says, “We can’t do this again.”
They never do. It’s as if none of it ever happened.
As John half dozes in Jesus’s loose arms, he remembers the day he saw him on the other side of the wheat field. He had come home from school in Sepphoris, and he was waving at him, laughing. It took a moment for John to know him he had grown so tall. And then he was running through the fiels to him, laughing, and he was caught up in his arms.
“You smell like apples!” John said.
“And?” his cousin said.
“Wheat?”
“And?”
“The road, and sweat. And what else do you want me to say?”
John felt so light in his cousin’s arms, Jesus swung him around the stalks of wheat lightly striking his legs.
“It is good to see you, Jonni! We will catch up. We will stay together a long while.”
Sleeping, he dreams of sleep, of that night when Magdalene filled his mouth with bits of raisin cake and heady wine, and as he dozed, yawning, he heard his Aunt Mary whispering. She was whispering, talking about a star.
“It was a star. Just like that. And then I tipped back my head and the star fell into my mouth…”
He is remembering her saying something offhanded, almost laughing when she speaks to Jesus.
“That’s right my darling,” she says as she stands over the cooking pot, the ladle in her hand red with bean sauce.
“I opened my mouth and a star fell into it, then ten moons later you, my first, was born.”
Now he remembers with the logic of dreamers. His cousin, always willing to please his younger relations but especially eager to please John, is on the ground with him, molding little birds. John’s look like lumps, but even at that age, Jesus is skilled in shaping and detail. If he were a pagan he could probably be a great sculptor. In the south they say this is a sin, but this is Galilee, and John is mesmerized as Jesus, with a stick and his fingernails makes one beautiful bird after another. And he does it slowly, so that John can follow and learn, and together they makes stacks of fat little birds, a whole flock, one after another, and then Jesus gets a look in his eyes and says: “Watch this.”
He gathers some of the clay birds in his arms, and hurls them into the air, but as John wails, “No—” dismayed by the apparent cruelty of his beloved cousin,, suddenly the upflung lumps of clay stretch out their plastered on wings and John looses his breath. Jesus flings the others up to join them, and the birds swirl in a circle around them while Aunt Mary, who was kneading dough, rises, her eyes wide, her mouth flat.
“No. No. Do not. 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 sin 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.
John looks between the mother and the son as the birds, wrens, rise up in a swarm and fly away.
He knows not to speak of this. He never does, and in time he forgets. Like he forgets the day bullies ran after him and Jesus shouted to them, and they looked back and cursed him, and a sycamore branch fell on their heads. Or the time when his cousins had come to visit and John ran into the house sobbing because his cat had died, but Jesus touched it and the cat immediately sat up in his arms. No… no… that couldn’t have…. He was dreaming. These were all dreams, and agreeing again with himself that they were dreams, John blinked at the grey light coming from the high window of Flotillus’s house and saw that it was morning.
They woke huddled together, legs entwined under the carpets, and Jesus, turning his breath and his face from John, stretched and yawned, “What hour is it?”
They were used to rising with the sun, but John leaned and turned to look up at the window, saying, “Judging by the light, it’s the third hour.”
“Three hours past…” Jesus rose, stretching, and John pulled him back down into the warmth of the bed.
“There is no hurry,” he said.
“No, hurry? Half the day is gone? What will everyone think?”
“Palmyra is not Nazareth. Or Capernaum,” was all John said.
In time they rose and made their way to the modest bathing pool in the roofless atrium where James and Jude already were.
“Can you believe this?” James demanded, clapping and splashing in the water.
“How soon do we return to Capernaum?”
“We return when we return,” Jude said. “Or when the money runs out. For now we see this city.”
“And there is so much to see,” said John.
“Yes,” Jesus ducked his head in the water, making a great splash.
“Let’s see the city, but after that the country.”
“I’ve had a enough of the country to last me a lifetime,” Jude shrugged.
“But they say in the mountains and hills there are old shrines and ancient stones,” Jesus said. “And I would very much like to see them.”
“The signs of devils and of false worship,” James said.
“The signs of things before and beside and outside of what we know,” Jesus said. “I will not be a small man who believes that everything outside of our Torah is the Devil, or everything that is not of Israel is evil. I would go into the hills and sit in those old shrines and see how men worshiped God before the prophets and Jerusalem said their way of seeing God was the only God.”
“Our Yehoshana is become a philosopher!” Jude said.
“Jesus was always a philosopher,” John said.
But James said to Jesus, “Why do you speak this way? You know that God gave his Torah to Moses to give to the people of Israel. Out of all the people in the world, only Israel would worship God, and so we are holy in his sight. This is faith.”
“Faith is not to echo back the stories you have heard,” Jesus said wearily, as he rose naked from the pool and John watched the water run in rivulets down his body. “And these are stories. A man and woman in a garden who are thrown out of it for listening to a snake, a God so irritated with mankind he floods the whole of creation and a boat rises on waves higher than the mountains.”
“Are you saying the Torah Moses gave us was a lie?”
“If Moses gave a Torah, then why is Moses a character in it?” Jesus said.
“But, Cousin—” James protested.
“You cannot say that faith is merely believing in stories you’ve heard read from a scroll,” Jesus said.
“Then what is it?”
Jesus stood naked before them. Like Adam, John imagined, the remaining water of the bath falling from the black hairs on his broad chest, running down his belly to bead in the dark hair over his heavy sex. Bare he was, like one of the pagan gods, and not bent over and veiled like the scholars even as, like a scholar, he quoted.
“Shema yisrael Adonai eloheinu Adonai echad. barukh shem kevod malkhuto le'olam va'ed. Ve'ahavta et Adonai eloheykha bekhol-levavkha u'vekhol nafshekha u'vekhol me'odekha. ve'hayu hadevarim ha'eileh asher anokhi metzavekha haiyom al-levavekha. veshinantam levanekha vedibarta bam beshivtekha beveitekha u'velekhtekha vaderekh u'vshakhbekha u'vkumekha. u'kshartam le'ot al-yadekha vehayu letotafot bein einekha. u'khtavtam al-mezuzot beitekha u'visharekha.”
Now Jesus turned around, toweling himself, and as he lifted a new unbleached robe and pulled it over his naked body, John recited:
“Hear, O Israel: The Adonai our God, Adonai is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
