"You know Scripture better than your uncle, don't you?" I looked at him, a dim figure now, against the lattice. Specks of light in his eyes.
"What has that to do with you and me and this?" he demanded.
"Think on it," I suggested. " 'Be kind to the stranger in your land for you were once a stranger in the land of Egypt.' " I shrugged. " 'And you know what it means to be a stranger.'. . . So tell me, how are we to treat the stranger in ourselves?"
The door of the house opened and Jason slipped back against the lattice, startled and shaken.
It was only James.
"What's the matter with you tonight?" he demanded of Jason. "Why are you hovering about in your linen robes? What's the matter? You look like you've lost your mind."
My heart shrank.
Jason snorted with contempt.
"Well, it's nothing a carpenter can fix," he said. "I'll tell you that much." And then he went off, up the hill.
James made some soft derisive sound. "Why do you tolerate him, why do you let him come into this courtyard and carry on as if this was a public marketplace?"
I went back to work. I said,
"You like him a lot better than you let on."
"I want to talk to you," James said.
"Not now, if you'll forgive me. I have these lines to draw. I told the others I'd do it. I sent them home."
"I know what you did," he said. "You think you are the head of this family?"
"No, James, I don't." I continued with my work.
"Now is when I choose to talk to you," he said. "Now, when the women are quiet, and the little ones are out of the way. I've come out here to talk to you, and for that reason alone."
He walked back and forth in front of the planks. I laid the planks side by side by side. Lines straight.
"James, the town's asleep. I'm almost asleep. I want to go to bed."
I drew the next line as carefully as I could. Good enough. I reached for the last plank. I stopped for a moment and rubbed my hands together. I hadn't realized it until now but my fingers were almost rigid with cold.
"Yeshua," James said in a low voice, "the time has come and you can avoid it no longer. You will marry," he said. "There is no reason any longer for you to put it off."
I looked up at him.
"I don't follow you, James."
"Don't you? Besides, where, where in all the prophecies does it say that you won't marry?" His voice was harsh. He spoke with uncommon slowness. "Whoever declared that you should not take a wife?"
I looked down again, careful to do this slowly, to move slowly so that he felt in no way more challenged than he already was.
I finished the last line. I looked over the planks. Then slowly I stood up. The pain in my knees was intense, and I bent to rub the left and then the right.
He stood with his arms folded, in a cold anger, far removed from Jason's hot currents. But in his own way, he was even angrier, and I looked past it as best I could.
"James, I will never marry," I said. "It's time we stopped this dance. It's time we put an end to it altogether. It troubles you . . . and you alone."
He put out his hand as he so often did and held my arm just tight enough for it to be painful and he didn't move.
"It does not trouble me alone," he said. "You try my patience to the limit, you do."