posts and squatted some distance from the cross, where they began to throw dice. I did not hesitate. I broke into a run. As I stood beneath the cross, the closeness of him shocked me. His breath rasped and raked through his chest. His legs rippled with spasms. Heat and sweat were streaming from his body. I reached for the timber, then drew back my hand, repulsed by it.
I took a deep breath and gazed up at him. “Jesus.” His head slumped toward his shoulder and I saw he was looking at me. He didn’t speak, nor did I, but I told myself later that everything that had ever passed between us was present then, that it was hidden somewhere among the suffering.
Mary rushed to him, followed by the others. She wrapped her hands about her son’s feet like she was holding a tiny bird that had fallen from its nest. I wrapped my hands about hers and then the other three women did the same, our hands like the petals of a lotus. Not one of us wept. We stood there mute and full and held up that flower for him.
The soldiers did not tear themselves from their game of knucklebones to chase us away.
They no longer seemed to care we were there. We watched Jesus’s eyes grow glassy and distant. I felt the moment come, the severing. It was gentle, like a touch on the shoulder.
“It is finished,” Jesus said.
There was a sound like a rush of wings in the blackish clouds, and I knew his spirit had left him. I imagined it like a great flock of birds, soaring, scattering, coming to rest everywhere.
v.
We prepared Jesus for burial by the flicker of two oil lamps. Kneeling on the cave floor beside his body, I felt oddly numb. How could this be my husband?
I looked at the other women in the tomb as if observing them from a corner of the sky. Mary, his mother, was cleansing his feet and legs while the others sang the songs of lament. Their faces were smeared and wet, their voices bounding and rebounding off the cave walls. A towel and a ewer of water sat beside me, waiting for me to join them in readying him for burial. Pick up the towel. Pick it up. But gazing at it, I was seized with panic. I understood that if I took hold of the towel, if I touched Jesus, I would fall from my niche in the sky. His dying would become real. Grief would swallow me.
My eyes wandered to the stacks of bones at the back of the cave neatly separated into skulls, ribs, long bones, short bones, fingers, toes—countless dead people mingled together in a morbid communion. No one who’d been buried here, it seemed, had the means to purchase an ossuary to hold their bones. This was a pauper’s tomb.
We were fortunate to have any tomb at all. Rome’s custom was to leave a crucified man hanging on the cross for weeks, then toss his body into a pit to finish decaying. Jesus would’ve suffered that abomination except for the goodness of a stranger.
He’d been no older than Jesus and adorned in an expensive robe and finely dyed blue hat. He’d approached us moments after a soldier thrust a spear into Jesus’s side to ensure his death. The act had sickened and appalled me, and I swung away, turning my back on the gruesome scene, almost careening into the man. His eyes were red and weighted.
He said, “I’ve located a tomb not far from here. If I can convince the centurion to turn over Jesus’s body, my servants will take him there.”
I eyed him. “Who are you, sir?”
“I’m one of Jesus’s followers. My name is Joseph. I come from Arimathea. You women must be his family.”
Mary stepped forward. “I’m his mother.”
“And I’m his wife,” I told him. “Your kindness is welcome.”
He bowed slightly and strode off, tugging a money bag from his sash. He placed a denarius in the centurion’s palm. I watched it grow into a column of silver.
When he returned to us, he held out more denarii. “Go into the city and purchase