DURING THOSE FIRST MONTHS it was plain to everyone, including me, that I’d spent my life as a pampered rich girl. Yaltha was of little help—she’d read Socrates, but knew nothing about pounding grain into flour or drying flax. Jesus’s mother gathered me under her wing, trying to teach me, and protected me as best she could from Judith’s reproaches, which gurgled like an unceasing spring: I didn’t light the dung fire correctly. I left chaff in the wheat. I left wool on the sheep. I could not cook pottage without scorching the lentils. My goat cheese tasted like hooves.
Judith complained of me even more vociferously when others were about, notably my husband, telling him once that I was less useful than a lame camel. She not only disparaged my domestic skills, but I half suspected her of efforts to disrupt them. When it was my turn to pound the wheat, the pestle went missing. When I laid the fire, oddly, the dung was wet. Once when Mary instructed me to latch the gate, it miraculously unlatched itself and the chickens escaped.
The only task I excelled at was caring for the goat, whom I named Delilah. I fed her fruit and cucumbers and brought her a little basket that she liked to toss about with her head. I talked to her—Hello, girl, do you have milk for me today? . . . Are you hungry? . . . Do you want your ears scratched? . . . Do you find Judith as annoying as I do?—and she occasionally responded with a string of bleats. Some days, I tied a piece of rope about her neck and fastened it to my girdle and she accompanied me as I went about my chores and waited for the sun to slope toward the hills and Jesus to return. At the sight of him, Delilah and I would rush to the gate, where I embraced him, oblivious to the stares of his family.
James and Simon took fun in mocking our devotion, which Jesus took in stride, laughing with them. There was truth in their teasing, but I didn’t find it as good-natured as my husband. They taunted him out of jealousy. Simon, two years from having a wife, was eager for the intimacies of marriage, and James and Judith’s union was like that of two yoked oxen.
iii.
One hot day in the month of Elul, while the courtyard baked, I milked Delilah in the stable, then placed the ewer of frothy milk outside the gate, where the sheep couldn’t capsize it. When I turned back, Delilah was in the water trough again. She’d taken to standing and sometimes sitting in it for long periods. I made no effort to deter her. I thought of climbing in myself. As Mary approached us with a basket of grain, however, I tried to lure her out.
“Leave her,” she said, chuckling. She looked tired and flush with heat. Now that Judith’s time was near, we’d taken over her portion of the chores, the bulk of which fell to Mary, since I was still an apprentice.
I took the basket from her. Even I could toss grain to chickens.
She leaned against the gate. “Do you know what we should do, Ana? Just the two of us? We should go to the village mikvah and immerse ourselves. Yaltha can remain here with Judith in case the baby decides to come.”
I gestured at Delilah. “I know, I envy her, too.”
She laughed. “Let’s shirk our work and go.” A lovely impish light had come into her eyes.
* * *
? ? ?
A LINE OF WOMEN had formed outside the stone enclosure that housed the pool, not because they’d suddenly grown devout, but because, like us, they craved a respite from the heat. We joined it, clutching our drying rags and clean tunics. Mary called out a greeting to the toothless old midwife who would soon attend Judith, and was greeted in return, but without enthusiasm. The women ahead of us stole glances at me, whispering and holding themselves stiffly, and I realized that my ill repute had followed me from Sepphoris. I couldn’t tell if Mary noticed or if, for my sake, she pretended not to.