if there is any, may not be what you hope to hear.”
I scarcely heard him. Her song about the blind girls was playing unbidden in my head.
* * *
? ? ?
IN THE AFTERNOON I found Jesus mixing mud-brick mortar to repair the crumbling stone in the compound wall, mud to his elbows, and I couldn’t bear to keep my secret from him any longer. I handed him a cup of water. I said, “Do you remember when you told me some men possessed an inner knowledge that caused them to leave their families and go out as prophets and preachers?”
He looked at me bemused, squinting through the sunlight.
“You thought that you yourself might even be among them,” I continued. “Well, I, too, have my own knowing inside . . . that I’m not meant for motherhood, but for something else.”
Such an impossible thing to explain.
“You’re talking about the prayer in your bowl. The stories you’ve written.”
“Yes.” I took his hands in mine, even though they were caked. “What if my words could, like men’s, prophesy or preach? Would that not be worth the sacrifice?”
I was so young, sixteen then, and exorbitantly hopeful. I still believed I would not have long to wait. Some miracle would intervene. The sky would part. God would rain down papyri.
I studied his face. I saw regret, uncertainty. Not to have children was considered a great misfortune, a thing worse than death. I thought suddenly of the law that permitted a man to divorce his childless wife after ten years, but unlike my mother, I didn’t fear that possibility. Jesus would never countenance such a law. My fear lay in disappointing him.
“But do you need to make this sacrifice now?” he said. “There’s time. Your writing will be there for you one day.”
I understood more clearly—when he said one day, he meant one faraway day.
“I do not want children,” I whispered.
This was my deeper secret, but I’d never spoken it aloud. Good women had babies. Good women wanted babies. It was pressed upon every girl precisely what good women did and did not do. We lugged those dictates around like temple stones. A good woman was modest. She was quiet. She covered her head when she went out. She didn’t speak with men. She tended her domestic tasks. She obeyed and served her husband. She was faithful to him. Above all, she gave him children. Better yet, sons.
I waited for Jesus to respond, but he dipped his trowel in the mortar and smoothed it over the stones. Had he ever prodded me to be a good woman? Not once.
I waited several moments and when he didn’t speak, I turned to leave.
“Do you wish, then, to bed apart?” he asked.
“No, oh no. But I do wish to use the midwife’s herbs. I . . . already take them.”
His eyes held mine for so long, I fought not to look away. They were tinged with disappointment that slowly softened, then ebbed. He said, “Little Thunder, I won’t judge the knowing in your heart or what choice you make.”
It was the first time he spoke the pet name he would call me until the end. I accepted it as an endearment. He heard the quake that lived at my center, and he didn’t seek to silence it.
vi.
The days he was away crept on tiny, unhurried feet. Sometimes in the evening my feeling of aloneness was so great, I snuck Delilah into our room and fed her citrus peels. Other times I carried my mat to the storeroom and slept beside Yaltha. I marked Jesus’s absence with pebbles, adding one each day atop his sleeping mat, watching the little pile grow. Nine . . . ten . . . eleven.
On the twelfth day I woke knowing Jesus would return before dark, bearing some sort of propitious news. I couldn’t concentrate on my tasks. In the afternoon, Mary came upon me staring idly at a spider that dangled from the lip of a water jug. “Are you well?” she asked.