Every week, Jesus came home from Magdala telling me about the blind and sick he saw on the road with no one to help them, stories of widows turned out of their homes, of families so heavily taxed they were forced to sell their lands and beg in the streets. “Why does God not act to bring his kingdom?” he would say.
A fire had been lit in him and I blessed it, but I questioned, too, where the spark had come from. Had Susanna’s death caused him to step from the periphery? Had it stunned him with the brevity of life and the need to seize what we had of it? Or was it all just the fullness of time, the coming of something that was coming anyway? Sometimes when I looked at him I saw an eagle on its branch and the world beckoning. I feared what would happen. I had no branch of my own.
Daily, I penned words behind the walls of my room on potsherds no one would ever read.
I stacked the used pieces of clay into wobbly towers along the walls of the room. Little pillars of grief. They didn’t take away my sorrow, but they gave me a way to make what meaning I could from it. To write again felt like a return to myself.
On the day I inscribed the last of the potsherds, Yaltha was sitting with me, rattling her sistrum. The writing would end now; even my aunt understood this. She’d endured a chastisement from Mary for shattering the pot and couldn’t risk breaking another. She watched me set down my pen and cover the inkpot. She did not cease playing, the percussion of her sistrum darting like a dragonfly about the room.
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THE NEXT WEEK, Jesus didn’t arrive home from Magdala before sunset as he always did. Dusk came, then dark, and he didn’t appear. I stood in the doorway and watched the gate, glad for the fullness of the moon. Mary and Salome delayed the Sabbath meal and sat with James and Simon in a little clump beneath the olive tree.
When he appeared, I disregarded my confinement and ran to him. He bore a heavy sack on his back. “I’m sorry to be delayed,” he said. “I detoured to Einot Amitai to the vessel workshop at the chalkstone cave.”
The road there was known to be populated with lepers and brigands, but when his mother admonished him about the danger, he lifted his hand to stop her, and without further comment he strode toward our room, where he poured the contents of his sack into a magical heap outside the door.
Potsherds! Stone potsherds.
I laughed at the sight. I kissed his hands and cheeks, then chastised him. “Your mother is right. You shouldn’t have traveled such dangerous country for me.”
“Little Thunder, it wasn’t for you,” he teased. “I brought the shards for you to write on in order to save my mother’s pots.”
xviii.
As the end of my confinement neared, I began to dream of going back to Jerusalem.
A woman was required to present a sacrificial offering at the Temple. If she had the means, she purchased a lamb. If she was needy, she offered two turtledoves. The poor, pilloried dove mothers. They bore a certain stigma, but I didn’t mind becoming one of them. I had no interest in the size of my sacrifice or whether the priest pronounced me clean, unclean, or hopelessly squalid. What I wished for was a respite from the compound—the walls that shrank like figs in the sun, the quiet hostilities, the unchanging daily-ness. Traveling to Jerusalem during the dull month of Elul would be more placid than Passover and a welcome reprieve before returning to my chores. I imagined it daily. Jesus and I would stay again with Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. I would revel in seeing Tabitha. We would go to the Pool of Siloam, where I would bid Jesus to lift the paralytics into the water. At the Temple, we would purchase two turtledoves. I would try to leave the lambs alone.
The thought of these things filled me with elation, but they were not my true intent. I meant to trade my silver headband, copper mirror, brass comb, even