Like God’s, women’s toil had no beginning and no end.
As the burnt summer gave way and the months passed, weariness hung along my bones like loom weights. It was hard then to imagine how my life could ever be different than it was now. Rising in the early hours to take up my chores, my fingers raw from the pestle and the loom. Jesus crisscrossing the towns and villages around the Sea of Galilee, home two days of seven. Judith’s and Berenice’s sharp judgments.
In the hidden forest in my chest, the trees slowly lost their leaves.
xx.
On the one-year anniversary of Susanna’s death, Jesus and I walked to the cave where she was buried and collected her bones into a small limestone ossuary, which he had carved himself. I watched as he placed the stone box on the cave ledge, then left his hand resting upon it for several moments.
The grief in me could be unbearable at times, and I felt it now . . . pain so cutting, I wondered if I could go on standing. I reached for Jesus in the gray light and saw his lips moving in silence. If I bore my grief by writing words, Jesus bore his by praying them. How often had he said to me, “God is like a mother hen, Ana. She will gather us beneath her wing”? But I never felt gathered into that place where he seemed to dwell so effortlessly.
Coming out of the cave into the brightness, I drank in the summer air, green and tart. We were walking down into the valley back toward Nazareth, when Jesus stopped on a plateau where the lilies grew wild.
“Let’s rest awhile,” he said, and we sat among the grasses and the thick, sweet scent. I could feel Susanna everywhere, and perhaps he did as well, because he turned to me and said, “Do you ever picture how she would be if she’d lived?”
The question pierced me, but I seized it, for I ached to talk about her. “She would have your eyes,” I said. “And your very long nose.”
“Is my nose that long?” he asked, smiling.
“Yes, very. And she would have your boisterous laugh. She would be kindhearted like you. But she wouldn’t be nearly so devout. She would take her religion from me.”
When I paused, he said, “I imagine her with your hair. And she would be spirited, just as you are. I would call her Littlest Thunder.”
This brought me a deep and sudden consolation, as if I’d been gathered, if only for a moment, into that most inscrutable place beneath Sophia’s wing.
xxi.
Standing at the village well, I had the peculiar feeling of being watched. During my first years in Nazareth the feeling came often; indeed, every time I left the compound. Look! There’s the rich girl from Sepphoris, now nothing more than a peasant. Eventually, though, I became too familiar for them to notice and the glowering stopped, but once again the hairs on my arms were lifting to attention, that sense of eyes watching me.
It was the first week of Tishri, just past the late-summer fig harvest. I wiped my brow and set the water pot on the stone wall built around the wellspring and looked about. The well was crowded—women milled about with jugs on their shoulders, children clinging to their robes. Journeymen were lined up to fill waterskins. A clump of boys tugged on an obstinate camel. No one seemed interested in me. But I’d come to trust the odd ways I knew things—the images, the dreams, the nudges in my body. Alert, I waited my turn to draw water.
It was when I looped the rope about the handle of my pot and lowered it into the well that I heard footsteps behind me. “Shelama, little sister,”