Testament (38 page)

Soon enough it happened that Moriah had her baby, and sure enough it was a boy. Naaman, Huram called him, after our father. True to his word, Huram took Moriah into town
not long afterwards to get her papers seen to for her freedom. But instead of her coming back to me the way I’d hoped, she let me know at once that she had it in for me. “Let Simon tend the pigs,” she said to Huram, which had been her job, “since I have the baby to look after.” And it wasn’t long before every little job that she could push off to me, she did, with the excuse of the baby. I had half a mind sometimes to take the boy and make away with him, seeing as he was mine, but Moriah was like a she-wolf around him, and never let him out of her sight.

Then once I overheard her say to Huram, “Your brother looks at me sometimes the way he shouldn’t.” Well, I felt fairly low then. But I thought I understood all of a sudden what was going on in Moriah’s head—she just didn’t want to lose another child. She knew Huram would kill her and the baby too if he knew the truth, so she wasn’t taking any chances—she’d make Huram and me enemies so he wouldn’t trust me, and then her secret would be safe. I should have been angry, but I’d got to thinking about some of the things Jesus taught, and how all her life Moriah had been just a slave and hadn’t had anything and now she had a house and a husband and a son.

Huram didn’t say a word to me about what Moriah had told him, but it was clear he believed her, because I wasn’t allowed in the house any more. Just like that, he didn’t give me a reason. For her part, Moriah didn’t come out except once in a while to do the wash, and even then Huram made her keep her shawl on, so that it reached the point where I could hardly remember what she looked like. You’d have thought that by then I’d have put her out of my mind. But instead it was like a pain in me, the thought of her and of
that baby hidden away in Huram’s house. I could hardly believe that she’d ever come to my bed, that that was the same girl who I had to sneak a glimpse of now when she came out to the well.

The only relief I had from all this were those times I’d go down to the lake to see Jesus—it got so that was all I had to look forward to, having something to eat on the beach with the rest of the crowd and listening to Jesus’s stories. For all the wondrous things you heard Jesus had done, it was mostly to tell us these stories that he’d stop by there, about rich men who’d made a ruin of their lives or poor ones who’d done even worse, or about farmers who knew what they were doing and others who didn’t. And though I didn’t understand everything he said to us, still it made me feel better just to listen to him. There was a place he liked to talk about, which he said we all could get to if we wanted, that he called his god’s special kingdom, and it sounded grand the way he described it, because the common folk were in charge there, instead of the kings, and the people who didn’t have anything were respected, but those who had it all couldn’t even get in. The way he talked about the place you thought it had to be just around the bend, some hideout in the woods that he’d set up there with his people. But the thing was he would never give a straight answer about it, as if it was up to our own heads to work out what he meant. And I thought that might be the point, that it wasn’t something he could lay out for us, either that or he was just pulling us along to keep us coming back. I, for one, was ready to follow—wherever his kingdom was, it was sounding a fair amount better to me than what I had on the farm.

Then sometimes I wondered if the place he meant wasn’t right there in front of our eyes. Here was Jesus, who was clever enough to have been rich or some sort of leader if he’d wanted, but instead he’d set himself up on the side of the peasants, and dressed in his homespun and slept in the open and wasn’t afraid to eat his food right under the sky with the rest of us. So wasn’t he living just the way he described, speaking his mind to the rich but then instantly taking in people who no one else would have to do with. It was as if he himself was his own little special kingdom, doing things his own way there, which somehow seemed to work out for him even though it was the opposite of everyone else’s. He’d always say to us, what was the point of worrying whether you had enough money or if your barns were full enough—and I couldn’t help thinking of Huram—when if you’d just let things come to you, you’d see you got what you needed. And that seemed to be the case for him, because if ever we ran out of fish when he came by to see us then sure enough someone else would have brought along a deer they’d happened to catch or we would all throw in whatever we had, and no one would go hungry.

By then there was quite a group of us that came by fairly regularly, thirty or forty or so. Some of these were people I knew from the farms nearby or from Baal-Sarga, and I was always afraid that word would get back to Huram through them. But the odd thing was that no one seemed to talk about these meetings outside of them, as if they were a secret we shared. Other people started to look at them that way too—it wasn’t long before the notion went around in Baal-Sarga that the Jesus people were no better than the Sons of Light in their little colony. Somehow the story of the
madman Jesus had cured—who was long gone by then, probably back to his family on the other side of the lake—had been exaggerated beyond recognition, so that now the man had had a hundred demons in him and Jesus had moved them into some poor farmer’s pigs, who straightaway had jumped into the lake. And all of this, to the ignorant peasants who were all you found in Baal-Sarga, showed that Jesus had it in for us, and was going to let loose all his Jewish devils on the countryside.

I knew Huram had heard these stories the same as everyone, though he never said anything about them. But I noticed he’d started to keep a closer eye on me all of a sudden, so that it got harder to steal down to the beach. He kept a watch over the lake now, to see what was going on there, and sure enough any time Jesus’s boats set out for our side he’d be at me for one thing or another, to muck out the stables or fix the fences or water the sheep. I won’t say it was Moriah who put him on to me—maybe it was just that he’d heard something in town. But still it got to me, how the two of them, which was how I saw them now, thought they’d take away the one thing I had left. The truth was it surprised me how disappointed I felt each time I missed out on one of Jesus’s meetings, though maybe it was just that I couldn’t fool myself then about how bad things were for me or about some special place I was going to that would make them better.

Then one day I looked out across to Capernaum and saw people had started to camp out on the hill above the town as if they were getting ready for a journey. A while later, I saw Jesus’s boats set out for our side of the lake, but headed down towards the Gadarenes, so Huram didn’t pay them any mind. I went straight to my lookout, though, from where I
saw what Huram couldn’t, that Jesus didn’t stop for the day with the Gadarenes the way he usually did but kept coming up the coast. Fairly soon I was able to piece out what he was doing—he was calling in for a visit at all the places he usually came to on our side of the lake.

It was getting on to sunset before he reached the farm. I’d already been late getting the sheep out, and should have been bringing them back in by then. But I had to hear what Jesus had come over to tell us, and left the sheep in the pasture without even so much as penning them in. I was scraped and bruised by the time I got down the hill but I managed to get there just as Jesus and his men were putting up their boats.

He’d come to tell us he was going to Jerusalem for a feast there, so we shouldn’t wonder if we didn’t see him. He’d put the thing lightly but there was a tone to his voice as if he wasn’t sure he’d be coming back. Someone asked if we could go with him, more as a joke than anything, since none of us were Jews. But Jesus said we could join him in his boats that very instant if we wanted.

When he’d gone I felt a bit miserable, because of that tone in his voice. Then I got back up the hill and found out one of the sheep had fallen in a gully and broken its leg. There was no way to hide the thing from Huram—the poor beast was crying so much when I brought it back to the stable that he came right out.

He hardly wasted a breath then but took the thing out of my hands and smashed its head on a rock.

“That’s two from your own share,” he said, “to make up for the wool I would have had from this one before you got it.”

Something broke in me then.

“I won’t be having my share,” I told him, not even knowing myself I was going to say this, “because I’m leaving to join up with Jesus the Jew.”

For a moment he looked fit to be tied, and that was worth a lot to me, because it seemed the first time I’d ever had anything over him. But then a look of disgust crossed his face, as if he’d known all along it would come to this.

“Suit yourself,” he said, then just turned and went back into the house.

For the next little while it felt as if a yoke had been lifted off me, so that it seemed it had been my plan all along to go off with Jesus, and I’d just needed to work up the courage. And the more I got to thinking about the thing, the more it seemed right. Who needed Huram, who I’d been just a burden to since our parents had died, or Moriah, or to see my own son grow up who I couldn’t call my own—at least with Jesus I’d learn a few things and see a bit of the world, and no one could tell me my business.

But then when Huram didn’t come out to me that night to change my mind, and not Moriah either, who I was hoping he’d tell, it started to look as if I wasn’t quite as sure about the thing as I’d thought, and that maybe I’d said it just to be talked out of it, or to find a way to make Moriah think of me again. So I didn’t sleep the whole night but lay there in my bed crying like a child, and thinking how I’d miss the flowers on the almond trees, and looking out over the lake, and Moriah, and how I might never see these things again. But I’d given my word, so there was nothing for it. And when the sun came up I took what money I had from the little I’d got out of Huram over the years, and I put on my
coat, and then I set out on the road that led down towards the lake from Baal-Sarga.

The trip from Baal-Sarga to Gadara, which I’d made once as a boy with my brother, was just a day’s journey, and that on a road so steep that the merchants practically had to carry their carts on their backs. So seeing that Capernaum was just across the lake and that I could have thrown a stone to it, I didn’t imagine I’d have any trouble getting there before dark. What I found out, though, was that you could hardly step out of your door in those parts without crossing some border or other, or without some other business or trouble stopping you up.

I was fine until I got to Gergesa, just whistling along in the sun like that, feeling fairly pleased with myself now that I’d actually set out. But then I made the mistake of going into the town, to get some food, I thought, and to see what was what. I wasn’t a minute past the gates, though, when some thug came up to me and made a grab for my purse. I managed to hit him off but he got a blow in himself and left me with a bloodied nose, and not a single soul stopped to give me a hand or say a word to me, just passing me by as if I was the one who was a thief. I had a mind then just to take myself right back home again, and it was only my pride that stopped me from doing it.

I got a cake in the market, but in an instant a fellow came up to me—and not very handsome he was, scrawny and dark and with a nose like someone had bashed it in for him with a hatchet—and he said, how would I like a game, and showed me his dice. Now, like I’ve said, I was young but no fool—I knew his sort. So I lied and told him I’d just spent my last
cent, smiling and playing the dullard. He looked me up and down and then he grinned at me with his rotten teeth, nodding his head to show he’d seen through my dodge.

“Where’re you going?” he said, so I told him about Jesus, and said I was going over to Capernaum to join up with him.

The fellow made as if he’d never heard of the man and asked all sorts of questions about him, what kind of person was he and what he did, which to be truthful I found a bit difficult to answer. Before I knew it, maybe just to impress the fellow, I started telling him things I’d only heard second hand as if I’d seen them with my own eyes, how he cured lepers and walked on water and the like. But the fellow just nodded and rubbed his chin as if he believed me, then offered to come along with me to see the man for himself, just like that.

I’d never been one to mind company, but when we got outside town and had to cross the border there into Gaulinitis I started wondering if this fellow I’d hooked up with—Jerubal, his name was—might cause me some trouble with the guards. Instead, they took one look at us and let us through without even a toll, though the people ahead of us had had to hand over half their purse. Jerubal winked at me and said, “Don’t worry, they’ll get their cut.” And it didn’t take long before I saw what he was getting at, because he had a little game going that brought him in a good penny. He’d stop along the road, and scratch out a gaming board somewhere, and then it never took long before a bit of a crowd started to gather. But here was the twist—I was his hook, because people would see me gambling there like one of the crowd and winning almost every time, and so they’d put their own money down. Then oddly enough they didn’t win quite as often as I did, and Jerubal would start drawing in the coins.

I thought he managed the game with loaded dice but he said he’d be dead in an hour if that was the case, someone always spotted them. It was the board that counted, he said, every dip and swell and knowing how to play them, and then the players, they had to be played as well. He was a master at that, I had to hand it to him—he knew just when to let up to keep someone in the game, and when to push. I wasn’t bad myself, it turned out—Jerubal said I had the perfect face, the kind people trusted, which was why he’d picked me out.

We didn’t cover a lot of ground this way, and by nightfall we hadn’t even got to Bethsaida. Jerubal had us put up at a village in the hills off the main road where the people knew him—even the children there were happy to see him, and he handed around some roasted almonds to them that we’d bought along the road. You’d have thought he was the most respectable man in the world, the way people treated him, bringing food out and laying down the mats for us, and the girls giggling behind their hands to be near him, even ugly the way he was. On his side, Jerubal was suddenly fine-mannered and polite, bending down before the elders and going off to the little hovel of a temple they had at the edge of the village to make a sacrifice. It was only after, when people started coming around with gifts for him to have their fortunes told, that I saw this was just another one of his games—they took him for some kind of wizard, though he wouldn’t tell me how it was that he’d won them over. “It’s like your friend Jesus,” he said to me, “walking on water and the like,” and I couldn’t tell at first if he was fooling or not. But then he grinned at me and I saw it was his way of saying he hadn’t exactly taken me at my word before when I’d told him about Jesus.