Christ the Lord - Anne Rice [10]
“Did you see what happened to Father? Did you see it? He tried to speak and—.”
“James, this day would have wearied any man, but after this . . . he should stay home.”
“How can we persuade him of that, that I can run things now? Look at Cleopas. He's dreaming, talking to the fields.”
“He knows.”
“Everything falls on me.”
“It's the way you want it,” I said.
Cleopas was my mother's brother. It didn't fall to him to be the head of the family. It was the sons of Cleopas, and his daughter Little Salome, whom I called my brothers and sister. The wives of these brothers were my sisters. The wife of James was my sister.
“That's true,” James said with a little surprise. “I do want it all to fall on me. I don't complain. I want things done as they should be done.”
I nodded. I said, “You're good at it.”
Joseph never went into Sepphoris to work again.
6
TWO DAYS PASSED before I got away to the grove, my grove.
In spite of unceasing work, we'd finished a series of walls early; nothing further could be done until the plaster dried, and so there came an hour of daylight in which I could go off, without a word to anyone, and seek the place I most loved, amid the ancient olive trees and veiled in a tangle of ivy that seemed to thrive in the drought as well as in the rain.
As I said before, the villagers were suspicious of the place and didn't go there. The oldest olives no longer bore fruit, and some were hollowed out, big hulking gray sentinels with wild young trees taking root in their emptied trunks. There were stones there, but I'd years ago satisfied myself that they'd never been a pagan altar or part of a burial ground; and the layer of leaves had long covered them so that the place was soft there for lying, just as an open field might be with silken grass, and in its own way just as sweet.
I had a roll of clean rags with me for a pillow. I crept in and lay down and allowed myself a long slow breath.
I thanked the Lord for this enclosure, for this escape.
I looked up at the play of light in the mesh of faintly moving branches. The winter days faded abruptly. The sky was already colorless. I didn't mind. I knew the way back home plainly enough. But I couldn't stay as long as I wanted. I'd be missed, and someone would come looking for me, and I would be trouble, and that was not what I wanted to be at all. What I wanted was to be alone.
I prayed; I tried to clear my mind. It was fragrant and wholesome here. It was precious. There was no such place in Nazareth as this, and no such place for me in Sepphoris, or Magdala, or Cana, or anyplace in which we worked or ever would work.
And every room in our house was filled.
Little Cleopas, the grandson of my uncle Alphaeus, had married last year to a cousin, Mary, from Capernaum, and they had taken the last of the rooms, and already Mary was carrying a child.
So I was alone. Just for a little while. Alone.
I tried to shake off the atmosphere of the village, the air of recrimination that had settled on people after the stoning; no one wanted to talk about it, but no one could think of anything else. Who had been there? Who had not? And had those children run off to throw in their lot with the brigands, and somebody ought to seek out those brigands and burn them out of their caves.
And of course the brigands had been raiding the villages. That often happened. And now with the drought the price of food was dear. Rumor had it, the brigands had swept down on the smaller hamlets to steal livestock, and to steal wine-sacks and sacks of water. No one ever knew when one of these cutthroat men on horseback would come stomping through our streets.
That was very much the talk in Sepphoris, of brigands in a bad winter. But there was also talk everywhere of Pilate and his soldiers moving sluggishly towards Jerusalem with ensigns bearing the name of Caesar, ensigns which should not pass through the city gates. It was blasphemy to bring such ensigns, bearing the name of an Emperor, into our city.