26

JAMES WAS ALREADY as a hollowed-out bowl, thin as it could get without complete ruin, yet the adze chipped again.

He had not said good-bye to Simon but watched him go. He had left with a small sack over one shoulder, bedroll over the other. The lord of the tack mallet had one sandal flapping and didn’t seem to notice. He had a waterskin dangling at his side and two loaves of bread in his tunic pocket. Jude had forced him to take a dinar and several copper prutas.

James sat with his back against the olive tree. Someone had been here, a child most likely, maybe one of Eli’s grandchildren; a small pile of pebbles lay nearby. The white stones ringed about the tree were all in order. He looked up into the branches, thick with slender green-gray leaves. It still bore fruit, this most ancient of trees, the oldest olive tree around. Joseph had once taken an expert in husbandry to this ridge to show him the tree. The man had been delighted, and confirmed what Joseph had known, that it was at least a thousand years old. The man had gone to bring others to see the tree. They had taken away cuttings from it. It had greatly pleased Joseph.

Come harvesttime they would clean it of the fruit and bring the olives to the press in the village. They would filter the oil, draining it through sieve after sieve. They would fill crocks and amphoras, sell some of it, store most of it. They would cure some of the harvest in brine. It had been so year after year since Joseph came to Nazareth, over thirty years ago.

It was a week now since the party of five to Jerusalem had returned a party of three. James wanted to tell Simon it wasn’t so bad, that first day back in Nazareth —the first day back in the workroom. Perhaps the dread of it was finished on the road home. Unlocking the workroom door, pushing it open. The kiss on the mezuzah.

The corner bench was doubly empty now. Nathanael had left a few tools out, and James felt dull pain as he watched Jude slowly put them away. Once when Jorah was busy with laundry in the back, and Jude was at market fetching items for her, James was alone in the workroom. He paused at his workbench and set down his nail jar, then looked over his shoulder to take in the shop. He went to the center of the room and stood beneath the awning. He lifted his chin —listening. Birds from outside. The muted slop of the laundry tub in the back. A distant shout of a child, one of Eli’s grandchildren. He did not hear what he listened for, and what that was he did not know.

He wasn’t the only one. He’d seen Jude pause at his hunk of white stone, caught him glancing over his shoulder.

“Feels different in here,” Jude had said quietly. “You feel that?”

James had nodded, glancing too, but the conversation went no further.

It wasn’t the absence of Jesus and Nathanael. It wasn’t the absence of Simon. It was a different sort of emptiness. A very large emptiness. It made Judas work the stone roller outside, and it made James come daily to the ridge. It was restlessness.

He drew his knees up and rested his wrists on them. A week ago he could barely leave the workroom. Now he couldn’t stay. He wondered how Simon was, if he —

Consider it all JOY!

His heart stopped, then started again. He sat up and with eyes huge in fear, looked to the left and right, expecting to see the indigo-clad madman from the East. He looked behind him. Where did that come from? Was it a shout? Did he hear it; did he imagine it? There was no one around, but he could feel the echo. His skin still stood out an inch! God of Israel, was he going mad? He didn’t mind dabbling in madness if only it didn’t make his heart seize.

Once his breathing settled down, he rested against the tree again, warily scanning the places he had already looked. He had not thought on that crazy notion for a long while. It sounded like what it was, an empty new philosophy, this time not born in Greece but in the East. Consider it all joy. Surely a bizarre new philosophy, because you had to bend God-given logic for it.

James could not consider a trial joy unless he could see something on the other side of it. Something worth the trial. The ball-in-a-cage puzzle when he was seven —how many times did the frustration of that project bring him to furious tears? But the joy when he presented it to Joseph. Or what about a mother giving birth? Consider those trials joy, sure, because there was something on the other side. Something worth it. He thought of one of his father’s favorite psalms: “We went through fire and through water, yet you have brought us out to a place of abundance.”

Pain isn’t such a bad thing, Son, Joseph had told him long ago, if it takes you where you want to go. Well. There it was, the reason misery could eat him whole, because this pain didn’t go anywhere. It never had, for three long years. Pain with nothing on the other side. Why consider this joy? Why not take a hammer and pound his toes for no good reason? Where was the God-given logic?

He got up from the tree. He went and stood on the crest of the ridge and looked to where the hill tumbled down to the rocky expanse below. His gaze followed the bottom of the ravine to the hills opposite him, followed the line of those hills south toward Megiddo. Looked beyond Megiddo to Samaria. Looked past Samaria to Jerusalem, where they crucified his brother.

“Nathanael is the only one who had it right,” he said to the ever-silent God.

It only makes sense, James. Love the Lord your God? With all your heart? That, James, is much to ask.

“Much to ask, Nathanael?” James whispered. “It’s impossible.”

You were the only one honest enough to say it. He once said he didn’t come to abolish but fulfill. I asked myself, Nathanael, what was not fulfilled that he came to fulfill it? I wish I knew the answer to that. I wish I knew what he was thinking. I wonder if it’s wadded up with the Shema. I wonder if, by saying what he said, that . . .

He knew it was impossible too.

James tilted his head to the side, gazing toward Jerusalem. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might? Why do you ask such hard things?

Do you love God, Nathanael?

“I do not know him well enough to love him.”

We’re just little humans. Is it fair for you to ask humans such a thing? Nathanael was the only one I knew who had the guts to bare that wide. I never thought about how big the Shema was. Well, you know what? I think I learned a little about honesty from Nathanael. I think I’m ready to say that I’m not sure I ever loved you. Really loved. Jesus I loved. But you? I don’t even know you.

Do you want to know something? It’s hard to be a Jew in this world. Hard on the outside and harder on the inside.

James lay down on the ridge on his side. He laid his head on his arm and his Jerusalem gaze drifted to the hazy blue sky.

Is this the way it’s supposed to be?

I don’t know why you made me.

Look at me. If I am made in your image, what a poor Ruler of the universe you must be. Made in your image; that’s as hard as the Shema. Jews in your image. Gentiles in your image.

If I believed that, it would change everything.

It would make you my Father. And it would make you their Father.

Stop making my Father’s house a house of merchandise.

Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?

My Father . . .

They say you have risen. If I believed that, it would change everything.

A tear rolled to the edge of his nose and dripped off.

It all comes down to belief. Belief is a hard thing, God. I stand up in the surf only to get slammed down again. I pray and get a portion of hell as my answer. There’s a pattern in it all, Joses said. I can’t see it, God. I can’t see why he came. Belief is too hard for me. Faith is too hard. I will go mad trying to figure it out.

Why does it seem that Nathanael died knowing something so good? What have I missed? I grew up in it all; I grew up with everything centered about you. I had good parents. I went faithfully to synagogue. He was the son of a whore. He was abused by his own mother. It should have poisoned him. But he died in peace.

What did Nathanael believe?

You know what? There’s only one thing I believe. One thing I know: I know who I was when he was here. And I liked that person better.

“Jesus . . . ,” James whispered.

“James.”

Slowly, James lifted his head.