THE ROAD TO SEPPHORIS was crowded all the way from Nazareth, and other smaller villages lay along that way. And we bowed our heads when we passed the crosses, though all the bodies were gone from them. Blood had been shed in the land and we were sorrowful. We passed houses that were burnt, and even burnt stands of trees, and there were people begging, telling how they’d lost everything to the bandits, or to the soldiers who had “pillaged” their houses.
Over and over, we stopped and Joseph gave them money from the family purse. And my mother told them what words of comfort she had to give.
My teeth were chattering and my mother thought I was cold, but I wasn’t. It was the sight of the burnt-out buildings of Sepphoris that I saw—even though most of the city was not burnt, and people were buying and selling in the market.
At once, my aunts sold the gold embroidered linen they’d brought from Egypt just for the purpose of selling, and pocketed more than they expected for it, and the same with all the bracelets and fine cups they’d brought to sell. The purse was bulging.
We went to the mourners who sat in the middle of the burnt wooden beams and ashes, crying for those who were gone, or to those who were begging: “Did you see this one, or that one?” We gave to the widows from our purse. And for a while we were all crying—that is, I was and so was Little Salome and so were the women. The men had gone off and left us.
It was the very center of the city that had been burnt, people told us—the palace of Herod, the arsenal, and also the houses nearest it where the rebels had stayed with their men.
There were men already clearing the way for rebuilding at the top of the hill. There were soldiers of King Herod everywhere, looking people up and down, but the weepers and the mourners took no notice of them.
It was a sight, the weeping and the working, the howling and mourning, and the buying and selling. My teeth weren’t chattering anymore. The sky was bright blue and the air was chilly but it felt clean.
I saw in one house nearby a few Roman soldiers who looked very ready to leave this place if they could, leaning against the door frames and staring off at nothing. The sun was shining on their helmets.
“Oh, yes,” said a woman who saw me look at them. Her eyes were red, and her clothes covered with ashes and dust. “And days ago they massacred us, I tell you, and sold off anyone in sight to the filthy slave merchants who descended on us to put our loved ones in chains. They took my son, my only son, he’s gone! And what had he done, but gone out to try to find his sister, and she too for what? That she was trying to go from my house to the house of her mother-in-law?”
Bruria began to sob for her lost son. She went off with her slave girl to write on a wall where others were writing a message to the lost ones. But she had little hope she’d ever see him again.
“Be careful in what you write on that wall,” said my aunt Salome. The other women nodded.
Down out of the ruins came men asking people to work: “You want to stand here and weep all day? I’ll pay you to come haul away the rubbage!” And another: “I need hands now to carry the buckets of dirt, who?” He held out coins to catch the light of the sun.
People cursed as they wept. They cursed the King; they cursed the bandits; they cursed the Roman soldiers. Some went to work and some didn’t.
Pushing through the crowd came our men, with a new cart and it was full of fresh wood, and sacks of nails, Joseph told me, and even roof tiles.
In fact, the men were in a dispute over the roof tiles, with Cleopas saying they were a fine idea, and cheap enough, and Joseph saying the mud and branch roof was good enough, and Alphaeus agreeing with Joseph and saying we had far too much of a house to tile all of it. “And besides, with all this building going on, there won’t be any roof tiles to be had in a day’s time.”
Men came up to them, offering them work.
“You’re carpenters? I’ll pay you double what you get from anyone else. Tell me. Now. I’ll put you to work this minute.”
Joseph bowed and said no. “We’ve just come from Alexandria,” he said. “We do only skilled work—.”
“But I have skilled work!” said a large well-dressed man. “I have a whole house to finish for my master. Everything was burnt—I’ve nothing left but the foundations.”
“We have so much to do in our own village,” Joseph said, as we tried to go our way. The men surrounded us, on to us now, wanting to buy the wood in the cart and use us as a team. Joseph promised we’d come back as soon as we could. The name of the rich steward was Jannaeus. “I’ll remember you,” he said. “You’re the Egyptians.”
We laughed at that, and we did move on and back to the peace of the countryside.
But that was how we became known—as the Egyptians.
I looked back at the city from the road, where I could see all the busy people under the late sun. And my uncle Cleopas saw me looking. He said,
“You ever look at an anthill?”
“Yes.”
“Ever step in one?”
“No, but I saw another boy step in one.”
“What did the ants do? They all ran around all over the place, but they didn’t leave the hill, and they rebuilt it. That’s the way it is with war, little or great. People just go on. They get right up and they go on because they have to have water and bread and a roof, and they start again no matter what happens. And one day you can be grabbed by the soldiers and sold as a slave, and the next day they won’t even see you pass by. Because it’s over. Somebody said it was over.”
“Why must you be the sage for my son?” Joseph asked.
We were walking at a slow pace behind the cart. The donkey was steady.
Cleopas laughed. “If I hadn’t been snared by a woman,” he said, “I would have been a prophet.”
The whole family laughed at him. I even laughed before I could stop myself. And my aunt, his wife, said, “His talk is better than his singing. And if there’s a psalm with an ant in it, he will sing it.”
My uncle started to sing, and my aunt groaned, but soon we were singing with him. There was no psalm with an ant in it that we knew.
When Cleopas had run out of singing, he said, “I should have been a prophet.”
Even Joseph laughed at that.
His wife said, “Start now, tell us whether it’s going to rain before we get home.”
Cleopas took me by the shoulder.
“You’re the only one who ever listens to me,” he said, looking into my eyes. “Let me tell you: no one ever listens to a prophet in his own land!”
“I didn’t listen to you in Egypt,” said his wife.
After we had all laughed at that, even Cleopas, my mother said gently,
“I listen to you, brother. I always have.”
“You do, sister, that’s true,” Cleopas said. “And you don’t mind when I teach your son a thing or two, do you, because he has no grandfather living, and in my youth I was almost a scribe?”
“Were you almost a scribe?” I said. “I never heard this before.”
Joseph waved his finger at me for my attention and grandly shook his head: No.
“And what would you know about it, brother?” asked Cleopas but his voice was friendly. “When we took Mary up to Jerusalem to commit her to the house where the veils were woven, I studied in the Temple for months. I studied with the Pharisees, I studied with the greatest of them. I sat at their feet.” He tapped me on the shoulder to make sure of my attention. “There are many teachers in the Temple colonnades. The best in Jerusalem, and then, well, some of them not so good.”
“And some of their students not so good either,” said Alphaeus in a low voice that everyone could hear.
“Oh, what I might have been if I hadn’t gone off to Egypt,” said Cleopas.
“But why did you go?” I asked.
He looked at me. There was silence. We walked on in silence.
Then he smiled kindly. “I went because my kindred went—you, and my sister, and her husband and his brothers and my kin.”
No answer to my question—no real answer. But I knew, and had known for some while, that it would be easier to learn things from my uncle Cleopas than from anyone else.
A low thunder rolled overhead.
We hurried, but a light rain caught us and we had to go off the road and into a grove of trees. The earth was thick with rotted leaves.
“All right, prophet,” said my aunt Mary, “make the rain stop so we can go on home.”
When we laughed, Joseph corrected us. “But you know a holy man can make the rain come and go,” he said. “Mark my words. From Galilee, the holy one, Honi, the Circle Drawer, in my great-grandfather’s time. He could make the rain come and he could make the rain go.”
“And tell the children what became of him,” said my aunt Salome. “You leave off at the best part.”
“What did happen to him?” James asked.
“The Jews stoned him in the Temple,” said Cleopas with a shrug. “They didn’t like the prayer he said!” He laughed. Then he laughed more as if he thought this even funnier the more he thought about it.
But I couldn’t see to laugh at it.
The rain was coming down harder now, and passing through the branches and we were getting wet.
A tiny thought came to me, so small I imagined it in my mind like a thought no bigger than my little finger. I want this rain to stop. Foolish of me to think such things. I thought of all the things that had happened … the sparrows, Eleazer—. I looked up.
The rain had stopped.
I was so amazed I stared up at the clouds, unable to do anything, even take a breath.
Everyone was very happy and we made our way out on the road and headed home.
I didn’t say a word to anyone, but I was troubled, deeply troubled. And I knew I would never tell anyone what I had just done.
Nazareth was pretty to me when we came back. I loved the little street and the houses of white plaster and the vines that grew on our lattices even in the chill of spring. It seemed the fig tree had put out more leaves even in these few days.
And there was Old Sarah waiting for us. Little James was reading to Old Justus. And the little ones were playing in the courtyard and running through the rooms.
All the sadness and grief of Sepphoris was far off now.
So was the rain.