Lamb Read Free Page B

The priests don’t want second sons. It will have to be you.”
    Joshua looked at me before he answered, then back at his father. Then he smiled. “But Abba, if you should die, who will take care of Mother if I am at the Temple?”
    “Someone will look after her,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”
    “I will not die for a long time.” Joseph tugged at his gray beard. “My beard goes white, but there’s a lot of life in me yet.”
    “Don’t be so sure, Abba,” Joshua said.
    Joseph dropped the bowl he was working on and stared into his hands. “Run along and play, you two,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.
    Joshua stood and walked away. I wanted to throw my arms around the old man, for I had never seen a grown man afraid before and it frightened me too. “Can I help?” I said, pointing to the half-finished bowl that lay in Joseph’s lap.
    “You go with Joshua. He needs a friend to teach him to be human. Then I can teach him to be a man.”

C hapter 2
    The angel wants me to convey more of Joshua’s grace. Grace? I’m trying to write about a six-year-old, for Christ’s sakes, how much grace could he have? It’s not like Joshua walked around professing that he was the Son of God every day of the week. He was a pretty normal kid, for the most part. There was the trick he did with the lizards, and once we found a dead meadowlark and he brought it back to life, and there was the time, when we were eight, when he healed his brother Judah’s fractured skull after a game of “stone the adulteress” got out of hand. (Judah could never get the knack of being an adulteress. He’d stand there stiff as Lot’s wife. You can’t do that. An adulteress has to be wily and nimble-footed.) The miracles Joshua performed were small and quiet, as miracles tend to be, once you get used to them. But trouble came from the miracles that happened around him, without his volition, as it were. Bread and serpents come to mind.
    It was a few days before the Passover feast, and many of the families of Nazareth were not making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem that year. There had been little rain through our winter season, so it was going to be a hard year. Many farmers could not afford the time away from their fields to travel to and from the holy city. My father and Joshua’s were both working in Sepphoris, and the Romans wouldn’t give them time off work beyond the actual feast days. My mother had been making the unleavened bread when I came in from playing in the square.
    She held a dozen sheets of the flatbread before her and she looked as if she was going to dash it to the floor any second. “Biff, where is your friend Joshua?” My little brothers grinned at me from behind her skirts.
    “At home, I suppose. I just left him.”
    “What have you boys been doing?”
    “Nothing.” I tried to remember if I had done anything that should make her this angry, but nothing came to mind. It was a rare day and I’d made no trouble. Both my little brothers were unscathed as far as I knew.
    “What have you done to cause this?” She held out a sheet of the flatbread, and there, in crispy brown relief on the golden crust, was the image of my friend Joshua’s face. She snatched up another sheet of bread, and there, again, was my friend Josh. Graven images—big sin. Josh was smiling. Mother frowned on smiling. “Well? Do I need to go to Joshua’s house and ask his poor, insane mother?”
    “I did this. I put Joshua’s face on the bread.” I just hoped that she didn’t ask me how I had done it.
    “Your father will punish you when he comes home this evening. Now go, get out of here.”
    I could hear my little brother’s giggling as I slunk out the door, but once outside, things worsened. Women were coming away from their baking stones, and each held a sheet of unleavened bread, and each was muttering some variation of “Hey, there’s a kid on my bread.”
    I ran to Joshua’s house and stormed in without knocking.