Two from Galilee Read Free Page A

felt his strong masculinity throughout her whole spare yet vital being. She did not miss the little tremor that ran through them, the unconscious leaning forward. All but Mary who sat locked in her quiet poise, betrayed only by the half-smile on her lips, the fixed and shining look in her great eyes.
    He was older than Mary by some six years. He should have long since taken a wife. But that he'd been waiting for her daughter Hannah knew with a helpless sense of dismay and stubborn rejection. Many times over the years he'd come by the house on unnecessary errands—to deliver a yoke that Joachim could have picked up himself, to bring an offering of his mother's fig cakes, to mend a trough. And he invariably lingered with Mary. Pictures plagued her: Joseph patiently picking out nut-meats and popping them into Mary's innocent mouth. Fourteen-year-old Joseph hoisting the basket of olives to his own shoulder as she struggled up from the common orchard behind the town. And once when unexpected clouds had sent down an avalanche he had picked her up and carried her bodily across the swirling waters.
    Hannah would never forget their laughter or the look of his streaming face as he set her down on her own doorstep. And though Mary had been scarcely eleven then and he almost eighteen, Hannah had felt a sense of dark outrage.
    "Never let such a thing happen again," she had said severely. "What would people think?"
    "That it was pouring and the streets were such a torrent that I might have been swept away and drowned."
    "Swept away indeed!" Swept away . . . and away . . . into youth and longing and dreaming and foolishness and the mistakes that were forever waiting to overtake those who imagined themselves in love.
    But she had guarded Mary well. She had made it plain in many ways not only to Joseph himself but his parents—yes, and the soft-hearted Joachim—that a match was out of the question. They had not had the effrontery to ask. But until Joseph had settled on another girl and the banns were announced Hannah would not rest easy.
    Mary, their Mary, was meant for a finer fate than toiling and bearing children for a poor young carpenter.
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II
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    T HE pink light was claiming the sky. The very breath of God was tinted as mists drifted down from the hills, across the fields, blurring groves and vineyards. Foliage sparkled with last night's storm and petals gemmed the streets. In all the little houses people were stirring, and the singing that always signaled the beginning of a good day in Nazareth joined that of the birds. There was the smell of bread baking. And passing the big public oven dug near the well for the use of the poor, Mary could feel the heat of the coals as the crone Mehitabel slapped her loaves upon them.
    "Mary!" Other girls carrying jugs or skins or leading livestock to drink at the trough, cried out to her. And it was as she had expected. Her cousin Deborah, who missed nothing, pounced on her secret and made it news. Above the creak of rope and bucket, the slosh of water being poured into pitchers and jars, the mooing and blatting of sheep and cattle, the ripple of it ran through the crowd. "Mary's a woman now!" Offering a mixture of congratulation and commiseration, they made room for her nearer the head of the line. Old Mehitabel joined them, her cackle splitting the bright fruit of the morning. "I say it's just the beginning of a woman's misery. A heavy price to pay, I say, because Mother Eve ate an apple. Now if it had been a pomegranate or a melon! . . ."
    The women laughed. They could see a joke. For wasn't their entire existence based on a proud if almost ludicrous anomaly? Here were the Jews, God's chosen people—yet none had known such bitter hardships. And their land for generations had been occupied by heathens to whom they must pay tribute, but whom they would not deign to touch. There was something crudely cleansing about Mehitabel's audacity.
    Another voice spoke up. "But