Second Touch (11 page)

here. Not as long as you support the Galilean. You know the decree.” “But my eyes!” How could they deny what had happened? deny the power of the miracle? “Enough!” Mama concluded as someone gave a shout from across the road. “You all right there? Trouble? Has the lad come back?” “Now you’ve done it!” Mama accused. Lifting her voice still louder so that it carried down the length of the street, she shouted, “Neighbors! Friends! Bear witness for us! See his arrogance? Do you hear him? The spirit of dishonor to parents? Disrespect for the Law? Who but a devil would think he knew more than the teachers of the Law and the Levites? Would our rulers cut off any who speak well of the Nazarene if he ¬weren’t evil and dangerous?” Then to her husband she commanded, “Do it!” For the benefit of the unseen audience she cried, “Neighbors! You all be our witnesses! We’ve not broken the decree of the judges! You see how we turn him away! They won’t find fault in us! Witness this!” With hands made powerful from a lifetime of working stiff clay, Papa grasped his tunic collar and ripped it open to mid-chest. “Peniel! Boy? You’re . . . dead . . . to us. And there’s an end to it,” he said in a monotone. “I have no . . . son!” Then, urgently, ¬under his breath, he warned, “Get out of here, boy! Run, Peniel! There’s a price on your head! Go now! And ¬don’t come back!”

7 The child known as Shalom died in the night. In the morning when Lily came to feed him, his soul had flown. Angels cared for his soul now. Tenderly she washed him. Combed his hair. Lily cried for the boy who had called her Mama. And as she prepared him for the grave, how she longed for the comfort of her own mother! ¬I’m praying again, Father of the Fatherless. Mama has forgotten me by now! And this boy’s mother. Will she think of him today? Will she sense that he is gone? Oh! Lord! We are forgotten! Make Shalom especially welcome in your home. Hold him tonight. Sing him a lullaby. There were no perfumes or costly spices in Mak’ob. Not even the homely spices of bay leaves and sage, hyssop and mint were available in Mak’ob to sprinkle over the dead. The boy was wrapped in palm fronds. Into Shalom’s folded arms was placed a bundle of keneh bosem, the sweet-smelling reed that grew beside the willows. Then this tiny fragment of humanity was placed in an oblong wicker basket. The bier served most of the funerals in Mak’ob. But it never looked so melancholy as when the occupant took up such little space. Today Lily was the ¬only woman walking before the body. The spot would have been reserved for the boy’s mother if she had been there. Mama! He called me Mama!

I’m praying again, O Comforter of the Brokenhearted. What am I feeling today? Is this grief? The senseless loss of one so small? Relief his suffering’s over? Fear that though we lepers live together in this place, ¬everyone dies alone? Help me find some meaning in this. Stout poles protruding from the sides of the bier provided handholds for six pallbearers, though today the strength of one would have been more than enough. Lily could have carried the body in her arms. The procession wound through the settlement. As it passed, those who were strong enough to rise stood in silence to honor the child. He had been one of them: chadel. Rejected by the world Outside. But Inside, loved by all his fellow sufferers. Cantor joined Lily, grasping her hand and lending her his strength. ¬I’m praying again, Approachable One. Grateful for Cantor. Glad ¬I’m here. Glad ¬I’m sick because he’s here. And we’re together. Rabbi Ahava waited beside the shallow grave as the body was lowered into the ground. “The prophet Isaias says of Adonai, ‘You will keep in perfect shalom him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in You.’ ”17 The rabbi paused to collect his thoughts before continuing, then again referred to Isaiah. “But Zion says—and perhaps we say at times—‘The Lord has forsaken me! The Lord has forgotten me!’ ”18 The old man searched Lily’s face as if he knew her question. Then he spoke again. “This is what the Lord says to your aching heart: ‘Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See! I have engraved you on the palms of my hands!’ ” Rabbi Ahava raised his arms, spread them wide, showing all present his bloody hands, stumps of fingers, open sores. “We are, each of us, like this child. Forgotten. And yet Adonai, the Lord, has engraved our names. No, he’s done much more than that. The word used in this passage says he hacked out our names, as with hammer and chisel, into the flesh of his palms! Love for his children has made the wounds we will see one day when we look at the outstretched hands of our Redeemer! The prophet Isaias tells us . . . the Lord ¬hasn’t forgotten this boy. No, and he won’t forget you either.” Around the grave in an arc of suffering, rejection, and hope, Lily, Cantor, and the other lepers raised their half hands toward heaven. “By his wounds we will be healed!”19 I’m praying again, Wounded One. Look at your palms and remember me! Remember this little one. We are your children. The brief ceremony concluded. The grave was filled in. Lily stood to one side, waiting for Cantor. He set down the spade, wiped sweat from his brow. His sharp eyes stared off into the haze around the trail leading toward Outside. “Someone’s coming.” Lily followed his gaze, adding, “Shalom is gone. And another ¬comes to us.” “Yes, well, this one needs help,” Cantor noted. “He’s small. Scared. He moves two steps forward and one back. I need to go to him.”

“I’ll go with you,” Lily said.

“¬I’m sure it was near here I saw him,” Lily asserted. Pointing toward a wind-sculpted terebinth shaped like the Hebrew letter resh, she added, “I saw him duck ¬under—” “Shh,” Cantor cautioned. It was so unlike him to reprimand her in any way that Lily stopped midsentence. Cantor crouched beside the trail as if studying the spore of a wild animal. Lily stooped also. What was he looking at? There was no sign of the newcomer, nor was there any mark in the dirt or on the tree trunk that she could see. She spread her hands in a questioning gesture. Cantor pointed to a single green leaf lying ¬under the dogleg bend in the tree, then up to a broken stem directly above it. Use your eyes, his motion said. Someone must have climbed over the low crook in the terebinth and knocked that leaf loose. Lily ¬understood. But where, then, had he gone from there? The rest of the path and the hillside had been in plain view all during their approach. Had this stranger vanished into thin air? Why was he being so secretive? Cantor studied the surrounding slope. Earlier in its existence the terebinth had been a spreading growth of magnificent proportions. Three limbs of nearly equal size had sprouted near its base. But of these, two died. Winter storms or summer Khamseen winds sent them crashing to the ground. Their tangled heap lay partly propped against the surviving trunk of the tree. Though most of the space beneath was filled with dirt cascaded down from above, there was one opening as big as the mouth of a large wine jug. If the hollow space below the debris was itself as big as an amphora, it might make a den for foxes or badgers . . . or a hiding place for a small boy. “Don’t be afraid,” Cantor coaxed. “We won’t hurt you. Are you thirsty? hungry? Take your time.” There was a momentary reflection of light within the gap, like the reflection of a wild animal’s eye. Lily had seen Cantor approach timid creatures before. She had seen him persuade a roe deer to accept grain from his hand, been with him when wild sparrows flew down to alight on his outstretched palm. “My name’s Cantor,” he called soothingly. “Are you hurt?” Lily heard a faint whimper, a muffled sob that seemed to come from the pierced heart of the crippled tree. “Are you hurt?” Cantor repeated. “Nuh . . . no,” the cavity sniffed. “Scared.” “What’re you scared of?” Cantor asked. “It’s a bright day. The sun is shining. Do you like birds? There are birds here. Listen.” It was true. In the hard-packed earth beside the trail a family of lapwings

had their nest. When ¬everything was very still Lily heard their rhythmic two-note calls. “There’s food and water waiting for you below,” Cantor offered. “But take your time. I have a hawk. Actually, he’s not mine, but he lives with me.” A tousled mop of curly dark hair jutted out of the hole. A face showed the lost eyebrows and thickened forehead ridges of early tsara. Black marks on each cheekbone demonstrated the progress of the scourge. In size and apparent age the newcomer was around eleven or twelve. “¬I’m Cantor. And this is Lily. Do you have a name?” “Tobias. But they told me I ¬couldn’t use it no more. Said creatures ¬don’t have regular names. That’s when they threw rocks at me. Told me I better go live with the other creatures.” Comprehension dawned on Lily. “So you were afraid of the creatures here?” she asked. “I was scared to come here,” Tobias admitted, “and scared to stay . . . out there.” “Do you want to come out now?” Cantor inquired. “Come home with me? You’ll have a meal, and you can ask me anything you want about us and how it is here in the Valley.” There was a lengthy hesitation. Then slowly, unbending one joint at a time, one shoulder, then an elbow, then another arm emerged from the burrow. “I am hungry,” Tobias said.

Tobias greedily devoured a meal of goat cheese and dried figs as he shared his story with Lily and Cantor. “I was studying for my bar mitzvah. ¬I’m twelve this year. The rabbi saw the spot on my hand. And that’s how it started. It was all done according to the Law. I was isolated. When I was examined, there was a spot on my right earlobe. My family ¬didn’t want to believe it at first,” he said. “Didn’t believe it,” he corrected himself. “Mother ¬didn’t want to send me away. Later . . . I ¬don’t know. They got scared or something. Scared of the priest? Scared of the other people in our village? Scared of me?” His inflection rose on the last syllable. This was the most wrenching question of all. Lily’s heart constricted as she experienced the echo of her own lost family in the boy’s words. Betrayed and abandoned. Willing to take the blame for being tsara if ¬only . . . if ¬only . . . there was a way to escape the terrible rejection. Me! Mama! ¬I’m still me! Blame me! Punish me! But ¬don’t send me away! Could I have done something to prevent it? “Mother fought them. Tried to keep me. Held on to me. They beat her and pulled me away from her. They locked her up when they sent me out. I saw my father among them . . . when the first rock was thrown . . . just standing there! He just stood there! Ashamed. His head bowed. He let them!” Tobias’ thin shoulders jerked up and down with his strangled words. Lily saw again the implacable resolve of her own parents. “Like a dog!” Tobias cried. “Once I got beaten for throwing a stone at a

stray dog! What did I do? What did I do wrong?” “Shhh,” Lily comforted, sliding her good arm around the boy’s back and pressing him to her side. “No more being driven away. Never again.” ¬I’m praying again, Rejected One. I was his age when I was driven away from my village. Let him find some joy among the outcasts as I have. Overhead, dead palm fronds rattled in the breeze with the sound of dead bones. Tobias huddled closer. “Hid outside the village. Watching. Watching my house! No good.” He shook his head. “Heard Mother crying inside. Like I had died. Grandmother left bread out for me. Wrapped it so nothing would get it till I came at night. Then Father shouting. Raging. They’d be unclean too, he said. They’d be driven out if they kept me around. I was dead, Father said. Dead to them. Someone told, I guess. Next time they threw rocks again, I ran away. Ran till I dropped. Stole apples from the orchard. The farmer caught me and told me he’d kill me. I left there.” Tobias sniffed, experiencing again the final good-bye from all he’d known as a child. Cantor nodded at Lily then slipped away. “Where did you go then?” Lily asked, encouraging the boy to get it all out. Every leper in Mak’ob arrived with a story of grief to tell. She knew he needed to tell it before he could accept his new home in Mak’ob. “Lived in a graveyard.” Tobias shuddered at the recollection. “I met another . . . another like me. Like us. Only . . . you know . . . his face.” The boy still could not call himself a leper. It was always hard because it was so horrible and so final, so inescapable. “He told me about a Prophet. A Teacher who could do miracles. Said he wanted to find him. Maybe he could heal us. If we could ¬only get close enough to touch him.” Could it be Jekuthiel? Eagerly Lily inquired, “What happened to this man, this tsara? Where was he?” “Died,” Tobias explained. “One night he just . . . gave up.” Lily’s heart plummeted. “What did he look like? What color eyes?” “Eyes?” Tobias repeated doubtfully. “Almost blind he was . . . but they had been hazel, I think.” Lily gave a small sigh of relief. “And his hair?” Tobias replied with greater assurance, “No hair. No eyebrows neither.” “Then you left?” Tobias nodded. “Didn’t know what else to do. Afraid to come here, you know? This place. So I tried to find this Prophet on my own. Lived in graveyards, ate—” From the unfinished sentence Lily conjured up whole worlds of horror: existing on the garbage dumps; picking through rotten fruit, moldy bread; finding a chicken bone with a scrap of gristle. “Came to a place where he—the Prophet, I mean—where he’d been. Heard people say how he healed a cripple. A deaf man too!” The boy’s excitement faded as quickly as it rose. “Too late. He’d moved on. Another time, by the river,

they say he’d been teaching there for a week. But I missed him again. Always too late.” Tobias was almost done, his tale of steeling himself to seek shelter in Mak’ob nearly complete. “Got caught pulling up a bucket from a well. Been walking all day, you know? Couldn’t wait for dark. Thought it was safe. No one to see.” He shook his thatch of black hair sadly. “They threw stones and set dogs on me! I ran! So thirsty . . . hungry. Couldn’t find the Prophet. No place else to go. I decided to come here after all,” Tobias concluded. Lily held him close for a while. It was, she thought, as though she were someone else . . . holding the child she had been. How she wished she could tell him ¬everything would be all right. That he would find a new life, a family of outcasts who had also lost ¬everything. “I miss my mother,” he cried. “Oh, Mother! Do you think she remembers me too?” “Of course. Yes. And she’s praying for you. Praying you’ll be safe. And so you are. This is the answer to her prayer. You’re safe now, Tobias. Here, no one will throw stones at you. No one will drive you away.” Lily and the boy sat together for a long time and wept for what was lost forever. Cantor returned with Rabbi Ahava. The old man stooped to sit beside the boy. He waited in silence until Tobias looked up and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Shalom,” said Tobias. “Shalom.” The rabbi nodded. “I am Rabbi Ahava. Also chedel. Also tsara’at.” He held up his desiccated right hand. “Cantor says you’ve been searching for Messiah?” “A Prophet. I heard rumors. I searched for him but never found him.” “His name? Did they tell you his name?” “No. No. I heard stories.” “Ah,” the rabbi said solemnly. “Yes. Always. There are rumors. But never mind. You’re here now. Safe with us. We have a Torah school. We meet just there, beneath those trees. There are three who are completing studies for their bar mitzvah. You look the age.”