“I hope we haven’t brought the judgment of the Pharisees down on your head, Simon,” Joshua said.
Simon waved a hand in dismissal. “Not to worry. There’ll be no Pharisees coming here. Jakan is terrified of me, and if he really believes that Maggie is possessed, and if his friends believe it, well, I’d bet he’s divorced her already.”
“She can come back to Galilee with us,” I said, looking at Joshua, who looked at Simon, as if to ask permission.
“She may do as she wishes.”
“What I wish is to get out of Bethany before Jakan comes to his senses,” Maggie said, coming from the other room. She wore a simple woolen dress and her hair was still dripping. There was still green goo on her sandals. She came across the room, knelt down, and gave her brother a huge hug, then a kiss on the eyebrow. “If he comes by or sends word, you’ll tell him I’m still here.”
I sensed Simon was smiling under the veil. “You don’t think he’ll want to come in and look around?”
“The coward,” Maggie spat.
“Amen,” I said. “How did you stay with a creep like that all of these years?”
“After the first year he didn’t want to be anywhere near me. Unclean, don’t you know? I told him I was bleeding.”
“For all those years?”
“Sure. Do you think he would embarrass himself among the members of the Pharisee council by asking them about their own wives?”
Joshua said, “I can heal you of that affliction, if you’ll allow me, Maggie.”
“What affliction?”
“You should go,” Simon said. “I’ll send word about what Jakan has done as soon as I know. If he hasn’t done it already, I have a friend who will plant the idea that if he doesn’t divorce Maggie his place on the Sanhedrin might be questioned.”
Simon and Martha waved to us from the doorway, Martha looking like a compact ghost of her older sister and Simon just looking like a ghost.
And thus did we become eleven.
There was a full moon and a sky full of stars thrown over us as we walked back to Gethsemane. From the top of the Mount of Olives we could see across the Kidron Valley to the Temple. Black smoke streamed into the sky from the sacrificial fires which the priests tended day and night. I held Maggie’s hand as we walked through the grove of ancient olive trees and out into the clearing near the oil press where we camped. Philip and Nathaniel had built a fire and there were two strangers sitting by it with them. They all stood up as we approached. Philip glared at me, which baffled me until I remembered that he’d been with us at Cana, and seen Joshua and Maggie dancing at the wedding. He thought I was trying to steal Joshua’s girl. I let her hand go.
“Master,” said Nathaniel, tossing his yellow hair, “new disciples. These are Thaddeus and Thomas the Twins.”
Thaddaeus stepped up to Joshua. He was about my height and age, and wore a tattered woolen tunic and looked especially gaunt, as if he might be starving. His hair was cut short like a Roman’s, but it looked as if someone had cut it with a dull piece of flint. Somehow he looked familiar.
“Rabbi, I heard you preach when you were with John. I have been with him for two years.”
A follower of John, that’s where I knew him from, although I didn’t remember meeting him. That explained the hungry look as well.
“Welcome, Thaddaeus,” Joshua said. “These are Biff and Mary Magdalene, disciples and friends.”
“Call me Maggie,” Maggie said.
Joshua stepped over to Thomas the Twins, who was only one guy, younger, perhaps twenty, his beard still like soft down in places, his clothes finer than any of ours. “And Thomas.”
“Don’t, you’re standing on Thomas Two,” Thomas squealed.
Nathaniel pushed Joshua aside and whispered in his ear a little too loudly. “He sees his twin but no one else can. You said to show mercy, so I haven’t told him that he’s mad.”
“And so you shall be shown mercy, Nathaniel,” Joshua said.
“So we won’t tell you that you’re a ninny,” I added.
“Welcome, Thomas,” Joshua said, embracing the boy.
“And Thomas Two,” Thomas said.
“Forgive me. Welcome, Thomas Two, as well,” said Joshua to a perfectly empty spot in space. “Come to Galilee and help us spread the good news.”
“He’s over there,” said Thomas, pointing to a different spot, equally empty.
And thus did we become thirteen.
On the trip back to Capernaum Maggie told us about her life, about the dreams she had set aside, and about a child that had died in the first year of her marriage. I could see Joshua was shaken when he heard of the child, and I knew he was thinking that if we hadn’t taken off to the East, he would have been there to save it.
“After that,” Maggie said, “Jakan didn’t come near me. There was bleeding right after the baby died, and as far as he knew it never stopped. He’s always been afraid that someone might think that there’s a curse on his house, so my duties as a wife were public only. It’s a double-edged sword for him. In order to appear dutiful I had to go to the synagogue and to the women’s court in the Temple, but if they thought I was going there while I was bleeding I would have been driven out, maybe stoned, and Jakan would have been shamed. Who knows what he’ll do now.”
“He’ll divorce you,” I said. “He’ll have to if he wants to save face with the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin.”
Strangely enough, it was Joshua who I had trouble consoling about Maggie’s lost child. She’d lived with the loss for years, cried over it, allowed it to heal as much as it would, but the wound was fresh for Joshua. He walked far behind us, shunning the new disciples who pranced around him like excited puppies. I could tell that he was talking to his father, and it didn’t seem to be going well.
“Go talk to him,” Maggie said. “It wasn’t his fault. It was God’s will.”
“That’s why he feels responsible,” I said. We hadn’t explained to Maggie about the Holy Ghost, the kingdom, all the changes that Joshua wanted to bring to mankind, and how those were at odds, at times, with the Torah.
“Go talk to him,” she said.
I fell back in our column, past Philip and Thaddaeus, who were trying to explain to Nathaniel that it was his own voice he heard when he put his fingers in his ears and spoke, and not the voice of God, and past Thomas, who was having an animated discussion with empty air.
I walked along beside Joshua for a while before I spoke, and then I tried to sound matter-of-fact. “You had to go to the East, Joshua. You know that now.”
“I didn’t have to go right then. That was cowardly. Would it have been so bad to watch her marry Jakan? To see her child born?”
“Yes, it would have. You can’t save everyone.”
“Have you been asleep these last twenty years?”
“Have you? Unless you can change the past, you’re wasting the present on this guilt. If you don’t use what you learned in the East then maybe we shouldn’t have gone. Maybe leaving Israel was cowardly.”
I felt my face go numb as if the blood had drained from it. Had I said that? So, we walked along for a while in silence, not looking at each other. I counted birds, listened to the murmur of the disciples’ voices ahead, watched Maggie’s ass move under her dress as she walked, not really enjoying the elegance of it.
“Well, I, for one, feel better,” said Joshua finally. “Thanks for cheering me up.”
“Glad to help,” I said.
We arrived in Capernaum on the morning of the fifth day after leaving Bethany. Peter and the others had been preaching the good news to the people on the shore of Galilee and there was a crowd of perhaps five hundred people waiting for us. The tension had passed between Joshua and me and the rest of the journey had been pleasant, if for no other reason than we got to hear Maggie laugh and tease us. My jealousy of Joshua returned, but somehow it wasn’t bitter. It was more like familiar grief for a distant loss, not the sword-in-the-heart, rending-of-flesh agony of a heartbreak. I could actually leave the two of them alone and talk to other people—think of other things. Maggie loved Joshua, that was assured, but she loved me as well, and there was no way to divine how that might manifest. By following Joshua we had already divorced ourselves of the expectations of normal existence. Marriage, home, family: they were not part of the life we had chosen, Joshua made that clear to all of his disciples. Yes, some of them were married, and some even preached with their wives at their sides, but what set them apart from the multitudes who would follow Joshua was that they had stepped off the path of their own lives to spread the Word. It was to the Word that I lost Maggie, not to Joshua.