Bright Dark Madonna. Elizabeth Cunningham

to ground.

      “…thus becoming the mother of kings, and when you find my mother and wife, I know you will do all that is rightful for a brother to do according to the Law of Moses.”

      It took us all a moment to realize that James had finally completed his sentence. Everyone was a little out of breath and waited uncertainly in the silence for someone to make an appropriate response.

      “And so here I am,” said James helpfully

      “And you are most welcome for as long as you like to stay,” Lazarus said.

      “But I suppose you will be taking the women back to Nazareth soon?” Peter sounded hopeful.

      “Indeed, after the wedding, I will take the women home to Nazareth where they will be safe and live a life in modest retirement, but myself, when I have done my duty unto my brother’s lineage, I will be returning to Jerusalem as often as I may to join you in the work of preaching God’s word, and preparing the way for his Messiah to return.”

      There was another silence. Since no one else seemed to know how to keep the conversation going, I decided to help out.

      “So who’s getting married?” I asked.

      Mary B, sitting across from me, suddenly choked and turned red, avoiding my eyes.

      “Mary!” I got up to give her a hug. “You’re so secretive. You never said anything.”

      “Mary,” she hissed in my ear. “It’s not me, you dolt.”

      “Then who—”

      I stopped abruptly, as everyone looked at me, then quickly looked away. Everyone but Ma, whose gaze hadn’t left the ceiling the whole evening. Martha and Susanna hovered in the wings, clutching each other.

      “Not,” I faltered. “You don’t mean. You can’t mean—”

      Me.

      “Wife of my brother’s bosom.” James launched forth again, though he appeared to be addressing the disciples rather than me. “You are a stranger from a strange land with strange ways and strange gods, and you do not know the Law, which the Most High God in his goodness and mercy has given unto his chosen people. The Eternal One knows that it is not good for a man to die with his seed unsown and his sons unborn, so he has vouchsafed that the brother of the man who has died with sons unborn must take unto himself the widow and go in unto her that the wife of the dead man’s bosom may yet bear sons of his line. And since the Lord in his wisdom has deprived me of the wife of my own bosom since, lo, she has died in childbirth, he clearly intends for me to be unto you your husband thus to ensure that his Chosen One will not die without an heir.”

      I turned to Mary B, on whom I always relied for exegesis. She looked at me, shrugged as if to say, “sorry”, and then she spoke one word.

      “Levirate.”

      With that one technical legal term she summed up all the longwinded James had just said. But I was still having a hard time taking it in.

      “James,” I turned to him. “Let me be sure I’ve got this straight. You’re asking me to marry you?”

      He looked honestly startled, as if the idea hadn’t occurred to him. I felt a wave of relief. It was all a misunderstanding.

      “Mary,” said Mary B. “He’s not asking. He’s accepting his obligation according to the Law of Moses. If he is able to marry you and impregnate you on behalf of his brother, it is his duty. Do you understand?”

      “But surely the widow has to give consent.”

      An awful silence answered me. I felt queasy, and realized I had eaten an inordinate amount of figs.

      “Come,” said Martha. “The men have matters to discuss.”

      I started to get up, not in acquiescence but because I needed to be sick, but Mary B yanked me back down.

      “Sit down, Mary. You, too, Martha and Susanna. Anything that concerns our duty to our beloved teacher affects all of us. You know he invited women to his table and included us in everything.”

      I reached for a wineskin and took a sip and nibbled some bread, hoping it might soothe my stomach. I sat up, took a breath, and then put my head between my knees.

      “Jesus,” I spoke to him inside my head, call it praying if you like. “What are you thinking? Before you go appearing unto people and arranging marriages for me, how about you try appearing unto me.”

      I waited for an answer, but I heard only my own breathing and the anguished workings of my digestion.

      “There is nothing to discuss, Mary,” Peter said testily. “James is honoring his brother and keeping the Law of Moses.”

      If it was a law, I was thinking, there had to be a loophole. I glanced at Miriam who was still gazing serenely towards the heavens and humming to herself. I knew I wasn’t the only one who suspected that Joseph wasn’t Jesus’s father, which would mean he wasn’t related to James at all or descended from the bloody royal house of David.

      “You bastard,” I prayed to my beloved. “You got me into this. Get me out of it.”

      All at once I felt inside me besides indigestion, the subtlest of fluttering. Not a kick yet—wings, fins, something tiny, tremulous, and strong.

      “Wait,” I said, lifting my head and feeling much better. “The law of levirate exists to ensure that the deceased has legitimate issue, correct?” I did my best to sound like a Torah scholar debating in the Temple porticoes. “Therefore, if the deceased already has issue, the levirate would be moot? That is to say, the widow would not have to marry the deceased’s brother?”

      There followed a lively discussion of the fine points of the levirate between Mary B, James, and the more erudite of the disciples. They had clearly forgotten the matter at hand and were going at it in fine rabbinical style when Martha (who had sat down) decided she had had enough.

      “Quiet! All of you!” She turned to me and fixed me with a stern look. “Mary, do you have something to tell us?”

      I felt a twinge of regret at yielding up my secret, one more loss but small enough to be absorbed in the great ocean of loss where my life already pitched and tossed.

      “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do. I am with child. I’m going to have a baby,” I added inanely as joy of speaking those words took me by surprise. I didn’t even notice the silence that followed. My joy kept expanding, filling the room, the sky, knocking Miriam’s wandering gaze back into earth’s orbit.

      “Who is the father?”

      Who is the father? Who is the father? That question. That question again.

      I am standing naked and pregnant before the college of druids, until my beloved comes to stand with me and shield me with his body.

      “Esus is not the father,” I say aloud to the druids.

      “Ha! That’s what I thought.” Peter’s voice pulled me back to the present where I faced not druids but alarmed and grim-faced disciples. Just as bad. Maybe worse.

      “Jesus!” I swore; I prayed.

      “Jesus is not the father,” Peter said again.

      “He is the father!” I cried, still disoriented. “He is. This time he is.”

      “You just said he wasn’t.” Peter’s face was as red as it had been the day I first met him at the gates of Temple Magdalen when he brought us a load of fish to thank us for curing his wife’s infertility, the day it dawned on him that he was not the father of his own child.

      “But that’s not what I meant!” I protested. “I was talking about my first child. Jesus wasn’t the father of that child but he was ready to let the druids believe he was.”

      The men looked blank. None of them knew the story, and they didn’t