A Fixed Point of Light
another child's story
I’ve not been able to post much the last few weeks—Julie and I were in Italy for our 25th, and then I came on retreat to Iona—but now I’m on the train, returning home and I thought I’d share another of the stories I wrote about the life of Jesus as witnessed by children. This one was inspired by Diego Velázquez’s “The Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus.” I hope you enjoy it. And pray I make it home safely. I miss Julie and the kids! (Pray they miss me too.)
She had lit the evening lights too early, dark hands unsteady over the pale wax. The sun still hung above the hills and she had no way of knowing when her master and mistress would return or in what state. Still, she lit the candles, moving with the unrewarded urgency that comes from knowing something without knowing that you know it. One by one the flames took, trembling around their wicks, bending like supplicants toward the old woman dying in the other room.
Lost in thought, the girl sat now before the hearth, knees drawn to her chest, watching motes of dust turn gold in the last shaft of daylight. From the courtyard, the sounds of the day’s final movements could be heard. The scratching of chickens. The buzz of locusts. A dove calling, falling silent. Sparrows settling into the trees with soft arguments about perches. The low, content sounds of the cow as her calf pressed close. On the shelf beside her, a trinity of figures stood just clear of the rising shadows. An ivory saint bent in unending prayer. A red stone grasshopper, songless, waiting for resurrection. And between them, yesterday’s wildflowers spilling from a blue Egyptian vase.
Memory has its own demands, its own hour. That morning at the well, before first light, the moon had shown her a stranger’s black face in the water’s black mirror. The other women’s voices drifted around her, their meaning at first too faint to catch. Then, walking home with the water jar steady on her head, it forced its way into her awareness. Another prophet dead in Jerusalem at Roman hands, his followers scattered and fleeing. It couldn’t be him, surely. The one from Galilee. The one whose name her mistress spoke with such wonder and wanting, as if even the mention of him were a prayer.
A fury rose in her, one she could not quite swallow back. They had everything. Why chase after yet another mad voice in the wilderness? Had they not learned to tell hope from hope? Even before she had come to serve in their house, her sufferings had trained her to spy out the looming shape of disappointment before it could find her. She knew the threat of it the way a shorebird knows a storm is coming and hunkers down, wings clasped against its body, waiting for the worst to pass.
Home again from the well, she had emptied the water into the cistern and moved through her litany of chores. Water for the cow and calf. Grain for the chickens. Eggs gathered in apron fold and stored in a pail under a cloth in a closet. Then, she sat to milk the goat, working the pink teats with practiced hands. Each stream of milk struck the copper pail like the ringing of a temple bell. “What do you catch,” the girl croaked, “when you chase after messiahs?” Nan worked her toothy jaw sideways, considering, her liquid eyes holding neither judgment nor consolation. The girl pressed her forehead against the goat’s warm flank, breathing in wool and hay and the earthier scents beneath, all things simple and sure. The goat shifted. The gentle nudge felt to the girl like a reminder not to wait for any answers.
All day, she struggled to stay present to her tasks. Sweeping the courtyard in the growing heat. Scrubbing the floors. Beating the rugs so their patterns showed again. Kneading the dough and leaving it to rise beneath a linen shroud. As she worked, memories surfaced and sank in her, tiny tide-caught things. Impressions of movement, faint scents of nearness and longing. Over the years, her mother’s face had worn away like an old painting, never retouched. Her father’s voice remained sharp as salt and tar. Don’t trust what the water shows you. Don’t trust what it hides. Just let it carry you. The words had come to her with some force as she’d wrung the rag and watched the dirty water spiral away between the stones. Now, sitting before the cold hearth in the house where she was motherless, fatherless, she watched the last beam of light fade to a glow in the cracks around the door. Rising with a sigh, she returned to the grandmother’s dark room.
Her mistress’ mother had shrunk even more since morning, her bird-like bones already showing beneath her weathered skin, silvery hair thin over the silk pillows. The girl’s hands moved with assurance and kindness, smoothing the bedding, straitening the cushions. A sour smell reached her nose. “No, no,” she murmured, already moving to gather what she needed. When she returned with a pail of water and clean bedding, the woman’s eyes had cleared, showing some new awareness of her own failing body, of the girl’s labors, of all that would have to remain unsaid between them. As she lifted the old woman from the bed, slipping her out of her soiled clothes, Imah showed not a sign of impatience or indignity. As if she considered it a gift to become a child again. “You're good to me,” she said at last, and her voice held such tenderness. the girl’s hands faltered over the dirty linens. The old woman reached up, shakily, and brushed the girl’s cheek with fingers papery as moth wings. “Little star,” she said, and closed her eyes.
The name hit like a blow. In all the years the girl had served this house, she had heard Imah whisper it any number of times, but always and only to her own daughter, the girl’s mistress—a mother’s special name for her cherished child. The girl told herself the old woman was confused, addled, losing her mind, touched. But her body knew better than her mind, and tears started in her eyes before she could stop them. She bent to adjust the blankets unnecessarily, hiding her stained face from the old woman and some deeper truth from herself.
The girl stood perfectly still, the name gathering in the hollows of her heart and seeping through its cracks like rainwater in the basins and fissures and rock-split caverns of the weathered mountain where wildflowers find root and all manner of things green and tenacious reach their way through stone toward sun. She knew that in the market they whispered about the old woman’s addled mind, her elderly silliness. But there had been something in her voice just now the girl recognized as holy, arising from some source deeper than sense.
Barking broke the silence. It continued, leading a growing chorus of noises. A bleat from the courtyard. The whoosh of birds taking flight. Gate hinges creaking. Footsteps. Then voices, her master’s voice loudest among them, carrying strange new notes. Shadows filled the doorway. She met them with her lamp held high. The light caught her master and mistress first. She had prepared herself for the worst, but their faces were bright and their movements unexpectedly and unnaturally light. Then came the stranger, his tunic short and plain but his bearing almost regal. The glow of the girl’s lamp bent around him like water around a diver.
The three of them settled on the divan that ran the length of the first room as she brought fresh water in the washing bowl with clean towels and the best sweet wine in a jug painted white and decorated with silver olive branches. She knelt first before the guest. She poured the cool water over his feet, and when she reached to dry them she found scars—not rough or angry, but clean and precise as if sculpted from marble. She could hardly resist the urge to touch them. The sea in her blood roared.
After starting a fire and setting a lentil stew over the fire in the hearth to warm, she served them dates from a ceramic bowl and white curds still tasting of hillside herbs and split figs weeping honey. Then she moved to prepare the table, spreading a striped Egyptian cloth across the length of it. As the trio talked, she could hear the lines of their exchange weaving together like threads in a priceless robe. With each dish she brought, she marked something new of him—the perfect scars on his perfect feet and hands, the voice like stripped oak and first leaf, the face lit from within like glass in fire. Even to stand near him was moving, like feeling the cool, promising darkness that gathers at the mouth of a holy cave, a cave where prayer has been so real as to have altered the very relation of heaven and earth.
Seated on cushions on the floor around the table, they waited, deep in conversation. She brought the stew boiling in its pot, the air shimmering above it, salted fish, its flesh pale against it’s own ceramic scales, milk in a small jug, two flagons of good wine, and a small cruse of water. Finally, she returned with a loaf of bread, still warm, on a smooth olivewood board. When she sat it on the table between them, the stranger’s hand, with its strange clean scar, rose and came to rest gently beside hers. The world drew down to that sliver of air. He lifted his face to hers. “Amah,” he said, and time slowed to a blur. What was he saying? He was thanking her. He was praising her too—for how she had tended so lovingly to Imah, for what she had learned. The girl felt the tears start. She tasted salt. Memory stirred in her and suddenly her mother’s face appeared, no longer faded.
“He’s here. The prophet they killed,” she stammered, the words dry in her mouth. She had fled for shelter to the old woman’s room. Imah lay still as carved ivory, her eyes open and unclouded. “I’m not frightened now, little star,” she whispered, weak but steady. “I thought I would be, but now that it’s here…” The girl took the woman’s hand, running her fingers along the line of the blue veins. She wept.
After a moment, she returned to the kitchen and though her back was to them she stood listening, listening, breathless. Over her shoulder, she caught a glimpse of her master gesturing wildly, enthusiastic perhaps or infuriated. Her mistress sat utterly still, like a deer in the wild scenting water. The girl had never noticed until now how silence held so much more light than speech. She watched as the stranger tore a piece of bread, scooping up the hot pulse of lentils, then jerked his fingers back with a small yelp that made the three of them burst into laughter. The sound burned through the girl’s body like wine and she had to steady herself against the doorframe, giggling despite herself, knowing she had no right to such feelings.
She crossed the room to bank the fire in the hearth, heart afire, desperate and more desperate to be near him, to hear what he was hearing, to know what he would say in response to her master’s words and her mistress’s silence. She was still kneeling, smoke stinging her eyes, when she heard a gasp behind her and turned to see—he was no longer there. Master and mistress sat unmoving, hands to mouth, staring at the table, terror and wonder twisted together like a mooring rope. Something broke in them both at once. They rose, words spilling out of them. They reached for cloaks, for sandals, speaking through and over each other, their words all edges and breaks, voices tangled. But they moved as one, her master's fire caught and held in her mistress's deeper flame. “It’s too late,” the girl said after they were already out the door.
The house opened like a cave around her, vast with absence. Smoke rose from the broken bread. She stood touching the edge of the table, the prophet’s words mingling with Imah’s in her mind. Blessed are you, Little star. Suddenly she understood who she was and what it meant to be neither ship nor sea but a fixed point of light, needed most in darkness.
She gathered the dishes with reverence, the clay bowls still warm, the silver cups still wet with wine. She broke off a piece of the bread he had blessed and stood eating it in the doorway, Nan and the cow and her calf nuzzling against her. Above her, she saw the same stars Sarah had counted while Abraham slept, learning to trust the promise growing in her body, learning to count what could not be counted. In the sick room, a deeper stillness had settled. The girl bent and touched her forehead to the woman’s, feeling the slow, soft rise of her easing breaths and the cool smoothness of her skin. Then she settled onto her mat beside the bed. She could feel tears on the sides of her face and thankfulness spilling from every pore in her skin, pungent as nard. Here in the dark, keeping watch under the heavens before the Eternal, she had found her place. Here was the ground of her beginnings, the truth of her purpose. Not the vast, terrible waters of her dreams but the small necessities of life, the quiet liturgy of tending the garden of this house where the dying and the living grew together like flowers wild in her care.
Morning came with the rooster’s crow. The courtyard filled with birdsong, and the calf pressed close to its mother in the strengthening light. Morning glories had climbed the wall overnight, their purple throats drinking dawn, and from their leaves came the clear song of a grasshopper. Returning from the well, she found Nan waiting on the smooth stones near the door, udders aching with promise. The girl settled onto her stool and caught her own reflection in the goat’s black eye. Like her father’s sea, it carried what could not be shown and revealed what could not be hidden and she recognized her dark face in the depths of that darker mirror changed but somehow more familiar, more lovely, like a word for silence translated into a language that had no such word and then back again.
Travel well my +friend.
kneading the dough and leaving it to rise under the linen shroud
rising in you, Little Star