The morning his son was born, Joseph was sent for water.
The contractions came faster now.
Mary gripped the bedding with both hands. They had cleared the animals from the cave below the inn and hung curtains for the travelers. In the night it had seemed enough. Now every footstep beyond the curtain made her look up.
Two women from the traveling company knelt beside her. One held her hand. The other looked at Joseph.
“Water. Clean cloths. Whatever she brought.”
He had built the house they were supposed to be in. He had begun a cradle. Both were in Nazareth, three days away.
He fetched the water.
“Breathe,” he said when he came back.
Mary caught his wrist.
Another wave bent her forward. He held still and let her hurt his hand.
At noon the child came.
One of the women lifted him. For a moment Joseph saw only the small wet body in her hands. Then the boy drew breath and cried.
The woman wrapped him in the cloth Mary had packed and laid him against his mother.
Mary’s eyes were closed. Her hands found her son before she opened them.
Joseph sat back on his heels. His hands shook. He watched the woman gather the bloodied cloths, glad of something ordinary to look at.
“You have a son,” she told him.
He nodded. He had understood the words before. He had not understood this.
Mary moved the cloth away from the child’s cheek. His eyes wandered toward her face, then closed again. She bent to him.
Joseph reached toward the swaddling. Through the rough weave he could feel the ribs. The smallness of them. The way they moved.
He had made things all his life. Nothing he had made had ever needed him like this.
The next afternoon they moved upstairs.
A traveler Joseph had met on the road arranged the exchange of rooms. Joseph carried their bundles up the steps. Mary carried the child. Neither objected to leaving the cave.
On the eighth day they named him Yeshua.
By the time the strangers came, he was nearly three weeks old.
Ardnon had begun to dread another door.
Weeks in Jerusalem. Priests who sent him to other priests. Men who heard the word child and wanted payment before they would hear another. He and his companions had been ready to turn home toward Ur when a priest named Zacharias stopped them.
“I think I know whom you are looking for.”
Now Ardnon stood outside an inn in Bethlehem with Kaspar and Balthazar behind him.
“This is it?” Kaspar said.
“This is where he sent us.”
“And if he’s wrong?”
Ardnon looked at the door. Back home a teacher had spoken of a dream: the light of life, appearing among the Jews as a child. They had come a long way on the strength of another man’s dream.
His thumb found the leather cord at his wrist. The teacher who had given it to him was dead. The cord had outlasted him.
Ardnon knocked.
Joseph opened the door with an adze in his hand. He had been repairing a stool for the innkeeper. He kept the tool beside his leg.
The stranger noticed it.
“My name is Ardnon. Zacharias sent us.”
Behind Joseph, Mary raised her head.
“What does Zacharias want?” Joseph said.
“He said you might let us see your son.”
Joseph did not move.
“We have brought gifts.”
“For what?”
“For him.” Ardnon looked past Joseph to the small bundle in Mary’s arms. “We believe he will bring light to more than his own people.”
“And if he’s just a child?”
Ardnon looked back at the carpenter.
“Then a child will have the gifts.”
Mary was watching him.
“Let them come in,” she said.
Joseph stepped aside.
Ardnon knelt beside her.
“May I?”
Mary drew back the edge of the cloth.
The child slept. His mouth moved once, seeking milk. Ardnon waited for something he could take home and put into words.
Mary adjusted the boy against her. Yeshua stirred, opened his eyes, and caught one of her fingers. She smiled down at him.
Ardnon’s thumb tightened on the cord.
“Bring the gifts,” he said.
Kaspar laid the packages beside Mary. Gold. Frankincense. Myrrh. She thanked them and shifted the boy so she could reach.
Joseph watched her accept them. Gifts did not tell him who these men were. But they had crossed a great distance, and their hands were empty now.
He set down the adze.
Herod heard of the visit afterward.
He summoned the three men to Jerusalem. He wanted to know about the new king. Ardnon tried to explain that they had not come looking for a rival throne.
Herod listened. Then he gave them a purse and told them to find the child again, so he too could worship him.
Outside the palace Kaspar looked at Ardnon.
“Well?”
Ardnon put the purse away.
“We are going home.”
They did not return to Bethlehem.
Joseph found work. They found rooms with relatives. The child grew.
Then word came that Herod’s men were looking for them.
Joseph stopped taking work that would bring strangers to the house. Mary learned which window could be seen from the road. The gifts and their small savings dwindled together.
Winter passed. Then spring. By the next autumn the boy could pull himself upright against a stool. Joseph moved the sharp tools higher.
The messenger came after dark in October.
He knew Zacharias’s name. He knew where Joseph had worked. He would not come farther into the room than the door.
“An order has been prepared,” he said. “Every boy in Bethlehem under two.”
Joseph looked at the stool. Yeshua was holding its edge with both hands.
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
The messenger put money into Joseph’s hand. Zacharias had sent it for the journey. Egypt. Alexandria. There were relatives there who could receive them.
Mary had already lifted the boy.
They left that night.
No companions. No lamps. Joseph led the donkey out of Bethlehem while Mary kept one hand across her son’s back and the other over the buckle that rattled against the saddle.
Yeshua was a little over a year old. He wanted to get down. He tugged at her shawl, cross with her for holding him so tightly.
She bent her face into his hair.
“Not now,” she whispered.
Joseph carried the adze in his free hand.
They heard hoofbeats before dawn.
Joseph pulled the donkey off the path into a cluster of rocks. Mary held still. The boy reached for her face.
The hoofbeats passed. Faded.
They waited longer than they needed to.
“Bethlehem,” Joseph said at last. The riders had gone toward Bethlehem.
Mary thought of the mothers who had lent her cloths. The children she had watched playing outside their relatives’ door. Their mothers would be putting them to bed, or lifting them when they cried.
Joseph touched her knee.
They continued south.
At their first rest Joseph ate dried figs and watched the road. Mary nursed the boy.
“The angel said he would be great,” she said.
Joseph looked at the road.
“He didn’t mention this.”
Her son’s fingers closed on the edge of her shawl. She freed them gently so she could cover his face from the wind.
Joseph finished the fig. His hand found the cloth at the boy’s back and rested there.
“We should go,” he said.
The days grew hot. Hills gave way to flatter country. They bought bread where they could and asked for water before asking for news.
By the time they reached Egypt, Mary had stopped looking behind them at every sound.
One evening she sat against a palm while Joseph slept. A fire burned across the travelers’ camp. The boy had gone to sleep against her chest.
A stranger laughed at something another stranger said in a language she did not yet know.
She put her cheek against the top of her son’s head. Under her hand his ribs moved in and out.
She did not put him down.