Neither of them slept.
And in Mary’s house the lamp was already burning when the first rooster called, and in Ezra’s house the lamp was already burning.
Yeshua sat on his father’s bench in the workshop before the sun cleared the ridge, his hands on his knees and the wood plane untouched at his side. On the corner of the bench beside the lamp lay the old yoke peg James had straightened two years before.
A bench for the baker was due Friday and a shutter for the mason Sunday, and he took up the plane and began.
His mother came at first light with a small wooden tray holding bread and water and a few olives. She set it beside the wood and put her hand on his shoulder and told him he had done what he had to do.
He gave her no answer, and she held his eyes and said, “I know what it cost you,” her thumb pressing once into the cloth before she lifted her hand and went back to the house.
Rebecca had not gotten back into bed but had sat from the second hour of the night until first light on the low bench under the grape arbor where she had sat with her father a thousand times.
When the roosters called, she stood and walked to the well at the edge of the village and drew water she did not need.
She carried the jar home and went to the loom her mother had set up in the inner courtyard, and put her hands to the wool.
James came to the workshop in the late afternoon and stopped in the doorway, saying the patriots had formed another committee and were asking for his brother again. Yeshua went on planing and told him no.
James said their mother had told him Yeshua had not eaten, and Yeshua said he had eaten half. When James answered that she said he had left all of it, Yeshua said again that it was half, still working the wood. James came inside and said he would go to the committee but would not join it.
James looked at what his brother had made and at the tools on their father’s wall.
“I wouldn’t have said no to her.”
Yeshua did not look up. “I know.”
“I am not you,” James said, and Yeshua told him he knew that too. James went out.
Across the village Rebecca found her father at the counting table and sat down opposite him. He set the bead string aside and waited while she told him she would not marry anyone, and then told him she would help him run the business and learn the numbers and be useful to him.
Ezra’s eyes softened, and he told her she had always been useful. When she said not like this, he pulled a second stool to his side of the table and pushed the ledger between them and turned it so she could read, and she came around the table and sat beside him.
Later she asked him to move the household to Sepphoris. She could not keep drawing water at that well. In time he agreed.