He climbed the ridge alone for the last time as a boy.
He left the workshop at sundown.
The old yoke peg lay beside the lamp. James had straightened it two years before. Tonight Yeshua left it where it was.
He carried nothing but the harp.
He passed the well at the edge of the village. The stone still held the afternoon. No one was drawing water at this hour. The path to the ridge began behind the well and rose for a quarter mile through scrub and olive and broken stone.
He had climbed this path since he was five years old.
He climbed it now.
His mother had stopped asking where he went when he was thirteen. She knew. She had not stopped him.
At the top of the ridge there was a stone he had been sitting on for fourteen years. The stone faced east toward the desert. Behind him to the west the village settled into evening. Below him in the south the road to Jerusalem moved in the dust. Above him the sky did what the sky did when the sun was gone.
He set the harp down on the dust beside the stone. He did not play it.
He sat down on the stone.
The hum had been in him since before he could remember.
In the years after his father died the hum changed again. It became a kind of pulling.
As if something had been planted in him long before he was born and was reaching for somewhere to put down roots.
He had not told anyone.
He stayed on the stone until the first stars came.
The cold came with them. He had not brought a cloak. The cold sat where it sat. His body had learned to wait.
He listened now.
The half-line surfaced under his breath. The one his father had taught him on the way down the ridge when he was nine.
The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.
He did not say it twice. He did not need to.
For a moment he could almost feel his father’s hand on his shoulder.
The weight. The warmth through the tunic. The callus on Joseph’s thumb where years of work had hardened it.
He remembered the way the hand always paused before lifting. He had barely noticed it when his father was alive.
Now he wanted that pause back.
He let himself want it.
The wind touched his shoulder. He was alone on the ridge.
He bowed his head.
He was on his knees.
His hands were on the dust beside his knees. His breathing had changed. He was breathing hard, as if he had been running, and had just stopped.
His face was wet.
He did not know when he had begun to cry.
His chest was quiet. The quiet was wider than what had left it. It filled the space behind his ribs the way water fills a cistern.
He stopped looking for the word. The looking for the word had been the loneliness.
He could not name it yet. He could sit here without having to name it.
He missed his father.
He stayed where he was.
The stars moved through the night above the ridge, and he did not move with them.
The first light came over the eastern edge of the desert.
The light came to his face. He had been turned toward it for hours.
When he stood his legs did not work at first. He had been on his knees the duration of the night. The dust was on his palms and on his knees and on the front of his tunic. He brushed at it. His hands moved. The dust came off.
The sentence came back to him. His father had said it over a board in the workshop and again on the ridge when he was small. The wood was here before us. It will be here after.
Where the hum had been was something steadier.
He walked to the eastern edge of the ridge. The side that faced away from the village. The side that looked out toward the desert and the road to Jordan and everything that was not Nazareth.
He watched the light move out across the desert.
Then he turned.
He walked back to the stone and picked up the harp. Jude would need money for school. He carried it down toward the village.
He stopped at the top of the path. He looked down at the village in its first light. The lamps in the windows. The smoke from the morning fires. The narrow streets. His mother’s house. The workshop. The well. His brothers. His sisters. The mother who had touched his shoulder the morning before. The brother who had brought him a piece of cedar. The girl at her loom across the village rooftops.
Later that year he sold the harp. The place where it had stood stayed empty. Jude went to school.