CONTENT WARNING

A New Nazareth

by Katja Sass

As the men shout and search in the distance, a woman whispers, “child!”- grabs at the young girl’s arm, and pulls her forcefully under a wagon.

The back corner of the wagon rests on a broken, splaying wheel, half sunken into the earth. A large, awkward rock holds the other corner off the ground. There is only enough room to crouch, so they wait, kneeling in their full skirts, swaying a little, too scared to settle before the sun does.

After a few minutes, the wide valley becomes shaded, causing objects to cast confusing shapes onto the ground and rocks; the night is a mask that disguises and hides them from the men.

A baby that has been forgotten about starts to moan, reaches out for the woman’s hair. “He likes you,” the girl says. “You remind him of his mother.” Even in the dark, she can see by the angle of the woman’s nose, the curve of her face, that there is a likeness.

The baby’s moans grow louder, larger, going beyond the wagon, spilling out into the open air. In one slow, graceful movement, the woman turns to her side, undoes the buttons on her dress and draws the crying baby to her, holding his small body until he latches onto her breast. Curling up around him, she strokes his soft hair, inhales his scent. The girl thinks of her cousin refusing to look at the newborn, forced to put her swollen breast in its mouth, her fists and jaw clenched.

The men’s voices fade across the valley, their fiery torchlight dimming as they walk back up the hill to New Nazareth. The girl’s heart slows to the same rhythmic pace as the baby suckling.

            The woman speaks, signposting their safety. “I’m Anna; I’m a friend. Do you have your own name yet? The men won’t come back; they don’t like to go too far from Father.”

The girl feels weakened by knowledge a stranger shouldn’t have. “No, I don’t have my own name. My baptism would have been this week. The boy is called John; his mother – my cousin – is Mary.”

            Anna looks back down at the baby as his eyes blink slowly, slowly, drifting into sleep. “They’re all called Mary. Where is this Mary?”

            “I was with her but I lost her when we got to the creek upstream.”

            “Many are lost in the water.”

It is something the young girl has heard many times whenever she asks why she cannot leave Nazareth: a command disguised as description. Mary said a friend would be waiting for them, would give a clue.

In the darkness under the wagon, Anna and the girl lie on their backs with the baby nestled into the small space between them. They don’t talk at all. Apart from the faint bubbling of the creek, the baby makes the only noises. When she thinks about Mary, the girl presses against her eyes to stop herself from crying.

Anna turns to her. “Let’s wriggle out from under here. I think we could all do with some air.”

The moonlight out in the valley is obscured by light clouds. The girl wants to say everything. Instead, she searches her mind for something that still tells her story.

“When I was a real little girl, I used to creep out at night to look up at the stars. I would cover my hair in a shawl, move quietly as I could past the cabins, crawl under windows, hide in the shadows when Father was moving between his wives. When I would creep out of bed, I wouldn’t have a name; I was just one of the children still, but the stars knew my name and would sing it to me, all together, with their bright, sparkling sing-song voices, making me a whole person of my own, and I’d crawl back into bed and dream I was that girl and that Father would see me and he’d say, yes, that can be your name. You’re as unique as one of them stars.”

Anna looks at the girl, not the sky.

“But when Father found out that I wasn’t in my bed one night, he told me he was so worried something would happen to me, didn’t I know the gates of our town had become surrounded by huge bears waiting to break my legs and chew me up? Can you imagine that? Just so as I wouldn’t go and look for stars. Then I never heard my real name again and now I can’t even remember what it was, and eventually Mary told me that Father made up lies about them bears anyhow.”

Anna looks at the sky, not the girl. “Elizabeth was Mary’s cousin, you know, in the gospels. So, I think the stars were probably calling you that. Do you like that name? It’s an older lady’s name, really, but I can call you Beth if you like it.”

The girl tilts her head back, becomes tiny against the expanse of sky that stretches away from her. Up on the hill in Nazareth, a dozen wooden cabins and one dirtied white chapel point downwards in the girl’s inverted vision.

She thinks of Father spitting fire and brimstone from his pulpit up there, yelling scripture at his two dozen wives sat cowering in the pews, half of them young women not much older than her. He’s talking again about the power God has given him, to channel the holy spirit. The Lord has told him his wives should wear masks, that they shouldn’t, or that they can’t – this seems to change – set eyes on the holy spirit as it enters them and gives them the same blessing it gave Mary, the womb chosen by God to bear the Christ.

Sense by sense, the girl withdraws from the scene, from Nazareth, from Father’s gaze. She is rising above the town, feet loosely walking up the steeple, reaching out to say hello again to the stars. “Beth,” they welcome her. She sleeps under them.

Just as the sun is rising, she is woken by a thick wetness between her legs, gloopy, still unfamiliar, soaking through her pantalets, tacking the cotton to her inner thighs. She can taste it, sickly, warm, metallic. She smells it, too; she has never been able to smell herself before. She smells like a woman.

It is two days since she saw Mary weeping when she learnt that Beth had started to menstruate and would now marry Father, as she had at the same age; one day since Mary took the wooden mask – her own wedding present from Father – and hit it with a rolling pin until it smashed into hand-sized splinters; half a day since Mary, who had been standing for many hours in silence on the cold flagstone floor of the kitchen, until it was nearly dusk, told her young cousin to get the baby from his cot and follow her. She had handed her a section of the broken mask, one eye and a whole mouth agape, just how Father would look thirty minutes later on the chapel floor.

A cool morning breeze moves through the long grass, drawing Beth away from thoughts of Mary and back to the valley. With it, a second smell lifts into the air; it is also blood but a little older, congealed and finally dried, faintly rotten like meat at its earliest stage of decay.

Anna is close by, feeding crusts to the mule while the baby bobs around in her other arm, his blue eyes wide open, hands scrunching up the mule’s fur.

“You make a natural mom,” Beth says. She has never known her own mother, only Mary, who fed her and cuddled her sometimes, and knew the best places to hide when Father or the elders came to see them. Beth has been shown far more kindness by her cousin than her cousin ever showed to her own son.

            Anna moves around from behind the mule, waits for Beth to see and understand what she’d only caught from the wind a moment ago: the large, dark red stains on the front and back of Anna’s skirt. She knows the wagon hit the rock hard and now imagines the woman clutching herself until, after a time, a baby’s soul soaks into the heavy weave of an apron, its tiny hands and feet just clumps trapped on a petticoat.

“I’m so sorry. How long have you been out here? How long since the accident?”

Anna gazes at the baby boy, alive in her arms, like a trick. “Mary sent for me through one of the men, and I came. I’m not sure. I think days, maybe a week,” then – awareness – “I’ve eaten most of the food, I’m sorry, but there is plenty of bread still. It’s a bit stale but that won’t hurt you.”  She gestures over to the wagon: a mobile bakery, black, glossy, dressed in the words, Hopson’s Baked Goods.

“Is Hopson your father? Your husband? Who will take care of you?”

Anna brushes dirty hair from her face. “I will take care of me. Just as I always do. This is not my first loss. Hopson and I - it seems - are not meant to be parents. God doesn’t want good men to be fathers.”

Anna reaches into the wagon and hands Beth a small loaf of bread and a tiny amount of red jam left in a cracked jar.

That breakfast, out in the open air, looking over the wildflowers towards the creek, chewing on hard bread that she hasn’t spent hours kneading herself, is the best meal of her young life.

When Anna comes to sit next to her, Beth holds out her own skirt, “This is the blood that started everything.” She feels aware of her own fertility, as well as what has died here.

“My cousin – John’s mom. I think she’s dead. I think the men found her last night, after she killed Father. I didn’t really lose her in the creek…I heard them coming for her and I just hid farther up behind an old tree. I put my hand around John’s mouth real tight; I nearly stopped him breathing, but I didn’t know what else to do and I figured she wanted to get me out of Nazareth so bad, so I should just keep following the creek, like she said.”

Anna strokes Beth’s hair, unthinking, or not thinking about Beth’s hair, and, after a few minutes pass, walks back up to the wagon and feeds John from her trembling breast, all the while stroking him, whispering to him, cradling him carefully.

Beth knows that John would never have seen this love from his own mother. In another life, he might have, but not in this one, not with Father in his blood. Beth’s eyes fall again on Anna’s stained dress and she trembles herself, not in sympathy, but in gratitude the universe has made room for John in this stranger’s arms.

The baby is put to bed inside the shade of the wagon and they leave him to go down to the water and fill up their flasks. The day grows warmer around them and, when they reach the edge of the creek, they agree they will bathe. Beth starts to pull down her dress, a ritual she is accustomed to, but Anna stops her, reaching out to gently push a sleeve back over Beth’s bare shoulder.

The two women, separated by a generation, bonded by blood, wade out into the creek together. Anna places one hand around the nape of Beth’s neck and her other against her chest, before pushing Beth’s whole body under the water. The coldness of it hits the girl first, then the freshness of it, until finally the whipping pain on her skin of small pieces of debris being carried around and into her by gravity and design.

When Beth emerges, all she can see through her soaked hair is the blurred glow from the midday sun. Anna mimics the baptism of Jesus, “THIS IS MY NEW FRIEND, BETH, WHOM I LOVE, WITH HER I AM WELL PLEASED.” She pulls the shivering girl into her arms and holds her as they laugh; in those moments Beth knows she is a whole person of her own, for the first time, she is named, and she is not Mary like all the others.

As they sway in their embrace, the water pushes against their dirty dresses, steals through the weave of their petticoats, breaks apart the seams of their undergarments, before wicking away dried blood, staining the water pink as it moves downstream.

Back at the wagon, they step out of the wet dresses and throw them down. They button themselves into clean clothes and warm coats, and stand over the dresses in a drowsy silence until they are roused by voices.

Three men are already walking towards them, their wagon parked nearby. They are wearing city clothes, not like the men looking for her last night. Their faces and hands are soft; they are men who have never worked too hard, or come back from the war with anger in their hearts because the English brew it up in them like a toxic ale, but Beth is happy when Anna lies and says her husband will be back shortly.

In return for repairs, the men ask if they can take bread, since they and their horses are hungry, and they haven’t covered the distance today they hoped to. As they swap in the spare wheel, the men talk to each other about the dead girl they passed earlier today, swollen, bruised, all broken like a grizzly got her.

Beth holds her cousin’s child close to her chest as if to shield him from news of his mother’s fate. Quietly, she says to him, “your momma was a brave momma, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from my time up on the hill, is that them grizzlies really don’t like a brave lady to stay alive once she’s outside them town gates.”

Beth knows there was one brave lady who hadn’t been got by the men Father pretended were bears. Once, when Mary was crying and holding her tummy again, after Father had left for the night, the two girls curled up in bed together and talked until sunrise. Mary was turning the mask around in her hands over and over, telling stories. Just as it started getting light, she said, “my momma got out when I was little; she got out way past the creek; I saw her run, and swim, and stay real still while Father’s men looked to bring her back, and she smiled at me from all the way over there, and I know she’s gonna come back and get me one day, and she’ll take you too, over to what’s on the other side of the valley, where Father can’t get me, or you, or any of these other little girls that he’s already planning on calling each of them Mary.”

On this occasion, as with many others, her cousin had held her hand and said, “you count yourself lucky you don’t have no name yet.”

As the men finish their repairs, one stops and looks over at Anna who is sat on the wagon’s front seat, holding little John’s arms up in the air, bouncing him on her lap, singing words that make no sense.

“Send my best back to Hopson,” he tells Beth, “a real decent man. I remember he found a girl - not much older than you - wandering in the valley out here not ten years ago, took her in. Poor girl running from that strange family on the hill, frightened half to death, saying she’d left her baby. Hopson told me a while back that she kept telling him she was Mary, and her baby was gonna be a Mary, and she was weepin’ every night, and makin’ no sense at all for months. If I remember, he said to her, ‘well if your baby’s a Mary, that makes you an Anna, just like in the Bible’ and – well, if I ain’t mistaken – that’s the very same girl right there, all grown. Good, God-fearin’ man, Hopson, taking in a girl who’s already been another man’s. Not sure I’d have done the same.”

Beth follows the man’s gaze which now moves past Anna and up to the hill.

“I don’t know what goes on up in that town they’re calling Nazareth. I ain’t met that pastor myself but I ain’t heard good things about him neither. I’d stay away if I were you.” The man shakes his head, lightly smacks his cheeks, as if trying to wake himself up from a dream, then tears himself a mouthful of old bread and heads away.

For the next few hours, the two women work together in silence. Beth digs a grave using the mask as a makeshift spade; it’s for Anna’s baby that never lived, and for the once-small girl she abandoned but was coming back to collect. Beth fills the hole with the two bloodied dresses and pats the raw soil neatly over them. Meanwhile, Anna carves the name Mary onto a small cross she’s made from the remnants of the old wagon wheel.

Later, as the mule pulls them out of the valley, Beth says “I know who you are.”

It is both true and untrue. She does not know what Anna has done to survive, whether Hopson was the kind man he seemed to be. She does not know how many babies Anna has longed for, and got ready to love, only to find some accident or urgency has taken the baby from her. But she knows Anna was once Mary, like her cousin, like she might’ve been herself. Women with many masks.

The baby sleeps soundly in Beth’s arms, his tiny face featureless in the dusky glow.