The Liars' Gospel Read Online Free PDF Page A

know nothing.
     You. Know. Nothing!” and he picked up a pot from the table and smashed it on the ground.
    The other children were not there. They did not see what happened. Yosef and Miryam looked at the broken shards. Yehoshuah
     stared, with flared nostrils and rolling eyes, at his father and then darted for the door. It was three days, that time, before
     he returned.
    He spoke to himself. Or he heard voices. Or demons. Only sometimes—not all the time, she told her other children when they
     complained. He does not do it all the time. He is engaged in his studies, she said. He is reciting the words of the Torah,
     to keep them pure and complete in his heart. Is it not praiseworthy? Yosef looked at him like a stranger at their table. Not
     a son, an odd, full-grown man, whom they had taken in for no reason.
    The arguments grew worse. There came a day, if she was honest she had known it was coming, when Yehoshuah hit Yosef in a rage.
     Yosef had provoked it, probably. With a critical tone, angry words. And Yehoshuah rose up from his place by the fire and with
     the heel of his hand whacked his father hard on the temple. Yosef was a man nearing fifty and Yehoshuah was young and strong.
     Yosef stumbled, almost fell. Yehoshuah looked at his hand in disbelief. And Miryam found that she was saying, “Yosef! Why
     did you speak to him like that?” Because what will a mother not do for her son?
    After that, Yehoshuah wandered farther from their village, into the desert, for days sometimes. He had not founded a family,
     he had no crops to tend or harvest to reap. When he returned from the wilderness he would not say who he had seen there or
     what he had done. And she remembered the charming child he had been, the one who would reach his little hand out for hers
     and show her a lizard he had seen, or a new fern, and she wondered when she had lost him.
    Then one day, a week had passed, then two, and he did not return. For a month or two she thought he had died out there. In
     her dreams the scorpion returned, or its parent to exact vengeance on her son for her murder of its offspring. Her hand ached
     in its old wound and she thought perhaps it was a sign.
    She and Yosef quarreled about it.
    “Why were you always so hard with him?” she would say, and although she knew in her heart that there was no answer here, she
     could not stop. “Why could you never show him kindness?”
    “He needed less kindness from you, woman! He needed to be taught to be a man, instead of you constantly keeping him near,
     mothering him!”
    “I am his mother. What else should I have done?”
    And Yosef made that disgusted noise he kept specially for arguments he knew he could not win with her.
    She saw Yosef one day talking closely with the daughter of Ramatel, the blacksmith, a tall, well-built girl, but at that time
     she thought little of it. Her mind was occupied with chewing over Yehoshuah and what had become of him and whether she would
     ever hear from him or see him again, or if he had died somewhere out there in the desert and the wolves had had his bones.
    And then she heard a tale from a merchant that he had been seen in Kfar Nachum, and he was preaching and working wonders like
     a holy man. And they said another thing. They said he was out of his mind.
      
    And it is evening, and it is morning. And it is time to prepare for the Sabbath. She washes herself and the children. She
     bakes bread for today and for tomorrow. Just before sunset, she lights the oil lamps which will burn through the night and
     makes the blessing. And it is Friday morning, and it is Friday evening. The Sabbath day.
    The boy Gidon goes to pray with the men in Ephrayim’s field. She and the small children go to sit in the long barn and sing
     the women’s songs welcoming the Sabbath. They share out bread and wine and make the blessings on it. They drink the sweet
     wine made in years when they were young, the jars sealed with wax by their fathers,