The Liars' Gospel Read Online Free PDF

keeping in those long-ago summers until
     this day.
    Some of the women ask about Gidon. Not just, like Nechemiah’s wife, because they have a daughter who has taken an interest
     in him. They have heard something. The news has come that there was a small rising in Yaffo several months ago, in the autumn.
     A man appeared claiming to be the rightful king of Judea, the son of the king the Romans slew. He had followers, only two
     or three hundred, but they tried to break into the armory. The soldiers quashed the rebellion easily enough, but the man himself,
     along with several of his most important followers, had escaped.
    Does she think…Gidon was from Yaffo, they knew, does she think that he might be one of those men?
    She shakes her head.
    “He is what he says he is: a fool, not a liar.”
    Rahav puts a thin arm around her shoulder and hugs her.
    “We still mourn with you.”
    Rahav kisses the side of Miryam’s head. She’s a kind soul, especially with a glass of warm fragrant wine in her.
    It’s Batchamsa who introduces a note of caution.
    “They’re looking, though,” she says. “They’ve sent out armed men as far as S’de Raphael.”
    “They won’t come this far north,” says Rahav, “not for a fugitive from Yaffo.”
    “They might,” says Batchamsa. “They just keep looking.”
    Rahav shakes her head. “One of his own people will betray him. They always do when they get scared or hungry and want to come
     home. In a month they’ll have found him in a cave near Yaffo and that’ll be the end of it.”
    Rahav does not say the part in the middle, Miryam notes. She does not say, “They’ll find him and then they’ll kill him and
     that’ll be the end of it.” Miryam supposes that this is Rahav’s kindness.
    She finds she feels a little protective of Gidon.
      
    In the evening, they eat with her brother Shmuel’s family. His wife has made soup and roast goat leg with wild garlic. Gidon
     eats with them. The village’s decision to treat him as an imbecile has faded. He has done good work on Miryam’s land. Those
     who work deserve to eat.
    Shmuel sets in on him again, saying,
    “But you will return to Yaffo in the spring, yes? Before Passover?”
    Gidon shifts his shoulders awkwardly. He is less comfortable here than he is with her alone. He does not talk so readily.
    “I might stay here,” he says, and then seems about to say something more, but falls silent.
    “He has been useful with the goats,” she says. “Iov can never bring them all in. We lost two over the winter. Gidon gathers
     them safely in.”
    Shmuel nods and takes more bread and goat covered in the thick paste of herbs and olive oil. Her brother is the patriarch
     now, the one who makes the decisions since her husband has gone. But he’s not an unkind man. He dips his bread into the green
     oil and swallows it, leaving a few emerald flecks in his beard.
    “But you’ll tell me when you get tired of him, yes?” he says, then grins widely, “so we can send him on his way with courtesy,
     of course.”
      
    They said he was out of his mind. This, they came to tell her. The sympathetic women from the villages nearby came, when they
     passed through for market day. “Passing through” was what they said, though Natzaret was a mile or more out of their way.
     People who had not visited her for five years came to tell her that her son was mad. Just as a kindness.
    He had desecrated the Temple, they said, and she could not believe it. He had loved going to the Temple as a boy, buying the
     cake for a meal offering in the outer courtyard and accompanying the sacrifice.
    He had done work on the Sabbath, they said, and she laughed and said, “Yehoshuah? Who never did a stick of work the other
     six days of the week?” And they laughed too, because nothing is funnier than a mother mocking her own son, and agreed that
     perhaps on this point she was right.
    Yosef, she noticed, did not laugh at this joke.
    As they were getting