Two from Galilee Read Online Free PDF Page B

fowl then? Say a duck whose blood has already been drawn, at the market?"
    "No, no, no. A fish perhaps, if the peddlers have brought in any that are fit to eat." He thrust her roughly yet amiably aside. "Go now and look after your brothers and sisters, they are quarreling. Quarreling is something that has always sickened me."
    Thrusting back his shoulders, Joachim tramped off to find his wife.
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Ill
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    IT was Joachim who went plodding down the cobbled streets. A great irritability goaded him, together with other emotions he found it hard to sort out. Yet this was no errand for a blind child, as Hannah had made plain. "You must be out of your mind to suggest such a thing!" And he sensed her consternation that their son, sightless and halt, should come groping into the inferior house of Jacob on such a mission. Well then, Joachim had retorted, he'd go himself.
    Hannah's protest that this would only lend more significance to what could otherwise be passed off as merely an invitation to discuss a loom, simply made firmer his determination. Just when the loom had entered the discussion he didn't recall, except that Hannah, seeing he was not to be dissuaded, had cleverly worked it in.
    "Certainly we can't have Jacob thinking we're so hard put to find suitors for Mary that we would go making advances to any young man. Least of all his son!"
    He had refrained from the arguments that sprang to his lips. He had long ago learned that the best way to handle his acrimonious little mate was to let her seem to have her way. Let her prate and scold, he thought with a kind of grudging admiration. So long as he did not stoop to contending with her, he retained his stature as a man and his will prevailed.
    Joachim stomped along, his dry red beard bristling in the sun, dreading his mission, yet feeling an irascible satisfaction in it too. He had a private sympathy for Joseph; he too had been forced to leave the village school at an early age to support his mother and sisters. And though Joachim had been a slow scholar, he loved learning. In a secret part of himself he fancied he'd have made a good rabbi, and had suffered the scorn of his family by poring over the few books he owned.
    He particularly loved the Scriptures that spoke with such certainty of the coming of the Messiah. He would come, he would come in all his glory! Perhaps even in Joachim's lifetime. The dream made tolerable this life of toil when you were only robbed for your sweat in taxes. It had even appeased those first raw years of his youth when he had suffered such torments over the unattainable Abigail.
    A faint amusement came into his blue inscrutable eyes. Abigail. And those distant days when he had believed it would be better to be strung up by his heels by the Romans than never to have her. ... He remembered the undulant roll of her hips going down to the well; how he would rise up from the shamed bliss of his dreams to watch from the half-moon of his window. And her eyes, round and moist and lush with secrets. The color of ripe grapes, he recalled with a sweet start. Purple, like the grapes they had once tramped together, joyously, both a little drunken from the wine.
    Would he have had the courage to kiss her otherwise? . . . The kissing had made it worse. The kissing and the clutching, those few stolen times together. It had seemed that he could not endure it when it was announced that she was being betrothed to a rich landowner.
    Joachim remembered only too vividly that stunning pain. Though he wished not to. Not on this fumbling errand to appease and gratify Mary . . No, now, he had been a dutiful son, loyal, patient, and innately cheerful. Striving to banish all thoughts of Abigail when he had journeyed to Bethlehem with his people and returned, a man betrothed. Bound to a wild little Judean who had become, withal, so dear to him.
    Well, but he must set his mind to the business at hand. Banging somewhat imperiously on the door with the heel