Name? Josodad, son of Nathan. Occupation? Hired shepherd. Place of residence? Bethlehem. Age? Forty-eight.
As the questions were rapped out, the answers given, he’d thought, Nathan should have been here beside me, and the answer to the second question should in both our cases have been, “Flock-master’.
Thinking about the tax register had been some slight relief and carried him on, in the teeth of the biting wind, to the top of the hill from which point he could look down upon the sheep, just visible in the gathering dusk. They were huddled together and he thought—They know. Lazarus was right; it will snow before dark. And almost instantly a few flakes, slowly, indecisively, seeming sometimes even to ascend, filled the air.
He thought—I chose the spot well. If I’d listened to Arad or Ibri we should now be lying nearer the town, with nothing between us and the snow-bearing wind. Not that I was thinking of snow, only of the wind; sheep don’t like the wind from the north.
Arad and Ibri had collected plenty of fuel and made a good fire. They were playing with Ibri’s stones, the light danced on their moving hands, and on their laughing faces. He could hear the laughter and the loud talk as he approached; but when he joined them they fell silent and took on glum expressions, as though his presence were a rebuke to their merriment. He thought—Here too I cast a shadow. He tried to think of something to say and could only think of a question, “Is all well?” And that, he knew, would strike a wrong note, as though he thought that in his absence things were bound to go wrong. Yet he could have asked Nathan that question as unthinkingly as he breathed. So he thought again, and produced a remark about the weather.
“It looks as though we’re in for a nasty night.”
Ibri—recently married—said, “All nights apart from Ruth are nasty for me.” Then he said, “Your turn, Arad,” and the game went on, but in a muted way.
A kind of contrition made itself felt in Josodad; he thought— I have resented them because they are live while Nathan is dead. And he remembered the perverse pleasure he had felt over Lazarus’ failure to manage the pipe. He thought of wounds: some healed, leaving no mark, or only a dry, healthy scar, some went festering on and on until they had poisoned the whole body. That was what grief had done to his mind, to his very nature, poisoned the whole. He was now fit company
fornobody, not even himself.
He opened the bag of food which the two Marthas had packed for him, small loaves of sweet crusty bread, some fresh cheese, some of the salted, smoked mutton which the Jews prepared in the same way as unbelievers treated pig-meat. And as he opened the bag he saw that the food was exactly the same as that which Nathan had carried with him on the fateful journey during which he had fallen in with Dan. So although he had intended to offer the food in a pleasant, conciliatory manner, his voice, when he said, “Help yourselves,” came out harsh, offhandedly as though he were offering food to animals.
Arad said, “But if we eat this, what’ll you do tomorrow? And the day after?” He was reminding Josodad that he and Ibri both had their home visits to make, and he must be on duty.
“There’s more than I shall need, even if you eat your fill.” And he thought—Never to be obliged to eat again, mumbling the tasteless stuff I Never to think again; or to remember … He knew then what he meant to do. The thought—I might as well be dead—had fallen, like a seed, into fertile soil. The first sign that it had rooted had been the next thought—They’d be better off if I were dead; and now, springing to full life the growth had revealed its nature, a determination to be dead. To end it. To have, done with everything.
There was plenty of time; he must wait until Arad and Ibri were asleep. He felt restless and would have liked to say—I’ll just walk round; but if he did that they would misinterpret his motive, think that he suspected some neglect on their part. So he sat down, within the fire’s radiance, but a little apart, and watched the snowflakes spin down.
It would be, as Lazarus had wished that it should be, a light fall. Already in the west the low clouds were breaking up.
He sat wrapped in his thick cloak and thought of what he intended to do; he thought of it from every aspect. Family first. He was sure that they would be better off. His brother-in-law was a good man, and his business brought him many contacts. The girls would be seen, admired, spoken for; the boy would take kindly to his uncle’s business, there being nothing in a vineyard to frighten him, as a ram had once frightened him when Josodad had tried to introduce him to the flock, Martha would be happy.
He then thought about God, who, though He had failed him, could not be ignored without condemning Nathan to oblivion. (And the strange thing here was that though for himself he desired nothing more than complete oblivion—Let Josodad be blotted out as though he had never been—he couldn’t accept oblivion for Nathan, that merry laughing boy.) There was nothing in the commandments against killing yourself. He ran them through in his mind, and there was nothing. He then called to mind such of the stories of the past as he had heard and could remember. After his defeat on the Mount of Gilboa Saul had fallen upon his sword. But Saul had been mad, deserted by God. Then there was the story of Elijah the prophet and how he had gone into the wilderness and sat down under a juniper tree and prayed, “Now, O Lord, take away my life.” His life had not been taken, because he still had work to do; but the prayer had been suicidal, and he had never been rebuked for that. And there was an account of somebody—the name escaped him—turning his face to the wall and willing himself to die.
He considered it all quite calmly, and reached the conclusion that if Nathan were now in the safe-keeping of God, his own self-destruction would be no barrier against their reunion.
And what was the alternative? Years and years more of this life, days during which he would steadily alienate himself from his fellows, nights when he would doubt his God.
But he would, he thought, give God one last chance! And then, for all his doubts, his orthodoxy rose in protest. A blasphemous thought. He’d ask God one last favour.
So he made his evening prayer, “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who at thy word bringest on the evening twilight…” and then he added his special request: that he might die as he slept.
It was usual for shepherds to draw lots for the order in which they should watch; but he and Arad and Ibri had long ago abandoned that custom. If he slept at all it was always in the first watch, then he’d wake with that jolt and spend most of, if not all, the rest of the
night awake. His two companions, after avery short time, had turned this to their advantage. No need, they said, for two people to stay awake. So one of them, or both of them officially, stayed awake and watched while he slept the brief sleep of exhaustion and then he watched for the rest of the night. Most often, when he woke, they were both asleep. In winter there was danger from wolves that would sneak down from the hills, and always there was danger from sheep-stealers, and these were not all men-of-the-hills, hungry and stealing for food. There were professionals, very skilled and soft-footed, who could snatch a sheep from the edge of a flock—the more easily if it were a large flock, like this, smother its head in a cloth and bear it off and sell it to a butcher.
There was no outcry, no trail of blood. In the morning there was a sheep missing, and somewhere, far away, an unidentifiable carcase on a hook.
Tonight, however, there was little danger from thieves. Men who lived by sheep-stealing were, fundamentally, men who liked ease and comfort without working to earn either; the cold and the snow would deter them. A visitation from wolves was . unlikely, too, with the flock lying so near to Bethlehem, it would take a prolonged spell of bad weather to make them desperate enough to venture so near a town. As for the men-of-the-hills, their raids had in the past two years been so infrequent that it seemed to Josodad as though the resistance movement, which had cost Nathan his life, was dying down. So the flock was safe, and it wouldn’t matter if he died in his sleep and Ibri and Arad slept on, as was their habit.