“If you want a job with sheep I can offer you one. Be glad to.”
“But I can’t say when I shall be back.”
“I can wait,” Ezra said, with apparent generosity, knowing that the waiting time would not be long.
“So long as I have your word.”
“You have it,” Josodad said.
He came back, in just about the time that Ezra had reckoned, with his empty purse, and his empty heart, a lie in his mouth for the boy’s mother—that was how he thought of her, the boy’s mother—and a memory like a white-hot iron in the brain. And without wasting an hour he had gone to work tending Ezra’s sheep.
He knew, almost at once, that he had been forced into the wrong job. For twelve years he and Nathan had worked together, so everything was a reminder. And there was so much time…. In the morning you looked the flock over. One not getting to its feet? One coughing? One walking on three legs? Any sign of fly-blows? Should there be anything wrong, you dealt with it, glad of the break in the routine. Then there was the nice judgement of pasture, of water supply, and, in winter, where the wind lay. But there were great tracts of time when there was nothing to do but wait and watch, listen to the monotonous bleating, and think, and remember… .
He was working with other men now, he who had worked only with his own father, by himself, and with Nathan. He worked with two young men, Arad and Ibri, hirelings, as he himself was now a hireling, but of a different kind; men who had never been anything else. For a week or so they had borne his gloom and his silences. They were local men and they all knew his story and what had happened to Nathan. Everyone in and around Bethlehem knew. Nathan had been crucified. Josodad had come home and given Martha his carefully prepared lie, “It was all over in an hour.” It had lasted for sixty and all that time Josodad had stood by the foot of the rough-hewn cross and prayed a single prayer, “God, of thy mercy, let him die!” and even as he prayed, had had flitting memories of the things he had done to make this boy strong, solid of bone and muscle. More than once, when Nathan’s plate was empty and clean he had said, “Have this; I’ve made my growth.” And more than once in summer he’d said, “Go and swim. I can manage.” In winter he’d been careful to see that Nathan’s fingers were not frost-bitten, as his own had been. And the end of all his care, his occasional self-denials, had been a strong body, dying slowly and inevitably.
Arad and Ibri had tolerated him for a time; then they had decided that he was surly and unsociable. And that mattered little to them, they were company for one another. Then he made himself unpopular with them.
In any flock, however tended, there were losses, but to Josodad, the
former owner of the flock, the attitude of his fellow hirelings was shocking. A lamb was lost, and Arad said, “The kites’ll find it,” and settled down to trim his nails with his knife.
“That is a sure thing,” Ibri said, and settled down to play with his five stones. Five stones, polished from much handling, which he held in his palm, and then threw upwards, and tried to catch all five on the back of the hand which he had turned palm downward; never yet had he caught all five, but four, or the few occasions when he caught them, made him jubilant; three was fairly good, two disappointing, and one a mere inducement to try again.
On that occasion Josodad had gone to hunt for the lost lamb and found it straddled over a rock which it had failed to jump. It was exhausted and he had lifted it, set it across his shoulders and carried it back to the flock.
Then there’d been the time when three ewes, old enough to have known better, had gorged themselves on a patch of vetchling and blown up, huge, helpless, lying on their sides and gasping with glazing eyes.
Arad had regarded them dispassionately.
“All old; they’ll be tough eating.”
“You’d let them die?”
“They always do,” Ibri said.
“Not in my flock,” Josodad said, with a vicious snap in his voice. He drew his knife and went to the nearest ewe, set his left hand like a fork over her neck and with his right made the small incision in the blown-up belly. The gas had rushed out with an audible hiss; the ewe struggled and Josodad helped her to her feet before turning swiftly to operate upon the other two.
Ibri said, “I never saw that done before.” But a few seconds later Arad said, “Did you hear that? My flock.” he said. He looks on these as though they were his.”
“You’d think,” Ibri said, catching Arad’s mood, ‘that he was married to them!” And in that remark lay the germ of a joke.
“The Old Tup,” they called him, behind his back, but, as such things do, the nickname reached Josodad’s ears, and hurt and was resented.
But for a long time, surly, resentful, scornful of their attitude as he was, he tried to be tolerant; but the time must come, and it came, when he was bound to think—They are rubbish; they work for pay and whether they earn it or not is a matter of indifference to them. My boy, a shepherd born, is dead. They flourish, and hundreds like them. Maybe this is a world where only rogues flourish.
There were other petty annoyances, too. Ezra, once he had him safely hired, seemed to enjoy putting him in his place, in opposing him, senselessly, in small things which merely said, my flock. Lambs that he, with his knowledgeable eye, had marked as good breeders were sent off to market or to slaughter, others, of less potential value, retained. And there was a constant running warfare about the amount of pitch needed to treat fly-blows.
“You must be heavy-handed with the stuff,” Ezra said.
“A quarter of the amount served in the old days.”
“Because half the blows were left untreated,” Josodad snarled.
The little he had of home life was no happier. Martha had vented her grief over Nathan noisily, for a day or two, maybe three; then, exactly as she would have drawn together the edges of a torn place in a garment, she had set to work to mend her life. Nathan was gone. Martha, named for her, and Mary, and young Lazarus remained. The girls were the cleanest, the most tidily dressed, the most well-brushed of all the girls in the village and the boy was being spoiled rotten, in Josodad’s opinion.
“You are fortunate; you still have a brother,” Martha had said to the girls once, in his hearing, ‘you must cherish him.” Josodad had recognised it as a back-handed slap at him, the father who had failed to take comfort in his second son. He had tried; he had waited, trying not to make comparisons. But the boy was seven now, afraid of the dark, afraid of a thunderstorm, afraid of his father, a timid shrinking creature, liking to sit in his mother’s lap, to play girlish games with his sisters. When Nathan was that age, Josodad had fashioned a miniature shepherd’s crook for him who was stamping with impatience,
and then watched, how proudly and happily nobody would everknow, how the boy had mastered the use of it.
These thoughts, and the memories of Nathan’s final hours, occupied his mind during the long days, the even longer nights. He would wake, abruptly as though disturbed by something, lift his head and listen, as he was paid to do. Arad and Ibri, Arad or Ibri, according to rota, similarly paid, slept on; and Josodad would stand up, survey the sleeping flock, dark humped shadows and know that all was well and that whatever had roused him came from within his mind. Then he would know that the torture hour was about to begin, and he would do his best to fend it off. In winter he would mend the fire, but winters were short. He would walk, with a shepherd’s slow, noiseless steps, around the sleeping flock; he would wet his finger on his tongue and hold it up to find which way the wind was blowing. He’d look at the sky and forecast the next day’s weather. And all the time he knew that he was doing these things in a completely futile effort to avert the evil hour when in the hollow, the sharp-thinking night he must face his memories, and his God.
He’d been a happy, a most fortunate and blessed man until the season of the Passover when Nathan was seventeen. It had been arranged, far ahead, that Nathan should then go to celebrate the Feast in Jerusalem. He was to travel with others of his age, and older people who had either never been before, not being able to afford it, or a few who were going for the second or third time. Josodad had been once, and so had Martha; they had remembered it and spoken of it often. Then she, busy with house and children, and he, busy with the sheep, had kept the Passover at home. Nathan had been very much excited by the project.