Amar

Amar and the other women finished clearing up after supper. Amar was preparing cups of tea by the cook fire, and she looked up at the orange and pink fingers of clouds in the fading sunlight. Silhouetted against the evening sky stood Jesus. He stood quietly about 15 cubits away and she watched as the warm evening breeze brushed at his linen tunic and his hair. The men were laughing and speaking loudly over by their tents and more of the women were now sitting on small rugs gathered around the cook fire beside their tents.

“James, John, quiet down over there,” their mother shouted out to them.

Amar had a vivid scar from her ear to the side of her mouth on her right cheek. The mother of James and John watched Amar smile and look again at Jesus. She liked the way Amar’s mouth curled at the side when she smiled, and she looked also at the missing index finger of Amar’s left hand.

Amar had loved Jesus like a son all his life. Her son would be the same age as Jesus if he had lived. Amar and her husband Perez had lived in the village of Bethlehem and were overjoyed by the birth of their son and delighted every day of those first two years of his life.

One morning, Amar opened her eyes as the sunlight came through her window and the rooster started crowing. She turned her head, and her son Ram opened his eyes and the sun glittered in his brown eyes and long eyelashes as he smiled at his mother while nestled sleepily between his parents.

But the rooster continued to cry out and the dogs were barking too loudly, and Amar suddenly felt afraid. She grabbed up her young son as she heard a growing din of shouting voices, barking dogs, and clattering noises.

The soldier’s sharp sword cut her cheek and severed her finger as he slashed at the son she never released from her arms, until she eventually dropped to her knees with her blood mixing with her son’s and her tears splashing on his now lifeless body. Her husband too was killed that morning as he and other men fought to drive away the soldiers who viciously slaughtered all the young boys in the village and nearby that day.

For these many years, Joseph and Mary and Jesus came twice a year to Bethlehem to help the mothers and fathers who lost their young ones that tragic day. Mary and the other women baked and spun and wove and sowed seeds and prayed and sang psalms. Joseph and the men repaired and constructed homes and made tools and built winepresses and fixed gates to the sheep pens.

***

After passing out the cups of tea Amar stood and looked again at Jesus. He was walking towards her and gave her a kiss on the right cheek, and whispered, “It’s time you take some rest, Amar,” before saying good night to the other women and walking away towards the men’s fire. Amar knew that Jesus knew she had been thinking again about her son Ram.

“Just stop your smiling, Amar, and tell us more stories about Jesus as a boy,’ said the mother of James and John, with a smile. Amar told the women stories of Jesus during those twice-yearly visits to Bethlehem and how he seemed to be everywhere she looked helping everyone with whatever task was before them.

The last time Mary and Jesus came together to Bethlehem was when they brought the body of Joseph to be buried. Joseph was laid sweetly in a tomb in a small grotto just across the way from the cave where Jesus had been born. The men in the village still use that cave to shelter the animals on nights when it is too cold, or the weather is inhospitable.

For nearly one year now, Amar had been traveling with this sometimes-changing group of women who accompanied and served Jesus and his disciples. Amar had always felt part of Jesus’ family and from her long study of scripture with his mother, Mary, Amar had grown in her understanding of the prophetic role of the Messiah. Amar knew that suffering lay before them as it had behind them, yet she gratefully thanked God for giving her the chance to follow and serve this loving man who was God’s son, and Mary’s son, and in a way, her son as well.

© Thomas Medlar 2024