Four

Matthew had not seen that image since he was a child. Whenever he had come close to thinking of his father, something always distracted him and kept it from entering his mind. But now it came back in all its clarity, hovering in front of him as he stumbled through the moonlit fields. He would turn to avoid it, and it turned to face him. He began to shriek and scream like the boy he had been, so closely echoed by the sounds his assailant had made.

The boy had evidently not tied his hands tightly, relying on his grip to hold Matthew. The cords loosened and then fell off, leaving his hands free, though he was not really aware of this. The past had engulfed him as he stumbled aimlessly on.

He saw his mother coming up beside the little boy he was, putting her arm around him to comfort him--and he heard her say again, as she had said then, "You are now all I have left! All I have! You will have to be the man of the family now."

He relived how he broke out of her grasp and looked at her in horror, and suddenly understood everything that had happened. All those discussions that went on in a low voice in his parents' room, he could piece them together now. She had driven his father to this with her constant complaints of how poor they were, and how he was not doing enough to put bread on the table. He would answer "What do you wish me to do? I spend my whole day in the fields, and then the tax man (the tax man!) takes it all to make himself rich, and leaves me with barely enough to stay alive!" She would say, "Others have enough to eat and more. Why cannot we?" And they would go on thus, hour after hour.

And now she wanted him to take over his father's role, and sweat and labor twice as hard as he was already doing, and for what? To listen to her reproach him as she had reproached this wreck of a man, until he too was driven to suicide. He saw it all laid out in front of him, and it frightened him even more than the terrible corpse they were looking at.

They stood silently before him for a while, every detail of the scene burning itself into him, until finally his mother said softly. "If you would help me take him down. No one must see him thus." He looked at her once again, and saw the pain on her face, but thought, "She cares not for him! She cares about what the neighbors will think, now that he has killed himself!" His education into human nature had begun at this point, to be confirmed a thousand times afterwards.

But he said nothing. She told him to go into the house and fetch a knife, and automatically he obeyed her, and then, he knew not how, the two of them completed the grisly process of cutting his father down and wrapping him in linen.

"We must dig a grave. Somewhere in the woods back there, where no one will think to look. We can say that he has abandoned us, for that is what he has done. Come, bring a shovel."

And he came, because everything he did simply happened without his willing it. There was an instant of hope that this was a nightmare and that he would wake soon, but he knew it was not.

He remembered the torture of digging the grave, his young body screaming in pain from every muscle, his mother prodding him--and he remembered thinking that this was to be his life from now on, and nearly running off then and there. Finally, she found another shovel and joined in, both of them digging into the fortunately soft dirt in a small clearing in the copse behind their house, until the grave was deep enough to contain his father's burly body. It was cramped, but finally it would do, and they lowered the body in and covered him.

In spite of his exhaustion--indeed, partly because of it--Matthew could not sleep that night, because every time he closed his eyes, the face of his father rose before him and set him screaming once again. His mother in the other room was no better, he could tell. He longed to go to her and have her embrace him and cry with him; but he knew that if he did, she would soon begin giving him instructions on what he would have to do to take his father's place, and he simply could not bear the thought.

It was plowing time, with a foggy drizzle hanging over the earth as he rose the next morning, and found that he had slept after all. Sleepless nights are not really as sleepless as they seem to be. He and his mother ate in silence, since he knew that he would have to go out and hitch the donkey to the plow and prepare the fields for planting the spring crops. He had never actually done it before, though he had watched his father often and often, the father grasping the handles of the plow as the donkey pulled, and driving the blade into the soil. It seemed, if not easy, at least possible. He remembered how his father had told him that one had to keep one's eye on the end of the row, or the rows would not be straight.

He fed the donkey, "just a little," his father had said, "or he will not work. One must make him think that he will receive more when he has finished." Then taking him along, he dragged the plow out to the edge of the field, which seemed to cover the whole world, and tried to hitch him to the plow. The beast resented having to work for someone other than his master, and immediately saw that this miniature human had no real idea of what he was doing; and so it was a fight from the very beginning, which the donkey, he remembered, almost won.

And then the plowing began. The handles were too high for him to bear down upon as his father had done. And if he did not, the donkey simply pulled the plow over the surface of the field, making no impression at all. He grasped the handles and tried swinging from them, but his whole weight was barely enough to bring the blade into the earth, until he reached a spot where runoff from the rain had made the ground soft. The plow sank in properly--and stopped. The donkey, having found that pulling the burden was now work, would not move.

Matthew took the switch and beat him gently on the back, as he had seen his father do, and he gave a "hee-haw" and kicked backwards at the plow, filling Matthew's face with mud. The boy was crying now, and he beat the donkey with all his force, which only made it dig in its heels and complain even more loudly.

Matthew, as he kept beating and screaming at the donkey--he could no longer remember his name after all these years-- looked up at the immense field through his tears, and suddenly was filled with a despair so great it swallowed up earth and time. He felt it once again in all its force.

He had hung upon the handles of the plow and cried, "I cannot! I cannot!" and pictured himself going back to his mother and saying, "It is too much! I am too little! The plow will not work for me!" But he knew his mother would only tell him that he must plow the field, that they could not eat unless the crops were planted, and that he was now the man of the house and must act like a man, though he had only nine years.

"I cannot! I cannot!" he kept wailing. Even the donkey looked round, now that he did not seem to be the subject of the reprimands.

And he left. He simply left the field and wandered tearfully, as he was now wandering tearfully, over the fields he knew not where, to do he knew not what, to live he knew not how nor cared. But he could not continue, and he could not go back to his mother and face her with his failure.

As now--how could he go back to collecting taxes and driving some other man to kill himself and leave his son as the man today had left his son and his own father had left Matthew? It was not to be thought of!

He pushed it out of his mind, but that brought his hanging father back before his eyes, as it had pursued him when he ran away. He remembered stumbling away from it across the fields, vaguely in the direction of Jerusalem--they lived in Judea, not really very far from the large city, though he had never been there.

Those first days and weeks were a blur now. He had a faint recollection of taking whatever he could find from the fields during the night when the farmers were gone. He had broken into a shed--had he not?--and stolen a knife and used it to kill a sheep, a leg of which he had eaten raw, and nearly choked on.

Several times during that first week, he had in despair and hunger thought of returning home, but as soon as the idea entered his head, the image of his hanging father came before him, and then the image of his mother full of rebukes for deserting her in her hour of need--and he simply could not face it. He was alone--as now. Everyone was an enemy--as was everyone now.

But then he was starving. He had thought, he remembered, of killing himself as his father had done, but his father's face had shown such agony that he was too frightened to try. And now? He could not think, could not decide.

His memory was like a stew cooking, a brownish, opaque, moving liquid, with images surfacing at random, more or less visible, through the boiling muck of the past.

His first recollection of Jerusalem was the Valley of Hinnom, "Gehenna," as they called it, and of him searching desperately for food in that garbage dump of the city--where he had fallen ill and nearly died. He remembered waking near one of its multitudinous fires, and feebly, tremblingly clambering over the stinking detritus to a fetid stream and slaking his thirst, only making his plight worse. He had enough sense afterwards to climb out for decent water, and that probably saved his life.

But how he actually survived he could not recall, only that later he had become adept at creeping into houses in the dark and stealing food, clothing, and whatever else he needed.

He had never been caught, partly because of sheer luck, but also because he had somehow become a friend, or at least a kind of companion, to an older lad who dressed quite respectably (in stolen clothes, of course), and who gave him words of wisdom that propelled him out of the common lot of child thief-beggars: "If you look like one of them, and especially if you learn to talk like one of them, then they won't notice you and you can get away with anything." Now that he thought back about it, he realized that the "friend" saw that he had the potential for looking and speaking better than himself and began using him as a kind of decoy.

He already had a reasonably respectable accent from his upbringing, and so he had half the battle won; and stealing the proper clothes was simply a matter of going to a decent house where the right stuff was hanging out to dry and walking off with it. If one moved reasonably slowly and confidently, no one paid attention; the trick was not to look suspicious.

The association with his companion did not last, he remembered, as soon as he discovered that he was being exploited, and so he had abandoned him and struck out on his own. He decided that he would clean himself up still further, and watch how the children of the moneyed classes dressed, walked, and spoke, and imitate them. It became rather a game; and he found as he played it that he began to feel like one of them and despise his former comrade.

One thing that had burned into his consciousness also was that at any cost he must escape being poor, sleeping in filth, grubbing for anything to stave off starvation--because at the back of his mind were the whispered conversations between his father and mother that proved that it was poverty that drove him to hang himself.

He now realized that the vague guilt he had had his whole life long had nothing to do, really, with his cheating those he came in contact with; that, in fact, assuaged it. No, it was associated, he now realized, his father's death, based on a fear that his own presence in the family had exacerbated the financial strain that led to the catastrophe--that he was the one who had driven him to it. Closely connected with this was a feeling that the mere fact that he was poor was a kind of crime against his father that he must somehow expiate.

It was almost, he now saw, as if becoming rich would bring him back. He had liked his father, he remembered. Once or twice back then he pictured himself as wealthy, returning to his mother--but as soon as he did so, the image collapsed, because he could not imagine her doing anything but blaming him for being away so long. He had not liked his mother, ever.

But all this was latent, and only emerged with the image of his father hanging there. All he knew at the time, really, was that he must be rich, somehow, anyhow. The thirst for wealth was simply an obsession: wealth for the sake of wealth; it became the definition of happiness, of getting rid of a demon, of expiating a kind of crime. As he focused more and more on this goal, his father and his former life disappeared from his mind. It was only now that all this came back to him, this feeling that he had at the beginning, and still possessed, even though now he had more than enough wealth, it would seem, to assuage it. Still, it was there, was it not? He would never be rid of it.

He remembered how some of the more enterprising urchins around him seemed to be making rather a decent living for themselves (especially those who knew how to whine piteously for handouts), but how he looked on them with contempt. They were simply locking themselves into a situation that knew no outlet, which was no different from walking along the floor of the Valley of Hinnom, to its dead end, where the cliff rose to a dizzying height, blocking all egress.

That was not for him. He was determined to climb up the side, somehow, and find his way to the top, to the city around the Temple area, not to stay as he was and "prosper" in what he was doing.

He remembered going into the outer court of the Temple once during this time. He had not had much of a religious upbringing, and knew little of the significance of where he was--he knew little more now.

There was a priest there, who spoke to him and told him about the God who loved him and whom he should love in return, and he had replied, "If there is a God, what kind of love is it for him to do what he has done to me? I have no home, no family, no food most of the time! You tell me he does not want me to steal. So he wants me to starve? How else am I to live? If this is his 'love,' I spit on it! I curse God for making me poor! That is what I think of your God and his love!" The priest, shocked, pushed him away and told him that he was Satan.

What he was was hungry. So no, he would not rely on God to help him out of poverty; he had to use his own wits. But, he now thought, look where his wits had brought him: to being the cause of the very thing that produced his own misery!

And the road began back then, starting from his respectable appearance. It had already set him apart. The priest himself would never have spoken to someone in rags, who did not answer in the proper accent. But he realized that he had now to add substance to the mere appearance, and find something that would make him piles of money, so that he would never, ever return to this torment.

But what? His father's complaints about the tax men came back to him, and how they made themselves rich on the labor of others. But how did a nine-year-old set about becoming a tax collector? Everyone knew the tax-collectors worked for Rome, and so he must somehow attach himself to the hated Romans.

He cared nothing for whether they were hated or not, only for whether they would provide him a means to becoming rich. He began to frequent the parts of the city where the Romans lived, noting where their children played.

--Ah, but they spoke a completely different language! What was he to do?

Obviously, learn it, speak it as well as they. But how? He stayed on the edge of a little park where they played, listening to them and studying them. Their pedagogue looked over at him, saw that he was not making a nuisance of himself, and went back to his conversation with the young woman beside him.

Once a ball escaped, and he ran after it and caught it, and heard one of them call out "Pilam jace!" He held it up, and shouted back "Pilam?" "Pila!" they said. "Jace eam!" and made throwing motions. "Jace!" he answered, and threw the ball to them.

A lad with lightish brown hair, perhaps two years older than he, caught the ball, looked at him, smiled an enormous smile, as if amused, and said, "Cape!" as he threw it. Matthew caught it, and threw it back, saying "Cape!" in his turn, which delighted the boy and made him grin even wider. Then he said, "Jace eam!" and the boy, with another smile, threw it to him, and soon he was playing with two or three of the Roman children, picking up a word here and there. The other boys were merely having fun, but Matthew was in deadly earnest; he was making progress. This was how one learned the language.

Fortunately, the light-haired boy, who, it seemed, smiled at everyone and everything, became interested in teaching him Latin, as well as in learning Hebrew, and they were soon trading words, and he was on his way. He was careful not to overstay his welcome, however, feeling instinctively that forcing his presence on them would alienate them in the long run. He soon left for his little shelter down a deserted alley, after stealing some food from the market, and spent the evening reviewing what he had learned.

But he was back the next day, and so was the boy with the light brown hair, wearing the smile as before. For a time neither paid any overt attention to the other, but Matthew could see that the boy had his eye on him, and after a while he suddenly grinned and called out "Cape!" and threw the ball again. Matthew threw it back, and once again joined the group, now more seriously trying to learn how to communicate, as the two experimented with more and more complex expressions in their respective languages. It was exciting. Matthew had not realized that there were different ways of saying the same thing.

Before long, the two had become somewhat clandestine friends; the guardian had paid no attention to their games beyond noting in a bored way that there was a new boy among them. But since Judeans would have absolutely nothing to do with the Romans, it apparently never occurred to him that this was a Judean child.

Some considerable time later, Matthew could not now remember how long, the boy, whose name turned out to be Pontius, asked Matthew if he would come home with him to meet his father. "I said shalom to him last night when he came in," he grinned, "and he asked where I had learned the word, and I told him that there was a Judean boy who had joined us and was teaching us Hebrew and learning Latin from us." This was conveyed haltingly, by fits and starts, but Matthew got the gist of it. It looked as if it might be the opportunity he was seeking, and he accepted with alacrity.

The father was a formidable sort, anything but all smiles as Pontius was, in a huge house in the center of the city, dressed in a gleaming white toga, with short-cropped hair of a brown rather darker than that of Pontius, and of course, no beard, as was the Roman custom. He looked Matthew over as if examining a sheep he was thinking of buying, and said, in somewhat halting Hebrew, "Could your father and mother part with you?"

"I have no father and mother," answered Matthew.

He pondered the answer, as if trying to make sure he understood it. "Really? With whom do you live?"

"I live alone. I live where I live."

"At your age? How old are you?"

"I will have ten years soon--around the next full moon, I think."

"You cannot have lived long in this way. You do not look--or sound--like a street child."

"My father and mother died not long ago. I have been living as I could. I almost died once." He said it matter-of-factly, and the father raised an eyebrow.

"It is true? No one is caring for you?"

"No, Master."

"You look too good to waste--and if you continue thus, you will be wasted. Consider: What would you say to becoming our slave? Perhaps not permanently, but until you grow. You could spend your time mainly in being a companion to Pontius here, doing things for him, studying with him, and teaching him Hebrew, as you have been doing. He will need to know it, and I can find no one willing to tutor him."

"Do it, Matthew! It will be fun!" said Pontius, in Latin. He of course had an idea of what his father was saying, and caught a word here and there.

Matthew made a pretense of being reluctant, and the father continued explaining that his duties would not be very onerous, and that he would be learning Latin and also Greek with Pontius, languages which would stand him in good stead in the future. "And you would learn to read and write. And to cipher. You could use this in the future."

Matthew was a bit taken aback that there was yet another language to learn; but it was obviously the opportunity of a lifetime. He grinned (almost in imitation of Pontius) and accepted, and when they asked him to go and fetch his possessions, he laughed and said that he was wearing all of them.