Chapter 27 | News from the Road
The vineyard was healing—slowly.
Baruch had the lower slope in order. The blight was contained. The new ties held. We were not prosperous, but we were standing.
James and some of the others had come and gone in the days after the storm, helping us catch up, helping us find our footing again. But as the weeks passed, they returned fully to the road.
Crowds were gathering again.
Rumors were traveling faster than carts.
“I’ll return soon,” James had said the last time I saw him.
I had nodded, because I had learned not to cling to promises that belonged to God first and me second.
But the days stretched, then weeks, then months.
No glimpse of him on the road, no laughter drifting in from the gate, no sudden shadow across the terrace.
I had to admit, I missed him.
And I worried.
Not only for him, but for all of them.
After Uncle Eleazar’s threats, the tension in the marketplaces, the way people lowered their voices when they said the Nazarene—something felt coiled tight across the region.
Heavy. Waiting.
Even the vineyard seemed to sense it. The wind came in strange bursts. The nights felt restless.
And then there had been that strange afternoon.
The sky dimmed without warning, shadows swallowing the vineyard hours before evening should have come. Workers stopped where they stood, glancing upward. Baruch muttered that he had never seen the light behave that way. Even the animals had gone uneasy.
It lasted only a while before the sun returned again, weak and strange at first.
No one understood it.
But afterward, the air had felt wrong.
Once, when a caravan passed through, a man mentioned Jerusalem.
“They say the leaders are done tolerating him.”
I did not ask questions.
I did not want to hear answers.
Uncle Eleazar’s voice returned to me in the quiet.
He will answer for his blasphemy.
I tried to push it away.
But fear has a way of settling in the ribs and refusing to move.
Every time the gate creaked open, my heart leapt before my mind could stop it.
Until the morning it did not leap at all.
~
The first I knew of it was the sound of running.
The wrong kind. The kind fear wears.
Lavi tore through the gate so fast he nearly fell, dust in his curls, moving like something chased him.
“Ima—Talia—”
He stumbled on both names.
His face was too pale.
Too wide-eyed.
“What is it?” I said, already bracing.
“It’s—” He gulped air. “It’s Jesus.”
Everything inside me went still.
I didn’t panic yet, but I felt… hollowed.
“What about Him?”
His mouth worked, but the words didn’t want to form.
“They—” He shook his head, as though he were afraid to say it, for fear it might make it true. “They killed Him.”
The word landed like a dropped jar. For a blink I didn’t understand the shape of it.
“No,” I said, because sometimes refusal comes before understanding. “Who told you?”
“Men at the well,” he panted. “A caravan back from Jerusalem. They said He was… crucified.”
The word landed wrong. It did not belong on his young tongue.
“They said His followers scattered.”
The ground shifted under my feet. The wall at my back felt too far away; the sky felt too close. I sat down because my knees forgot how to hold me.
I had wanted—selfish as a child—to see Him again, even once. To ask forgiveness with my eyes if my mouth failed. To say what I had said to others: I was wrong. You were here.
Now the chance blew away like ash.
I pulled Lavi to me, and he folded in, finding his place against me. “Are you certain?” I asked—a foolish question, because his small body shook with the weight of grief.
He nodded into my shoulder. “They said Pilate,” he whispered, as though naming the governor could make the evil orderly. “And a hill with a name I can’t remember.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Where is James? Is he—?”
I didn’t let him finish. “Sh’mrehu na Elohim,” I said—over and over, because I had no other words—“Please protect him, O God.” I meant James. I meant John. I meant Peter and Nathanael and the quiet ones whose names I never learned.
The yard went quiet except for bees and the far clink of Baruch setting a post in place. The world kept doing its ordinary work. I hated it for a moment—the way the sun kept being the sun while a Light I had only just learned to trust went out.
I pressed my palm to Lavi’s hair. “We will wait for word,” I said, though I did not know from whom. “We will keep the lamp and the Law and the rows.” The words came out because my mouth knew how to speak order when my heart was a field after hail.
When Lavi’s shoulders eased, he lifted his face. “Is everything different now?” he asked.
I thought of the way Jesus had looked at me in my own vines and said, Your labor is not unseen. Of bread that fed too many to count and of blind men who saw. Of the small courage that had finally grown in me like a seed that finds light.
“Yes,” I said, and my voice held. “Everything is different now.”