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Everything is rosy in Joseph’s world. The sun shines twice as brightly, the birds singing twice as sweetly and Her name is on lips as he hammers longs planks, sands a new bench. He thinks of the house he is going to build for her, the animals he will carve on his first child’s cot. He wonders if he will first have a son, but smiles at the idea of having a daughter who wore flowers in her hair and sang to him and he is just so happy, because Mary said yes to his proposal.
He comes to visit her at the end of the week, work apron still on but not forgetting the posy of flowers he asked a shepherdess to make.
To his surprise, Mary’s face is pale and the ends of her veil are full of creases due to being twisted as she waited for him.
“Joseph, there is something I must tell you,” she begins, and the castles of his daydreams shatter as petals fall.
Mary loves Joseph in a way that is hard to explain. The young woman has never had many boys as friends, nor had a brother. The memories of her father are hazy at the edges. But Joseph is someone in between; his silence bears the warmth of respect, his presence steadfast like the oak tree. The last thing she wants is to lose him like this, the pang of the assumed betrayal on his face.
“But he won’t be mine.” Joseph says. His voice isn’t blunt, or angry, just sad.
She turns her face to the trees, at the sunlight that filters through. “He’s God’s,” she says at last. “And we have been called.”
Joseph only looks at her as if she has metamorphosed into someone else he doesn’t recognize. “I don’t know, Mary. I don’t know anymore.” He walks away from her, the distance lengthening like shadows.
Heart heavy, Mary thinks about how nothing will ever be the same, and the sun sinks below the horizon.
He plans to let her go quietly. While upset, he cannot bring himself to haul her before a tribunal and be the first to cast a stone. And the worst part of it all, he thinks, is how Mary just takes it all in, not interjecting or excusing herself, always only apologizing and repeating that she was visited by an angel. But the unlikelihood of it all is a weight on his shoulders. First, he will tell her alone, and then go to the synagogue on his own to retract his intentions.
Mary leaves the town to visit her cousin the next day; giving him time, he understands, to make the decision on his own.
Joseph hates himself because he cannot hate Mary even if he tried, and he pounds his hammer on nails with all his strength because he does not want to think.
“I do love you,” her last words to him echo.
He realises he still believes it.
Mary’s cheerful spirits from her visit to her cousin begin to dissipate as she crests the hill and sees the long fields of her town. There are too many uncertainties that shadow her there, and she walks a little slower down the thin path.
She sees Joseph standing at the town gate straighten as she approaches.
“Jo…seph?”
Joseph gazes at her with an expression she cannot decipher. Her eyes note the absent apron; how he is wearing the robe she had made for him as an engagement present.
“Yes?” she prompts, and he blinks, finds his voice.
He doesn’t tell her of what the angel told him in his dream, the words that still ring in his ears. God has chosen her, and the child she bears is the Messiah you have been awaiting. See that she is safe. Believe her. Love her, like she deserves.
Instead he closes the distance that separates them, and falls to his knees.
“Will you still marry me?” he asks her, and Mary stares at him, eyes wide.
Joseph catches his breath when she first appears at the doors of the synagogue for the marriage contract. She has transformed the long swath of the fabric he’d given her into a shawl that drapes over her shoulders with embroidered flowers and stars that catch the light.
He forgets that this is as far as they will ever get to know each other, too in awe of this Mary, lips reddened, eyes darkened, bracelets glimmering, to be wistful of what could have been.
“Thank you,” Mary tells him, blushing slightly. And then, “I am honoured to be your wife.”
She means it.
It’s not what she expected her wedding night to be. She never pictured herself holding back tears, hoping the guests do not notice her slightly growing stomach under the long drapes of her wedding dress. The guests all assume her shaking fingers are due to fear that will wear off in time but their minds will never grasp it; their consciences never accept that she is playing a part that she chose to defy.
They toast good health and fidelity to each other amid cheers, and Mary feels the child within her move.
They sleep on opposite sides of the bed on their first night together, unsure of what to say. The last of the guests had spent the most time near the wine and as the moon climbed higher their stories grew more and more intimate, till Mary was left blushing and Joseph embarrassed and it was almost funny because it didn’t cross anyone’s mind that maybe the newly wedded couple planned to do things differently.
The sun will rise in only a few hours but neither are close to sleeping. In her head Mary replays the time the angel appeared to her and she had said yes even though she didn’t know what the future held in store, she thinks of how light and free-floating she had felt afterwards, and then so fearful the moment her fiancée crossed her thoughts. Her husband – the word sounds so strange to her because she cannot imagine what it must be like for him and this unthinkable reality that is theirs – is kinder than anyone she knows and while she is glad that she is safe from stoning, her heart aches for him, for all that he’s done for her sake.
Joseph hears his wife –his wife, his wife and yet not so – raise her hand to wipe her leaking eyes and in the warm darkness he inches his hand to hers. Her fingers are cold and start at the touch of his, but she allows herself this small comfort as their fingers interlace.
“I love you,” she whispers, telling herself not to mind if her husband doesn’t understand it the way she means it.
“Me too.” Joseph answers, and for the first time that day, Mary smiles.
Less than a month after their marriage, Mary’s stomach begins to swell. It becomes harder and harder to keep a secret and for once Mary finds the walls of her new house as a safe shield against a judgmental world instead of a cage.
But while her old friends give furtive eyebrow raises to each other when they notice, Joseph‘s palm on her rounded stomach secures her. ‘They will understand someday,’ his eyes say.
Each progression into their marriage is a revelation that the other loves them. It is in the way Mary scans the crowd to find him, in Joseph’s protective arm around her shoulder, in the way they are both content with what they give to the other. Loving is breathing, to them. She leaves kisses on her husband's hair and makes the house a home. He in turn, fills the gap that friends and family might have filled had her - their, his - unborn child not been conceived out of wedlock. They fill in the spaces they never thought they had in them, closing the circle; filling it in.
The days pass with the idyllic languor of the daydreams before salvation had anything to do with them, and the birth of redemption draws closer in a summer haze.
There is a prison cell and a man strung to the ceiling, struggling to breathe.
“Call your Father to save you, son of God!” a voice mocks, and a cry of pain is ripped from a parched throat as the man is kicked to the floor.Then there is red on the floor and thousands of voices chanting for death and her heart aches, ripping, and there’s a sword protruding from her chest –
The dream shatters and she wakes up gasping, crying, blankets on the floor.
“I’m here,” Joseph’s voice cuts through the darkness, anchors her to reality. “I’m here, Mary.”
The prophet Isaiah’s words are the booms of a cannon, rocking her being to the core. Her son will be the Man of Sorrows, who will look for those who would comfort him and find none. He will taste the depths of sorrow; submerge himself with the filth of the world in order to bring it out to the light. Her son. Hers.
“What will our child endure to save us?” Mary cries into her husbands’ sleeve, too dismayed to care that she is crumbling before him. All she can think about is the man in the prison cell with her eyes and a mocking voice that scorns her, calling her the Woman who will not defeat him and nothing makes sense. “Joseph… Our boy…”
“I don’t know,” Joseph tells her. He’s never understood the faith she has in him until now, asking him for answers that he is too earthbound to give. “What did you see, Mary? In your dream?”
Her answer comes out in a whisper pierced with shards of grief. “I saw Jesus die. Joseph.” Her eyes search his, pleading. “I saw him die.”
Joseph doesn’t trust himself to speak but Mary sees the pain in the eyes that reflect hers. She weeps into a chest that smells of earth and wood – things that grow, things that stay solid and secure, unfazed by the slow passage of time – while Joseph brings the blanket around her again.
She is Mary, the woman of the prophecies he has grown up hearing and he wonders how he got here, how God would notice a lowly carpenter like him and trust that he would keep her safe. The knowledge humbles him, molds him. He holds his wife closer and whispers that he is by her side and wide-awake, they wait for the morning.
He hears the thin wail of an infant, and the world is born anew.
“My son,” he breathes, unable to take his eyes from the child in his arms. So small, so fragile. So perfect. A child with a destiny of death and salvation.
“Our son.” Mary says, and their fingers interlace.