As Joshua embraced Mary, she said, “You’ve got to do something about this wine situation. Where’s the wine?”

James tapped Joshua on the shoulder. “Didn’t bring any wine with you from the lush vineyards of Jericho?” (I didn’t like hearing sarcasm being used by James against Joshua. I had always thought of my invention as being used for good, or at least against people I didn’t like.)

Joshua gently pushed his mother away. “You shall have wine,” he said, then he went off to the side of the house where drinking water was stored in large stone jars. In a few minutes he returned with a pitcher of wine and cups for all of us. A shout went through the party and suddenly everything seemed to step up a level. Pitchers and cups were filled and drained and filled again, and those who had been near the wine jars started declaring a miracle had been performed, that Joshua of Nazareth had turned water into wine. I looked for him, but he was nowhere to be found. Having been free of sin all of his life, Joshua wasn’t very good at dealing with guilt, so he had gone off by himself to try to numb the guilt he felt over John’s arrest.

After a few hours of subterfuge and guile, I was able to get Maggie to sneak out the back gate with me.

“Maggie, come with us. You talked to Joshua. You saw the wine. He’s the one.”

“I’ve always known he was the one, but I can’t come with you. I’m married.”

“I thought you were going to be a fisherman.”

“And I thought you were going to be a village idiot.”

“I’m still looking for a village. Look, get Jakan to divorce you.”

“Anything he can divorce me for he can also kill me for. I’ve seen him pass judgment on people, Biff. I’ve seen him lead the mobs to the stonings. I’m afraid of him.”

“I learned to make poisons in the East.” I raised my eyebrows and grinned. “Huh?”

“I’m not going to poison my husband.”

I sighed, an exasperated sigh that I’d learned from my mother. “Then leave him and come away with us, far from Jerusalem where he can’t reach you. He’ll have to divorce you to save face.”

“Why should I leave, Biff? So I can follow around a man who doesn’t want me and wouldn’t take me if he did?”

I didn’t know what to say, I felt like knives were twisting in fresh wounds in my chest. I looked at my sandals and pretended to have something caught in my throat.

Maggie stepped up, put her arms around me, and laid her head against my chest. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“I know.”

“I missed both of you, but I missed just you too.”

“I know.”

“I’m not going to sleep with you.”

“I know.”

“Then please stop rubbing that against me.”

“Sure,” I said.

Just then Joshua stumbled through the gate and crashed into us. We were able to catch ourselves and him before anyone fell. The Messiah was holding the little girl’s pet bunny, hugging it to his cheek with the big back feet swinging free. He was gloriously drunk. “Know what?” Josh said. “I love bunnies. They toil not, neither do they bark. Henceforth and from now on, I decree that whenever something bad happens to me, there shall be bunnies around. So it shall be written. Go ahead Biff, write it down.” He waved to me under the bunny, then turned and started back through the gate. “Where’s the friggin’ wine? I got a dry bunny over here!”

“See,” I said to Maggie, “you don’t want to miss out on that. Bunnies!”

She laughed. My favorite music.

“I’ll get word to you,” she said. “Where will you be?”

“I have no idea.”

“I’ll get word to you.”

It was midnight. The party had wound down and the disciples and I were sitting in the street outside of the house. Joshua had passed out and Bartholomew had put a small dog under his head for a pillow. Before he had left, James had made it abundantly clear that we weren’t welcome in Nazareth.

“Well?” said Philip. “I guess we can’t go back to John.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t find the camels,” Bartholomew said.

“People teased me about my yellow hair,” said Nathaniel.

“I thought you were from Cana,” I said. “Don’t you have family we can stay with?”

“Plague,” said Nathaniel.

“Plague,” we all said, nodding. It happens.

“You’ll probably be needing these,” came a voice out of the darkness. We all looked up to see a short but powerfully built man walking out of the darkness, leading our camels.

“The camels,” said Nathaniel.

“My apologies,” said the man, “my brother’s sons brought them home to us in Capernaum. I’m sorry it’s taken so long to get them back to you.”

I stood and he handed the camel’s reins to me. “They’ve been fed and watered.” He pointed to Joshua, who was snoring away on his terrier. “Does he always drink like that?”

“Only when a major prophet has been imprisoned.”

The man nodded. “I heard what he did with the wine. They say he also healed a lame man in Cana this afternoon. Is that true?”

We all nodded.

“If you have no place to stay, you can come home with me to Capernaum for a day or two. We owe you at least that for taking your camels.”

“We don’t have any money,” I said.

“Then you’ll feel right at home,” said the man. “My name is Andrew.”

And so we became six.

You can travel the whole world, but there are always new things to learn. For instance, on the way to Capernaum I learned that if you hang a drunk guy over a camel and slosh him around for about four hours, then pretty much all the poisons will come out one end of him or the other.

“Someone’s going to have to wash that camel before we go into town,” said Andrew.

We were traveling along the shore of the Sea of Galilee (which wasn’t a sea at all). The moon was almost full and it reflected in the lake like a pool of quicksilver. It fell to Nathaniel to clean the camel because he was the official new guy. (Joshua hadn’t really met Andrew, and Andrew hadn’t really agreed to join us, so we couldn’t count him as the official new guy yet.) Since Nathaniel did such a fine job on the camel, we let him clean up Joshua as well. Once he had the Messiah in the water Joshua came out of his stupor long enough to slur something like: “The foxes have their holes and birds have their nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head.”

“That’s so sad,” said Nathaniel.

“Yes, it is,” I said. “Dunk him again. He still has barf on his beard.”

And so, cleansed and slung over a camel damply, Joshua did by moonlight come into Capernaum, where he would be welcomed as if it were his home.

“Out!” screeched the old woman. “Out of the house, out of town, out of Galilee for all I care, you aren’t staying here.”

It was a beautiful dawn over the lake, the sky painted with yellow and orange, gentle waves lapped against the keels of Capernaum’s fishing boats. The village was only a stone’s throw away from the water, and golden sunlight reflected off the waves onto the black stone walls of the houses, making the light appear to dance to the calls of the gulls and songbirds. The houses were built together in two big clusters, sharing common walls, with entries from every which way, and none more than one story tall. There was a small main road through the village between the two clusters of homes. Along the way were a few merchant booths, a blacksmith’s shop, and, on its own little square, a synagogue that looked as if it could contain far more worshipers than the three hundred residents of the village. But villages were thick along the shores of the lake, one running right into the next, and we guessed that perhaps the synagogue served a number of villages. There was no central square around the well as there was in most inland villages, because the people pulled their water from the lake or a spring nearby that bubbled clean chilly water into the air as high as two men.