Joseph shot a glance my way, to see if I had reacted. I had, but it was because I was considering my own status as a first son, hoping that my father wasn’t thinking along the same lines. “James is a second son. The priests don’t want second sons. It will have to be you.”

Joshua looked at me before he answered, then back at his father. Then he smiled. “But Abba, if you should die, who will take care of Mother if I am at the Temple?”

“Someone will look after her,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”

“I will not die for a long time.” Joseph tugged at his gray beard. “My beard goes white, but there’s a lot of life in me yet.”

“Don’t be so sure, Abba,” Joshua said.

Joseph dropped the bowl he was working on and stared into his hands. “Run along and play, you two,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

Joshua stood and walked away. I wanted to throw my arms around the old man, for I had never seen a grown man afraid before and it frightened me too. “Can I help?” I said, pointing to the half-finished bowl that lay in Joseph’s lap.

“You go with Joshua. He needs a friend to teach him to be human. Then I can teach him to be a man.”

Chapter 2

The angel wants me to convey more of Joshua’s grace. Grace? I’m trying to write about a six-year-old, for Christ’s sakes, how much grace could he have? It’s not like Joshua walked around professing that he was the Son of God every day of the week. He was a pretty normal kid, for the most part. There was the trick he did with the lizards, and once we found a dead meadowlark and he brought it back to life, and there was the time, when we were eight, when he healed his brother Judah’s fractured skull after a game of “stone the adulteress” got out of hand. (Judah could never get the knack of being an adulteress. He’d stand there stiff as Lot’s wife. You can’t do that. An adulteress has to be wily and nimble-footed.) The miracles Joshua performed were small and quiet, as miracles tend to be, once you get used to them. But trouble came from the miracles that happened around him, without his volition, as it were. Bread and serpents come to mind.