“She’s a giant snake, what’s to be afraid of?”

Joshua frowned. “Don’t pretend to be simple, Biff. We were saved by a serpent and a girl, I don’t know what to think about that.”

“Why think about it at all? It just happened.”

“Nothing happens but by God’s will,” Joshua said. “It doesn’t fit with the testament of Moses.”

“Maybe it’s a new testament,” I said.

“You aren’t pretending, are you?” Joshua said. “You really are simple.”

“I think she likes you better than she likes me,” I said.

“The snake?”

“Right, I’m the simple one.”

I don’t know if now, having lived and died the life of a man, I can write about little-boy love, but remembering it now, it seems the cleanest pain I’ve known. Love without desire, or conditions, or limits—a pure and radiant glow in the heart that could make me giddy and sad and glorious all at once. Where does it go? Why, in all their experiments, did the Magi never try to capture that purity in a bottle? Perhaps they couldn’t. Perhaps it is lost to us when we become sexual creatures, and no magic can bring it back. Perhaps I only remember it because I spent so long trying to understand the love that Joshua felt for everyone.

In the East they taught us that all suffering comes from desire, and that rough beast would stalk me through my life, but on that afternoon, and for a time after, I touched grace. At night I would lie awake, listening to my brothers’ breathing against the silence of the house, and in my mind’s eye I could see her eyes like blue fire in the dark. Exquisite torture. I wonder now if Joshua didn’t make her whole life like that. Maggie, she was the strongest of us all.

After the miracle of the serpent, Joshua and I made up excuses to pass by the smith’s shop where we might run into Maggie. Every morning we would rise early and go to Joseph, volunteering to run to the smith for some nails or the repair of a tool. Poor Joseph took this as enthusiasm for carpentry.