The Innkeeper

Author’s Note: This one is purely fiction. It has little to no Biblical basis except for the mention that there was no room for Jesus to be born in the inn.

###

It was the disappointment in all their faces. The innkeeper relished in it. He watched as their eyes cast downward, their shoulders slumped, their brows furrowed in anger. Every face mirrored just a fragment of the innkeeper’s own pain. He thought he may be able to gather it all like he was collecting stones, more and more from each traveler he turned away. He could put the sadness together and see a mosaic the same shape of the sorrow that he carried.

“There’s no room.” The innkeeper watched the shadow fall on the man’s face. There it was, the innkeeper thought, the disappointment.

The traveler turned and looked behind him at his family. Three children, the innkeeper noted. He looked at his wife who didn’t meet his eyes.

“What if I pay you more?” He said to the innkeeper. “I have money.”

“More? What do you mean?” The innkeeper said.

“Will you give me a room if I give you more money? How much would you need? We’ve been traveling for days. We need a warm place to sleep. I’ll pay you whatever you want.” The amount of desperation in his voice was embarrassing, even to the innkeeper.

“Look, I can’t help you.” The innkeeper growled. “There isn’t an empty pillow in all of Bethlehem. The damn census has this place overflowing with weary travelers mucking up the streets, filling up the square. I have nothing for you, good night.” The innkeeper began to shut the door, this one was pushy and he didn’t like it.

“Wait, sir.” The man said and put his hand in the door jam, his fingernails dug into the wood. The innkeeper nearly shut the door on them to prove his point, but he thought of faces of the three children standing in the road.

“What?”

“What if I pay you enough to--,” he dropped his voice to a whisper, “take someone else’s room. I’ll pay whatever.”

Now the innkeeper was done.

“It doesn’t work like that.” He shut the door as fast as he could to keep the man from stalling any longer.

The innkeeper sighed and lifted the cup he had set on a stool near the door. The wine dribbled down his chin and into his beard, he swiped at it absentmindedly with his sleeve and walked to the interior door closest to him. The handle was the only ornately carved knob in the whole inn. He had it commissioned when he had been younger, more idealistic about his life.  He cracked the door. The room was empty, save a few things that were his, his empty cups, his clothing. The most important things weren’t there—the ivory comb, the crimson sash, the vials of oils, and the woman herself. She had gone.

The innkeeper closed the door and walked back to the front of the inn. He peered through the little window and looked up at the moon. This was the night his wife had left, one year ago. This was the angle of the moon when she had gone. It had been full and heavy like a woman ready to give birth. He had come back to the inn after a night of dice throwing and all her things were missing.

He had been heartbroken but not surprised. She had disappeared many months before her body was actually gone. Slowly, she had recessed into herself so far that it was as if her mind was the inn where she was living, instead of the actual inn they had built together.

Sometimes the innkeeper would open the door to their room, that same sad door, and she’d be sitting in the dark staring at the wall. He would scurry in to light a candle but she would extend her hand to stop him.

“I like the dark.” She would say.

“But what are you doing?” He would say, never one to sit still.

“Just thinking.”

“What about?” Although he knew the answer the minute the question passed his lips.

“The babies.”

“Oh.” He never knew what to say to that. “How long are you going to sit in here like this?” Then he realized that sounded rude. “It’s just the guests are asking after you. They say they miss you.”

“I just need to sit.” She would say. “Please close the door.”

Sometimes she would come out and back to her life. She would hustle around the inn as she had been doing before, always the last one to bed and the first one up, asking about the traveler’s lives and their next destination, asking them what stories they had heard along the way. Before she began to sit in the dark, she had been the heart of the inn, the one everyone came to see. He had been the heavy. The one to remind her that she needed to charge for additional nights of stay.

“But their child doesn’t feel well, they’ll travel tomorrow.” She would say.

“But sick child or not, they’re taking a room.” He huffed as he counted their money.

“Take it out of my wages.” And she would kiss his nose as if he had already agreed to ignore the fact that she had no wages. He loved her with all the force of the sandstorms that came from the East and she knew it.

When she got pregnant for the first time, she had grown even brighter, like oil on a fire. She found more energy in her reserves, chattering on and on about the child, the gender, the duties the child would take on around the inn, how it would be loved by all the guests, how it would be the first of many.

But the baby died in the second month in her womb.

It wasn’t uncommon, she had said. She knew some other women that miscarried at that time. There would be another, she said, then she busied herself despite his attempts to get her to rest.

She was pregnant again quickly and the twinkle in her eye returned. She planned and laughed and she spoke about the baby as if she held it in her arms.

But they lost that one too, and another.

She began to refer to them as “the babies” and to sit in the dark alone.

Eventually, the inn became overwhelming to her. Each traveler seemed to take her energy instead of adding to it as they had once done. She did her tasks in silence and walked through the halls as if she were laden with bricks.

The innkeeper knew something would come. Either a baby had to be born or he would lose his wife. He summoned doctors. He made a good living but they were expensive. They offered oils and pastes and strange roots. His wife followed regimen after regimen but there were no more pregnancies and no more babies and there was no more money for hope.

“Lots of children stay here in the inn.” He had said to her one night, the night of a day in which he had barely seen her face. “You could be like a temporary mother to them while they are here.”

“But they already have mothers.” She sighed and turned over.

She left the next day.

The innkeeper had berated himself over that comment for a year now. As if those final words were the reason she left and not everything leading up to them. But the bottom of each cup of wine said the same thing to him, there was nothing you could’ve done. Still, the pain didn’t go away.

There was a knock again. It startled the innkeeper from his thoughts. He banged open the door, bolstered by the sadness of his vacant bedroom. He cracked his knuckles, ready for a fight.

There stood a man with a woman on a donkey. She was heavy with child and against, the moon in the night sky, he noted that they did look somewhat similar.

“Is there room at your inn?” The man said. The innkeeper started to shake his head, looking for the disappointment in the man’s eyes but he was stopped by something else.  There, in this man’s eyes, he saw something that reminded him of his wife. It was the same light he saw when she had been pregnant. The innkeeper paused, fumbling over his words. He made the mistake of looking up at the woman. Her eyes, too, shined like his wife’s.

For a minute the innkeeper almost wished he did have a room. He thought of the sacred space in his own room, the space both cavernous and full, full of the emptiness that it now held. No. He certainly couldn’t lend it out.

“Sir, we would greatly appreciate a place to stay, as you can see, my wife is almost ready to have our child. You have a room?” It was like this young man could read his mind, was asking after the room, that room.

Anger flashed across the innkeeper’s face, who did this man think he was, asking for the room that was his own and his wife’s?

“I don’t have a room.” He said shaking his head. “You’ll be hard pressed to find anything. The census has everything full.”

“Yes,” the man said. “We’ve looked everywhere. We were told you may have space, you might have a room.”

There it was again. He knew about the room. He was looking into his heart.

“What room?”

“Any room, sir, we would take anything.”

“No room.” The innkeeper said again. “I have no room. You must leave now.” He closed the door just as the woman was lifting her voice to add something. He caught the sound of it on the wind as it had rushed past the edge of his door. It harmonized with the sound of the latch like a song.

He stared at the closed door, imagining them turning and walking away. He saw the  woman’s face, her swollen fingers gripping the saddle of the donkey, the animal straining under the weight. He saw the pleading look of a man about to become a father for the first time, terrified and elated. He looked down at his own wrinkled hands, the ones he thought might cradle a newborn one day. He thought of his wife. Her smile and generosity. How she had made his heart bigger and softer.

He swung open the door.

“Wait.” He said. “I don’t have a room, but I have a stable. Would you want to stay there? It would be free of charge and I’ll give you feed for that poor donkey.”

There was something about them. The innkeeper didn’t really know what. He shuffled around, looking for a candle to show them the way. Could I hold that baby someday? He wondered. But it seemed too weird a question to ask.

###