No Lasting Burial (26 page)

“I always disappointed him,” Yohanna said softly.

Yakob gripped his brother’s arm.

Shimon looked away to let the two brothers have that moment to grieve. “Let’s get the boat out,” he said gruffly.

“One moment.” Bar Cheleph walked to where Yeshua stood behind the stern and knelt.

“Before we embark,” Bar Cheleph pleaded, “baptize me,
Rabboni
. I … I have done evil. My own kinsfolk loathe the sight of me. Immerse me. Please. Make me clean. Then I can follow you even against the dead. I will go where you go, eat where you eat. I will not be parted from you. I promise it. El Shaddai witness it!”

“Do not promise.” Yeshua’s face went stern, as cold and hard as the face of a mountain. “Do not promise me,” Yeshua said, “and do not promise God. Do you think God who promised the stars they would burn each night will wait on your promises? Or that the father who has written his promises into stone itself will trust the vows of men and women, who break them? Say only yes, or no. Do not promise. Only do.”

Bar Cheleph swallowed.

Shimon listened with disquiet. The Yeshua he had known the previous day had worried him because he seemed a vagrant and because his raving questioned everything that kept Shimon’s town and his family secure. But this Yeshua, the one who had faced the dead, worried him even more. This Yeshua called for a boat, and received one. This Yeshua dismissed the Sabbath and spoke of God as though he had something to say about him. This Yeshua seemed more the
navi
. The prophets of their past had raised and buried kings, called fire from the sky, and torn apart cities with a word. What might this one do?

Yeshua stepped away from Bar Cheleph and gripped the gunwale as though to leap into the boat.

“
Please
,” Bar Cheleph cried.

Yeshua stopped, his face stricken, as though some defense he had erected that night against the screaming in his mind was shivering. For a moment he stood at the gunwale. Then he turned back. He placed his hand beneath Bar Cheleph’s chin and lifted his face. Something flickered in his eyes. “You are loved,” he said, his voice quiet and firm, “you are, and the way you were hurt, it does not change that. It never has. It never will. What hurt you have done to others, the father has forgiven. He has forgiven it. Hurt no one else.”

Bar Cheleph gave a small nod, though that yearning had not left his eyes. Yeshua turned again and leapt into the boat and seated himself against the gunwale—leaving the benches, as Rahel had, for those who would be rowing. After a moment, Bar Cheleph followed, with a grimace of pain much like Rahel’s. Yohanna climbed into the boat as well. Kana sprang in, too, a gust of wind pulling his cloak aside to reveal that he carried, once again, the sica at his hip. But his face was pensive.

Then they had the bow in the water, and Shimon got behind the stern while Yakob pushed from the starboard, and Koach came running, splashing into the water, with the beggar woman wading in beside him. They reached the gunwale opposite Yakob, and Shimon looked at them in shock. Bar Cheleph rose and stood over the gunwale.

“She is coming, too,” Koach said. “It’s important to her.”

Bar Cheleph didn’t say a word. He just reached down, let Koach take hold of his arm just below the elbow, and lifted the smaller man into the boat. Then he and Koach turned and lifted the woman in, water running from her coat and from the ragged remnants of her dress beneath it. She stepped toward the stern, tripping over the nets, but Koach caught her arm and helped her down onto the short bench at the stern. Then he shrugged his thick-sleeved outer garment off over one shoulder and used his left hand to tug it off the other. He threw it into the bottom of the boat as though it repulsed him, this garment his mother had made to conceal his arm. In just his tunic, with his withered arm naked, bare for anyone to see, he sat beside the strange woman. His face had set in hard, determined lines as though he had carved it from driftwood, as he had carved so many other things.

Staring at Koach’s right arm, Bar Cheleph muttered, “Didn’t he heal you?”

“He did.”

And that was all Koach said.

Shimon cast a pensive glance at his mother. “A storm is coming. I can’t take all my kin out there. And what use are women in a boat?”

“I have been in this boat before,” Rahel said quietly.

Shimon frowned, not understanding. Then he glanced at the sky. Definitely a storm. Worry clenched in his gut.

Yeshua watched his face from where he sat near the bow, but he didn’t speak.

Yohanna slid one of the oars into the oarlock and held the oar blade up above the shallow water. “It is written,” he said softly, “that when the anointed
navi
comes to deliver the remnant of Yehuda tribe, his coming will make hills into valleys and valleys into hills. That what was wilderness will be as a straight road. Ha Matbil spoke of this often.” He gave Koach a thoughtful look. “Perhaps his coming will also make women into fishers and brothers whose bodies are broken into boatmen. We are only men. Who are we to argue with what God has written?”

That talk did nothing to settle Shimon’s unease. But Yohanna had always been like this—speaking more like a priest’s son than a fisherman. “We are all fools,” Shimon muttered.

The hardness in Yeshua’s face broke, for the first time, into a wry smile. “You speak the truth.”

Still Shimon hesitated.

Yakob exchanged a glance with him, a dry look, as though to say,
We are a long row from where we were last night, aren’t we?

And Shimon’s eyes answered back,
We are, and I am not sure how we have ended up here, or where “here” is.

Every night for fifteen years—except for the Sabbath and that one winter when Shimon had taken ill—he and Yakob had slid the boat carefully down into the sea. Just the two of them—and in the last year Yohanna, after he’d tired of eating locusts and wild honey with Ha Matbil by the Tumbling Water.

Now the boat was full of people. Bewildered, Shimon glanced up the tideline toward Yesse, whose white hair streamed behind him in the rising gusts of wind. But if the elder did not approve of this break with tradition and Law and all good sense, he gave no sign. He only watched. Shimon blew out his breath, recalled Yeshua staring into the eyes of the dead, the wonders Yeshua had done before collapsing into his arms. With a mutter beneath his breath, he gave the craft a great shove, and Yakob with him, heaving with their feet planted in the sand, and they ran the boat down onto the water until the next wave surge lifted it and the water was cold about their knees, and then each of them gripped opposite sides at the stern and pulled themselves in.

Being out on the water is an isolating experience. The world is gone, the land barely visible, if at all. There are only the people in your boat, only the sound of your own breath and the lonely cries of gulls or the loud calling of cranes echoing over the water. The sky is wider and deeper than any sky over any town or village on the earth, and you glance up at it cautiously, knowing that at any moment it might crack open and unleash the wrath of God over your small, bouncing craft.

The sky was heavy. Shimon found that he and the others spoke in hushed voices beneath it. Even Yeshua’s voice was soft. “I feel that I could sleep until Pesach,” the
navi
murmured. “I have never been so weary, so weary. All of you, I see your eyes, I see them; you are too scared to rest. Don’t be. Whatever … whatever happens on this sea, don’t be afraid.”

“I have lived most of my life afraid,” Kana said, after relieving Yakob at the oar. “But I am not afraid today. I am here because I have seen
your
eyes. I know you have seen what I’ve seen. More than that. You’ve seen things I haven’t. Things that would break my mind if I did see them.”

Yeshua was silent for a bit. He leaned against the side of the boat, his head against the gunwale, and though he could not have been comfortable there, his eyes were lidded as though he might fall asleep in another breath. His face was still pale. “We are the same age, Kana,” he said at last. “And we have both seen too many things. Too many.”

“That is the truth,” Kana said grimly.

“A dark time
is
coming,” Yeshua said, and Kana breathed in sharply, hearing the echo of his own words. “But the father can take that time and make … make of it something different. Have faith in that.” More softly, Yeshua added, “As
I
must.”

“Where are we going,
Rabboni
?” Yakob asked.

“Out there,” he said, with a nod toward the middle of the sea.

“Yes, but when do we stop? We can’t row all morning, not with that storm coming.”

“We will know when to stop,” Yeshua said. “For now, keep rowing, keep rowing, and wait. You will need to wait … often, if you come with me.”

“Come with you?” Shimon said, his throat tight. “With you, where? We haven’t said we’re coming with you.”

Rahel smiled faintly, as if at some memory of his father, but said nothing.

Yeshua smiled too, a different smile, as though he wanted to laugh but was too fatigued. He opened his eyes slightly. “All your life you have fished for barbels and musht, Cephas, all your life. Come with me, and we will fish together for the hearts of men.”

Shimon heaved at the oar, and wrestled again with the strangeness of this man. He remembered the man gasping for air, after—after what he did with Benayahu. After those words about stars and memory, the night before.
I am spent
, Yeshua had whispered, gazing past Shimon’s head at the night sky.
I have to go, have to go. Just for a while. Into the hills, to some quiet place, some place where the screams are not so loud, not so loud as this. There are so many, Cephas, so many, so many. The cries, the cries I hear. I need to be away. Just the father and the stones and the wind.
Yeshua had sucked in a breath and his body had trembled as though with fever or great pain. Yet Shimon had no longer feared that there were
shedim
in him, that he might be unclean or a witch.

But not yet
, the man from Natzeret had whispered.
Not yet. One more promise to keep.

Shimon stared at him now, in the boat. Yeshua’s face had settled into hard lines, as though he’d set his body against some great boulder and was bracing himself to push. One more promise to keep. Shimon didn’t know what Yeshua meant to do, but he knew what promise was meant.

But because the riddle of this man could not be answered, Shimon turned to one that could. Kana was watching the sea, and he didn’t look up when Shimon spoke. “Why did you come back, Bar Nahemyah?” His voice was rough. “It wasn’t to recruit me, or others, not really. You were running. Hiding. Why? And why did it take you a year to return?”

Kana’s face went tight with pain.

The others hushed, listening.

“The way you fought,” Yakob said after a moment. “The way you moved with that knife. I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“One of the things I spent that year doing.” A bite in his voice.

“You almost saved my father.” Nearly a whisper.

“Almost.” Kana lowered his head.

Shimon had heard the memory beneath Kana’s words, and knew the memory to be a bad one. He frowned. He had always thought Bar Nahemyah had thrown in with Barabba, that he had never come back because he had chosen not to. That, and the dead rising from the water in ever greater numbers in the year since—dead that Kana had dropped into this sea—had done little to endear his memory to Yonah’s oldest son. Now Shimon wondered.

“Why
didn’t
you come back?” he asked, more softly.

Kana’s face darkened with shame. “At first, Barabba kept me bound in a cave, and men came—” He paused, then glanced at the young woman in the stern huddled beneath Koach’s water-coat, the coat that had been Yonah’s. Kana stared at her for a long moment, and then, as if deciding suddenly that if a woman who had seen horrors could bring herself to sing then he could at least speak, he went on. “Men with blood on their hands,” he said. “Not that you could see it, but you could smell it. They came to the cave and spoke with me, one night and then another and another. Told me what Barabba was doing in the land. Not his plans, but their effect. And stories of what Rome was doing. In the long days in the cool of that cave, bound and naked, I craved their return, their words. I can’t explain it to you.” His right hand trembled; he stilled it, and his face became distant, the secrets of his heart buried deep, drifting like restless corpses far below the reflective surface of his eyes.

“They took everything from me. My coat, my strength. I was thirsty and weak and shaking when the nights came. But they left me with the shofar, at least.” His fingers touched the ram’s horn where it hung at his breast. “And then, when I thought I would live the rest of my life in that hole in the rock, Barabba came to me. He looked bigger, somehow. He said,
I need men who will blow the shofar even in the streets of Yerushalayim itself. The dead and the Romans alike will devour us all, if I haven’t such men.
” Kana was silent a moment, and then he glanced not at any of his kin but at Yeshua, the stranger. “He took me there. To Yerushalayim. Showed me how our People suffered. Not in Kfar Nahum, not in Natzeret, not in any ruined village of our land, but there, in the very heart of the land God promised us, where people rot where they stand and the moaning fills every street and our people die between the cold stares of the priests and the Roman walls.” His voice went hard and cold. “You don’t know what it is like. You can’t know. What it’s like in Yerushalayim.”

“I know,” Yeshua said, his eyes unfocused as though he were listening to distant voices.

And then Kana’s control crumpled.

The
anguish
in his face. Shimon swallowed. He wondered if his own face had looked that way, sometimes.

“You don’t have to tell us anymore,” Shimon said. “You are home.” He took a hard pull at the oar.

“Home.” Kana gave a small laugh, hardly more than a breath. “I haven’t been home in fifteen years. Since that night. I am an outsider, in my own town.”

“We’ve all been that,” Shimon murmured.

Kana nodded, took a breath. “I fought for him for a while. After what I’d seen. Because I
had
seen, and I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t just run back here or steal some Roman’s horse. Not after what I’d seen. So I stood before Barabba in the hills and he put the sica in my hands. The very knife he’d used to cut my bonds. And I made the first of these.” He brushed his hand over the cuts on his arm, his face still raw with emotion. “I fought with him. Killed. But—” He struggled a moment. “There was a … a woman, and her husband, their daughter. Roman. The man was some petty official under Pontius Pilate. It was … a test. So Barabba would know if each of us could do what had to be done, if we were in truth to rise against Rome and drive the Romans back to the sea. There were four of us, we went into that city. I haven’t seen the other three since, because I left that night and kept moving until I reached this shore.” He met Shimon’s eyes, and Shimon wanted to look away from the pain there, but he couldn’t. “That family, that Roman family, was given into my hand. I was to kill them. In the night, as they slept. With the sica I carried. All three, Barabba said, and any slaves in the house.” He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. When he continued, his voice was hoarse. “I thought I could do it, Shimon. I thought: they were Roman. I could do it. I was in their house, I was standing over their daughter’s bed. The sica in my hand. And I … I couldn’t. She was young. I just kept thinking of the dead I’d seen. And Ahava, my betrothed. I hadn’t thought of her in so long. Do you remember her, Shimon?”

He nodded, though he had rarely spoken with her as a boy. She had been tall for a girl, he remembered that, and she used to sneeze tiny sneezes that sounded like laughter.

“Now I see her, every night. Every time I close my eyes.” Kana looked away, his voice unsteady. “I couldn’t do it. We can be torn from our lives so easily. Can be left grasping and moaning for what we’ve lost. All my life I have loathed and feared the dead, and now I don’t.”

“
I
fear the dead,” Bar Cheleph muttered.

Kana said, “I pity them.”

For a moment there was only the splash of the oars, the chop of the waves against the boat, the duck and roll of their path out onto the uneasy sea.

As he heaved hard on the oar, Shimon glanced at the
navi
. His eyes widened.

The stranger rested in the crook of the prow, his shoulders against either gunwale. His head was bowed almost between his knees, as though he was at the end of his strength after facing the living and the dead. Heedless of the roughness of the sea.

He was asleep.