When Jesus Wept (27 page)
I expended my silver like water, buying supplies and medicine. Peniel hiked to my home and waited outside the gates. Martha filled a leather pouch with coins and carried on a shouted conversation about the progression of the disease. Peniel purchased what was needed and trudged back to the hospital.
Soon it seemed even that effort would not be enough to keep up with the plague’s demanding maw. Roman soldiers rounded up Jerusalem’s beggars at spearpoint and forced them into my shelter. Most were not ill, but since the plague had begun among the poorest of the citizens, the wisdom of the powerful was that the disease itself could be confined if the beggars were all imprisoned.
A ring of troopers surrounded the warehouse. They were not present to lend any assistance, only to see that none escaped … unless carried out dead.
The space that had seemed ample for the army of boys was now jammed wall-to-wall with a hundred patients.
I wrote a letter to Nicodemus, imploring him to ask the Jewish Council to send aid.
What I got in response—with Nicodemus’s apology for the lack of caring on behalf of the Council—were four crones, matrons from the women’s prison. They were greasy, surly, uncooperative, brutish wretches barely qualified to empty chamber pots.
Much of my time was occupied carrying out Sosthenes’ instructions. He urged me to pay special attention to swabbing throats with the tincture he called
phytolacca
. It was the only means, he said, of stopping the progression of the disease into its acute phase.
My thoughts were haunted by dread of the malevolent olive-hued evil creeping down young throats and choking out their lives.
I dedicated myself to the task, though it was far from simple.
Eight-year-old Jason was braced against my knee as I sat on the floor. In one hand I held a bowl of the mixture. In the other I had a sprig of hyssop as a brush. Each time I attempted to paint his throat Jason would gag, cough, and spray phytolacca on both of us. Then he would apologize, and we would try again.
Meanwhile I was surrounded by pitiful cries for water. These were supplemented by the whimpering moans of children unable to care for their own sanitary needs.
“Rapha,” I said, calling the senior of the matrons, “Rapha, do you hear? Can you attend the water, please?”
She and her sisters looked around at me like a herd of cows studies a passing rabbit, then resumed their gossiping. A phalanx of unfeeling, lazy flesh prevented the comfort of a charcoal brazier from reaching the patients. The women warmed their hands around the fire and studiously ignored me.
“Rapha!” I repeated more sharply. “I need your help!”
“But sir,” she whined, “didn’t you just tell me to stir the kettle so the stew don’t burn?”
“How long does that take?”
She sniffed and sounded abused and unappreciated when she put her hand to the small of her back and said, “It’s this cold and damp. My old bones don’t move as well as they used to.”
Her complaint provoked a chorus of sympathy from her cronies. They also made sure to let me know that all these duties were beneath their station in life. According to Rapha, performing chores for beggars was lower than keeping hogs.
“And besides,” Rapha said, “none of us has no medical training. We wouldn’t want to do something wrong and accidentally kill one of these boys.”
The only success I had making them be of use was when I threatened to stop their food. Even that consequence only served before they had eaten. After sucking down a bowlful of lentils each, they were just as obnoxious and arrogantly slothful as before.
On more than one occasion I caught them stealing bites of stew that were supposed to go into the patients’ mouths. They also hid bits of bread in their clothing.
In almost every instance it was easier for me to perform the tasks myself, unless I was free to stand right over the women as they worked. The only reason I got any work out of them at all was that the guards stationed around my hospital had orders that no one could leave, so they had no choice but to remain.
The physician had expressly ordered that the medication, the doses of camphor in sweet oil, had to go on around the clock. Otherwise, he said, we had small hope of saving any of the patients. For that reason I had to snatch a few minutes’ sleep whenever I could.
It was not often. The rasping coughs and the cries for help kept me awake most times. If these sounds were not enough to prevent slumber, Rapha’s snoring was.
After a few days I was exhausted, stumbling from boy to boy in a stupor almost as profound as the worst of the ill. In the morning I penned a note appealing to my sisters for help. I did not know what they could do, but I was at my wits’ end.
The help that came in response to my note was more than I could ever have imagined. The day after I sent Peniel to Bethany with my appeal, my sister Mary and her servant Tavita appeared
at the hospital. Within moments of taking in the situation, they also took charge.
“We will not risk asking Rabbi Jesus to return,” Tavita said.
“And didn’t Rabboni tell us to ask whatever we needed in his name and his Father would hear us?” added Mary. “So, we’re asking! Almighty Father, we are not worthy that you should do anything for us, but in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, and by his direction, we do ask. Help us save these boys!”
Then Tavita added, “And we’re going to keep on asking too!”
Mary whispered to me, “Putting the Almighty on notice is a new achievement, even for Tavita.”
“She has always intimidated me,” I confessed.
“Now that we’re here you must sleep,” Mary urged.
“But the next round of treatments—”
“Can wait for one hour,” Mary replied. “You nap, and we’ll organize. That’s it. Off to the quietest corner with the cleanest blanket. There you go.”
Truthfully, I did not require much urging. I think I was asleep while my feet were still moving toward my pallet.
I drifted off, listening to Mary stating her plans and Tavita barking orders. The last comment I remember before slumber claimed me was Mary observing to Rapha: “You will obey everything Tavita tells you to do, and you will do it immediately and without complaint. Or do you know what? I will see that you are returned to the prison as inmates for pilfering supplies! And you’ll be confined in the lowest, coldest cell.”
“Actually, you’ll be thrown in with the prisoners you abused before you came here,” Tavita added. “Wonder how that will turn out for you.”
I slept with a smile …
When I awoke it was dark outside. I bolted upright in a panic: the medicine! The throat treatments! I was failing in my duty!
Mary reassured me otherwise: “Once Tavita got things organized, the rest was easy.”
I scanned the warehouse. Before I slept, the patients had been arranged in long rows. Some were comfortably near the fires but others were chilled at too great a distance,
Now the boys were arranged in circles, like the spokes of a wheel, with a charcoal brazier at the center of each.
“Tavita, Peniel, and I have made the rounds with the medicine. We’re starting with the throat painting now. You can help, if you’re up to it.”
I nodded, overwhelmed with generosity and hope.
“And they’ve all been fed,” Mary added. “Rapha and her crew saw to that.”
“How?”
“Let’s just say Tavita found the right encouragement.”
I mixed the phytolacca and prepared to show Mary and Tavita how to apply it. The boy I used for my demonstration was named Lamech. When I sat down next to him, his eyes were clearer than in days and his voice sounded stronger. “Please, sir. If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather the lady dosed me,” he said, pointing at Mary. “She told me part of a story when she gave me my tonic. I’d like to hear a bit more, if you don’t mind.”
Soon enough I was wrapped again in both a blanket and in slumber, confident that with Mary and Tavita in charge, my boys—I thought of them that way—were in better hands than in the previous week I had been caring for them. And that notion did not injure my feelings one bit.
Telltale barking coughs still ricocheted around the ward of Jerusalem Sparrows. The plague would not lightly give up its grip on my boys.
What changed was the atmosphere in the hospital, meaning both the air we breathed and the spiritual sense too.
With only the prison matrons to assist us, Peniel and I had felt like drowning men. No task was ever completed; no dosage or feeding gave satisfaction.
We had been holding our own, but that was all.
When Mary and Tavita took charge, they insisted that any old, filthy rags be taken out and burned. The cheap charcoal we had been using was discarded; higher quality coals burned with more heat and less smoke. The crones were set to work sweeping and scrubbing floors with the steaming lemon water under Tavita’s watchful eye.
The boys were bathed. The straw of their pallets was turned every day and discarded once a week, to be replaced with fresh stuffing. Tavita washed faces, cut and brushed hair, sewed new robes from blanket stock.
How she found time for all that and nursing as well I never discovered.
After another week, with rotating care provided by Mary and Tavita, it was clear that a true miracle was in progress. Not another death did we have.
Some, like Jason, were not only stronger, but they were gaining weight by eating regular, nourishing, hot meals.
Others, like Suda, who had been very low indeed, were brought back literally from the brink of the grave. Suda, who still mourned his lost brother, was able to swallow an entire bowl of broth and nibble a bit of bread.
Mary rocked the children. She sang to them and told them
stories about Jesus. “Do you know how, when our great-great-great grandfathers were in the wilderness, God sent manna … bread from heaven … to feed them? Well, Jesus did something just like that in Galilee. He fed thousands of people from just five barley loaves and two little fish.”
“And then what happened?” they chorused.
“More later,” she promised.
Disappointed groans followed her to her next circle of patients, but they were the sounds of boys on the mend, their strength returning.
Tavita also told every one of the Sparrows about Jesus of Nazareth. “In Capernaum there lives a girl named Deborah. She’s about your age,” the servant said, pointing toward a twelve-year-old. “Well, she got sick and died.”
“Did she have the plague too?” piped a listener.
“No, something much more sudden,” Tavita said. “But do you know what Rabbi Jesus did for her? He spoke to her, and she woke up and sat up.”
“Was she really dead?”
Tavita nodded vigorously. “Really and truly. But Master Jesus spoke her name, and she came to life again.”
Suda whispered, “I wish he did that for my brother Hiram.”
Tavita folded the boy in her arms and rocked him. “Me too, lamb. But Hiram’s in
olam haba
now. Who else do you know in
olam haba
who was there to meet him?”
“Mama and Papa,” Suda said, his lower lip trembling. “They both died the same year we came to Jerusalem. That’s how we came to live in the quarry.”
“There now, my sweet boy,” Tavita crooned, stroking Suda’s forehead and cheeks. “Someday we’ll go see them together, eh? What a reunion that will be.”
At the other end of the hall Mary sang. She had a beautiful, lilting voice. “Listen! This is a song written and sung by my namesake, who was the Lawgiver’s sister:
“Sing to the L
ORD,
for he is highly exalted
The horse and its rider
he has hurled into the sea.
1
“Now I know,” Mary said, “your terrible sore throats won’t let you sing now. But I’ll teach this to you, and soon enough we’ll all sing it.”
They all believed her and looked forward to joining her choir.
And so did I.
T
here came a morning when I awoke with a headache and a sore throat. In the reflection of a polished brass serving tray I inspected my tongue and saw two pale white spots there, each about the size of a denarius. I did not tell my sister, but she knew instinctively I was not well. I was shaky when I walked and halting in my speech.