Testament

by Nino Ricci

  Now it happened at the time that there was a madman living in one of the caves along the shore there, because he’d been thrown out from the colony down the beach. That colony—the Sons of Light or some nonsense, they called it—was all madmen, from what I could tell, but as I said they kept to themselves, and had walls all around their place, so nobody knew what exactly they did. They had some fields near the lake, and raised some sheep, but from the looks of it they hardly had time for their work, since they were always washing themselves or saying their prayers. All in all, there were maybe fifty of them, though even if some new beggar should wander in one day to join them, you could be sure that another day they’d be turning someone out, for breaking some rule of theirs that only they could understand.

  It seemed one of these men they’d turned out didn’t take it well, and every night when the rest of them came in from the fields he’d be waiting at the gate howling to be let in again. But the others weren’t having it. By now the man was looking rough, just eating roots and so on and living in a cave the way he was. Sure enough, though, when he smelled our fish he came right over. People made a path for him fairly quickly, seeing the devil that was in him. But Jesus, when he saw him, didn’t move. “Would you like something to eat?” he said, and then made him sit down right next to him. And the fellow went along with him, since it looked like the first time in a while someone had treated him with a little respect.

  Everyone had gone quiet now, to see what would happen next. So after the man had had his bit of fish, which he ate right down, Jesus said to him, “What’s the matter with you?” just like that. And the fellow started sobbing then, and told Jesus that the Sons of Light had turned him out because they’d caught him talking with a girl when he was in the fields.

  We all thought Jesus would side with the colony, because they were Jews. But he said, “Was she pretty, at least?” and everyone laughed. Then he went on and asked how it could be wrong for one person to talk to another one, and what they could be thinking in that colony to turn someone out the way they had and to close themselves off as if it was the end of the world. “If you had a lamb,” he said, “and it got out of the pen, would you let the wolves have it to teach it a lesson or would you bring it back?” And he made sense, when he put the thing that way. In the end, even the fellow himself could see he’d been lucky to get away from that lot. “Go out and find yourself a wife and forget them,” Jesus said to him. And to look at the man now, calmed down after his cry, you’d think he was cured. Jesus took him down to the lake then and made him wash a bit, then gave him his own coat to wear and said to the crowd, “Who has a daughter for our man here?” And everyone laughed again.

  I would have stayed on then, but his talk about sheep had started me worrying about my own. Sure enough, when I got back to the farm Huram was standing there at the corral looking fit to be tied. Without a word, he gave me the back of his hand.

  “You’re not a boy any more,” he said, “to go playing whenever you want.” And he told me I’d be spending the night with the sheep on the hill, and any one missing was out of my own inheritance.

  You’d have had to know Huram to understand this was the worst thing he could think of. Huram believed there were bandits behind every bush, ever since they’d killed our parents, even though it was years now since anyone in our parts had been attacked. So he must have supposed I’d be lucky to survive the night myself, let alone save the sheep. But he was ready to make that much of a lesson of the thing, to risk even the sheep, not to mention my life. For my part, I was more frightened of the wolves, who in a night could pick off half your flock. That would be my inheritance gone—ten sheep was what I was entitled to when I married, and two cattle and one pig.

  I thought Huram was a little disappointed to come out the next morning and find me alive and the sheep all accounted for. But I’d had some time to think out there, under the stars. And what I’d thought was, ten sheep and two cattle and a pig. That was all I was worth in the world, what a wolf or a thief could take from me in an hour. I got to thinking about Jesus then, and what he’d said to the rich man from Hippus, and it didn’t seem such a joke any more. What was the point, to care so much about your little bit of this or that, when it was nothing. When Moriah and I had been getting along, it wouldn’t have mattered if I hadn’t owned my own shirt, just to be with her. So what were ten sheep, if I didn’t have her.

  I couldn’t have said I’d worked all this out in my head but it was how I was feeling then, with Huram the way he was and Moriah so changed. And I stole down to the lake to see Jesus again a few more times, and more and more the things he said made sense to me, how it was always the lowest ones who got the worst of matters when they didn’t deserve it and how people never missed a chance to put on airs and lord it over anyone who was weaker than they were. A lot of times what he said went against what you might have thought was the case, or what you’d been taught. But he had a way of leading us towards a thing as if we were ones who’d found it ourselves, taking us this way and that until finally we turned a corner and the answer sat in front of us as plain as stone.

  Once he picked a man out of the crowd and asked him what god he worshipped.

  “Augustus,” the fellow said, because we’d had to pray to him ever since he’d died and they’d made him a god.

  “Good, he was very powerful,” Jesus said.

  But then he started discussing with us and asked what Augustus had done, precisely. And people said he was the king of the world, and built cities all around, and when he died, or so people claimed, a cloud came down from the heavens to take him up with it. And Jesus nodded at all this as if he was considering. Then he asked, “How many of you, if you had the tools, could put up a building?” And everyone said that they could. So he went on like that, and asked if we could fight a war if we had the weapons, or make a road if we had the stones, or do nearly all the things that Augustus had done. But then he said, “Now how many of you could make a bird?” and we were all stopped by that. “How many of you could make a flower or a tree? Could even Augustus do it? Could even Augustus, out of nothing, make as much as a grain of sand?”

  It was clear from this, though he wouldn’t say it because it was treason, that Augustus wasn’t much of a god in his opinion. And everyone was happy to hear it, because none of us had ever taken to him. But Jesus went on, “Think of the strongest god you’ve ever heard of, then think of one a thousand times stronger than that, and even that one wouldn’t be a thousandth as strong as the real god I’m going to tell you about.” We all just assumed he was talking about the god of the Jews, since that was how they always made him out, as the strongest—Yahweh, I’d heard his name was, though the Jews weren’t allowed even so much as to say it. But Jesus asked who had told us there was a god for the Jews and a different one for the Syrians or the Greeks. Where was the logic in that, he said, when then they’d be battling all the time in heaven and it’d be even worse than it was on earth. And what he meant to say, and it made a great deal of sense, was that there was just the one god who ruled, the way our Hadad was always said to before the Romans came.

  Soon enough it happened that Moriah had her baby, and sure enough it was a boy. Naaman, Huram called him, after our father. True to his word, Huram took Moriah into town not long afterwards to get her papers seen to for her freedom. But instead of her coming back to me the way I’d hoped, she let me know at once that she had it in for me. “Let Simon tend the pigs,” she said to Huram, which had been her job, “since I have the baby to look after.” And it wasn’t long before every little job that she could push off to me, she did, with the excuse of the baby. I had half a mind sometimes to take the boy and make away with him, seeing as he was mine, but Moriah was like a she-wolf around him, and never let him out of her sight.

  Then once I overheard her say to Huram, “Your brother looks at me sometimes the way he shouldn’t.” Well, I felt fairly low then. But I thought I understood all of a sudden what was going on
in Moriah’s head—she just didn’t want to lose another child. She knew Huram would kill her and the baby too if he knew the truth, so she wasn’t taking any chances—she’d make Huram and me enemies so he wouldn’t trust me, and then her secret would be safe. I should have been angry, but I’d got to thinking about some of the things Jesus taught, and how all her life Moriah had been just a slave and hadn’t had anything and now she had a house and a husband and a son.

  Huram didn’t say a word to me about what Moriah had told him, but it was clear he believed her, because I wasn’t allowed in the house any more. Just like that, he didn’t give me a reason. For her part, Moriah didn’t come out except once in a while to do the wash, and even then Huram made her keep her shawl on, so that it reached the point where I could hardly remember what she looked like. You’d have thought that by then I’d have put her out of my mind. But instead it was like a pain in me, the thought of her and of that baby hidden away in Huram’s house. I could hardly believe that she’d ever come to my bed, that that was the same girl who I had to sneak a glimpse of now when she came out to the well.

  The only relief I had from all this were those times I’d go down to the lake to see Jesus—it got so that was all I had to look forward to, having something to eat on the beach with the rest of the crowd and listening to Jesus’s stories. For all the wondrous things you heard Jesus had done, it was mostly to tell us these stories that he’d stop by there, about rich men who’d made a ruin of their lives or poor ones who’d done even worse, or about farmers who knew what they were doing and others who didn’t. And though I didn’t understand everything he said to us, still it made me feel better just to listen to him. There was a place he liked to talk about, which he said we all could get to if we wanted, that he called his god’s special kingdom, and it sounded grand the way he described it, because the common folk were in charge there, instead of the kings, and the people who didn’t have anything were respected, but those who had it all couldn’t even get in. The way he talked about the place you thought it had to be just around the bend, some hideout in the woods that he’d set up there with his people. But the thing was he would never give a straight answer about it, as if it was up to our own heads to work out what he meant. And I thought that might be the point, that it wasn’t something he could lay out for us, either that or he was just pulling us along to keep us coming back. I, for one, was ready to follow—wherever his kingdom was, it was sounding a fair amount better to me than what I had on the farm.

  Then sometimes I wondered if the place he meant wasn’t right there in front of our eyes. Here was Jesus, who was clever enough to have been rich or some sort of leader if he’d wanted, but instead he’d set himself up on the side of the peasants, and dressed in his homespun and slept in the open and wasn’t afraid to eat his food right under the sky with the rest of us. So wasn’t he living just the way he described, speaking his mind to the rich but then instantly taking in people who no one else would have to do with. It was as if he himself was his own little special kingdom, doing things his own way there, which somehow seemed to work out for him even though it was the opposite of everyone else’s. He’d always say to us, what was the point of worrying whether you had enough money or if your barns were full enough—and I couldn’t help thinking of Huram—when if you’d just let things come to you, you’d see you got what you needed. And that seemed to be the case for him, because if ever we ran out of fish when he came by to see us then sure enough someone else would have brought along a deer they’d happened to catch or we would all throw in whatever we had, and no one would go hungry.

  By then there was quite a group of us that came by fairly regularly, thirty or forty or so. Some of these were people I knew from the farms nearby or from Baal-Sarga, and I was always afraid that word would get back to Huram through them. But the odd thing was that no one seemed to talk about these meetings outside of them, as if they were a secret we shared. Other people started to look at them that way too—it wasn’t long before the notion went around in Baal-Sarga that the Jesus people were no better than the Sons of Light in their little colony. Somehow the story of the madman Jesus had cured—who was long gone by then, probably back to his family on the other side of the lake—had been exaggerated beyond recognition, so that now the man had had a hundred demons in him and Jesus had moved them into some poor farmer’s pigs, who straightaway had jumped into the lake. And all of this, to the ignorant peasants who were all you found in Baal-Sarga, showed that Jesus had it in for us, and was going to let loose all his Jewish devils on the countryside.

  I knew Huram had heard these stories the same as everyone, though he never said anything about them. But I noticed he’d started to keep a closer eye on me all of a sudden, so that it got harder to steal down to the beach. He kept a watch over the lake now, to see what was going on there, and sure enough any time Jesus’s boats set out for our side he’d be at me for one thing or another, to muck out the stables or fix the fences or water the sheep. I won’t say it was Moriah who put him on to me—maybe it was just that he’d heard something in town. But still it got to me, how the two of them, which was how I saw them now, thought they’d take away the one thing I had left. The truth was it surprised me how disappointed I felt each time I missed out on one of Jesus’s meetings, though maybe it was just that I couldn’t fool myself then about how bad things were for me or about some special place I was going to that would make them better.

  Then one day I looked out across to Capernaum and saw people had started to camp out on the hill above the town as if they were getting ready for a journey. A while later, I saw Jesus’s boats set out for our side of the lake, but headed down towards the Gadarenes, so Huram didn’t pay them any mind. I went straight to my lookout, though, from where I saw what Huram couldn’t, that Jesus didn’t stop for the day with the Gadarenes the way he usually did but kept coming up the coast. Fairly soon I was able to piece out what he was doing—he was calling in for a visit at all the places he usually came to on our side of the lake.

  It was getting on to sunset before he reached the farm. I’d already been late getting the sheep out, and should have been bringing them back in by then. But I had to hear what Jesus had come over to tell us, and left the sheep in the pasture without even so much as penning them in. I was scraped and bruised by the time I got down the hill but I managed to get there just as Jesus and his men were putting up their boats.

  He’d come to tell us he was going to Jerusalem for a feast there, so we shouldn’t wonder if we didn’t see him. He’d put the thing lightly but there was a tone to his voice as if he wasn’t sure he’d be coming back. Someone asked if we could go with him, more as a joke than anything, since none of us were Jews. But Jesus said we could join him in his boats that very instant if we wanted.

  When he’d gone I felt a bit miserable, because of that tone in his voice. Then I got back up the hill and found out one of the sheep had fallen in a gully and broken its leg. There was no way to hide the thing from Huram—the poor beast was crying so much when I brought it back to the stable that he came right out.

  He hardly wasted a breath then but took the thing out of my hands and smashed its head on a rock.

  “That’s two from your own share,” he said, “to make up for the wool I would have had from this one before you got it.”

  Something broke in me then.

  “I won’t be having my share,” I told him, not even knowing myself I was going to say this, “because I’m leaving to join up with Jesus the Jew.”

  For a moment he looked fit to be tied, and that was worth a lot to me, because it seemed the first time I’d ever had anything over him. But then a look of disgust crossed his face, as if he’d known all along it would come to this.

  “Suit yourself,” he said, then just turned and went back into the house.

  For the next little while it felt as if a yoke had been lifted off me, so that it seemed it had been my plan all along to go off with Jesus, and I’d just ne
eded to work up the courage. And the more I got to thinking about the thing, the more it seemed right. Who needed Huram, who I’d been just a burden to since our parents had died, or Moriah, or to see my own son grow up who I couldn’t call my own—at least with Jesus I’d learn a few things and see a bit of the world, and no one could tell me my business.

  But then when Huram didn’t come out to me that night to change my mind, and not Moriah either, who I was hoping he’d tell, it started to look as if I wasn’t quite as sure about the thing as I’d thought, and that maybe I’d said it just to be talked out of it, or to find a way to make Moriah think of me again. So I didn’t sleep the whole night but lay there in my bed crying like a child, and thinking how I’d miss the flowers on the almond trees, and looking out over the lake, and Moriah, and how I might never see these things again. But I’d given my word, so there was nothing for it. And when the sun came up I took what money I had from the little I’d got out of Huram over the years, and I put on my coat, and then I set out on the road that led down towards the lake from Baal-Sarga.

  The trip from Baal-Sarga to Gadara, which I’d made once as a boy with my brother, was just a day’s journey, and that on a road so steep that the merchants practically had to carry their carts on their backs. So seeing that Capernaum was just across the lake and that I could have thrown a stone to it, I didn’t imagine I’d have any trouble getting there before dark. What I found out, though, was that you could hardly step out of your door in those parts without crossing some border or other, or without some other business or trouble stopping you up.