by Nick Tosches
Only then did we see that the man still vomiting blood from his neck had worn a striped cloth on his head. This head-cloth now lay in the dirt beside his fallen body.
I heard words come from my mouth, hearing them as if I had heard them somewhere before:
“No matter whose hand holds the knife, it is always truly the hand of God that wields it.”
He looked at me with disgust as I said them. I was half-mad with trembling. There was frenzy in my breath.
“Even now do you compose pretty words for me?” he said. I could hear the trembling frenzy in him as well.
“Have you never killed before?”
“No,” he said. “I have not. And you?”
“Once, as a soldier.”
This was a lie. Even at such moments, when all falls from us, men and their lies are not easily parted.
We knew without saying it that we now must kill the man who cowered in silence in the pit. He could not be left there to die, for he would not die. Whoever had laid the trap would be round, and the man in it would live to tell.
We had no spades with which to bury him alive. Jesus peered into the darkness of the pit, where a shadow breathed in pain, and he said to that shadow:
“Raise your hand to me, that I might help you.”
“You will not help me. You will kill me as you have killed those whom I guided to the place.”
He was no guide. He was a fourth killer, now trying to exculpate himself through subtle lying.
“If we wished you harm, we had only to leave you here to die in this hole we dug for fallow deer. We had only to take our spades and bury you alive in minutes with the soft earth that was dug to makes this hole.”
The lies of these men, and my own, could almost be tasted in the cool of the darkness.
We watched his hand rise toward moonlight. Jesus grasped its wrist with both hands. I grasped Jesus round the waist, and together we pulled the man from the pit. Pain was thick in the gasps that came through his clenched teeth. The white of jagged bone shone through the flesh of his leg. He could not move. He could only lie crying in the dirt.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Heal him.”
The daggers were gathered up, and we robbed the corpses of what money was on them. I removed the striped cloth from the blood and dirt in which it lay.
Blood-drenched linen clung to us uncomfortably. When we came to a stream, we cleaned ourselves, our tunics, and the daggers. The moonlight showed the blood like a pool of blackness spreading around us in the slate-colored water. I raised a stone and put the striped cloth under us. With the blades of daggers, we scraped beneath the nails of our fingers. We stepped forth shivering.
We moved slowly under the moon to Sidon. The sun began to rise. I could see that his damp old tunic was still pink here and there with lingering stains. A tunic of beggarly-gray fustian was gotten at a stall in the little market of Sidon. I told him that at Tyre he would have a new tunic and robe of the finest flaxen linen and immaculate white.
Before he could discard the stained tunic and draw over him the tunic of gray fustian, the young disciple Andreas approached us. As a fisherman familiar with the rosy tints of blood that were not to be washed away, he beheld his Lord as if to question him.
“An injured beast shed blood on him,” I said.
“And did him no harm?”
“The injured beast came to him meaning no harm.”
“And what became of the injured beast?”
“It was healed and now roams free again.”
When Andreas told this story to the other disciples, the injured beast had already become a leopard.
Jesus laid his hands to the forehead of a self-afflicted boy who had been brought to him on a makeshift litter.
As he did so, I stared at his fingernails, looking for traces of darkened blood that the blade had failed to scrape out.
The self-afflicted child opened his eyes and smiled before the face of Jesus, and his parents wept and knelt before him.
“See that he gets his fill of vinegar with his bread,” he said to them. “And keep him from the presence of the dead.”
A farmer came to him and said that a curse had been put on his fields, which for seven years had yielded paltry grain while the fields all round his had been harvested full and lush.
“Your seven lean years will now be followed by seven years of plenty. This curse is lifted and will not be on your fields again.”
He paused to tell a woman who stood with her small daughter:
“This child is special. She is a lamb not to be sacrificed. Someday she will bring you grace, and someday she will bring you more prosperity than you have ever known.”
The disciples had apparently done much good here. Many of the townsmen called fondly to them as we made to leave. Some rushed forward to kiss the hem of the tunic Jesus wore, and to utter to him some of his own teachings that they variously especially liked, teachings that the disciples had spread among them, or that already had made their way to them otherwise.
“This tunic is of your town,” he told them as they brought their lips to its humble edge. “It will keep you close to my breast, as you already are.”
The nails of his toes showed blood, which could easily be taken for dirt.
Thence to Tyre.
18
EXORCISM IS EASY. ALL ONE NEEDS IS THE RIGHT DRUNKARD and a knowledge of drunkenness.
I speak not of a man who is drunk, but of a man whom the need for drink has come to define, so that he is no longer really a man but rather what is left of a man—the dregs of a man, whose every atom doth scream for the dregs of wine. His sanity lies in pieces behind him, like so many crumbs of bread. Dragged down by wine to the doorway of death, he would enter therein for more wine, or, for want of it, would relinquish himself with his own shaking hand. Drink was his obsession; and a man obsessed is a man possessed—by a demon, as it were. And demons were indeed often seen, along with all manner of other terrible phantoms, by a man such as he. Yet somewhere in him an ember of hope seeks rekindling by an unknown breath. Such is the right drunkard.
The drunkard is more suggestible, and more fearful, than a child. If you tell him that there are sores or boils or a skin rash upon him, he will excitedly examine himself and see with alarm what you told him was to be seen. If you tell him that he will not live to see the sunset of the new day, he will believe you and become distraught with panic.
It was a new entertainment among the Jews, this casting out of demons. We tried to give the people what they wanted. But we found it quite strange that men and women who had given little thought to demons now felt their presence all about. In the thousands of years of the tales of the Book, only once does there occur the expulsion of a demon.
A woman known as Sarah, in the Persian lands, was prey to Asmodeus, the demon of lust. He did not enter her or take possession of her; he merely lingered close by. He so desired her that he slayed on the nights of their marriages to her, before consummation, the seven successive husbands she took. As she prayed for death and its deliverance, the angel Raphael, sent by God, came to free her of the demon.
Asmodeus is called by the Book “the worst of demons,” but the Book says nothing else of him. Except for the Satan, to whom allusion is made here and there in the Book, there is little concern in the Book for demons. And I wonder, if Asmodeus is said to be the worst of them, and he could neither seduce nor rape the woman Sarah, what menial piddlers these imagined demons must be.
Only the heart, liver, and gall of a fish, and the smoke from the burning mixture of them, are mentioned by the Book in connection with this sole exorcism. Our fishermen were put to use in procuring and preparing a paste of these stinking things.
I remembered the two men in Bethlehem carving their little olive-wood demons to be sold as amulet trinkets. It seemed so long ago.
Yes, we found it quite strange that men and women who had given little thought to demons now felt their presence all about and sought riddance of them. But slow
ly we sensed this strangeness to be only part of a greater strangeness in the air. For such was the air of those days, whose every breeze seemed to whisper foreboding, whose every stillness seemed to bear presentiment, whose every aspect seemed to possess a darkening shadow. The demons thrived in the strangeness, the eeriness of those days.
After crossing the raised sea-road to Tyre, we came upon the right drunkard on a hillock very near to the walls of that town. He was sprawled close to his wineskin in the sandy soil and weeds.
Jesus stood over the drunkard, and the drunkard stirred and drank. Jesus said to him words from the Book.
“Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink; that continue until night.”
The words of God as revealed to Isaiah, whose ghost now seemed to be always near. These words were said by Jesus only that he might ascertain the nature of the drunkard, only that he might see if he was the right drunk.
The drunkard shrank from him, hurkling with dread and muttering sorrow. His watering red eyes, set deep in yellowed skin, were the eyes of one who saw horrible things. He was the right drunk.
“This man is possessed of a demon,” said Jesus.
“This man is drunk,” said the priest.
“Yes, that too,” said Jesus. “But his drunkenness claims only him. I sense that the demon seeks to claim many men.”
He called to Peter to bring the paste of fish heart, liver, and gall. Peter brought the phial to him.
“Do you wish to be free of the demon that is in you?”
The drunkard tried to rise, staggered, and fell again to the ground.
“Yes,” he said. His body shook violently. “Yes!” he cried, then wept and affirmed, wept and affirmed.
Jesus knelt beside him, took him by the hair, and with the paste signed his forehead with the beth that is both the second character of the Hebrew alphabet and the word whose meaning is “house.” The man writhed and gasped.
“In the name of God, I declare the vessel of this man’s body to be my home. No longer will you dwell here, demon, and you will eat of him no more.”
The drunkard again shook violently, and Jesus moved as if withstanding a strong sudden gust.
“Away from us, demon! Away!”
Seeming weakened, he lowered his head and let fall his shoulders. With the aid of my hand, he rose.
“You are cleansed,” he said to the drunkard. “Do you feel your freedom?”
The wretch nodded rapidly and repeatedly. He seemed to be much confused and abstracted.
“You can now take food again,” Jesus told him. “You need not drink. Your thirst for wine was of the demon, who now is fled.”
The drunkard continued to nod, rapidly and repeatedly, seeming now even more confused and abstracted. Jesus turned from him, toward the walls of ancient Tyre. People were watching us from the gate. The closer we got, the more excited became their welcome.
“It was Azazel who possessed him,” Jesus said to us as the acclaiming grew among those who awaited. “She let her name be known to me as she rushed from him to the desert wind.”
“But Azazel is a demon, not a demoness,” said the rabbi. His tone was one of deferential perplexity. “The Azazel of Leviticus, the Azazel to whom a scapegoat is sacrificed on the Day of Atonement. Azazel is a he-demon.”
“Azazel is of both male and female aspects. At times they roam together and are one. At times they roam apart and are two.”
The rabbi, like the others, received this elucidation with a look that expressed an effort to understand.
“Were other things addressed to you in the rushing forth of the she-Azazel?”
“Yes. Unspeakable things.”
One of the men milling at the gate of Tyre asked why we had tarried with the drunkard on the hillock. As was usual in a situation that might result in seeming lack of modesty on his part, Jesus allowed one of the disciples to say what he would.
“The man was possessed of a demon,” a disciple said. “He is possessed no more. Please be accepting of his return to a sober life among you.”
Another of the men at the gate said that he had for a long time suspected that a demon had taken up residence in the poor wretch. The speaker had known him for many years. Before his descent, he had been a fine young man.
But what a story this was to become! We were to be celebrated for it far and wide, for the drunkard did in fact convalesce and become sober again and did eagerly lay the blame for his wretchedness on the demon of our invention and expulsion, which he believed to have been real.
Some months later, Jesus performed an exorcism that was most exceptionally delightful in that the drunkard was so hoarse, parched, and scorched of throat that in forcing out words, it truly sounded as if a demon of otherworldly voice spoke from deep within him. This gave good fright to all.
For every miracle affected, the talk of men greatened it and multiplied it by three. Such was their hungering for these tawdry ticks.
“It is as I told you,” Jesus said to the priest. “I worry lest the Word be lost to these ostentations.”
“God knows his way,” the priest would say. “As we follow the path you make for us, so you must follow the path he makes for you.” There were times when the exaggerations and fabulations of the people grew so preposterous as to tax their own credulity and prove an embarrassment to us.
On the western shore of the Jordan, for example, there was much praise for an exorcism we were said to have performed across the river near the town of Gerasa. As the tale had it, a possessed man there had run from his cave at the sight of Jesus and thrown himself at the feet of our Lord.
“Come out of this man, you evil spirit!” Jesus was said to have reprimanded the demon within the man, and the possessed man, or the demon within him, was said to have cried:
“What do you want with me, Jesus, son of the most high God? In the name of God, please do not torture me so!”
At which, Jesus was said to have asked the unseen demon its name, eliciting the reply:
“My name is Legion, for we are many.”
It was said that there was a hillside nearby on which grazed a herd of some two thousand pigs.
It was said that the demons begged Jesus to be allowed to enter the pigs if they must vacate the man. It was said that Jesus granted permission, and the legion of demons left the man and entered the pigs, whereupon the pigs rushed down the steep hillside into the Sea of Galilee, which now also happened to be nearby, and there the two thousand pigs drowned themselves.
The possessed man was said to have been restored and at his ease, and the swineherds were said to have run off and reported this throughout the countryside and in Gerasa, whose people were said to have pleaded politely with Jesus to leave the region. And so it was said that we had come to be here, on the other side of the river, among these other, more appreciative and sophisticated people, as they said themselves to be.
It was in the town of Scythopolis that we heard this tale. I believe it was then and there that we decided to evict no further demons and to let all right drunkards be. If we could not prevent such gross and overly outrageous tales from circulating, we could at least not encourage them.
Jesus spoke twice at Tyre, once before sunset, again at daybreak. He spoke of the Word and he spoke of the Way. He spoke of the will of God the Father, and he spoke of what was and was to be.
We collected much money from the good people of Tyre, including a number of Romans. Phoenician gold and silver shekels were in abundance. Many who lived in this place of busy commerce seemed to have prospered well. The merchant at whose home Jesus had spent the night gifted him most prodigiously.
Our donkey was becoming heavily burdened with the wealth of the new temple that was never to be. Surely we were tempting, and soon could not but attract, the bands of thieves and highwaymen who shared with us the roads and ill-gotten gains of Judea. We had overcome the Egyptian and his men by good fortune, not by prowess. Fortune might not be with
us were we caught, alone and unawares, by highwaymen or footpads. We were at risk also when spending our nights in the towns we visited. Our treasure-sacks were becoming too ponderous to lift, and the donkey that bore them needed good guard. I worried again over what to do to safeguard our growing riches.
What ways were open to me? Again I thought of Caesarea, the provincial capital. Surely in that seat of Rome’s power, there must be at least one respectable and well-established Roman argenter who was of such wealth and probity as to be entrusted with the extensive and complex finances of the Roman prefecture here. I could easily deposit our fortune with him, either as vacua pecunia, bearing neither interest nor risk, or as creditum, to be lent out by the argentarius at the conservative fixed legal rate of twelve per centum per annum. Many Roman citizens deposited all their capital with an argentarius. I was a Roman citizen of equestrian rank, with much money to deposit.
But such an agent, who worked for the prefecture but was not a member of it, would nevertheless be subject to answering to the prefect, Pontius Pilate. While Pilate ostensibly served under Tiberius, he was the chattel of Sejanus, who had arranged his appointment. This was the praetorian prefect, perceived by Tiberius to be his bosom friend, who had murdered Drusus, the son and heir of Tiberius, and pressed Tiberius to flee Rome, where he, Sejanus, now played at princeps.
You will remember the circumstances under which I was banished from the court at Rome.
It was Pilate whom I had been banished to serve. But I had not entered the palace walls at Caesarea, and the curt letter of assignment that bore the seal of Tiberius was still with me, still unpresented and still unopened.
When I thought of the argenter, who was faceless, I thought of Pilate, who was faceless; and then I thought of Sejanus, Tiberius, and Drusus, whose faces were quite clear. And then I thought of the order of assignment I had disregarded. And then I stopped thinking of the argenter in Caesarea, though my mind would return again and again.
I thought of Jerusalem, where the wealthiest of the Jews deposited their money at the treasury of the Holy Temple.
Though the Book forbade Jews from lending money at interest to their own kind, this prohibition was ignored rather than feared. Here alone did the devout dare to defy their God so openly. While Roman law limited money-lending to a certain rate of simple annual interest, the consortium of Temple-affiliated usurers not only imposed much higher rates, but also often the treachery of compound interest.
