by Stant Litore
Yeshua’s words stirred him; a hard glint came to Shimon’s eyes. Whatever revelation had come to the stranger with the light and the heat as he faced the corpses, it had burned away much of his uncertainty, his dread. Yeshua’s face was still bruised, his words still rapid and breathless, but he spoke with a fierce confidence and a demand for help to which there could be only one answer.
Shimon glanced at his father’s boat. “I will take you out there,” he said.
Yeshua gripped Shimon’s arm below the shoulder and squeezed so hard, it hurt.
“We can end it,” he said again.
Then he let go and strode back down to the water’s edge.
“Come on,” Shimon muttered, and ran down the shore toward that other line of boats, those still seaworthy. Yakob stood, hesitating a moment, staring after Yeshua. Then he ran after Shimon, shells and other sea debris cracking beneath his sandals.
Rahel watched Yeshua walk down the line of the sea. He was different this morning, Yeshua. Harder, colder. All his formidable energy channeled into one fierce purpose, as though every breath he took before launching out on that sea was a breath taken at high cost.
Rahel stared at the bodies of the dead. With the fingers of her right hand she reached into her left sleeve and touched the old, woolen shawl she had tucked away there. Yonah’s tallit. It brought her a smile of both remembered happiness and remembered grief. All those years ago, she had grieved alone. Most of the women she could have called friend or sister had died that night, violated and beaten by the Roman mercenaries and then eaten by the dead. Having none to turn to for comfort, Rahel had taken to carrying her husband’s tallit with her while she cooked and while she slept, while she nursed her crippled child. It was all she had left of him besides their children, and for a while, the cloth still carried his scent. It was many months before she could bring herself to wash it, and she did so only after the scent was too faint for her to detect it and after she had forgotten what that scent had been like. She had waited until her infant was sleeping and Shimon was gone from the house, then had wept as she washed the shawl in her basin, scrubbing it until the water was browned with the months of oil and dirt, then wringing it out and scrubbing it again. When it was clean and beautiful (though less so to her eyes than it had been), she had draped it over its peg to dry, and then sat for most of a Roman hour by the basin, staring at the dirtied water. In her heart she had felt that the last of her husband’s scent and the last of him was in that water, and she could not bring herself to pour it out. She thought of asking Shimon to spill that water out over the sand or over the sea when she could not see it done. But she had decided at last that it had to be her, and, asking Shimon to watch the baby after he came home, Rahel had carried the basin down to the sea.
Now she gazed on the bodies of the dead, wondering who they were, and whether men or women in Kfar Nahum had grieved at their death. Their faces had been eaten away by time and the sea and the hunger of fish. She couldn’t even tell if they had been Hebrew. One of them might even have been a woman she had laughed with by the cistern. She couldn’t know.
The back of her neck warned her she was being watched, and a glance behind showed her Koach’s waif, the young woman who had been silent and then had sung. She was picking her way carefully through the grasses. The sight startled Rahel, and she realized suddenly that the girl must have slept the night in her house. She should have been angered, but strangely she felt only pity and a sense of kinship, though this bewildered her. She and that girl—they had both been touched by the navi. Both of them had been given back something lost, something resigned. Both of them had been, by that act, torn away from their old lives. Now they stood in the empty place, the place of waiting, where the waves eat the world and yet the world remains. She didn’t know what was going to happen.
While Yesse stood some way up the tideline and watched, his face drawn with grief, the men drew Shimon’s boat toward the water, the scrape of it against the shingle an oddly comforting sound, an ancient sound, one the People had heard night after night upon this shore for generations—the sound of their men leaving behind land and bed and security and setting out on the fragile surface of a terrible deep. The boat slid quickly, its bow toward the surf, for Yeshua lent a hand, and Bar Cheleph did also, though Shimon gave him a look of furious warning, a look that said as clearly as a shout: Get your hands off my father’s boat.
Rahel reached the boat just as the men brought it down to the surf. She took the gunwale in her hands and sprang in, almost as though she were a young girl again. She winced when her feet struck the bottom of the boat, jarring her hip.
Shimon gasped and motioned for the others to stop. They let go of the gunwale and stared at Rahel.
“Amma! What are you doing?”
“Going with you,” she said, her teeth clenched against the pain. She seated herself between the oar benches, using one of the nets for a cushion, her back to the hard wood of the hull.
“No, you are not.”
Rahel met his gaze, her own as hard as winter. “What began with a spear through your father’s brow—I want to see it ended.”
Leaning against the gunwale, Shimon exchanged uncertain looks with the other men. Yeshua was staring intently at the sea, seeming hardly to have heard. Then Bar Cheleph spoke, his brow damp with sweat. “I am coming, too.”
“You,” Shimon said, “are not welcome in my father’s boat.”
Bar Cheleph smiled faintly. “I am the adopted brother of Yakob and Yohanna. I would have been casting the nets with you long before, if I had any bravery at all. But …” He looked down. “I had dreams. The same dream, each night. I’m out on the water, and we’re casting the nets, and in the dream I always bring them up.”
Shimon gave him a startled look. He knew such dreams all too well.
Bar Cheleph whispered, “I never knew if my father and mother were among those who were tossed in.”
Kana looked away. Yeshua stood gazing at the waves.
Shimon hesitated, the incoming sea nearly reaching his toes. “You are blessed,” he said after a moment. “Never to have seen your father risen, like that.”
“Not knowing is worse.” Bar Cheleph looked out over the chop of the water. “Not knowing if he found rest. Or if he is hungering.”
“He found rest.” Shimon’s tone was harsh. “Fathers don’t pursue their children across the sand to eat them. Whatever is down there, it is not him. Nor your mother either.”
Yakob nodded to Bar Cheleph, his face drawn. “I put your father in a tomb last night, and mine. Our father had two Yakobs. Never forget that.”
Bar Cheleph’s eyes moistened. He whispered a word of gratitude, so quiet it almost couldn’t be heard.
“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 f
amily 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.
ONE MORE PROMISE TO KEEP
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.
