Authors: Nino Ricci
The route we ended up taking out of Scythopolis wasn’t east across the Jordan into Perea, where everyone else was going, or even west to Samaria, but south right along the river valley, though there wasn’t really much of a road to speak of and you had the feeling bandits would jump out from behind every rock. Jesus was walking out ahead of us all seeming in a foul mood, and I thought maybe some of his camp had got up to the same sort of mischief the evening before as me and Jerubal. But what had happened was that he’d sent a couple of his men into Samaria to collect his followers there for the trip, and the men had come back in the night saying the Samaritans wouldn’t join. They had their own temple, they’d said, and didn’t want any part of going down to the Jewish one. But Jesus took it hard—it seemed he’d been trying from the start to bring the Jews and the Samaritans together but couldn’t find the way to do it, though from what I understood it was only this little rule or that one that made the difference between them and then just the bad blood that there’d been for hundreds of years.
After the night we’d had, Jerubal and I put up our hoods against the sun and stayed at the back of the troupe. The road we’d taken was scarred with gullies sometimes as deep as a man, and it was a struggle getting along it. Then at one point I glanced over at Jerubal and saw he was looking a little grey. I thought it was just the wine from the night before, but it was something he’d eaten—not long afterwards he suddenly retched up his breakfast, and soon enough half of the rest of us had done the same, spilling our stomachs into the river. It seemed some of the fish we had along had gone bad. We had to abandon three baskets of it there by the river for the buzzards to take, going on then hoping to reach a town up ahead where there was a place to rest. But after we’d gone on a ways, Jerubal pulled me to the back of the file and told me to slow my pace a bit, and then without warning gave my arm a tug so that I suddenly found myself lying on top of him at the bottom of one of those gullies. I hardly knew what to make of that. But Jerubal put his hand up to keep me quiet. He peered up over the edge of the gully to make sure no one had noticed we’d disappeared, then said, “We’re going back for the fish.”
I had no idea what he intended and was half-inclined to leave him to work the thing out on his own. But he had that grin of his, which always said, you’d be missing something to pass this up. So in the end I followed him back. And it turned out a good deal of that fish wasn’t as foul as we’d thought, and the lot of it was wrapped in ferns that hid the smell. So there we had ourselves a windfall, three big baskets of fish for the taking, except I didn’t see what we were going to do with it, out in the middle of nowhere. But Jerubal grinned and said he’d worked it out—there was a town we’d passed a ways
back, a bit off the river. He had us run the baskets through the river a bit to freshen them up, and then we hoisted them onto our shoulders—and I was the one who got saddled with two of them—and started retracing our steps, though the sun was getting high and the heat rising by the moment.
The town was a bit further than Jerubal had led me to believe and I was nearly crippled under my load by the time we got to the place. It looked to be just a wilderness town, a bit of mud thrown together, with a few squares of field around it that took water from the river but then beyond that only scrub and waste. It was our luck, though, that there was a market going on, and Jerubal took us into it, going along on a walking stick he’d culled out of the brush so he looked like an old desert wise man. Then as soon as we were in the thick of the crowd, he started shouting, “Praise to God!” at the top of his lungs, so that it wasn’t long before people had gathered around us.
The way Jerubal had it, those fish we were carrying were part of a miracle we’d seen. He had the whole story plotted out, how he and I were simply walking along the river when we came on Jesus, the holy man of Galilee, on his way to Jerusalem with his followers. They’d run out of food, and hadn’t money, and thought they’d have to turn back and miss the feast. But Jesus said to his men, “Cast a net into the river,” and it came out teeming with fish. And they’d been able to eat their fill and pack some away for the journey and still had these baskets left over that wouldn’t keep, and Jesus, seeing us going along there, had given them over to us so that we might raise some money for the poor. “I saw it with my own eyes,” Jerubal said, “and my servant here, who’s never told a lie in his life, will tell you the same.”
Jerubal had said all this almost in a single breath, as if to admit no contradiction. But it was clear in an instant that this was no village of Amorites, because those townspeople just stood there staring at us as if they didn’t know whether to stone us or spit, probably wondering, from Jerubal’s accent, what kind of foreign demons we were. It seemed they were just girding themselves to drive us from the town when suddenly a man emerged from the crowd looking as if he’d just crawled in from the wilderness, his hair and beard tangled as thistle and reaching down practically to his waist, and his shirt belted on with a raw strip of goatskin. He had the glint of a madman in his eye, and I thought the crowd would chase him off. But instead everyone cleared a way for him as if he was some sort of leader in the place.
“You mentioned Jesus from Galilee,” he said, staring at us as if to burn a hole in us.
But Jerubal, keeping calm, agreed that he had.
“He was with John the prophet,” the man said, which didn’t mean a thing to me though Jerubal seemed to know what he was talking about. “There’s a lot of us here who still follow John. He used to preach at the river.”
I thought he was intending to say that we’d insulted John’s name, and he’d have to avenge it.
But Jerubal said, “Then it must be his power that Jesus called on, to do what he did.”
I could see the fellow considering that—now he’d be the one to insult the memory of John, to say it couldn’t have happened. He seemed to strain then with the weight that was on him, everyone looking to him.
Finally he said, “Then it must be a sign of the end of things, the way John warned us, if he’s giving that power to
the ones he taught.” And he walked up to the baskets and took the first fish himself, giving us a coin to pass on, and Jerubal stood there as if it was the most natural thing in the world that this wild man should just believe when all the rest had their doubts.
Another man would have turned to the crowd fairly quickly then and said, “Look, even John’s follower took one, now do the same.” But not Jerubal. He just stood there a moment staring at the crowd as if to say it was clear they didn’t even believe in their own god here, then started to pack up the fish. And you could see people begin to shuffle nervously at that, and talk amongst themselves, and look at Jerubal and the fish. And finally someone came up with a few coppers in his hand and said he would take one as well, and then another came and another, and Jerubal had me collect the money as if it was a little beneath him to touch it, saying we’d be catching up with Jesus on the road to hand it over to him.
It wasn’t long before half the town was lined up for their fish. It was as Jerubal had told me once, the bigger the lie, the more people fell for it in the end. And it seemed true, because Jerubal could open his mouth and you never knew what kind of incredible thing would come out of it, yet he always found the way to make people believe him. Now he was going on about how he’d worshipped Aphrodite and Baal all his life but seeing the miracle by the river had won him over to the god of the Jews, and he was going down straightaway to the temple in Jerusalem to make an offering. And people were taking him seriously, and agreeing with him that their god was great, and Jerubal happened to mention in passing that rather than eating their fish, they’d do best to hang
it over their doors for good fortune, to save himself a lot of sick folks holding their stomachs and chasing him down.
Our pockets were full by the time we left town. But I was feeling a bit uneasy about that money. I asked Jerubal about the prophet John and he said the Jews had all sorts of holy men like that, who lived in caves and said outrageous things about the end of the world and who the Romans usually came along and killed off, the way they’d done with this John. I wanted to know if he’d performed any miracles but Jerubal couldn’t say. “What about Jesus?” I asked him. “Do you think he does miracles?” “Of course he does,” Jerubal said. “Look at us—we were just a couple of poor sots when the sun came up and now he’s turned us into rich ones.”
In my own head, though, I couldn’t make a joke of it—I had to know what was what, all of a sudden, since Jerubal had me so turned around by now I couldn’t tell the difference any more between things that had actually happened and what we’d made up. I’d been that way as a boy—I’d hear a story about some piece of wonder or magic and then it was as if I was the one who’d witnessed the thing, I saw it so clearly. The truth was you could meet a lot of people who were like that, sensible people otherwise but who, when it came to wonders, couldn’t have told you what they’d seen with their own eyes, or only heard about, or invented whole cloth. That seemed the way so many stories got spread, until you’d think wonders were as common as spit.
It didn’t take us long to catch up with Jesus’s band again—they’d put up at the roadhouse outside Aenon, just a couple of miles on, to wait out the heat. The place was known for its waters and was surrounded with palm groves and gardens, though beyond them was desert, dozens of trees
sprouting up above the town walls all in bloom then with the spring. Some were the purple-flowered ones, wispy as gossamer, that we called King’s Ghost up in Baal-Sarga. I felt a pang, seeing them and remembering the lake and how green everything had been around it, next to the sun-cooked flats we’d been travelling through. But the roadhouse was fine enough, with a large pool in the middle of the courtyard and a little wine shop in one of the arcades.
With money in our purses again, Jerubal and I bought some wine for some of Jesus’s followers who we’d got friendly with. But while we were standing there with our cups, Jesus himself came around to join us, instantly ordering a cup as well to save us feeling sheepish at being caught with wine on our breath. Jerubal immediately got out a coin to pay for the thing, and Jesus didn’t try to stop him but just said, “Thank you,” as if he meant it, and took a drink.
I’d assumed by this point that Jesus hadn’t recognized me from our meetings. But he turned to me now and said, “I see you’re still hiding your light at the back of the crowd, the way you used to,” and I saw he’d known all along who I was.
I must have blushed then because he smiled.
“I’m glad you and your friend could join us,” he said, and drained his glass and went off, leaving my head spinning. But then I remembered the money in my purse and all my good feeling left me. I’d find the way to make some sort of penance with it, I said to myself, maybe keeping just enough of it back that I didn’t go hungry.
We were getting ready to set off again when a bit of an argument broke out. It seemed that the town we were at, even more than the one before it, was crowded with followers of the prophet John, and some of them had got wind that
an old student of his was passing through and had come out to see who it was. But when one of these fellows heard that Jesus had been drinking with his followers, he said that John would never have stood for such a thing. Jesus, instead of defending himself, agreed that the fellow was right.
“He lived the way most of us can’t,” he said, “and we’ll never see the likes of him again. I remember how we used to come to this very town, though it wasn’t everyone here who believed in him then.”
It seemed he was saying that maybe the fellow himself was one of the ones who hadn’t believed, and from how his face fell for an instant, it looked as if that was the case. But then he said, though more carefully, “There are more who believe in him now because they saw he was ready to die when Herod took him. But some of those who were with him just ran off.”
It was as if Jesus had been slapped—he fell quiet, and turned away, and said to his men, “Let’s be going.” And that was how he left the place, under a cloud, so the rest of us had to hurry to collect ourselves and straggle in behind him. It was unusual for Jesus to let anyone get the better of him and people looked confused, wondering how he could have been in the wrong. But Jesus didn’t stop to explain, marching straight on into the blazing wilderness. A few miles from town, we reached a spot where the river widened and there was a bit of a ford.
“We’re crossing here,” Jesus said, he didn’t say why, though you could see he wasn’t brooking any argument.
People arranged their goods on their heads and we went into the water single file, with Jesus out front. There must have been some rain up around the lake the night before,
because the current was running swiftly, and the children along with us might have been washed away if they hadn’t been tied to their parents. The other side of the river was even more blasted than the one we’d left, just rubble and sand and stone and then bald white hills that stretched as far as you could see. When we’d landed Jesus led us down the shore a ways to a little resting spot where there were a few thorn trees to give a bit of shade. We all stretched out our belongings to dry, but not settling much, imagining we still had a patch to cross to get to whatever town it was we were headed to for the night. But then Jesus announced we’d be stopping right where we were.
It seemed strange to camp in that bit of wild away from any town or road. But Jesus said he had chosen the spot because the prophet John had had his camp there. I made out then the old tent pegs in the dirt, and the spots where the ground was beaten down. I had an image of the place as it must have been, with the tents all around and a young Jesus there with his teacher John. Not far from the river an embankment rose up that had a row of caves in it, and I pictured John and his men putting up there looking like the wild man we’d sold our fish to, with their hair coiled and long and the strips of goatskin tied around their waists.