Authors: Nino Ricci
Jesus was chained behind him and in the confusion managed to drop his beam and crouch to him before the soldiers could stop him.
“His leg’s broken,” he said, feeling around the bone there. The captain looked as if he didn’t know what to do, and Jesus said, “I can help him.”
The street had widened there near the gate and a crowd had been able to form around us, watching. The captain, not wanting to appear an animal in front of it, gave a nod to Jesus and had his men undo his and Jerubal’s irons. Jesus called for a stick from the crowd and someone passed him a walking stick, which he broke in half. Then he started to shift the bone around gently with his hands while Jerubal, hardly seeming to feel the movement, sat there on the wet pavement. After massaging the thing for a few moments like that, Jesus tore a strip off his own shirt and used it to tie the two halves of the stick to Jerubal’s leg as a splint.
The crowd had fallen quiet, watching Jesus work there in the rain. He hadn’t done any miracle, maybe just what any doctor would do, but still they could see there was something in him, that he wasn’t what they’d expect in someone condemned. I saw his mother looking on, still at the back of the crowd, and how she watched him as if she was seeing him for the first time. Likely she hadn’t known anything of him but the stories people told, and so had been afraid he’d become a delinquent or worse. But now she saw him with Jerubal, not just the skill he had but the dignity.
Jesus helped Jerubal up and called for another walking stick from the crowd, which someone passed in, and Jerubal managed to limp forward a bit with it. But he looked helpless now. Seeing him seemed to bring home to me suddenly that all this was real, that Jesus and Jerubal were headed for the cross and no trick or plan would save them. It was a solace that they had each other, at least—I saw that Jesus was
stronger than Jerubal and Jerubal needed him, that Jerubal had stepped beyond what he could manage but Jesus was ready for this, as if all his life had prepared him for it.
There wasn’t any thought of getting Jerubal’s crossbeam onto his shoulders again, and the captain of the guard was looking more and more distraught at how the march was going. His eye went down the line of those of us in back and quickly settled on me.
“Tie it to his upright,” he said to his men, and they scrambled then to join Jerubal’s beam to my own. We started up again but looking less impressive now than when we’d set out, the soldiers churlish at the setbacks and the steady downpour and the imposing line of fetters and chains that had joined the prisoners broken now where Jerubal had been unshackled and was hobbling along on his cane.
We passed through the gate. There was a bit of a hill there rising up beneath the city wall where they did the executions, just an outcropping of mealy rock with the yellowed look of old bone, ringed round at the base with a stone fence and completely bare except for a couple of bushes and withered trees. Off to one side, closed off behind its own low wall, was a small graveyard with a few humps of tomb carved into the chalky stone where the convicts were put after they’d died. There were a few soldiers on the hill carving out holes for the uprights, or more likely clearing old ones, since you could see the place was already riddled with holes from the regular killing the Romans probably did there.
We were marched in through a small gate in the stone fence, half the soldiers staying behind to keep watch over the crowd and the other half staying with the prisoners. The hill
didn’t rise up more than forty paces, but still it was hard getting up it because of the slick of dirt that covered the stone, slippery as ice in the rain. I was sweating with the effort but at the same time chilled to the bone, and so numbed I could hardly feel my legs. When we got to the top and the captain told us to drop our loads I couldn’t bend enough to get free of mine, and one of the soldiers had to lift it off me.
The prisoners had been unshackled and lined up in a row facing out towards the crowd, the wall of the city rising up wet and grey behind them. They looked ready for death, rain-drenched and hobbled by their march and their shirts still dripping blood from their flogging. But Jesus hadn’t lost that look of being apart. I overheard one of the Galileans then, looking already as pale as death, confess to Jesus that he was a murderer, and that he could see what a thing he’d done to take a life, now that his own was being taken. But Jesus said, “If you’ve understood that, you’re already forgiven,” which seemed to comfort the fellow.
Those were the last words I heard Jesus speak, because our group was herded away, now that our work was done. Before we were led off the hill one of the soldiers came with a bag of coins—it seemed we were all entitled to payment for our efforts. The Jews refused it to a man, not even deigning so much as to say a word but just shaking their heads. But the soldier just shrugged them off and offered to split the lot between me and the Egyptian. I had to think then—I hadn’t a penny to my name, all my coin pinched by the warders in the castle. In the end I took just the denarius that was due to me, and let the Egyptian have the rest.
I saw now that the crowd looking on was not as large as it had seemed in those narrow streets—there were a few
hundred in all, and half of them just urchins. It didn’t seem much when I thought of the crowds I’d seen lined up in the temple square to kill their lambs, the thousands and the tens of thousands of them, so that it made what was happening here appear insignificant and small. But just beyond where we were was the camp the Romans had laid out for the pilgrims, and people had started filtering in from it despite the rain to see what was happening. It was in amidst them that I made out Simon the Rock, drifting in hunched and alone towards the wall at the bottom of the hill and looking as lost as I’d ever seen a man.
I went over to him. I hardly knew what to say to him and just stood there, and he looked at me with such a blank stare that he might never have laid eyes on me before.
I asked what had happened to the Zealot.
“He went off,” was all he said, and I imagined him drinking himself half to death, or worse.
It turned out most of our group had fled at the news of Jesus’s arrest, even among Jesus’s inner circle, and those who had stayed Simon had sent home. It was just the two of us left and the women, somewhere in the crowd.
The rain hadn’t let up. On the hill, four soldiers had set to work on the crosses with Roman efficiency, chiselling niches into the beams to lock them together and binding them with rope and nails. Then they laid them out in a row, each to its hole, to ready them for their load.
They brought the prisoners over one by one, since it was just the same four soldiers who were doing the work, two to hold the men in place and two with hammers. One of the Galileans went first, and he just took up his position on the wood on his own, with a quietness that chilled you. The
soldiers took his measure, so a peg could be fastened to the upright to rest his weight on, and then his arms were stretched out along the crossbeam with a soldier holding each and the spikes were nailed in at the wrists. The first blow was the one that got a scream but it was also the easiest, since it was only flesh to pass through. Then there were just the grunts of swallowed pain and the thump of the nails sinking into the wood.
The soldiers worked their way along the line like that, thundering away with their hammers as if building some infernal machine. They showed the same efficiency they had in putting the crosses together, attaching the peg and then hammering the wrists down, in unison, and then doing the feet, one over the other, with hardly a breath in between to break their rhythm. But the more they went along the more steeped they were in blood, despite the rain and a rag they carried to wipe themselves, so that it was like a dream to watch them, where suddenly some normal, innocent thing turned into a horror. And all this, too, like the flogging, was a kindness to the men, since it helped them to die, instead of leaving them to hang alive for days while their limbs turned green and their eyes were plucked by the birds. It seemed the Romans had devised the perfect way to kill a man, with such a mix of cruelty and kindness you couldn’t fault them either way.
After the first Galilean it was his companion who was up, then Jesus and Jerubal. Jesus wasn’t any different than the rest, crying out with the pain—he was made of flesh like them, which was what such treatment reduced you to, just skin and blood and bone and the ache of them. It was strange to see him that way, as if all of his notions, all of his sayings
and his stories, counted for nothing now, and it was only his animal nature that mattered.
Because of his leg Jerubal had to be laid out by the soldiers, who took him by the arms and leaned him back to the ground. I had to look away then, though I couldn’t miss the howl of pain when they did his legs. That was the sound that stayed with me during the rest, like a wind blowing through.
It was only when the four had finished the last man that they started setting the crosses upright, two of them lifting at the crossbeam and the other two guiding the base and then heaping dirt around to secure it. The crosses went into their holes with a thump, so you were afraid the men would tear free. But there was just their cough of pain at the jolt and then they hung in eerie suspension, their feet only a few spans above the ground so it seemed that with the smallest effort they might step down from there, and walk away.
Then they were lined up on their crosses in the rain, with the grey wall of the city behind them and, above that, the black sky. Jerubal’s face was already set in what looked like the rictus of death from the pain, so that there seemed hardly a trace left in him of the grinning man I’d met in Gergesa. I wanted to think now it wasn’t so fanciful that he’d done the thing on purpose, to save some of the rest of us—it didn’t make much sense, otherwise. Maybe he’d been Jesus’s miracle, won over by him in the end like a character from one of Jesus’s stories. But it was just as likely he’d made a mistake, and had never reckoned he’d be killed.
Simon and I stood there a long while after that, staring up at the hill. Eventually the crowd started to thin and I made out not far from us, hardly a hundred paces away, Jesus’s brothers, and the women. I hadn’t picked them out
since before we’d passed through the city gate. Even now, the rain had reduced them to the same mud and grey as the rest of the crowd, so that it took a moment to notice the different air that came off them. They had shuffled into two groups as if someone had sorted them, the three brothers in one, the eldest like a bulwark in the middle of them, the three women in the other. I noticed now that the mother had an arm around Mary, the two joined under the mother’s cloak as if they’d been brought to the same level, helpless like children who’d been left behind. It didn’t seem to matter any more how differently they’d seen Jesus—it had come to the same thing, in the end, that neither had got what they’d wanted from him, and now they’d lost him.
A silence seemed to hang over the group of them, as conspicuous as if it was itself a sound. I thought of the funerals I’d seen in Baal-Sarga, with the keeners who were paid to mourn, and their wailing seemed a quiet thing next to this, just the drone of the rain and then nothing.
There wasn’t much to see on the crosses after the first agony had passed and the men had settled into the bearable misery of it. Still, you couldn’t take your eyes away, looking for the twitch of a limb or a heave of breath, any smallest sign of life. Jesus’s mother was the same, and Mary beside her—you thought they’d turn away, that the pain of watching would be too great, but they stood there with their eyes fixed on Jesus as if to take in every bitter drop of his dying.
“I ought to have stood by him,” Simon said. It was a long time since he’d spoken. “It was what he taught us.”
I thought to say, Then you’d be there alongside him. But it seemed that was his point, that he’d rather be up there on the hill than watching from below.
Jerubal, on account of his leg, was the first to die. I could sense the moment it happened, though it was a while that he’d been hanging limp—one instant it was Jerubal on the cross, clinging to his last breath, and then just dead flesh. Jesus died not long afterwards. The rest hung on though it looked to be getting towards nightfall, when they’d have to be taken down, to respect Jewish law. The soldiers went around with a club then to smash their legs, so they’d slump and suffocate. It didn’t take long after that. Even before the last one had gone, the soldiers had started lowering the crosses to cart away the dead, prying their limbs from the wood with an iron wedge and then carrying them over to the graveyard nearby and heaping them all together into one of the tombs.
Mary came over to us then, her face so emptied it cut to your bone.
“We’re undone,” she said, and just fell to her knees in the mud. Simon tried to gather her up and ended by awkwardly embracing her, hulking and large against her tiny frame.
“We always came to understand the hardest things with him,” he said. “Maybe even this we’ll come to understand.”
They stood like that, Mary clinging to him, until Simon grew uneasy and said there was nothing to be done, and they should leave for home.
He looked to me to ask if I’d join them but his eyes said the opposite, wary of all I knew.
“I’ll manage on my own,” was all I said, and the truth was I only wanted to be alone then, and on my way.
They left me there and walked over to Jesus’s family, and then the group of them set off together without looking back,
Simon and the older brother big-shouldered and tall in the middle of them but seeming reduced now, like mountains worn away.
The rain had stopped by then and the crowd had mostly gone, thinned down just to straggling groups of passersby coming and going from the pilgrim camp. I ought to have gone myself, but instead I just stood there watching the soldiers as they took the last of the men away. They propped the crosses haphazardly back into their holes to stand a little ominous and askew there at the top of the hill, to be left to rot, I supposed, or scavenged by someone low enough to make use of them. Finally darkness came on but I kept by my place, at the back of my head thinking that when the soldiers left I might get into the tomb where they’d put the dead and maybe clean Jerubal a bit and lay him out properly for the other side, since it seemed to fall to me to be the one to mourn him.