John (5 page)
'The children must be buried,' Papias says, softly. 'They are gone to the Lord.'
The widow shows no sign of understanding. Her eyes stare, as if across the room she keeps demons at bay.
Gently Papias leans down and places his hands on one of the children. The flesh is cold and scaled with something rough he cannot see. He goes to lift the child off the mother, and the moment the weight shifts she lets out a scream and grasps the infant to her.
'The children must be buried,' he says again. But the mother will not let go the child and shakes her head back and forth, and would be weeping if she had not wept herself away already, and so instead makes a kind of moaning crying and clings to the dead. Papias pleads with her. He tells her he will pray over the children. He tries to lift the first from her again, a girl it is, but the mother will not let go her hold. It is wretched and ugly and intolerable, and still the door bangs and opens and bangs and opens behind him in the wind.
'O Lord, help me,' Papias cries. 'Stop, stop, let go!' He wrenches the infant from her then, and then the other, and rushes outside into the ravaged light of day.
The girls are as nothing in his hands, weight of shells, no more. The lower side of one child's face and down her neck is spread a greenish scaling; the other wears it about her mouth like a lumpish paint. Papias looks up to the sky and wails. He holds the infant girls in the wind as if in offering, as if he believes that from the sky now will come a miracle. He draws down into the deep well of his faith and brings up this clear pure stuff that believes in the absolute bridge-way between man and God, that between earth and heaven is constant traffic of beseech and grant, that somewhere in all the lands stretching from Judea into Asia Minor, and even to Rome and Gaul beyond, there occur visits of the Divine, and the sick are sometimes restored. He holds the infant girls aloft in the wind. Ioseph has baptised all on the island, and will have dipped these children in the water; there is no fear for them. But still Papias finds himself asking. His faith tempts him to think of a personal favour. He looks at the girl with the ruined skin of her face and he closes his eyes. When he opens them, it will be gone; it will be cleansed away and he will feel the returning breath. Papias prays for it. He asks that it happen now. In a fever of belief he tells God that he will not succumb to vanity but keep the curing a secret. No one need know.
The wind beats at him. His eyes are shut to the dull grey hood of cloud, the obscured face of the heavens, but at any instant he expects to feel the blaze of illumination. His youth demands it, a visitation fierce and rapturous and violent.
Salt air swirls. Sandflies find the gash at his ankle and embed in blood. Gulls downed and raucous make urgent angry business with their wings. But Papias pays them no heed. The girls in his arms, his praying is absolute and aloud now. The Greek ascends into the air like a white ladder pressed up into the invisible, all about it the soft, exhausted collapse of the sea in the stones.
'Now, O Lord, come and make these, your children, live!' Papias cries. He tilts his head to allow the imminent radiance to blind him. That, he would gladly accept. Gladly he would be as the old apostle, his master. He has heard of so many healings, so many accounts of miracle, of leprosy cleansed, lameness righted, and even, yes, the dead rising, that he does not doubt the power; what he doubts is only his own worthiness to be its conductor.
The children lie along his arms, his hands cupping their heads. Across the sand floor unseen scuttles a crab. It delays on ochre seaweed, makes small pinchings of sideways motion; it is the size of a man's hand. What food it finds in the slime of the weed is insufficient, and it comes forward, pincers purposeful and elegant, across the shifting undulations of the sand. Minute twigs, like fingertips, the crab squeezes for small life. The blown bits of dwellings and boats from the sea, briny insect-loaded sea wrack, soft crumble harvests of rot alive with maggots, pieces of cloth run away in the wind, sheltering hard-skinned sea slugs, all that the storm undressed and shore-scattered like a bounteous god the crab considers on its route. In low observance it finds a plenitude and yet progresses onwards, as if a little of each is allowed only, or its lot is to be unrestful always on land. The crab crosses shingle and grit, finds brief meaningful pause in the under-place of a rock, scuttles on.
The crab arrives at Papias's foot before it knows it. The force of the youth's stance has embedded him, and sand thinly covers his sandals. The level is blown next to his ankle, where in the wound sandflies cling and suck and buzz, emboldened by the man's stillness to believe him dead or dying. Some, giddy and sated, fly up and hover briefly about the lifeless girls, land inquisitive, explorative, then flee the wind, back down to find the warm blood of the ankle they have forgotten. Black-shelled, sea-creased in an exquisite pattern of five arcs, ignorant of the world above, the crab lies motionless; it pinches a full careless fly, an ooze of white pulp, then senses the something in the sand below it.
Papias knows nothing of this. His voice is hoarse from praying against the wind and he has stopped now to wait. He imagines more prayers will only annoy; he has asked and his entreaty must travel whatever vast distances, through what realms lie ranked and assembled the saints and all the orders of angels up and on to the throne itself. He must attend. The girls grow weightier in his outheld arms. An ache pulls at the top of his shoulder. But Papias will not yield to it. He fears the slightest movement may disturb the ladder, may off-centre the miracle. Suffering is the currency for salvation, and he intends his arms to fall away before he surrenders the girls to death.
In the thin sand covering Papias's right foot a featureless ant is paused. Sweat, salted and savoured with longing, has fallen. The ant moves upon it and the crab pinches and catches sand and skin both. A flake of toe flesh is peeled. The sand shifts, exposing a small wound, and the crab sidles closer, till it lies along the line of the foot facing the five toes.
Papias feels the claw and the sharp announcement of intent, but he does not move and he does not open his eyes. His arms are agony. His head is bowed forward.
The sky darkens. Gulls and petrels dance upon the breaking waves. Effort and strain make the youth hot.
Papias cries out. For an instant, no more, he tries to endure the pain, tries to hold the girls in his arms and see if, now, at this moment of agony, at last the light is to descend. He looks up into the merciless grey, then cries and drops to his knees, laying both infants on the sand. Then he crouches forward, his two hands pressed into the damp grit and his forehead lowered to it, and he lets from him a long loud cry of no words, a wailing plaint that goes on and on, issuing freely from the place where his faith has been pierced.
Dark is fallen. Papias stares out into the sea. He has missed returning for the evening bell and prayer. A wounded part-moon is uncovered in the sky.
The bodies of the girls are before him.
It was for me to do this, he thinks. It was for me and not another to come today.
Wearily he rises and goes by the dwelling and finds a heavy stick there. With this he breaks the shale and opens a hole. In time he kneels and claws the dirt free, then is himself inside the pit, scrabbling at the dark below when he had imagined such light from above. He finishes and climbs out and goes inside the fisher's hut. It is dark. The shape of the woman Marina is where Papias had last left her.
'We must bury the children,' he says. 'I have prayed for them. They are with our Lord in heaven.'
She rocks back and forth slightly in her sitting. She says nothing.
Papias goes outside and lifts the infant girls one at a time and lays them into the pit. The wind is gone. Night is tranquil and ink. He stands bowed and prays again and does not look up into the sky. He scoops the dirt with both hands and lets it fall.
He returns to the hut.
'A mouthful of your water, please,' he asks. But Marina does not move, and he pats the dark blindly till he finds the water pouch and drinks.
'I have demons. I have death,' the woman says.
Papias lowers the water.
'My husband first, then my children. Who I touch dies. Now you,' she says.
Afraid that he is forgetting, John remembers. Afraid that age invents memories, he goes into the vastness of his mind to find the true.
Six stone water jars. Or eight?
Six. Our talk at the table. Nathaniel and Philip joking, something about under the fig tree.
Dusty from the long walk to Galilee. Andrew leaning to me: 'We will see the sky opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. He has said so.'
Yes.
Drinking the wine freely all of us, excited. Chosen.
At the wedding they were not expecting us. They did not know you had disciples, Lord.
Your mother: 'They have no wine.'
'My hour has not yet come.'
That look. As if you did not wish it to begin.
We fell silent. A bird flapping high in the awning.
'They have no wine.'
Because she knew it would be now. Now would be the first sign. There in Cana.
But you did not speak; you looked to your mother's eyes.
I thought to say we would leave and get wine. I was the fastest; I could run and bring wine from a cousin of Nathaniel not far.
But the look in your mother's eyes. As if she pushed you with her eyes: Go, now, begin.
The bird flapping high above. Not escaping.
The six stone water jars, empty.
I did not need a sign, Lord. Already I believed.
Your mother turning to the Architriklinos: 'Do what he tells you.'
The moments after, I remember. Your mother touching your sleeve. Walking from you. My puzzlement sitting next to you. Across from me, Nathaniel and Philip and James. Andrew pushing to see. None of us knowing what to do.
Your face. The light in it. The knowledge.
'Fill those jars with water.'
The buckets being brought from the well, the water clear falling into them.
'It is only water,' Andrew whispered.
More buckets brought. More water.
Your face unperturbed and considering each of us. Your sad smile of knowledge.
'Now draw some out.'
The heads of us turned to see.
Not I. I knew. I heard the Architriklinos cry, 'It is wine!' But already you had stood.
'Come.'
Philip could not stand; Nathaniel took his arm. Your mother was watching us leave. The music was playing.
You looked at the awning; the bird flew free.
The angel descending has golden wings. From the fore rank of seraphim, seated blissful in divine light, it has come, its form majestic, its purpose sanctified. Rising resplendent upon its summons, and laying broad the full glory of its wings, it had paused momentarily before flight, in manner as one elect and upon the rim of high heaven prepared. With single beat it met the hallowed air, fanned to the seraphim ambrosial farewell and flew beyond the gathered company of the prophets and the saints and the martyrs of the Almighty, beyond Isaiah and Elijah and Moses and all the faithful departed. To the furthest frontier of the celestial it arrived effortless, was as a flaming comet passing, lustrous, sublime. From its prominence at heaven's gate it considered amassed the stars below, myriad assembly of creations, carpet of illumination, then plunged headlong. Wings enfolded rearward, feet as one, it fell like God's arrow. Past the illumined belt that girdles paradise, and the supernal glow that radiates beyond, past the black and the blue, the lesser worlds of empty space, fathoms numberless of uncreated nothing wherein the cries of the undeserving perish and reach no further, past all the angels flew.
It made descent beyond purgatory and paused not to pity or preach, not to tell of those elsewhere bound in chains by the burning black waters of the Styx, the Acheron, the Lethe, whose agony was promised everlasting. It passed as lightning, swift, strict, missioned; came to that outer region where the sun burned white brilliance of fire, made melt any. But here the angel was scorched not and came itself as silvered light, in form formless, in speed absolute. And so appeared in hovered pause above the placid shelf of planet Earth, within its sight all lands and seas that were, all from Asia to Judea and to the north as far as Gaul and Brittania. Its wings it extended then; feathers slight fell, drifted below as marvels; then, in brief quiescence considered the beauty and perfection of creation, what rivers and mountains, what seas.
From all, the angel chose the island, and lifted and lowered its wings mightily and swooped invisible down.
Now, here, at the entrance of the cave, it comes. Appears from within a great illumination, a thousand lamps large, dazzling to human sight. In accompaniment is a sound, sweet, melodic, music without playing. He folds to him his golden wings. He comes from the light and is clear and beautiful to behold, face becalmed, demeanour serene, as though journey from the ranks of seraphim in heaven to the place beneath is not arduous or lengthy.
'Prochorus,' the angel says.
The man bows low to the ground, then drops to his knees.
'Prochorus,' the angel says again.
The scribe cannot believe the angel knows his name. Then he believes it and believes his reward is at hand, believes when he rises that he will assume eternal form and begin his own ascent. His being is filled with gratitude and surrender. Upon his face is a look of transport.
Then he feels himself shaken. A hand touches his cheek.
'Prochorus!'
And he opens his eyes and sees Papias standing there.
'Wake, Prochorus, wake. Where is the Master?'
The angel is gone. There is only the looming face of the youth.
'Prochorus, the Master is not here.'
The scribe is curled on the floor. Chastened by the vanity of the dream, for some moments he cannot stir. It is as though, returned to earth, he is made of weightier stuff and will not be able to stand. But the look of Papias is wild and urgent, and Prochorus presses against the burden of disappointment and rises.
