Christ the Lord - Anne Rice [15]
He stood up. He paced.
“You don't even know what I'm talking about, do you?” he asked. “You don't understand what I'm trying to tell you!” he said. “I think one moment you understand, and the next I think you're an imbecile!”
“Jason, this place is too small for you,” I said. “You wrestle with demons every day and every night in all you read, all you write, all you think, and probably in every dream you dream. Go to Jerusalem where there are men who want to talk about the world. Go to Alexandria again or Rhodes. You were happy on Rhodes. That was a good place for you, with plenty of philosophers. Maybe Rome is where you belong.”
“Why should I go to any of those places?” he asked bitterly. “Why? Because you think that old man Shemayah was right?”
“No, I don't think so at all,” I said.
“Well, let me tell you something, you know nothing of Rhodes or Rome or Athens, you know nothing of this world. And there comes a time when any man can be fed up with fine company, when he's tired of the taverns and the schools and the drunken banquets—when he wants to come home and walk under the trees his grandfather planted. I may not be an Essene in my heart, no, but I am a man.”
“I know.”
“You don't know.”
“I wish I could give you what you need.”
“And what is that, as if you knew!”
“My shoulder,” I said. “My arms around you.” I shrugged. “Kindness, that's all. I wish I could give it to you now.”
He was amazed. Words boiled in him, and nothing came out of him. He turned this way and that, then back to me. “Oh, you had better not dare to do that,” he whispered, staring down at me with narrow eyes. “They'd stone the both of us, if you did that, the way they stoned those boys.” He moved towards the edge of the courtyard.
“In this winter,” I said, “they very well might.”
“You're a simpleton and a fool,” he said. A whisper from the shadows.
“You know Scripture better than your uncle, don't you?” I looked at him, a dim figure now, against the lattice. Specks of light in his eyes.
“What has that to do with you and me and this?” he demanded.
“Think on it,” I suggested. “ ‘Be kind to the stranger in your land for you were once a stranger in the land of Egypt.’ ” I shrugged. “ ‘And you know what it means to be a stranger.’. . . So tell me, how are we to treat the stranger in ourselves?”
The door of the house opened and Jason slipped back against the lattice, startled and shaken.
It was only James.
“What's the matter with you tonight?” he demanded of Jason. “Why are you hovering about in your linen robes? What's the matter? You look like you've lost your mind.”
My heart shrank.
Jason snorted with contempt.
“Well, it's nothing a carpenter can fix,” he said. “I'll tell you that much.” And then he went off, up the hill.
James made some soft derisive sound. “Why do you tolerate him, why do you let him come into this courtyard and carry on as if this was a public marketplace?”
I went back to work. I said,
“You like him a lot better than you let on.”
“I want to talk to you,” James said.
“Not now, if you'll forgive me. I have these lines to draw. I told the others I'd do it. I sent them home.”
“I know what you did,” he said. “You think you are the head of this family?”
“No, James, I don't.” I continued with my work.
“Now is when I choose to talk to you,” he said. “Now, when the women are quiet, and the little ones are out of the way. I've come out here to talk to you, and for that reason alone.”
He walked back and forth in front of the planks. I laid the planks side by side by side. Lines straight.
“James, the town's asleep. I'm almost asleep. I want to go to bed.”
I drew the next line