Christ the Lord - Anne Rice [58]
Most of those falling in with us did not know that John bar Zechariah was our near cousin. Those who did were silenced fairly quickly by our simple admissions that we knew very little of him, that decades and miles had separated us completely.
I'd last seen John when I was a boy of seven.
Jason of course could rather vividly describe him, but it always came down to the same interesting yet remote picture: studious, pious, a model among the Essenes—who had then vanished for the even harsher life of the broiling desert.
My mother, who might have more stories of John and his parents than anyone present, said nothing. My mother, in the months before my birth, had gone to lodge with Elizabeth and Zechariah, and it was from those days that the stories came which Jason had repeated to me—my mother's song of happiness, the prophecy of Zechariah at his son's birth. These were all things well known to my mother. But she had no care now, any more than she'd ever had, to join in the conversation of the Pharisees and the Scribes, and the young nephews, and occasional nieces, who knew only bits and pieces of these things, and were hungry for more.
Jason kept his secrets too, though I could see many a night by the fire, he was bursting with the desire to stand up and recite from memory every prayer he'd learnt from John which had come down from John's father and mother and my mother.
I gave him a little smile now and then, and he would wink and shake his head; but he accepted that these were not his tales to tell. And on went the arguments as to who was this John to whom we were all so devoutly committing ourselves.
As we left the high hills of Galilee and went down into the Jordan Valley, we came into the more welcome and warmer air. It was dry at first. Then we were as close to the reedy marshes along the river as we could come, and every hour brought fresh news that John, approaching from the south as he ministered, was even closer to us perhaps than we thought. And we might on any day come directly upon him.
Joseph was not well.
Joseph took to sleeping in the wagon, constantly, and it sent a shiver through James and through me to see it, the manner of this deep unbroken sleep. We all knew this kind of slumber. We all knew this strange rhythmical breathing, the seemingly effortless way it went on over the clatter of the wheels and the inevitable heave of rocks and ruts.
The women marked it, without question, but seemed more patient with it than was my uncle Cleopas or my younger brothers, who would waken Joseph at the slightest excuse.
“Let him rest,” said my mother. Aunt Esther ordered them all to do the same.
The look in my mother's eye was sad as it had been the night we'd received the letter. But she was steady in her sadness. Nothing surprised her, or alarmed her. She sat beside Joseph from time to time, between him and her brother, Cleopas. She cradled Joseph against her shoulder. She gave him water when he did stir, but in general she kept the others from rousing him which they did principally to comfort themselves that he could indeed be roused.
One night Joseph woke and did not know where we were. No matter what we said, we couldn't make him understand it, that we were headed to the Jordan to meet with John bar Zechariah and his following there. James even took out the rumpled letter and read it over to him in the waning light.
Finally my mother said, “Do you think we would take you where you don't want to go? We would never do that. You sleep now.”
He was immediately comforted, and closed his eyes.
James went off alone so that no one could see him cry. This was his father who was leaving us. Oh, we were all brothers, but this was the father of James by a young wife whom none of us, except Alphaeus and Cleopas, had ever known. As a little boy, James had been at his mother's deathbed along with Joseph. And soon now too Joseph would be gone.
I went to be near to James, and when he wanted, he beckoned for me to come. He was troubled as always, turning this way and that. “I shouldn't