Christ the Lord - Anne Rice [76]
“Who said that I was sick? Who said that I should be in this bed?” she asked.
And immediately she rose and scurried around the little house, heaping pottage into bowls for us, and clapping her hands for her maidservant to bring us fresh water. “Look at you, how thin you are,” she said to me. “Why, I thought I recognized you when you walked in, thought I'd seen you somewhere, but I've never seen anyone like you.” She put the bowl of pottage in my hands. “Eat a small bit of that or you'll be ill. It will catch in your throat.” She glared at her son-in-law. “Did you tell me I was sick?”
He threw up his hands and shook his head in wonder.
“Simon,” I said as we sat down. “I have a new name for you. Peter is your name from this day forward.”
He was amazed. He was still speechless. He could only nod.
John immediately sat at my side. “And will you give us new names, Rabbi?” he asked.
I smiled. “You're too eager, and you know it. Have patience. For the moment, let me call you and your brother the Sons of Thunder.”
I took the old woman's advice. I ate only a little of the pottage. Hungry as my body was, it did not seem to want more than that.
We all sat on the floor here, cross-legged as usual. I forgot completely from time to time about the fine clothes I wore, which were already dusty, and I looked at Simon who said he must get back now to his fishing.
I shook my head. “No, you're to be a fisher of men now,” I said. “You come with me. Why do you think I gave you a new name? Nothing in your life will be the same now. Don't expect it to be.”
He looked astonished, but his brother nodded vigorously to him. I lay back and dozed as they discussed all these things amongst themselves. Now and then I watched them as if they couldn't see me. Indeed, they couldn't guess what I was seeing. It was like opening a book, and reading the contents, to know as much as I wanted to know about each and every one of them.
There was a crowd gathering outside the door.
My sister Little Salome had come, the dearest and closest to me of all my kindred. It was a nagging pain to me that she had gone to live in Capernaum.
I was still half asleep when her kiss woke me. Her eyes were deep set and lively and spoke of an intimacy that I shared perhaps with no one in this world, except my mother. Even the shape of her arm in my fingers, the touch of her shoulder against me, these things brought back cascades of memories and unutterable tenderness.
For a long moment I merely held tight to her. She drew back and eyed me in a wholly different way than she ever had before. She, too, seemed lost for a moment in a string of recollections. Then I realized she was committing to memory what she saw of me now, the changes in my expression, in my demeanor.
Her son came in, bushy headed and curious—the image of my uncle Cleopas, her father—though he was only a boy of six.
“Little Tobiah!” I kissed him. I'd seen him on the last pilgrimage but only briefly in Jerusalem, and that seemed an age ago.
“Uncle,” he said to me. “The whole world is talking about you!” There was something playful in his eyes so like his grandfather's.
“Hush now,” said my beloved sister. “Yeshua, look at you! You're thin to the bone. Your face is shining, but you must be in a fever. You come now home to us, and let me care for you, until you can go on.”
“What, and not be there for Avigail's wedding on the third day?” I laughed. “Do you think I won't be there for that? Surely you know all about it—.”
“I know that I've never seen you as you are now,” she said. “If it isn't fever, what is it, Brother? Come, stay with me.”
“I'm hungry, Salome. But listen. I go on an errand. And I take these men with me, these men who've come here with me. . . .” I hesitated, then, “I have one night to spend here only before we leave for the wedding and I go to find the toll collector. I'll dine with him tonight under his roof. This cannot wait.”
“The toll collector!” John bar Zebedee was immediately agitated.