23

THE SUN WAS CLOSE to the horizon. Golden light gave the world a brief golden cast. Joses ambled back to Bethany, kicking stones here and there, marveling that he could look upon a hillside bedecked in colors like a celebration and see it beautiful.

“It is too big for me, Lord God,” he murmured, and sent a stone skittering to the side of the road. He was your man. At least I thought he was. I thought I believed.

The seedling died in the desert the moment his brother did.

Joses raised bleak eyes to Bethany ahead. And what will you do now, with one who could have prevented it? Punish me, if you will, for allowing the death of your prophet, because the world has not seen such a man.

He thought he had known grief when Father died. This grief was different. It was not right. Father’s death was reasonable, if sorrowful. Father was old. He was ready. But this . . . he could tear out his hair for the rage and the pain. For the helplessness. The injustice.

A sound like a small squeak caught his ear. He looked to see a grubby little shepherd boy, not much bigger than Ben, watching Joses as he passed. The child was wide-eyed. Joses looked away. Even little ones recognized a brother of Jesus. What the family had already endured was nothing compared to what they would endure.

The little boy watched them slowly amble down the road for Bethany. The shorter one looked at him with such sadness in his face. But the other one . . . he gave him such a nice smile.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. It was the first conscious thought James put together when the roaring in his ears ceased.

The woman before him honked into a wadded cloth, murmured something James could not understand, and left. He stood in the doorway, hand on the door. He did not move for he had no place to go.

“James? What is it?” Judas was behind him.

“Nathanael is dead.” There was a long silence. Then, “I will go tell Simon.”

It was all wrong. Everything. Nothing was the way it should have been. Nathanael was not supposed to die. He was to live, marry Jorah. He was to —

And what of the other? What of the one who calmed a storm? Who threw no stones?

Boulder after boulder of unreasonable grief. James laughed out loud. Unreasonable! The perfect word. He slammed the door and turned into the workroom. Utterly unreasonable. He walked about; then he came to lean against a wall. He looked at the beams in the ceiling of the workroom.

“They say you have risen,” he said to the beams. He lifted his arms and let them fall. “Congratulations. I don’t believe it. You hear me?” Rage bloomed, and he punched his fist at the ceiling. “I don’t believe it! And I don’t care! You couldn’t stay long enough to heal Nathanael? I believed that much. You couldn’t stay long enough for me to look into your eyes? It was all I wanted! All I needed, and I would have believed in you to the end!”

New rumors had come earlier in the day. That Jesus had appeared to his friend Mary Magdalene, and some of the other women among his followers. To a fellow named Cleopas, and even to some of his disciples.

“If you are alive, then hear me, Son of God,” he spat. “You appear to others, but not your own family? You care more about others than . . . but of course! ‘Who are my brothers . . . ?’”

Unreasonable. Such a perfect word. He sagged down the wall to the floor and laughed himself to tears.

Simon sat on the back porch of Devorah’s home. Was there nothing but madness to hold the family together? Jude had given him the news and walked away with those strange murmurs on his breath. Autumn trees without fruit. Doubly dead, uprooted. I can see it plain as my hand. Then he heard laughter within the home, heard it diminish to ragged weeping.

Madness and sorrow, both without measure. Were these the things to hold a family together? Simon rubbed his hands together, looking into the back portico of the home behind Devorah’s. Potted plants, a few chairs, and a table set with fruit.

So the scrappy apprentice was gone. And Joses with his new madness, that he could have prevented the death of Jesus. An hour ago he had stumbled in from wherever he had gone, blurting that it was his fault all along, that he had seen Judas Ish-Kerioth trade his inheritance for pottage. Joses seemed dully surprised when the brothers did not rise as one to crucify Joses himself. Did a plot matter now? Joses wasn’t thinking right, but who could make him see it? Jesus was gone. Nathanael was gone. What did it all matter?

Scarred ones know. Trust the one with the scars.

The words lifted as a wave through him, separate from his own thoughts. Simon stilled his hands. Then madness took him too. No one immune. No one left to keep things together. Joses with his guilt, Jude with his babblings, James —but he had changed early on —and Jorah, infected with this new hatred, and now bereft of the one person who could make her happy. Oddly, all Simon wanted to do was pay another visit to a man named Kardus. Perhaps because the madness had left him.

Simon gazed at the potted plants on the porch. “What is that like, Kardus? To have the madness leave? What is it like to have a smooth sea inside?”

He would like to sit quietly with this man Kardus, sip some good wine, and sit on that seashore. Talk about things. Talk with someone sane. The potted plants blurred before him, and he began to rub his hands again.