The River

John’s hand stopped above the water.

The man waiting before him had come down through the crowd and left a closed book in a travel bag above the waterline. He wore a road cloak gone pale at the shoulders and dark at the hem. Mud covered his sandals. His brothers James and Jude stood behind him in the shallows. The people made room for him without being asked, then closed behind him.

John had put farmers under that morning. A tax collector. Two soldiers who left their sword belts with a boy on the bank. He had taken each by the wrist, set one hand between the shoulders, and lowered the body into the Jordan. The work had found its rhythm before the sun cleared the reeds.

James and Jude had come to him one after the other. James went under fighting the current with both feet. Jude let the river take his weight and came up with his hair across his eyes. They moved into the shallows and waited for their brother.

Now the rhythm broke.

The current pressed brown water around John’s knees. His raised hand fell to his side.

Yeshua stepped off the mud.

The first shelf dropped under his weight. Water climbed from his shins to his thighs. His mother’s cloak spread behind him, caught the current, and pulled hard enough to turn one shoulder.

John reached out before the river could.

His hand closed around Yeshua’s forearm. Yeshua found the lower shelf with his foot and stood before him.

The bank waited.

John shook his head.

“Why have you come into the water?”

“For what you give here.”

John released his arm. “I have need to receive it from you.”

He stepped aside.

Yeshua moved with him until they stood beyond the nearest listeners. The river made small sounds against the wet wool between them.

“John.”

The wild man looked at him.

“You were given this work.”

“To make ready.”

“Then make me ready.”

John’s mouth opened. Nothing came.

Up the bank, a woman shifted a sleeping child from one hip to the other. One of the soldiers looked toward the sword belt he had left behind. Andrew stood ankle-deep at the edge with a coil of reed rope in his hands. His eyes moved from John’s empty hands to the man waiting in front of him.

Yeshua held out his wrist.

John took it.

The cloak made the first problem. Wet wool could pull a man sideways before his shoulders reached the water. John had seen it happen to old men who locked their knees and women who would not release a child until the last moment. He gathered the loose cloth and folded it across Yeshua’s chest.

The second problem ran beneath them. The winter current had cut a narrow channel beside the gravel bar. John’s rear foot found the hard rim. His forward foot tested the silt and sank to the ankle.

He drew Yeshua two steps upstream.

There the bottom held.

John placed Yeshua’s right hand across the folded cloak. He took the wrist with his left hand and set his right palm behind the shoulder blades. Yeshua let his weight come against it.

John bent one knee.

The river rose over the road dust at Yeshua’s waist. It reached the line of his ribs. His head tipped back. The crowd, the reeds, and the white noon sky narrowed against the brown surface.

John lowered him.

Water closed over Yeshua’s face.

The road cloak pulled once in the current. John shifted his rear heel against the gravel rim and held the body beneath the surface for one measured breath.

Then he brought him up.

Water broke from Yeshua’s hair and beard. He drew air and stood with both hands open at his sides.

The river ran around the four men.

This is my beloved Son. I am well pleased with him.

Yeshua lifted his face.

John’s hand remained under his arm. His fingers tightened against the wet cloth.

Behind Yeshua, James caught Jude’s wrist.

A child coughed. Andrew looked toward the child. The soldier bent to wash mud from his heel. Behind him, the line of waiting people leaned forward to see why John had stopped.

There was nothing above the river but the hard white light.

Yeshua lowered his head.

John removed his hand.

Yeshua stepped past him toward the bank.

No one moved to touch him. A woman drew her child out of his path. The tax collector who had wept in the water earlier wiped his face again and watched the Galilean pass.

Yeshua reached the bag above the waterline. He opened it only far enough to check the book. The leather cover was dry. He tied the bag shut, drew the strap over his shoulder, and wrung the lower edge of the cloak once.

John was still in the river.

James stepped toward Yeshua.

Jude kept hold of his brother’s wrist.

Yeshua looked at the road east, then at the two wet men.

Yeshua raised one hand. He looked back toward John.

James looked toward the river. John had lowered his head.

Jude released his brother’s wrist.

Yeshua took the eastward track alone.

A man at the front of the line stepped down from the mud.

John raised one palm.

“Tomorrow.”

The man stopped.

“Come back at noon.”

The people looked from John to the wet traveler securing his bag. Questions rose behind them. John stepped onto the bank, took the reed rope from Andrew, and ran it between two stakes across the entrance to the water.

Andrew held the second stake while John drove it deeper with a stone.

“Is the work finished?” Andrew asked.

John struck the stake again.

“For today.”

He gave the rope back and walked after Yeshua.

The eastward track climbed away from the ford through tamarisk and low thorn. Yeshua had gone beyond the last tents before John caught him. John came beside him breathing hard, the wet hair garment striking his legs.

“When our mothers carried us,” John said, “a messenger came to mine.”

Yeshua kept walking.

John told it without stopping. The promise made before either child had drawn breath. The visit between the women. The words his mother had kept through all her years and given him until he could repeat them without losing one.

At the first rise, Yeshua stopped.

The river lay below them. Andrew was turning the waiting people back toward the road. A woman lifted her child over the rope. The soldiers fastened their belts. John stood beside Yeshua with river mud drying white on his shins.

“Now I know,” John said.

Yeshua adjusted the strap of the bag.

John waited.

No answer came.

He reached for Yeshua’s wrist, the one he had held in the river. His fingers touched it once and fell away.

Yeshua turned east.

John stayed on the rise until the tamarisk took the road from view. Then he went down toward the river, where Andrew was coiling the rope for tomorrow.

Beyond the last thorn, Mary’s road cloak swung against Yeshua’s legs.

Water fell from its hem into the dust as he walked east.

<3EKO

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The Cousin

He heard the voice a mile before he saw the water.

It came up out of the valley on the dry wind, one voice, going on and on, the words lost at that distance but the shape of them plain even so, the shape of a man saying a thing he would die saying and knew it. Yeshua came down off the high ground toward it. The track dropped through chalk and thornscrub, switching back on itself, and at each turn the voice was louder and the air was heavier and warmer, the dry desert wind giving over to the wet green smell of a river that had cut down through rock longer than there had been a road to walk to it.

The thing in his chest that had never had a name moved as he walked, the same as it had moved when he was a boy on the ridge. He did not slow for it and did not name it. He only came down toward the place where, for the first time in his life, something out in the dark moved when it moved.

He was not the only one on the track. Others went down ahead of him and behind, a family with a loaded donkey, two young men arguing a passage of scripture line for line, an old woman who stopped often and would not be helped. They had all heard the same thing in their own countries and walked out into this dry one to stand near it. None of them spoke to the dusty traveler keeping their pace. People on the road to a holy man save their words for the holy man.

He came over the last rise and the Jordan was under him.

It was a poor river to look at, brown and slow, narrower than the lake at home, sliding between walls of cane and tamarisk with the heat shaking the air above it. But the people. They were along both banks as far as the bends, more than Nazareth held, more than he had seen gathered for anything that was not a feast, sitting in the thin shade of the cane, standing in clusters, wading to the shallows and back. Cookfires smoked at the edges of it. Children ran the mudflats. A whole ragged town of the seeking had set itself down in the wilderness around one man standing in the water.

He stood midstream, to his knees.

He was burned dark as old harness and gone to bone, the ribs showing, the arms all cord and vein, camel-hair roped at the waist with a leather strap and nothing else on him. His hair and beard had never been cut and the river had not been kind to them. He did not look like a man so much as something the wilderness had grown and then sent down to the water’s edge to say aloud what it had spent forty years telling him in the dry places.

He took them one at a time. A man would wade out to him, and he would set a hand flat between the shoulder blades and a hand on the chest and lay the man back under the brown water and hold him there a beat longer than the man expected, and bring him up streaming. Some came up weeping. Some came up only wet and stood blinking, as though they had expected a thing to happen that had not. He did not mind which. The water was his work, and the saying. What grew in a man after was between the man and the One the wild man kept pointing him past himself toward.

“You brood of vipers.”

The voice had gone to gravel from years of it, and it carried to the back of the crowd anyway. “Who warned you to run from the wrath that is coming? Then run. But bear the fruit of it. Do not stand in my river and tell me Abraham is your father. God can raise sons of Abraham out of these.” He stooped and brought up a fistful of river stones and let them fall back, one and two and three, into the current. “The axe is already at the root of the tree. Not the branch. The root. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown on the fire.”

A tax man near the front was weeping and not wiping his face. Two soldiers stood at the edge of the cane with their thumbs hooked in their belts and their heads down, like men at a graveside. One of them called out, rough, what they were supposed to do, then. The wild man told him.

The soldier nodded, slow, and that was a thing to see, a soldier taking his orders off a starving man standing in a river.

Yeshua came down the bank into the press of them and stopped at the back of it, one more sun-dark traveler with road dust to the knee, the bag on his shoulder he had carried up from Nazareth.

A woman beside him shifted to make him room without looking. A boy shoved past his legs chasing another boy. A man behind him asked him low was this the place, was this the one they had walked for, and he said yes, it was, and the man grunted and craned to see over the heads and forgot him. No one looked twice. No one ever had. He had gone through twenty-eight years as the one the talk went past, the one who took it all in and gave the least back, on the ridge and in the shop and at every rail and fire and sickbed of the road behind him, and he stood in the last hour of that now and let it be what it had always been, because it was almost over and it had been his.

He listened. It was the thing he did better than anyone on that bank, and not one of them knew it. He listened to his cousin’s ruined voice throwing out loud, in fistfuls, to a thousand strangers, the thing that had lived in silence in his own chest for as long as he could remember. The wild man had a word for it. Yeshua had never had the word. He had only ever had the thing. And around him in the heat the men and women stood with their faces open and their mouths a little apart, and some of them felt the pull under the words too, and had walked out into the desert because of it, and had no word for it either, and had come here to borrow this one’s.

The cousin worked his way along toward the near bank, taking them as he came, calling out between, his eyes going over the crowd head by head, a field he meant to harvest, missing none. The eyes came along the bank. They went over the soldiers and the weeping tax man and the families in the cane. They reached the dusty traveler standing quiet at the back of it all.

They stopped.

The voice stopped with them. Mid-word, on a breath already drawn to say the next thing, and the next thing did not come. The wild man stood midstream with the river running off his lifted hands and looked at his cousin across the heads of all those people, and the thing that had passed between the two of them once, a long time ago, when they were boys and neither of them could have told you what it was, came back across the years and the distance, grown now to the full size of the men they had become.

The crowd felt the silence before it understood it. A man who has not stopped talking since first light does not stop. The ones waiting in the water turned first. Then the ones on the bank. A thousand faces came round and followed the wild man’s stare back across themselves to the place it had caught and held, and they found nothing there to catch it. A traveler. Dust on him. A bag on his shoulder. They looked, and they looked at one another, and a low sound of not-understanding moved through them and died.

Yeshua took the bag from his shoulder. The boy’s book was in it, the one he had carried home and not opened and carried here, and he set the bag up on the bank above the waterline, where the river would not reach it, and left it closed.

He came down through the people. They moved aside to let him by without deciding to, opening for a thing they had not been told to honor and honoring it anyway, and closed again behind him. He came out of them onto the open mud at the lip of the water, and there was his cousin a few steps out in the current, waiting, the river breaking pale around his shins and running off his stopped hands.

Neither of them said anything. There was nothing that could be said in front of all these people. He had come down off the high country to take his turn in the water like the tax man and the soldiers before him, and it was his cousin’s hands that would put him under it, and the one true thing could not be said at all, only done, and it had not been done yet.

The river went on as it had since the hills first made it, sliding brown and patient past the two of them and the reeds and the thousand turned faces.

On the bank above the waterline the boy’s book sat closed in the bag where he had set it, the water a stride short of it and going no nearer.

The wild man did not move. The carpenter did not move.

And where the voice had been, the silence spread out over the water and the reeds and the turned faces, and held, and held.

✧

End of Volume Two.

This concludes The Nazarene: Far Country.

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Volume Three, Narrow Gate, begins serializing here Friday with “The River.”

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<3EKO

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