Pure Fiction…

Pathetic souls! Their balled fists were but nubs; some grotesque fleshly hammer that was once a hand, now useless. My belt bulged with coins, a fistful would do the lepers well; just a token for their suffering but it would buy a lamb and herbs and wine.

The dust had gathered in the socket of my eye, a muddy crystal, a painful prick. I pawed at the miniscule stone with my index finger until I managed to roll it down my cheek and brush it away with my hand. The road had been dusty, hot; the sun oppressive, forcing its way through my tunic, my arms radiated like burning logs on a campfire.

I’m certain there are more, farther down the road; more lepers, more blind beggars, more miserable men whose legs hang like twisted grape vines in a tortured vineyard. I must meet them; I must. That’s how it began.

That conversation, that singular conversation had revealed more of me to me than I’d ever known about me. Now it lingers like gangrene, spreading, eating me alive.

I wish I’d never met the man, maybe.

That first day, I thought, if I just walk far enough the weight of the words would bubble out of me with each drop of sweat seeping out of my pores. But I couldn’t walk far enough, long enough, and the thoughts remained.

Give. The word traveled with me, always a companion, for days, then weeks, now it’s been months, or maybe a year, or maybe longer, I don’t know, I can’t remember.

Markets crammed with thousands of eyes, each one a potential recipient and orphans everywhere; potential there also.

It took me days before I decided it was worth doing; what he had demanded. Somewhere deep down my conscience roared, bellowing like a goat with the knife at its throat waiting to be slaughtered in the temple.

I’ve done it all, everything, everything I was supposed to, everything I knew to do, everything required of me, the Commandments. Why wouldn’t the roar leave me? It silently resonated with his voice, they agreed; against my will and want, they agreed.

The second was a widow; mangy. She sat at the entrance of the market, never looking up; blown sand lay across her shoulders and head covering, she had to have tasted the grit in her parched mouth, I was tasting it in mine. My first thought was a cup of water, but how would I have looked doing that? I had a reputation, I was above that, above stooping. I had never stooped, not to a woman.

The first coin danced in her cup with conspicuous noise, the marketplace turned, heads swiveled with wishful curiosity. The second coin kissed the first and the two caused more necks to crane. Then a handful and a second; it was audacious and the crowd knew it.

I never looked back, just kicked dust, and I felt like something died in me that moment. Something died that would never come to life again. Was that what he was talking about? Was it the beginning of all?

I couldn’t breathe; I felt as though the life was being sucked out of me like a jackal sucking the marrow from the bone of a hare. I wept at my loss.

It was a small basket of pomegranates, five or six. The man’s fingernails, caked with crud, extended the two small coins to the merchant, but I intercepted them. My hand wrapped around his and I curled his fingers into a fist that clutched his own coins and caused his nails to plant divots into the palm of his hand. He recoiled slightly; the merchant took a defensive posture, ready to retaliate, thinking I was leading his buyer away. The merchant’s brow furrowed, the leathery skin on his forehead folded together between his eyes like a rug stubbed by a toe.

“Allow me!”

Neither man understood; the buyer confounded, the merchant perplexed. I held two of my own coins between my thumb and fingers; fanned them out until Caesar’s image peeked above my knuckle. “Shalom!” The coins dropped into the merchant’s hand, a blank stare etched itself across his face, and then I dropped another half-dozen coins into his palm with the dull clunk of metal on metal.

A grimy boy of seven or eight stared at our transaction. I moved on, accidently dropping a shekel at the feet of the boy. He didn’t know if it was safe to pick it up.

Days turned into weeks and weeks into months, each morning I filled my belt with new coins.

All, was all I could think about; did he really mean all?

I’ve never feared having enough for myself; I’ve always had what I needed. That wasn’t his concern though, it was the poor.

Murder? I’ve never murdered. Adultery? I’ve never even been married. Steal? I wouldn’t think of it. Our family earned everything we had. Lie? Lie…perhaps the scales were a little off once and a while; that’s what my father had taught me though. How could I not honor my father and mother? God was pleased, our prosperity proved it.

I once had enough to last me a lifetime; enough to live comfortably, enough to take my ease. That was my plan; let the peasants strive, I’d always thought.

Not now though, not since that day, not since he said all.

I seldom traveled the same road; if I did they would come to expect it, then it would be the same people over and over and over. Seventy times seven—give. So I journeyed into obscure villages, to people who didn’t know me and I didn’t know them, where there was no expectation. I once gave my entire belt to a anguished shepherd; wolves had ravaged his flock the night before, bloody carcasses lay strewn across the hillside; a ribcage, some heads, some wool, leg bones, and twisted spines; his livelihood gone. He was the needy. Treasure in heaven?

Even amidst the great commotion the poor stuck out like a city on a hill, I couldn’t miss them. I used to ignore them, they were blight, and there were too many of them—always too many of them.

Four coins here, a dozen there, seventy one time for a wilted and weathered old man, three for a mute who couldn’t ask, just a needful grunt; his tongue tied since birth. Who sinned, him or his parents?

The commotion grew louder by the hour, at first it was raucous cheering, “Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna,” then it turned into something else, something sinister.

Bleating lambs and human clamor, voices shouting over voices; moneychangers, hawkers, a man with half an arm, palm fronds as carpet, human urchins; and the crowd swelled and my last coins ached for the poor.

A few more days and it would be gone—all, as he had instructed.

Weary travelers to Jerusalem would need lodging; travelers who’d come from Samaria, Syria and beyond.

I stopped buying new tunics months ago, my sandals are thinning.

I’ve discovered there’s very little I need, he was without a place to lay his head—I knew this, many of us did, but its meaning was as hollow as a fallen sycamore rotting for a hundred years.

Abraham’s cost was four hundred shekels of silver; rest for Sarah. The one I purchased was forty shekels; ready with a behemoth stone, rough hammered, wobbly, nondescript, like any other grave.

All is spent. It was what he asked for the day I rationalized with him.

“Keep the commandments.”

I had done that, I was rich, I went away sad that day, back to Arimathea.

“Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle” he said; a camel with a great hump like a hairy mountain, and spindly legs and mammoth hooves. He knew me well.

He–a bloody mess, gaunt, ribs forced themselves to the brink of breaking through the skin, emaciated, he too was pathetic. All!

It had taken months, months of giving it all away before I recognized I had become his disciple, though a secret one. I couldn’t bring myself to public confession, the other Pharisees might have stoned me; that hellion Saul. Gamaliel might have understood; old wise sage.

I stand at Pilate’s door craving his body.