No Lasting Burial (28 page)

“
Shalom
,” Yeshua whispered again. “My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give. My peace I give to you.”

Peace.

Gazing out over that still water, Shimon realized for the first time that a hunger for peace could raven the body and gnaw the heart almost as sharply as a hunger for fish could chew at the belly. That hunger could waste you away, day after day after day, until you were thin and empty as a corpse, though you still walked and moaned, grasping for something you needed, though you didn’t know what it was.

Peace was more than stillness. More than sleep. More than numbness, more than the absence of conflict.

Peace was consolation and wholeness. Peace was two men breaking bread together, forgiving an old quarrel. Peace was a mother holding her infant up to its father for the first time, or a mother opening her eyes to greet her child after long illness. Peace was two lovers in each other’s arms after a long, good night. Peace was an open door and a wall torn down. Peace was a
cephas
, a rock lashed by the waves yet unmoved. A rock people could stand on.

Kfar Nahum had starved for peace.
He
had starved for peace. He looked at his brother’s face and saw the same shock of recognition there. His mother sank down to the bench and put her face in her hands. Yohanna and Yakob—their eyes were wet. Kana was gazing at the water as though he were looking at the face of God. The girl Miriam stared at Yeshua where he stood, her face bathed in awe. Bar Cheleph was looking at the others’ faces, even as Shimon was, and their gazes met.

How strange, that they were all in this one boat. The son of the town’s most renowned fisherman, his crippled brother, and the man who’d beaten him. Two women, one of them an outcast. Priests’ sons and a trained killer and a stranger who could call up out of the water the living and the dead. All here, on this little bit of wood on the surface of the sea.
Shalom
.

Yeshua stood still while the boat rocked on water older and deeper than the dreams and the yearnings and the breathing of human beings.

His voice was soft above the waves, and sad as rain before dawn.

“So little faith,” he said. “All of us have so little faith.”

He turned to them then. His face burned briefly, and glancing at his eyes was like looking into the sun. Yet Yeshua’s hands shook, and after a moment he sat slowly against the gunwale, tucked his knees against his chest, and closed his eyes. The light went out. His chest rose and fell.

The men in the boat and Rahel and Miriam of Magdala watched him sleep, their faces awed and troubled. Silent, but their silence no longer that of the fishers on the lifeless sea. And beneath their boat, the dead drifted at last in that same silence. All of them still beneath the irrevocable weight of a glory that could not be understood or named, only witnessed. So many bodies carried beneath the waves on currents no men knew, drifting to final sites of sea-burial marked and noted by none living, and whether God might remember them where they lay or whether their souls had gone to great rooms in God’s house, none could tell. Unless perhaps that one man resting now against the gunwale, that man of sorrows whose eyes burned with a fire that consumed his memory to ash and whose coming had tumbled the houses of their town and all their lives into an architecture new and unpredicted. Yet perhaps not even he could tell, not even he.

FINIS

This is the most difficult novel I have ever written, and I am not the same man I was when I began it.

As I wrote of Rahel’s illness and her healing, and of her child’s disability, my own infant daughter took ill. She was diagnosed with epilepsy and cortical blindness. She spent two of her first twelve months hospitalized for seizures.

I sat in that hospital by her bedside, in the cold of winter. It was warm enough in that carefully sterile place, but I
felt
cold. I felt angry. I felt exhausted, and determined. The wind that rattled the windows one night seemed to hurl against the hospital glass all the moaning horror and shrieking of the
shedim
.

Now my daughter is improving, and we are on the other side of that time together. Yet those nights by her bed are recent in my heart, and they hurt. I don’t know what this past year has meant, only that the love I now hold for those I call my own is fiercer than anything I have ever felt. I have learned that hope, which I had thought small and delicate like a moth in the night, can be hard as steel, a blade with which you cut your way through a press of moaning and hungry foes.

Without the help and encouragement and quiet strength of a great many people, I would have made it neither through this past year nor through this novel. I name them here, because they were with me in the boat when the sky went dark: Ever Saskya, Andrew Hallam, J. R. West, Tim and Susie Grade, Brian and Lara Hedberg, Max and Tamara Siler, Jan and Jim Buntrock, Bill and Dottie Amann, and many, so many, in my community and my workplace. My editor, Alex Carr, did not blink an eye when I told him that I was staying up nights with my daughter and that this novel would be longer and harder to write than I’d thought. Jacque Ben-Zekry and many of her friends at Amazon Publishing—including many I know only by name—were there to encourage me. My house is filled with children’s books that they sent to my family by the box, to let us know we were loved. Novelists Rob Kroese, Elisa Lorello, R. J. Keller, and Sarah Paquette sent my daughter what must surely be the world’s largest pop-up book. Don McQuinn sent me the kindest note. Kevin Kientz grieved with me, and Amit Mrig had my back. Clarence Haynes read my novel with compassion and insight, and encouraged me. Aunt Dee, who I think had rarely let a day pass in the last few years without grinning, called often with words of hope or joy. She passed away the same week that I finished this manuscript, and we miss her. And we will always remember her.

My wife Jessica went through the storm with me and I with her, both of us lashed to the gunwale and howling our defiance to wind and sky. Little River gave me her laughter and her shrieks of joy, and hours watching
Doctor Who
together. And Inara, my youngest, faced needles, medical tests, medications, and sleepless nights with a grin on her face that could cure even Shimon bar Yonah’s despair. I am a blessed man.

To all of you, my readers, I offer this book, with my thanks for casting the nets with me. Let us see what comes up. Whether scant fish to feed us or teeming millions to break the nets, in either case this life we live is our fathers’ sea, and ours. Each night we will take our boats down to that water knowing that whatever happens, the night is ours to live.

Stant Litore

August 2013

You’ve met them before, or you think you have. You have seen their faces in stained glass, or in prints of da Vinci’s
Last Supper
. You’ve heard their names recited in children’s nursery rhymes or in your fathers’ prayers—Jesus of Nazareth and his companions, who in the first century AD changed forever the way our world confronts the recurring threat of our restless and ravenous dead.

Yet if you who read this are to remember those who stood against the walking corpses—if you are to do more than remember, if you are to know what they knew, grieve as they grieved, burn with fury at what angered them, or smile at what warmed their hearts—then you must know them by their own names, not our English ones. And you must meet them in their own boat, the wood of the oars cold even through your gloves. Or on the shore with the fierce wind off the sea in your face. They are:

There they are, the first of them. And this is the first of their stories.

Entire libraries have been written about Simon Peter, but relatively little in recent centuries about his fierce brother. Yet the apostle Andrew has often been a figure of fascination. Today he is held to be the patron saint of nations as diverse as Scotland, where he brings victory in battle against overwhelming numbers; Malta, where he is associated with a rich harvest of fish; and Russia, where he is recognized for farsight and prophecy. The third century devoted an apocryphal text entirely to him:
The Acts of Andrew.
Other texts describe him, late in life, traveling among the nomadic tribes north of the Black Sea, teaching them the sharing of bread, and leading them to stand against the dead that in the later part of the first century lurched out of the Caucasus in great numbers. Overshadowed in history’s eyes by his brother Simon Peter, Andrew yet possessed courage and compassion every inch as deep as his older brother’s heady mix of loyalty and guilt. And he, no less than his brother, changed the world.

No Hebrew or Aramaic name is remembered for the apostle we know as Andrew; “Andrew” is from the Greek, and it means strong or manly. It means Vigor. In reconstructing the events of 26 AD, I have chosen to use the Hebrew word for strength and vigor—
koach
(the first syllable rhymes with
bow
, the second with the Scottish
loch
)—as Andrew’s original name, speculating that the Greek recorders may later have translated it.

Koach was of course a physically weak man, and the vigor that others saw in him was a strength of the heart. The Hebrews regarded physical illness and weakness as a sign of evil, a blighting of the People; the Greeks and the Romans saw it as the outward sign of an inner malformity of the soul. Yet even in these cultures, the man Koach was able to achieve such stature through the strength of his heart—for he did not believe that the condition of his body was an impediment to his mission—that even the Greeks who loved beauty and feared its opposite consented to call him Andreas, the Manly. In this story we encounter him as still hardly more than a youth, though even then, he was a formidable youth.

The only irremovable impediments are those we shore up within our own hearts.

Stant Litore doesn’t consider his writing a vocation; he considers it an act of survival. As a youth, he witnessed the 1992 outbreak in the rural Pacific Northwest firsthand, as he glanced up from the feeding bins one dawn to see four dead staggering toward him across the pasture, dark shapes in the morning fog. With little time to think or react, he took a machete from the barn wall and hurried to defend his father’s livestock; the experience left him shaken. After that, community was never an easy thing for him. The country people he grew up with looked askance at his later choice of college degree and his eventual graduate research on the history of humanity’s encounters with the undead, and the citizens of his college community were sometimes uneasy at the machete and rosary he carried with him at all times, and at his grim look. He did not laugh much, though on those occasions when he did the laughter came from him in wild guffaws that seemed likely to break him apart. As he became book-learned, to his own surprise he found an intense love of ancient languages, a fierce admiration for his ancestors, and a deepening religious bent. On weekends, he went rock-climbing in the cliffs without rope or harness, his fingers clinging to the mountain, in a furious need to accustom himself to the nearness of death and teach his body to meet it. A rainstorm took him once on the cliffs and he slid thirty-five feet and hit a ledge without breaking a single bone, and concluded that he was either blessed or reserved in particular for a fate far worse. Finding women beautiful and worth the trouble, he married a girl his parents considered a heathen woman, but whose eyes made him smile. She persuaded him to come down from the cliffs, and he persuaded her to wear a small covenant ring on her hand, spending what coin he had to make it one that would shine in starlight and whisper to her heart how much he prized her. Desiring to live in a place with fewer trees (though he misses the forested slopes of his youth), a place where you can scan the horizon for miles and see what is coming for you while it is still well away, he settled in Colorado with his wife and two daughters, and they live there now. The mountains nearby call to him with promises of refuge. Driven again and again to history with an intensity that burns his mind, he corresponds in his thick script for several hours each evening with scholars and archaeologists and even a few national leaders or thugs wearing national leaders’ clothes who hoard bits of forgotten past in far countries. He tells stories of his spiritual ancestors to any who will come by to listen, and he labors to set those stories to paper. Sometimes he lies awake beside his sleeping wife and listens in the night for any moan in the hills, but there is only her breathing soft and full and a mystery of beauty beside him. He keeps his machete sharp but hopes not to use it.

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