John Read Online Free Page A

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    When Papias reads it to me, it seems familiar yet strange.
    Dear Lord, remember your ancient servant. Have pity. Pages in the book of my memory fall away.
    Did the angel come to me truly?
    Did I see such vision? And then was blind?
    But Jerusalem fell. The mountain Vesuvius opened with fire. Nero's Rome burned. Such things did happen.
    And yet you did not come.
    Papias reads to me: ' "And I, John, who have heard and seen these things. And after I had heard and seen, I fell down to adore before the feet of the angel who showed me these things."'
    But now I am afflicted, Lord, and cannot remember.
    My spirit thirsts for salvation.
    John kneels in the rock chamber and confesses. Papias is gone to see what fish have been caught. The old apostle's head is bowed. The news of the death of Andrew has struck him like many blows. Though the crucifixion may have happened a long time ago and the news taken this time to travel, it is to him as though yesterday. Cut as wounds into his mind is the history of the suffering of each of the twelve. Accounts he has heard. Each of these return him to one moment on the road.
    They were passing through Phrygia and the country of Galatia when they met a traveller in purple. He was a wizened creature, humped, with ragged beard. Sun blazed upon them. 'O Christians!' he called out, his head tilted upward, his rheumy eyes aswim. 'Come, buy from me!' He had a wife and a loaded ass, gestured with a long-nailed hook hand for them to pause. The Apostle and his followers had nothing to trade. And when he discovered this, the traveller spat into the sand. 'Ye are not worth spit,' he said, and waved his wife to stop unloading the goods. 'Ye will be dust soon,' he muttered for consolation, glare-eyed, blister-cracking his lips. 'Ye're heads will roll like the son of Zebedee,' he said with undisguised glee and turned away.
    'Wait. Tell us,' John called after him.
    The traveller stopped, looked back over his hump. 'For what profit?' he asked.
    'I am a son of Zebedee,' John said and walked forward. 'Tell.'
    And for the pleasure of pain, for the tale he could carry to the towns of Phyrgia and perhaps trade upon it, the traveller turned. 'I saw myself the head of James, son of Zebedee, cut from his body by order of Herod Agrippa. I saw the blade rise, the hair pulled back, the eyes wide like moons.' He came closer. 'I heard the bone snap,' he said, clutching his hooked hand to his own throat below a blister-smile. 'The head, it rolled,' he said, and rolled his hand in a tumbling fall. 'The brown eyes stared till dust blinded them.'
    John fell to the ground and cried out. And then bowed down and scooped a handful of dust and pressed it into his mouth to keep from shouting out with sorrow. The wild lamentation that lacerated him he could not release in weeping, for the others of his followers he believed he could not show the feeling of abandonment by the Lord. Instead the wolf of grief he took inside himself and let it roam and savage freely.
    In repeated dreams after came the sight of his brother bowed before the blade the traveller told. In such dreams always John stood among the assembled witnesses; powerless, he saw James refuse to deny the Christ and his prayers growing louder even as the blade rose in the air. Forever since, though blind, he sees still; he hears the terrible crack and sees his brother's head fall away.
    Now, with news of Andrew, all such returns to him. The loss is so great as to be unutterable.
    John kneels and confesses. He kneels so long on the bare rock of the cave floor that his knees lock, and the framework of his bones entire is turned solid. First he aches, and pain is everywhere. And then, slowly, slowly, he passes beyond the condition of pain, into an inner terrain where by himself he himself is forgotten. There, these his ancient hands held together, this his bowed head with white hair, are no more present to him, and he is become instead like an element or a timeless feature