Fall Silent

by Ian Donnell Arbuckle

Table of Contents
Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

Simon knelt on the ground over Judas; the traitor’s rough robe jutted out through the cracks in Simon’s fist.

John felt the lower half of his arm go numb from the flat of a blade.

The others were moving, cold startled blood in their faces, and each falling into the posture of a shepherd who has just felt a wolf step over his body and into the fold.

Confusion never erupts; it always creeps up on you carefully and twists your neck clear around. You go in an instant from a calm face forward in the daylight to a view unfamiliar, like riding backwards in a car, and everything is black, as though you’re walking on the cusp of night. Your own feet brought you here, but you can’t see the proof in the prints. You are just like two young parents, hot and sweaty from travel, lifting the blanket from the back of the cart and seeing that their child is gone. They panic, clutch each other’s hands much tighter than they would their own, and call out his name, and when he doesn’t answer, they turn the donkey around on a width of brown rock and settle the cart back into its old tracks. Confusion leaves them, then, for panic, but it doesn’t deign to untwist their heads or toss them up a good few steps to make up for letting the night overtake them.

The garden, swirling in a sudden growth of color and unease, was grown neither for nor in peace. The disciples, to a man, began to scream.

Jesus moved, but he didn’t know which part of him was leading. Flesh went bronze and silver, flashing between torch- and moonlight, and a riot of limbs pushed him away from any brief goals. He bent once over Judas and heard someone yell, “No!” He ran to help Bartholomew stand off against a Roman and slipped on the dewy grass. As he struggled to his feet, someone’s arm snaked around his neck and pulled him off balance. A roar burst through him, seeming to come from all muscles — it was a cry to sink ships, to murder schools of fish, and clear the merchants from the temple. It did no good. The light in the clearing faded from the constant angry yellow of the torches to the pure, impenetrable gray of the moon, a light which hides blemishes and softens sound.

The hand around Jesus’ neck loosened, and all other sound fell away in turn. “I did it,” said Judas.

The traitor turned away from Jesus and leaned against a tree; he looked like a stump. “I gave them Simon,” he said.

Jesus opened his mouth to speak. Judas fell to his knees and clutched at his teacher’s robe.

“I couldn’t do it, Jesus. I couldn’t let them take you. Do you know what they will do? Have you seen?”

Jesus’ silence might have slain the birds overhead, or the deer in the forest. “They took Peter,” he finally said. It would have been wrong to feel relieved. It would have meant that Jesus was taking delight in the misfortune of one of his closest friends. So, he did not feel relieved; he felt a pleasantly cool breeze on his face and an insistent fatigue. He sat on the wet grass right where he stood; hot needles pricked the inside of his nose, his throat swelled and, as Judas sat down next to him, he wept.

When his teacher’s sobs had gone quiet, Judas said, “I did it.”

Jesus said, “Yes, you did.”

Judas said, “Only I could.”

Jesus said, “No, Judas. Anyone could have done what you did. Anyone else would have.”

It may not have been true, but it stung just the same. After a while, Judas rose to his feet. He stretched, faking ease. The silver pieces he had been paid made a gentle sound in his pouch. Grimacing, he pulled out a handful and tossed them at Jesus’ crossed feet.

“I did it for you, master.”

Then, hearing nothing in reply, he set off down the path, trying to keep the remaining coins from clinking too loudly.

* * *

The guards had Simon bound at the wrists. He was forced to the ground, bashing his knees on the packed dirt floor. Torches tossed and turned their heads in sconces all around, but even with their light Simon couldn’t see the faces around him. His eyes were bruised nearly shut and what thin slits remained open were clogged with water and crusts of salt.

“You are Jesus, the Galilean who calls himself the Christ?” asked a voice above him and to the left. Simon turned his head a finger’s length toward it; pain in his neck stopped him from turning further. A natural force, like gravity, pain urged his face forward again, and tilted his head slightly down.

From his right came, “You are the one whose followers call the king of the Jews.” He didn’t answer. What could he say? I am not this man; I have walked with him, I have laughed at his jokes, I have tried hard to remember each soft word he has spoken, each harsh one more so. Harsh ones, like, You will deny me three times, Simon. Soft ones, like, Be comforted, Peter; even on you the children of generations can and will have steady footholds.

“Are you sure?” Simon, the fisher whose only complications had come in the form of tangled nets, had asked.

“I’m willing to work under the assumption,” Jesus had said, grinning.

“Are you the Messiah?” asked a voice behind Simon.

The first laugh had to fight through a clenched throat; the second bubbled up behind it underneath a wad of phlegm. “All at once?” Simon said. He fell forward and couldn’t help but feel guilty for laughing, for not feeling one hair’s weight of the sound’s humor.

“Are you sure?” asked a voice above him.

“It was this one. His friend showed us,” said the younger guard. A few moments later, the other guard said, “Yes.” A rooster crowed, sounding like a louder try at Simon’s laughter. And then, “It’s almost morning. What should we do with him?”

“Take him to Pilate.”

* * *

Later, along the road from Pilate’s hall to the place of skulls, the crowd smelled rotten, like vinegar. Jesus put his hand on the shoulder of the woman in front of him and pushed her slightly to the side. She scowled at him as he slipped past. The side of the road was littered with the detritus of a festival: curled strips of thin leather torn from hair, scraps of wooden toys, dirt-caked fish bones. Jesus felt it all crunch under his sandals.

Three were being taken to the hill that day, made to carry the beams of the crosses they would hang upon. Simon was the last. Jesus tried to meet the eyes of the criminals, but neither of them could lift their chins above their shoulders. Their arms were streaked with dried blood, and one had a gash in the side of his neck that looked like a baby bird’s red mouth.

Both looked a world better than Simon. You know how his hair hung; you’ve seen it in pictures. You know the color of skin, darkened by the sun and made even darker by the red that is common to all of wounded humanity. Jesus felt as though he was looking into a mirror, a mirror that showed how things should have been.

He shoved forward and tripped over the legs of a stubborn heckler. As he did, Simon tripped on a flagstone and went down face first. The wide splintered trunk across his shoulders pinned him to the ground. Two guards leapt to lift it off of him. A centurion reached into the crowd.

“You,” he said, laying a hand on Jesus’ shoulder and lifting him into the street. “Come here.”

The guard led him to Simon’s side. By this time, the other two had managed to lift the beam from Simon’s back. Sticky blood had glued it to his rough robe; the lifting had opened scourge wounds and the near black spots of dried blood were becoming shiny with new flow.

“Bend over,” said the centurion to Jesus. He did, tilting his head to keep Simon in view. He begged, silently, for Simon to look up, to see who was taking his burden. When Simon did, Jesus wished he would look away again, but could not himself. Simon’s eyes seemed to say, Take it all the way. But there was no way Jesus could. History was rolling, now; it wasn’t a matter of changing one mind or two — they would have to change the minds of all the crowd and empire. Most of them wouldn’t care, and that would make it even harder.

The guards yanked Simon to his feet. He groaned. He limped forward. Jesus fell in behind him. When the guards were a safe distance behind, Jesus whispered, “You will be in paradise tonight.”

He thought maybe Simon hadn’t heard. Then, “Are you sure?”

Splinters dug at Jesus’ neck. He shifted his weight and let his head drop.

* * *

“Let me borrow your boat,” Jesus had said as Simon struggled to cut through an oily clog of tangled line. Simon, crouching in the shade offered by his small vessel, hadn’t been paying much attention to the noise and bustle further down the shore. He covered his eyes from the sun and looked up.

“Mister,” said Simon. “I don’t take passengers.”

“I do.” Then Jesus had laughed and shook his head. “I’m sorry; that’s a terrible metaphor. May I please use your boat? I’m going to be swamped.”

Simon peered around Jesus. Dozens of men and women were standing in a knot twenty yards back. A glance down the row of faces showed Simon the entire range of emotion in expression, from fear to wonder.

“They getting angry?”

Jesus looked over his shoulder. “No, I don’t think so. You never know. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Easier to take you out than try to fight my way home through them, I guess.” He gestured for Jesus to climb in, which he did. Simon gave a shove and leapt into the bow. “Just let me raise—”

The cross was high. Simon leaned forward to separate his back from the biting slivers of the beam. His wrists screamed; he could almost hear the blood pumping from them. He opened his eyes and blinked away involuntary tears. He could see the countryside; he could see trees and dirt and a shadow and he cared about it all. They wavered, the country and the caring. His shoulders, pulled back and pinned, couldn’t hold the weight of a wind, much less the world, without closing his lungs and suffocating him.

Jesus watched his friend wriggle like a fish on the side of the cross. Of the two other criminals, one had already died; it had been the one with the gash on his neck. He had bled to death.

The other was screaming obscenities at Simon, exhorting him first to listen, then to reason, then to blaspheme. Simon, the rock pouring its water, said nothing, and eventually the criminal gave up.

Jesus’ mother was clutching his hand in both of hers. He looked down at the top of her head, which was veiled in black. He remembered her telling him of his birth. How he hadn’t hurt her as much as she was expecting, speaking of him as she would of a lover. How the shepherds had, bemused, stood outside the barn and offered their joy wrapped in confusion.

He remembered, though only barely, the astrologers who had visited him when he was a very young boy. They had brought gifts that the family had sold on their arrival in Egypt when they fled from Herod’s scourge.

Mary felt her son’s eyes on her and turned her face up to him. Her clear blue eyes were trailing tears as she shook her head in some unstated emotion. He couldn’t tell if it was happiness or pity. Then she laughed. It was choked, yes, and quickly silenced, but it was a laugh. He pulled his hand away.

“What’s wrong? Jesus, what is wrong?”

“Do you think that somehow I am saved, woman? You disgust me; right now you disgust me. Leave me alone.”

Leave me alone, he thought, as he pushed through the crowd, determined not to see Simon’s last breath, to keep him alive in memory. In memory, forced into isolation by tongues, hands, metal, silence. It should have been me.

* * *

It was customary to burn the crosses after they had been used. The wood they chose in the first place wasn’t strong enough to last two days under the weight of the human, so the easiest disposal was into the sky as sparks and smoke.

Jesus sat on the hillside above the blaze. The heat brushed through his three year beard and dried his eyes. A couple soldiers yelled at him to move, but he ignored them, and after a while they went back to throwing the bodies of lepers on the fire. You don’t waste a good bonfire, not when it gives you the chance to be clean, or, more accurately, the chance to get rid of a little filth.

Is this how mercy has always worked? Jesus thought. Abraham gives up Isaac, only to have God spare the son’s life, and replace his sacrifice with that of a stupid animal. Is this how mercy always works. A conservation of goodness, and though you have spared my life, you have ruined what it was supposed to mean.

“Lead us,” Judas had said, and had meant with a sword, or with a hammer, or stones; whatever came to hand.

“Anyone can do that,” Jesus had replied, an idle reproach.

He sat until the fire died down. The heat had beaten back his grief, but only to a distance, not to a disappearance. It came on him again as he watched some citizens poking over the coals with long sticks, looking for pieces large enough for the home fires. He yelled, once, for them to leave the place alone, that they didn’t know what they were doing. This land was wounded, and they were further taking it apart. For the most part, they ignored him. One or two pointed. They were small, and seemed to grow smaller as the sky darkened.

There was a scrape behind and a cough. Jesus didn’t turn.

“I’ve been watching you,” a voice said. Another scrape, and the voice was closer. “I don’t know what to say.”

With a sound of diminished chaos, a dozen silver pieces landed in the dust in front of Jesus. One landed on its edge and rolled down the hill. Jesus followed it with his eyes until it disappeared in a small black puff of ash.

“That’s the rest of them,” said the voice.

“I prayed for the dust, Judas,” said Jesus. “I prayed for time to reverse, until each grain of sand became a pebble, each pebble a stone. Then, with a handful of stones.” He almost went on, but his throat was dry and, more than that, his words had left him no further in his understanding of his own resolve.

“Maybe we could buy a boat,” said Judas.