“Sure,” I said.
Just then Joshua stumbled through the gate and crashed into us. We were able to catch ourselves and him before anyone fell. The Messiah was holding the little girl’s pet bunny, hugging it to his cheek with the big back feet swinging free. He was gloriously drunk. “Know what?” Josh said. “I love bunnies. They toil not, neither do they bark. Henceforth and from now on, I decree that whenever something bad happens to me, there shall be bunnies around. So it shall be written. Go ahead Biff, write it down.” He waved to me under the bunny, then turned and started back through the gate. “Where’s the friggin’ wine? I got a dry bunny over here!”
“See,” I said to Maggie, “you don’t want to miss out on that. Bunnies!”
She laughed. My favorite music.
“I’ll get word to you,” she said. “Where will you be?”
“I have no idea.”
“I’ll get word to you.”
It was midnight. The party had wound down and the disciples and I were sitting in the street outside of the house. Joshua had passed out and Bartholomew had put a small dog under his head for a pillow. Before he had left, James had made it abundantly clear that we weren’t welcome in Nazareth.
“Well?” said Philip. “I guess we can’t go back to John.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t find the camels,” Bartholomew said.
“People teased me about my yellow hair,” said Nathaniel.
“I thought you were from Cana,” I said. “Don’t you have family we can stay with?”
“Plague,” said Nathaniel.
“Plague,” we all said, nodding. It happens.
“You’ll probably be needing these,” came a voice out of the darkness. We all looked up to see a short but powerfully built man walking out of the darkness, leading our camels.
“The camels,” said Nathaniel.
“My apologies,” said the man, “my brother’s sons brought them home to us in Capernaum. I’m sorry it’s taken so long to get them back to you.”
I stood and he handed the camel’s reins to me. “They’ve been fed and watered.” He pointed to Joshua, who was snoring away on his terrier. “Does he always drink like that?”
“Only when a major prophet has been imprisoned.”
The man nodded. “I heard what he did with the wine. They say he also healed a lame man in Cana this afternoon. Is that true?”
We all nodded.
“If you have no place to stay, you can come home with me to Capernaum for a day or two. We owe you at least that for taking your camels.”
“We don’t have any money,” I said.
“Then you’ll feel right at home,” said the man. “My name is Andrew.”
And so we became six.
Chapter 26
You can travel the whole world, but there are always new things to learn. For instance, on the way to Capernaum I learned that if you hang a drunk guy over a camel and slosh him around for about four hours, then pretty much all the poisons will come out one end of him or the other.
“Someone’s going to have to wash that camel before we go into town,” said Andrew.
We were traveling along the shore of the Sea of Galilee (which wasn’t a sea at all). The moon was almost full and it reflected in the lake like a pool of quicksilver. It fell to Nathaniel to clean the camel because he was the official new guy. (Joshua hadn’t really met Andrew, and Andrew hadn’t really agreed to join us, so we couldn’t count him as the official new guy yet.) Since Nathaniel did such a fine job on the camel, we let him clean up Joshua as well. Once he had the Messiah in the water Joshua came out of his stupor long enough to slur something like: “The foxes have their holes and birds have their nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head.”
“That’s so sad,” said Nathaniel.
“Yes, it is,” I said. “Dunk him again. He still has barf on his beard.”
And so, cleansed and slung over a camel damply, Joshua did by moonlight come into Capernaum, where he would be welcomed as if it were his home.
“Out!” screeched the old woman. “Out of the house, out of town, out of Galilee for all I care, you aren’t staying here.”
It was a beautiful dawn over the lake, the sky painted with yellow and orange, gentle waves lapped against the keels of Capernaum’s fishing boats. The village was only a stone’s throw away from the water, and golden sunlight reflected off the waves onto the black stone walls of the houses, making the light appear to dance to the calls of the gulls and songbirds. The houses were built together in two big clusters, sharing common walls, with entries from every which way, and none more than one story tall. There was a small main road through the village between the two clusters of homes. Along the way were a few merchant booths, a blacksmith’s shop, and, on its own little square, a synagogue that looked as if it could contain far more worshipers than the three hundred residents of the village. But villages were thick along the shores of the lake, one running right into the next, and we guessed that perhaps the synagogue served a number of villages. There was no central square around the well as there was in most inland villages, because the people pulled their water from the lake or a spring nearby that bubbled clean chilly water into the air as high as two men.
Andrew had deposited us at his brother Peter’s house, and we had fallen asleep in the great room among the children only a few hours before Peter’s mother-in-law awoke to chase us out of the house. Joshua was holding his head with both hands as if to keep it from falling off his neck.
“I won’t have freeloaders and scalawags in my house,” the old woman shouted as she threw my satchel out after us.
“Ouch,” said Joshua, flinching from the noise.
“We’re in Capernaum, Josh,” I said. “A man named Andrew brought us here because his nephews stole our camels.”
“You said Maggie was dying,” Joshua said.
“Would you have left John if I’d told you that Maggie wanted to see you?”
“No.” He smiled dreamily. “It was good to see Maggie.” Then the smile turned to a scowl. “Alive.”
“John wouldn’t listen, Joshua. You were in the desert all last month, you didn’t see all of the soldiers, even scribes hiding in the crowd, writing down what John was saying. This was bound to happen.”
“Then you should have warned John!”
“I warned John! Every day I warned John. He didn’t listen to reason any more than you would have.”
“We have to go back to Judea. John’s followers—”
“Will become your followers. No more preparation, Josh.”
Joshua nodded, looking at the ground in front of him. “It’s time. Where are the others?”
“I’ve sent Philip and Nathaniel to Sepphoris to sell the camels. Bartholomew is sleeping in the reeds with the dogs.”
“We’re going to need more disciples,” Joshua said.
“We’re broke, Josh. We’re going to need disciples with jobs.”
An hour later we stood on the shore near where Andrew and his brother were casting nets. Peter was taller and leaner than his brother, and he had a head of gray hair wilder than even John the Baptist’s, while Andrew pushed his dark hair back and tied it with a cord so it stayed out of his face when he was in the water. They were both naked, which is how men fished the lake when they were close to the shore.
I had mixed a headache remedy for Joshua out of tree bark, and I could tell it was working, but perhaps not quite enough. I pushed Joshua toward the shore.
“I’m not ready for this. I feel terrible.”
“Ask them.”
“Andrew,” Joshua called. “Thank you for bringing us home with you. And you too, Peter.”
“Did my mother-in-law toss you out?” asked Peter. He cast his net and waited for it to settle, then dove into the lake and gathered the net in his arms. There was one tiny fish inside. He reached in and pulled it out, then tossed it back into the lake. “Grow,” he said.