Verbatim

by Laura Morefield

It was hot—the heavy heat of clay ovens.  Heat without the simplest relief of stirring air.  Worse, the heat where dust hung in the air in little puffs where feet and hooves had kicked it up.  Where it caked to sweaty feet, crawled up under robes and tallith.  Dust marrying skin, becoming a film of mud that suffocated him more than still air.

They were walking to Galilee in silence.  Had been walking since dawn had fingered their eyes awake.  It was coming on the sixth hour and there was a town in the distance.  And what looked like a well.

His companions picked up their pace without thinking, it seemed to him.  Eager for what?

To be away from his silence perhaps.  He knew to them it was a physical thing—like the heat—searing them.  Drying them up.

At first they’d tried cajoling him with comic aspersions about the Pharisees and teachers.  They puffed out cheek and stomach; spoke in ponderous, rolling voices.  Then farted, eyes wide.

He didn’t speak.  Or laugh.  Just smiled a bit and kept walking.

There was jostling then.  Peter scolded Thomas for his vulgarity, then hung back from the crowd a bit, falling into step alongside him.

“They’re wrong, you know.”  Peter looked to see if he was listening.  “The Pharisees and teachers.  They’re wrong and jealous and petty.”

He kept walking.  Peter walked, too.

“Can I do anything, Rabbi?”

He shook his head—gave Peter that much—and withdrew into his walking feet, sweating skin, the itch of his beard.  Peter squeezed his arm just above the elbow and hurried to catch up with the others.

He could hear the authoritative murmur.  The Rabbi needed quiet.  And so they were.  Quiet with an absence of conversation, a layer of silence draped like heavy muslin over their unease.  Their chagrin at heading to the hinterlands when it all had been going at last, and going so well.

Two and a half days of trudging.

He knew the pains they were taking to honor him with stillness.  He understood their confusion.  He felt their relief when they left him, Peter’s suggestion of course, beside the well in the crescent of shade while they went into town for supplies.

And then, at last, it was silent because he was alone.

He noticed the ceaseless shifting of dust, drank in the quiet turning of birds in the air.  Felt the benediction of one stray breeze over the covered well.

He was angry.  He knew that it shouldn’t have surprised him to be misunderstood, lied about, by the teachers.  It was a prophecy of all that was to come even as it was an echo of all that had come before.  It was a pebble falling in deep water.

And still, he was angry.  Peter was right.  They were jealous.  Thomas was right.  They were foolish and laughable.  What made him angry was not their failing but the snapping of his thin hope that one—just one—would be more.

So he had left.  Because they feared him and were right to fear him.  Because it was wrong that they should fear his abilities more than his truths.  They all had so much to learn still.  He did, too.

He was used to being misunderstood.  Even Mother had thought him merely disobedient when, at his mitzvah age, he stayed at the temple.  He had known the expectation that he return with his family.  He had responded instead to the greater expectation of his Father that he linger awhile at home.

But these misunderstandings were by familiars.  Not by learned men who claimed revelation, who thought to cage truth and show it off.

These misunderstandings were not deliberate.

The faint scrape of leather on stone directed his attention to the right.

There she was, carrying the dull earthen jug on her hip.  Head down.  Following the intimately known path without consciousness of her surroundings.  It showed in the slope of her shoulders under the rough robe, in the casual way she scratched her right breast.

Her head was uncovered as Samaritan women do and the mantle of glossy ringlets belied the tough edges of mouth and brow.  Ah.  She had noticed him.  Her step hitched.  Resumed.  Eyes averted, back straighter.  Hips reigned into a more dignified, more fluid gait.

He was aware of his thirst.

She came up to the well, put down her jug to wrestle the wooden lid aside.  She drew up the rope, twists glistening on its last third.  She poured water from the swollen, goat stomach into her jug and began lowering the rope.

The long pour had awakened his dusty voice.   He spoke as she lowered.  “Will you give me a drink?”

She looked at him with eyes full of the knowing of men’s needs.  She stopped the rope, cocked her head so the curls curtained aside.  Her words flowed with practiced honey.

“How can you ask me for a drink?  You are a man and I am a Samaritan.  And a woman.”

And there it was again.  Misunderstood.  As if he didn’t have the right currency in a foreign country.  His words were not kind.

“If you knew the gift of God—if you knew who asked, you would have asked him instead and he would have given you living water to drink.”

“Oh?”  The rope coursed through her hand.  “Jacob himself dug this well and watered sons and sheep here.  Are you greater than he is?  Able to give us better water?”

She was still flirting.  Her tone had moved from general interest to the specific mockery that had drawn batterers to her like locusts.

He softened.  How could she know?

“Jacob’s water will leave you thirsty again as soon as that jug is empty.  What I am offering is water that will spring up within, overflow into eternal life.  You will never be thirsty again.”

She knew what he meant now.  He felt it in the twist of her soul, mirrored in the hardening of her eye.

“Oh!  Well, give me some of that magic water, then.  I’d love to stop hauling this jug around.  I’d love to never get thirsty for water again.”

She revealed the teachers to him.  It wasn’t that she misunderstood.  It was that she understood too well—that she preferred to shade the lie rather than sear in truth.

He gave her another chance.  “Go, get your husband.”

She stopped.  No movement.  No noise of body or seduction.  She drank.

“I have no husband.”

And so he sat with her in the long afternoon as the sun sank from its zenith.  He told her what she already knew about her life but what she had hidden in the dirt.  She was amazed and he drank in her naiveté, newborn, like living water.  Which it was.

Later, John prettied up the story thinking he’d written it down verbatim.  But he misunderstood.