The Partner Who Changed at a Rope-Dragged Grave

They tied the rope at his ankles because nobody in that street would pay for a coffin, and the two men who pulled him did not slow down for stones. The body came off a curb and turned half over, but neither man broke stride. Behind it the dust took two long lines, and because nobody swept that street a cart crossed them before evening.

Click for full size

His partner watched from the mouth of the alley where the pair of them had waited so many nights, one at the corner and one at the latch. He had expected grief, or something like it. What came instead was his stomach turning over, because the man on the end of that rope had been his own age and his own trade, and the pit at the end of the street smelled of lime.

He went home and did not go out that night. When the old knock came at his shutter he lay still until it stopped, and when it came again a week later he lay still again. Before the year turned he carried a stolen cloak back to the house he had taken it from, and although the door was shut in his face he left the bundle on the step anyway. He never touched the thin iron again.

Both Souls Went Up

The dead thief did not stay under the lime. The wicked do not slide off into some private hole at the first breath after death; righteous and wicked both rise, and he rose with the rest of that season's dead, still carrying the reflexes of a man who had always talked his way out of a room.

Above, the souls of the righteous were being set into a treasury, the way a jeweler sets stones in a locked room and knows every one of them by weight. Avigail had put the thing plainly to David once, on the road, with her loaves and her wineskins still strapped to the donkeys behind her while she argued for the lives of her household. May the soul of my lord be bound in the bond of life. Bound, she said. Tied to something that does not let go.

Then she had said the other half of it, and the other half was his. May He sling out the souls of your enemies from the hollow of a sling. No shelf, no weighing, no name written down. The stone leaves the pouch, and the hand that threw it does not stay to watch where it comes down.

He came down among the wicked, where the heat had no wind in it and nobody turned to look at him, since a new arrival there was worth nothing to anyone.

We Stole Together

He had no way to count the years after that, though years went by on the other side of the wall. Then the light over there moved, the way light moves when a gate has been opened for somebody, and he heard a walk he knew. His partner. Grayer, slower, whole, going in.

He shouted across the gap. "We were partners! We stole together, we schemed together! How is he with the righteous and I am not?"

The answer came back with nothing soft in it. "Fool. Your death was repulsive. No coffin. They dragged you to your grave on ropes. Your friend stood in the road and watched the end of you, and he could not keep it down, so he swore off the trade before the week was out. He turned while there was still breath in him. You had the same road under your feet. You did not take it."

The arithmetic came to him while they were still talking, and it was worse than the sentence. His own body had done the work. The maggot spread under him and the worms that covered him had been the whole sermon, and every word of it had been preached over a man who could not hear it. He had been the lesson. He had never once been the student.

Let Me Go Back

So he begged for a year, and when that got no answer he begged for a month. Let him go down and pull straight what he had warped, he said, and afterward they could put him back wherever they liked.

The refusal came in kitchen language, because heaven argues like a householder when it wants to be understood. "This world is the day before Shabbat, and where you are standing is Shabbat itself. A man who cooks nothing on Friday, what does he eat on Saturday? That world is dry land and this one is open sea. A man who loads no bread on the shore starves out on the water. That world is a settled place with markets in it, and this one is wilderness, and whoever bought nothing in the settlement dies in the sand."

He had been given a whole Friday. He had spent it on other people's latches.

What is warped can be pulled straight while a body still breathes, and what is missing can still be made up. After that the warp sets. He had heard the verse read a hundred times in the street without ever once thinking it had his name in it.

He Asked Only to Look

Then he asked for something smaller. Not to return. Only to see his friend's glory, one look across at the man he had split coin with on a low wall for years. That was refused too, because the gate of the Lord is the gate the righteous walk through, and the wicked do not get to stand in the doorway and watch them go.

He tore his clothes at the neck and kept tearing until there was nothing left worth tearing. He pulled hair out of his head with both hands and then looked at what had come away in them. Then he set his teeth into his own arm and bit down, and there was nothing else there to eat.