John by Niall Williams Page B

Master, because we have walked together in lands as far as Phenice and Antioch before banishment here, and because I believe the Lord watches over you and all of us? That you will live until he comes again, I am certain. And so have hoped that I, too, might see the glory. This is my first sin, I confess it: this vanity. Then the death of Prochorus has made me chastise myself. He was my friend. Why should he die? And in the darkness of my thinking a serpent has come: we all will die here, it says. We are forgotten and a plague comes now amongst us. I confess it. I have listened to the serpent, and my flesh has grown cold with the thought. I have clung to myself and wept, touched my face to find plague I dreamt would be coming. My prayers ascend not. They lie about my feet like stone birds. I despair.'
    The two men sit. Little wind blows. John's face is tilted, his eyelids closed, his grey-white eyebrows lowered. He says nothing. He is a man for whom time itself seems inconsequent. It is as though, some time past, the turning of one hour into the next became to him of no matter and the numbering of one day to another a thing no longer counted. In his darkness, time is without measure of light. When he speaks of the hour that is at hand, it may be yet an age hence. He will wait. So it is, he sits and says nothing in reply for a long time. The two old men look not unlike statues high on the smooth rock. But the Apostle is troubled. He has known Ioseph more than two score years and never felt in him the despair he hears now. What is he to say? Is he to confess his own fears? To tell his old friend that he prayed for Prochorus to be spared? That he mounted high stacks of petition on the shelf of his mind, and yielded to the death only with a weak acceptance of the mystery of the Lord's way? There would be no consolation in this. He cannot tell his own thoughts. Instead, he holds silence, searches in himself for a voice.
    Then, loudly the Apostle says: ' "My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me. And I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand." I heard our Lord Jesus say this with my own ears, Ioseph, in Jerusalem, in the winter, in the time of the feast of the dedication. "And I give unto them eternal life." ' He reaches and finds the other's hands, holds them in his own. 'Old friend, do not despair. Grieve not for Prochorus. He was a loyal servant of our Lord and this day is in the kingdom of heaven. Neither grieve for yourself, Ioseph. For each of us the Lord has his plan. Ours is only to recognise this truth and attend him as servants a master. We wait.'
    There are curious seabirds overhead. They watch for fragments of bread, foodstuffs, fish, and cry raucous as though in torment. The sea tumbles. Sky burdened with cloud releases no light. The island seems evermore a prison.
    Then John speaks from a psalm. He speaks softly, as if testing that the words like stepping-stones will take him across water.
'When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion,
We were like them that dream.
Then was our mouth filled with laughter
And our tongue with singing.'
    He has found the psalm without looking. The words of it are inside him. It may be that in the lifetime of his preaching he is become a living book. The scriptures entire are scratched on his spirit, written with reed pen, dipped and dug into the soft red pulsing of his inner being. Inside him is a scribed record of testament. The voices of Moses, of Joshua, Ruth, Samuel, the Books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, and Job, the Psalms and Proverbs, all of these are within him, and so, too, all from the twelve chapters of Ecclesiastes to the Book of Isaiah, from the voice of Daniel to Malachi. He is living book and carries their voices and their telling like a wind ever whispering inside him.
'Turn again our captivity, O Lord
As the streams in the south.
They who sow in tears shall reap in joy.
He who goes