within his skull, and she wondered if my brother the priest could not do something about it. The fever was consuming Father like a fire, and he did indeed scream out like a man in the midst of flames. Father shouted for cold water, but all we brought him was never enough; his skin was hot as a bed-iron to the touch, and lesions covered his face like moss upon a stone. The sores oozed and seemed to boil within his flesh, but nothing we did, no amount of water or ointments would cool or heal them; it would be best, we all agreed, just to let him die. His body was like a besieged city; every part of him was under attack, and he was rotting away. His hands and feet had withered and his eyes were crusted over and all his hair had fallen out. But, he wailed at us, I’ve never felt more alive, why don’t you all go away, I’ll thrash you all when I get up, you’ll see. He had always acted like that, and we had always feared him, but never as much as then.
Just when it seemed he would finally die and we could all get back to our own duties, a change came over Father; the fever lost its grip, his sores healed almost overnight, and his body once more was sound and uncorrupted. There were only a few purplish marks, like scratches or old scars, left on his skin, and even these were faint and certain to fade. His appetite returned and he told us old stories about his youth and his years at sea and threatened to knock our heads as he had always done. Mother was hopeful. Truly, he seemed to grow years younger and stronger with each passing day, and though he said he was too tired to get up, he appeared healthy and as capable of thrashing us as he always used to. So all but Mother left his bedside to get back to the spring planting and tending the sheep. She told us later that Father spoke then of feeling as if he were a hawk, looking down upon fields and plains from the clouds, with a desire to keep soaring until he reached his home in heaven. His speech so contented her that she fell asleep, the first time in days, and woke only when she heard her husband crying aloud in pain.
The purplish scars, she immediately saw, had spread and darkened, and he tore at his skin with his fingernails, as if trying to scratch them out. By the time we had gathered around the bed again Mother had bound his wrists with rags to the bedposts to keep him from scratching, and we watched in horror and amazement as Father moaned and the odd markings rose like welts on his flesh, forming odd symbols and signs, like ancient runes carved in rock. They circled his bared legs in a tiny, menacing, continuous line, clear as writing in a book, as precisely detailed as print, and the words, if that’s what they were, repeated themselves in a pattern and had risen halfway up his pale chest by the time I looked at them closely. They still seemed to be evolving, and hour by hour their shapes changed imperceptibly. By nightfall Father had fallen into a sleep of exhaustion, though his body still writhed in pain. In the candlelight his scarification looked even more like warnings written in an unknown script; all of us agreed that Father’s body was trying to tell us something, old sins and even older truths about himself he no doubt had never dared to tell even his wife.
By the next morning Father no longer seemed to be in pain, though he would not waken.
We unbound his wrists and my ordained brother sent for the old priest in town, who had studied Greek as well as Latin. These words were not Greek, he told us, but possibly something much older-the language, perhaps, which the first angels had used before they were cast from heaven. Mother and most of my brothers and sisters were relieved to hear this, but I remained skeptical— wouldn’t the angels be able to write our own language? The old priest left, saying he would have to consult the bishop. By this time the sentences had wound around Father’s arms toward his shoulders and they had turned a blood-red; if you touched a mark, it would smudge slightly like half-dry ink and your finger would carry a trace of blood. The sheets were moist and stained all over. But our father slept calmly as a man who had worked the fields all day, and so Mother opened the windows of the sickroom to let in air and light. She took up her scarf, which had been hanging over the mirror, and went to draw water, and the rest of her children went back to their homes as I took up guard in a chair near the bed. There was a smell like lilies and beeswax, like a church, in the room.
I was studying my face in the mirror when Father coughed in his sleep and I thought I noticed something peculiar about his reflection. To test my idea, I held a hand-mirror to his side and gasped when I saw that in his reflection I could read the script on his body, written in Father’s own quaky, unschooled hand, and every phrase read merely: Forgive me for I have sinned, over and over again, around and around his limbs and rapidly rising toward his neck.
I cried to Mother to come have a look, and she hurried in with several of her daughters in tow. They took turns holding the mirror, but they could not read, and suddenly the letters were scrambled, as if the message I thought I had seen had been meant just for me. One of the girls, who could read a little, said she was sure the message was merely WE MUST ALL FEAR GOD, though our brother the priest said later that the marks spelled out something too blasphemous to repeat. Another brother who had come in seized the mirror and whispered to me, No, you’re all wrong, it’s a smutty sea shanty Father used to sing, don’t tell Mother. Father’s body, which had been so cool and sweet-smelling for the past few days, turned fiery and loathsome once again, and the welts seemed not just to throb, but to sizzle upon his skin. They had now circled his throat and the “words” had become a thick solid line, like a scarlet necktie, and it seemed he was choking. I suppose it all lasted just a few minutes, but at the time it seemed to be taking far too long. Our brother the priest raised a crucifix and anointed his fevered body with oil and Father screamed once—a miserably faint sound, however, as if heard from the bottom of a mine-shaft— and died. There was no angelic rush of wings, no thunder or ray of sunlight, nothing of the sort of thing we’re taught to expect, just a hen squawking in the barnyard and one long last loud breaking of wind from our father’s collapsing body. When we raised his heavy body from the bed, I saw that the sheets, which had been imprinted with blood from the marks upon his back, now spelled out something so foolish, you see, so foolish and idiotic that it does not bear repeating here.
Lazarus Risen:
Little Meditations
First Meditation
Our primary consideration might be as simple as this: Perhaps he had never really been dead at all! Perhaps behind the mossy stone, within the rough-hewn tomb, a thin current of life trickled secretly deep inside his swollen, ulcerous flesh; or, to explain it otherwise, even if the fire had burnt itself out, it is possible the coals of his heart glowed so faintly one whisper from The Doctor might have blown them out—although, with enough care, enough precision, the last ember might, just might be coaxed into a flame.
This we shall never know with any certainty—though of course all outward signs of life must have been checked before he was wound in a shroud soaked in aloe and myrrh: wrists squeezed, shoulders shaken, hollow chest thumped, limbs massaged with oil and wine, and lastly something silver (if there was anything silver about—if not a mirror, at least the thick blade of a dagger) held for long minutes before his gaping, sulfurous mouth. His eyes must have already been blind, crusted over. One imagines then all the sounds he might have heard, if he was still capable of hearing: the harsh shouts for assistance, several women weeping, someone else praying in great gulping shrieks, even a child’s rasping queries soon stifled in the next room. So one wants to ask: if he was not really dead, of what was he aware? And how could he and how did he decipher and order whichever sensations made their way to him, through fog and fever, the muffled distances and clotting dusk? Could he, later, when they heaved back the stone, have been able to put into clumsy words what he felt when searing thunder shook the horizon at the foot of his sickbed, when ice gripped his brain and raced down his bone-thin arms and legs to the antipodes of his body’s frail compass?
No, it is easier to imagine him really and completely dead, and all he had known lost to him, seemingly forever.
Second
Meditation
My brother’s heart stopped somewhere between the elevator and the taxi waiting below. It could be that the swooping descent from the thirtieth floor had felt to him like being inside a cage with its top suddenly removed, setting free that which shot upward—or more likely that the jostling and dragging down the front steps and over the snow-banks, and in through the taxi door, jarred free his last hold onto life. Within the taxi, all down Boylston on the way to Beth Israel, Simon cradled my brother’s broken body like one might a fallen fledgling, held tight as he dared if he were not to snap any of his beloved’s already very porous and brittle bones. Even if he lived, Simon knew, there would be many ugly new bruises both inside and out; but Simon soon realized there was no longer any breath or heartbeat, only a terrifying limpness, a quickening chill. On a freezing day there was no heat in the taxi, or so it seemed at the time, he told me later. Outside the taxi the falling snow already lay thick on the ground, so there was a strange silence to the Boston traffic, and a deeper silence than he’d ever known in the