John by Niall Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

What will it mean for them if the Apostle is gone? Without him what will be the hope for their faith enduring there in banishment on the island? What if he is simply wandered out in the dark and fallen to death? What if he has simply succumbed to the fate of the aged or infirm? A mere human ending. It will mean nothing; his power will fade away. There will have been no sign, no miracle. They will feel cheated; they will hunger for a new master.
    'I will go the southern shore,' Matthias says. He points in the opposite direction. 'Can you walk that way?'
    Papias nods.
    'If you find him and he . . .'
    They look at each other, then away. They do not say. Matthias's impatience is clear; the old man cannot be left alone; that is what their living has become, minding him on an island. He shakes his head at the thought of it, then he is gone up on to the large rocks, where a man falling from above would be broken like a shell.
    Papias prays as he walks. He scans the upper shore, the grey sand where gulls stand curious over spews of seaweed, the smoothed salted stones. The morning is bleak and cold. His eyes are rheumy, blurring the middle distance so a blackened mound of algae, or rockweed might easily be the figure of a fallen man. Papias fists an eye, the other blinks into the bare wind. Is that him? His sandals quicken on the sand, sinking some and making jagged twists of his prints. His heart races, his prayers are stopped. He runs lamely, wound in ankle smarting, pushing back with his hands parcels of the air, wavering his head to and fro and blinking for vision. The black mound, is it the Apostle's white garment sea-spoiled? Did he fall blindly into the sea? Papias clambers on to the first of the rocks, his ankles angled over and slipping, his body pitched forward so he feels for balance with his hands. He progresses, and then stands, fists his eyes again, and sees that the mound is not a man but a large, dark fish haloed with flies.
    Momentarily, Papias sits, sighs relief. A needle of pain presses in above his left eye. The fish is of great size and without wound. It lies on one side with mouth pursed and flat incurious eye, its scales lustreless beneath the leaden sky. How it arrived so far up the rocks, what ailed it, age or disease, are not apparent to Papias. It seems to him a strange portent, and for a moment he delays on lunatic logic: the fisher gone, a fish in his place.
    He looks at it, waves away flies: is it living still? Is it beached and in need only of return to water? It may be, and is briefly puzzling for reasons he cannot shape, but Papias cannot delay. He steps back, the flies return. He scratches at his face and moves back down the rocks again, hurries limping once more along the grey sand.

    My soul longs for you.
    Each day, each night.
    I have loved you with my life, Lord.
    As the vine for water, my soul thirsts for you.
    Come, Lord.
    I have remained.
    Come for me now and take me to you.
    This is my prayer. Now, Lord.
    Now.
    Further along the shore Papias finds the footprints. The parting tide has left a virgin floor of sand, and upon it in the curved pathway of the blind is a pair of barefoot prints. Heel-heavy, stagger-stepped, by the white salt frill the prints make a route towards the water. Papias hurries after them. His head is still needled, his stomach unwell. Is a fever establishing in the caverns of his body? Warm droplets glisten on his brow, fall like stars past his eyes. The prints blur in the softened sand and sink, vanished into the shallow pools and low waters of the tide. Papias feels his heart drop. The Master is gone into the sea, he thinks, and without reason he thinks again of the large fish, the symbol of the Christian, beached on the stones, and steps himself into the first skirting wave. The water is shocking with cold. It seizes his ankles like ice manacles, burns his toe wound. He is gone, he thinks, gone; and with utter grief he scans the waves coming toward him and thinks he will