The Shattered Vessel

The old man sits beside the road. His gaze never changes, staring beyond us, through us as if hypnotized by the ripples of heat rising from the road of rock and choking dust between us. His face is weathered, entombed in a mask made of that same dirt, his eyes, barely visible and slitted with distrust as the distance between us is consumed in the Master’s inexorable march.

And we follow.

He is in our shadow. The Master’s shadow and we behind him. Some of the younger ones in the back rustle nervously, their sandals pawing against the ground like penned donkeys. Neither the man nor the Master takes any notice though the sound is a familiar one to both. His ancient eyes, seeming only a few paces back like black slits cut into a sheer coastal cliff, now roll upward, milky and unfocused. His hands spasm unselfconsciously around a pottery vessel, broken but not so completely as to eradicate the form it once held. A cup or a vase, perhaps. A brittle clank within what remains of its base with walls high enough yet only to cast a shadow upon the contents if not hoard water from a downpour that is sure to never come.

“Alms?” he says, without emphasis, holding his purposeful shard high enough to accommodate a generous hand but close enough to guard against avarice, “Alms?”

“I have not come to bring alms.”

The man’s face contorts into an ugly fist. His body swivels impossibly inward with his frail limbs and shoulders, bent by time and neglect, assume what is clearly a more natural posture—a ragged semi-circle poorly sheltering the shattered pot and the clanking coins. A woman wanders past carrying urns filled with brackish water that drags a trail of dead fish and sewage through the air behind her, muttering something only recognizable as a prayer by the uneven staccato of hard sounds punctuating her every wheezing breath.

“I’ve neither sport nor spoils to offer you and your men, then. You’d be beating a dog for less than what it would take to feed it for a day.”

The Master’s face is unreadale though we stand just behind him, only staring without malice or pity at the man in his shadow. After a long moment, he speaks.

“Say I was to give you a coin like one you have there already. What good would it bring?”

“Five in a day,” the old man spits through a mouth filled more spaces and shards than teeth, “and I eat crumbs spilled from the mouths of slaves. Today, that needs be only yours and one more.”

“And if I were to give enough coin to double your need, what then?”

The old man’s body relaxes only slightly, producing another rattle from inside the clay as he settles it into his lap.

“Why, then, Master,” he says, “I could sleep off that meal on a pallet cooled by the Sea and shaded by palms…if but for a night.”

Again the young men shuffle behind us. Each of us, to the last man, has stood before the blind, the maimed, the unclean and spoken these words and those which will follow. Only those first called have forgotten the sting of cruelty it left in our mouths as we cultivate hope within the hopeless so that we might then crush and remold it to our purpose. These stiffen and glare, stifling the disquiet among the more newly converted.

“And if I were to give you a coin of silver instead?”

The man’s body begins to shake, passing from disbelief to rage and then bitter humor in the time it takes for his ragged smile to upend itself into a venomous grimace.

"Find another," he says, "to pelt with your imaginary silver and leave me to my miseries!”--and then, as if to reiterate his point, hoists his clay treasury defiantly into the air shouting past us, "Alms? Alms for the blind?"

The Master stands motionless and silent for a long moment, watching. Behind, some among us exchange hurried, guilty glances between each other, at the Master, at those who show no emotion at all, at the blind man launching spittle with the same, ever more desperate, cry.

"Alms? Alms for the blind?"

The Master leans forward, angling at the waist, deliberate and graceful. The old man's voice seizes up in mid-cry, his eyes suddenly bled of their defiance and transfused with fear. Flinching as the Master's face brushes his own on his downward descent. No one breathes. The sound of lamb's bleat and fowl's cry rush in to fill the vacuum of sound. The sea nearby. The scratchy wind through the palms.

"Why do you seek that which you've told me will bring you no gain?"

The man turns his head slowly until his face meets that of the Master. Dropping his money jar to the ground with a clatter, his hands convulsively fly up and grasp the Master's face. Each finger moves seemingly of its own accord, deftly tracing the outline of his jaw through his beard, his eye-sockets, his unfurrowed brow, his gentle mouth. The Master kneels before him, laying his left hand gently on the man's outstretched right arm as he steadies him with his left. Long seconds pass, his fingers, each one in turn, ceasing its motion until, his hands, for a moment, rest there, slack, and then fall, in concert, into the Master's own. His head droops. His face falls. The wind. The water lapping up on a rocky shore.

"What is your name, brother?" asks the Master.

With a voice more broken than his alms-jar, the old man replies. "I am no one from nowhere."

The Master studies his shamed face with the expression of one who surveys his crops. Then, turning his head and looking up into the shadow we are now casting across them both, he speaks to us, smiling without cruelty.

"Brothers, rejoice, for our Father has left for you, here on the side of this road, one who already has seen the kingdom which each of you seek but dare not to enter."

And, turning his head back now to the man.

"How long have you held the keys to the kingdom?"

Holding fast to the Master's hands, he looks up into the group, focusing on none.

"I-I have counted twenty-seven winters since last my eyes were whole. I've never seen the road upon which my life has so long depended," pausing before he adds, "I know nothing of your kingdom. You must be mistaken."

"How did you come to lose your sight?"

The old man's head dips again, his gaze staring deeply into his own painful and discarded past. His arms pull slightly inward, his elbows cradling towards his torso.

"A fever. A fever that should have taken me but left me trapped, instead, inside this shattered vessel."

With this, the Master closes his eyes. His lips move without sound, his hands, shaking as they knead and then caress the old man's calloused palms. This continues for what feels like an eternity until, at last, his voice rises again, one more gust amid the swirling winds.

"What was your trade before your fever?"

With a laugh quick reduced to half-coughing spasms, the old man replies, "I am a Jew made for different days, Master. I worked the land. I pulled fish from the sea. There was no artistry in me save that which feeds a man who seeks to end his hunger. So it was then, and yet I remain now but with no plow nor beast nor boat nor net to aid me."

Without warning, the Master rises to his feet, dropping the man's hands in his ascent. Turning his head, first this way, then that, the beggar clutches, palms upward at he air where mere moments before the Master had held them.

"Wait, wait! I meant no offense if you have a trade, only that I had none and am now a beggar by no one's fault of my own. Please do not abandon me in this wasteland of my regrets, Master. for I spoke of it only at your own request."

The Master laughs, his whole body shaking as the rest of us watch him. His voice fills the air and, if but for a moment, envelops the sounds of the wind, the birds, the dogs, the trees and the sea with his until it seems as if the whole world around us is laughing along with him. A single chuckle escapes me in spite of myself and spreads in spasms among the disciples.

Looking towards the city gate, the Master speaks again.

"I'm ashamed to say, dear brother, that I do have a trade as did my father before me. There is none however in being unfit to live in a world where a man's labor alone may be so easily substituted for his value."

Moving with excruciating grace from his knees to his feet where he wobbles, for a moment, with uncertainty against the unyielding wind. Then he lunges forward, his arms groping before him until at last his hands clasp onto the fabric of the Master's tunic and, comes to a sort of balance.

"Are you a magician, Master? I have sacrificed at the temple twice since my eyes went dark but I have not been granted my sight."

The Master, still smiling, if less broad, responds without pause.

"From only where we stand, I can see more people than I might count. There is a man, carrying a cage full of birds meant for slaughter. There is a woman, carrying water. There is a child, chasing after a dog who is, himself, scrambling after a scrap of cloth that been caught up in the wind and dust. Even as I see them and they see yet others who see yet others, not one among us enjoys the sight which our Father has gifted to you, along among us."

"But," speaks the old man, frustrated now nearly to tears, "Master, I have told you that I see nothing."

"And so must it be if the Kingdom is to be realized by all who dwell within it presently but behave as if stranded in some foreign land."

The old man slumps. Tears well up in his senseless holes, tracing the deep lines in his face until spilling on to the Master's tunic pulled taut by the man's clutching hands. Soon, he is sobbing and some of us sob silently with him. The Master's gaze never wavers as the man's knees buckle and, as quickly, he is kneeling before before the Master, his arms still drawn upwards until his hands finish their lazy slide down the front of the Master's tunic until only the hem remains in his dirty hands.

"I can not pay for your magic."

"Go and ply your trade among the wealthy and leave the dead to their dying."

The sun is setting and it casts a purplish haze across the sky. The wind introduces a sudden chill tinted with the smell of waves crashing upon mossy rocks somewhere in the distance. The Master's tunic, stained with dirt of this land where we have no home, whips gently in the old man's gnarled fingers.

His head inclining downwards before we had seen him move, the Master speaks.

"The hour is late and your cup is broken."

And then he looks over his shoulder at us, sixteen men, all dressed as he, shivering in the waning dusk and says nothing. We move as one, around and then past the Master until we are all around the old man, some kneeling, none speaking, but gingerly pulling him to his feet until he is brought to his unstooping height, staring without seeing directly into the Master's deep brown eyes who regards him without pity.

Taking the man's hand, the Master leans forward slightly and whispers something that is inaudible above the rising wind. The old man's hand suddenly spasms within the Master's grip but he does not pull away. He nods, almost imperceptibly and then turns his chalky eyes upon us, gazing as we watch, seeing past us as we are transfixed upon him. The Master is looking towards the city's gate.

"Judas," he calls above the wind, "how many homes are open to us in this place?"

I smile in the darkness as I call back to him, "As many as are needed, Master. As many as are needed..."

He smiles too as he begins walking towards the gate.

"Then bring our Brother and let us find a place where I might serve us a meal and speak of the Kingdom."

I put my arm around the old man. He is shivering.

"Come, Brother. Hot food awaits us all."

A moment of panic arises in his eyes as he tries to break free of my grasp. Concerned that he might fall from his efforts, the others step in and keep him aright as he bobbles away from me, his hands splayed downward and open as he feels his way towards the ground.

"Wait, my jar. I can't leave without my jar."

I kneel in the whipping dust and pick it up from the ground where it had fallen. Inside, two dull and flat stones, each roughly coin-shaped, lay in its basin. Rocks such as one might find by the sea. Looking for only a moment at the groping man, I throw it against the ground and it shatters. The old man's face freezes at the sound.

"I'm sorry, Brother," I hear myself say, "but your cup has been destroyed and its contents lost to the night."

I look towards the city gate. The Master is gone inside and, already, the younger disciples straggle after him , now talking low but quickly in pairs and groups until only the old man and I remain.

"Come, Brother," I say, putting my arm around him, "let's go enjoy a meal. We can find you a new cup come morning."

He nods and together, slowly, we begin the walk towards the city gates.