Fifth Gospel:The Odyssey of a Time Traveler in First-Century Palestine Read online

  Many different people have expressed it in many different ways. “Give me liberty or give me death,” “It is better to die on one’s feet then to live on one’s knees,” “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once,” “Live free or die.” The way the Apache says it is simply, “A man without honor is nothing.”

  I’ve digressed a bit here, but it is part of what I am, and it is one of the things I must say in this book. The world may never recognize Aloysius Lightfoot O’Brien, and it will promptly forget him as soon as he is buried, but it must never lose sight of this code. Many great men and women have lived by it and died by it, too many for us to let their struggles have been in vain.

  As I said, that was a digression. During the ride, Clarence and I spoke only of happy things. We had just finished a good laugh when Clarence suddenly grew serious. When he opened his mouth to speak, I interrupted before he could begin.

  “Remember, we’re taking a couple of days off. No talk about business.”

  “It’s not about the project, Lightfoot. It’s about the business at hand—meeting my family.”

  “I know. I look like a wino, but with me being half-Indian, my beard is just not coming in too fast. Stubble is all you’re going to see for a while. You’re the one who said I’d be less conspicuous in first century Palestine with a beard. I’m just following orders.”

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “O.K., jeans and flannel and denim and sheepskin is pretty casual attire. I know I look a little seedy, but you guys told me not to wear my uniform anymore, and that’s what I’ve always worn when I needed to dress up.”

  “Lightfoot, just be quiet a minute and let me talk. It’s Cindy, my daughter. She’s thirteen years old. I just want to prepare you. She’s dying.” My heart sank. I felt like reaching out to put a hand on his shoulder but didn’t. I tried to think of something wise and right to say to ease his pain, but I couldn’t.

  “That’s one reason why the Old Man is letting me have some time off,” he continued. “This will be her last Christmas.”

  I felt stupid. Just plain stupid. Here I had been babbling on about my beard and my clothes as if the world revolved around me. My tongue felt like a log. I switched off the radio. “I’m …” I started to say, but stopped just in time. Too many people had said that to me when I’d faced personal tragedy, and it doesn’t do any good. I know. Sometimes it can even make things worse. “How long does she have?” I finally asked.

  “Anywhere from two to nine months, depending on whether she responds to the drugs they’re giving her. Nine months tops. She has acute myeloblastic leukemia.” Keeping his eyes on the road, he blinked rapidly a couple of times and went on. “It came on very quickly. At first we thought it was some kind of flu. She had a high fever and some infection of her throat. Then she started to complain of joint pains. We called in a doctor, and he diagnosed it as acute rheumatic fever. Then …” he took a deep breath, “there was some bleeding from her mouth and nose. Then …” his voice broke, “God help us all, she’s dying, Lightfoot.” For a long time, the only sounds were the rhythmic two-stroke movements of the windshield wipers as the heavy snow continued unabated. “You see, I just wanted to prepare you. She’s very weak already. She’s in a wheel chair, and her skin is the color of this snow.”

  “Does she know?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’s she taking it?” He gave me a proud smile as he turned and looked me straight in the eye.

  “Like an Apache, Lightfoot. You’ll like her. She’s prepared. She’s not afraid. She’s more than ready to meet her Creator.”

  “Ready to meet Usen,” I said softly. “I am twenty-seven years old, and a Chiricahua warrior, and I, Aloysius Lightfoot O’Brien, am not yet ready. Yes, I think I’ll like Cindy.”

  “They why don’t you find some music on that radio and pour me another cup of Mrs. Eisenhower’s famous hot chocolate while I tell you about the time Fatty Rutherford got a harmonica wedged in his mouth?”

  14

  What with the snow and the leisurely stop for lunch, it was getting on toward 4:30 p.m. before we finally pulled into Clarence’s driveway in College Park, Maryland. College Park was then as it is today—a combination of a typical university town and a nice, quiet middle-class suburb, whose inhabitants consisted mostly of federal employees who commuted into Washington. U.S. Route 1 bisects it and also serves as its main street. Downtown College Park in December of 1958 consisted of two bookstores, two pizza parlors, a record store, two bars, a gas station, a drug store, a grocery, and a motel. I understand it hasn’t changed too much since then except for the addition of some fast food outlets, a “head” store, and a few more bars.

  Marge met us at the door, along with the four kids and two dogs. I think the dogs made more noise than Marge and the kids, but it was too close to tell. Clarence had more spontaneous love bubbling up all around him than he knew what to do with. The pandemonium gradually diminished as we got the door closed behind us and began to take off our snowdusted coats and stepped out of our cold wet shoes onto the colder linoleum kitchen floor. I couldn’t believe it. Clarence’s kids were right there, handing him his slippers, and me a pair of his loafers. They didn’t fit, but appreciative of the thought, I grinned and beared it. I really felt out of place, as must any man who steps into a Norman Rockwell painting.

  “So,” Marge beamed, “You’re the new agent Clarence told us about! Unmarried too! I’ll have to take care of that.” Clarence let out a mock groan.

  “I should have warned you, Lightfoot. Marge is an inveterate matchmaker. I’ve lost more single friends because of her than I care to count.” He turned back to her. “Now leave him alone, do you hear? He’s got a lot of very important work to do.” She smiled and nodded but I didn’t like the looks of that smile. I could hear the whir of little cogwheels. As she went to hang up our coats, I was formally introduced to the children, something that made me even more uncomfortable. Since the time I had left the reservation to go to school at the University of Arizona in 1948, I hadn’t been around any children, nor did I care to. Now I must admit that this aversion was due to fear, and the fear came through ignorance. Children were a completely unknown quantity to me. I couldn’t tell any two kids apart. They’re all short, and most have no distinguishing scars or tattoos or other similar characteristics. Younger children all have high-pitched voices regardless of sex. The worst thing is that you can never tell what’s going through a kid’s mind.

  “Lightfoot,” Clarence beamed proudly, “this is Clarence Junior; he’ll be fifteen next month. The twins, Mark and Ann; they’re eleven. And,” he said, kneeling to embrace the little figure in the wheelchair, “this is Cindy.” All the young eyes turned to me.

  “Good afternoon,” I said in a somewhat stilted fashion. “I am Aloysius Lightfoot O’Brien.”

  “Are you a real Indian?” Mark asked breathlessly.

  “I am real,” I acknowledged. “I mean, yes. I am a Chiricahua Apache.” Great, I thought, now a thousand questions …

  “Hey, you guys, Mr. O’Brien is pretty tired, and he’s going to be around for quite a while. Let’s let him rest.” I smiled at Clarence in gratitude. But he had turned back to Cindy. The poor kid looked like she had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.

  “How’s my good girl?” The love and warmth in his voice were indescribable.

  “Daddy, I’m so glad you’re home. Can you stay awhile this time?”

  “You bet, baby, I’ll be here. How’s the pain?”

  “Worse, but I feel better now that you’re here.”

  “Well, I won’t be going on any more out-of-town trips, Cindy. Mr. Eisenhower gave me a couple of weeks off, and when I start back to work, I’ll be coming home every night.” Her smile broke my heart, so I can imagine what it did to Clarence.

  “Daddy, the pain is getting real bad. Will it be much longer?” Boy, did I want to leave that room. I was an intru
der on a very private moment and a very painful one. At least for me it was. But I couldn’t think of a graceful way to exit.

  “No, honey. The doctor says not much longer.” There was a catch in his husky voice. “Not much longer.” He kissed her forehead.

  Suddenly Clarence’s wife was kneeling beside him, her face and voice bright, almost radiant. “Just think Cindy! You and Jesus will be waiting for the rest of us, but the wait with Him will seem just like a minute! Then, before you know it, we’ll all be together again. You and me and Daddy and Mark and Ann and Clarence. And we’ll all have perfect bodies. You’ll be able to run and jump and play. Your friends will be there too.” I began to run my right index finger around the inside of my shirt collar. I felt like bolting from the room.

  “I know, Mommy. It’s just that sometimes the pain is so bad, I can’t think of heaven or Jesus or you or Daddy or anything except the pain.”

  “Well, when we pray together tonight, we’ll ask that God give you the strength you need to think of Him. Then the pain won’t be so bad, will it?” Marge smiled. I was incredulous. Then Clarence staggered me all the more with his words.

  “And, in any case, Cindy remember that it won’t be long now.”

  Incredible. Even though Clarence had told me in the car that they had leveled with Cindy, I just wasn’t prepared to see it with my own eyes, not to the extent that I saw. They had not only told a thirteen-year old girl that she was going to die, but they evidently kept reminding her of it. Prior to that moment, I had believed that only Indians did things like that. I had thought that the drill for other Americans was to lie right up to the end with a child. Or even with other adults for that matter. Sure, don’t worry. The doctor says you’re going to be just fine. Why, this time next year … and so I had only been in the Jones household for a scant five minutes before I saw that they were a most unusual family.

  15

  I got integrated into that family so fast it made my head spin. Hilda, the younger of the two Elkhounds, was the first to grant me total acceptance. That was after I’d been in the house for about half an hour. I was sitting in an armchair in the living room, and Marge and the kids were getting Clarence caught up on the latest household news. Hilda had been inspecting me, her alert brown eyes looking almost human, when, evidently satisfied, she rolled over on her back so I could rub her belly. First Friend.

  By bedtime, I was astounded to find myself feeling comfortable in the house. Throughout Clarence’s holiday vacation, as we did things as a family, bonds were even more strongly formed. By the end of the first week, even Heather, the older Elkhound, had accepted me, and that was something indeed. I have never seen, before or since, a dog like Heather. They say that if you work with a dog hard enough and really know what you’re doing, you can get the dog to understand about 75 words. Heather knew about 500 words, and the Jones’ told me they hadn’t given her any special training.

  The Jones family surprised me with a birthday cake on December 18, my twenty-eighth birthday. I helped Clarence Junior do some Christmas shopping for his father. Clarence and I took the twins ice skating. I could only act as a spectator on that trip, since I was unfamiliar with ice and didn’t like it anyway, but I liked being with the kids. We all trimmed the tree together. We threaded chains of alternating popcorn and cranberries and strung them around the tree while listening to Bing Crosby’s rendition of “White Christmas” on the radio. We also hung balls and gingerbread men and aluminum icicles. Naturally, one tree light bulb was bad, and it took us a good half hour or more of trial and error to find out which one it was. There was eggnog and there were carols and there was a Christmas turkey. And, for the first time in my life, I think I caught a glimmering of what the holiday is about in the hearts of Christians—it’s a kind of euphoria that comes not only from a feeling of deliverance, but from a sense that makes peace and brotherhood seem as if they’re actually possible if the world will only reach out to grasp them.

  Cindy was as animated as any other kid about her Christmas presents, both those she received and those she gave. But particularly about the latter. You see, she painted with watercolors, and her present to each member of the family was a small five-by-seven watercolor portrait of the family, including her as she perhaps would have looked had she not been dying. In the portraits, she was standing tall and straight, and her cheeks were like roses. Each watercolor had been done separately, of course, so no two were exactly the same. We found that she’d been working on them since early October, and only her mother had known the secret. I knew, as did everyone else there, that they would treasure those amateurish little watercolors for the rest of their lives.

  16

  The six months I spent as a member of the Jones household went by quickly. I had never worked so hard in my life. Clarence and I would catch the 7:21 B & O commuter into Washington every morning after devouring a hearty breakfast prepared by Marge. From Union Station, I’d catch a bus to a CIA cover operation just off DuPont Circle. Wilros Travel Agency was a place that anyone could walk into without any suspicion being aroused. Say an embassy clerk on lunch hour, a member of a visiting trade delegation, someone on a cultural exchange program, and so forth. They could make a delivery or have a very private talk with a “travel agent,” depart with a fistful of brochures, and leave no one the wiser. If any legitimate customers walked in off the street, there were a couple of real travel agents there to accommodate them, although the service was very bad and the prices exorbitant, so few returned.

  It was in one of the small back rooms at the Wilros Travel Agency that I met Professor Kazakov, the renowned Talmudic scholar who was to teach me Aramaic. We didn’t hit it off too well at first, and things kind of went downhill from there. Here he was, a professor of international repute, who could think of about a thousand other things he’d rather have been doing than spending half of his sabbatical teaching a class of one Aramaic. He had consented to do so only after the Secretary of State had asked him to do it as a personal favor. He was being well paid for it, but, like most men of genius, money meant nothing; it was his time that was important to him. No one could replace the six months that was being taken from his life, and he never had any particularly warm feelings toward the CIA in the first place. He felt certain that he was being used to prep me for a spy mission on which I would impersonate a scholar, and that once I was caught, this infamous incident would only serve to discredit genuine Talmudic scholars the world over, leading to a new wave of oppression against Jews. When we first met in that back room, he glared at me sternly over a pair of half-spectacles.

  “Young man,” he said with the expression of one who has just bitten into a lemon, “I am here to teach you. I am here against my better judgment, and only because a man whose integrity is beyond question assures me on his honor that what you are going to do is absolutely essential if we are to survive as a nation. I will do my best, my very best, I expect you to do the same. Do we understand each other?”

  I nodded and we were off and running. Those were the very last words of English spoken in that room for the remainder of the six months. From then on, he spoke in nothing but Aramaic, and I either had to sink or swim. I understand that Berlitz uses the same method in some of their courses; it’s called “total immersion,” and believe me it’s effective. You get instant results, and progress is rapid beyond belief. But it’s mighty hard work. I left that room every day feeling like a limp, damp dishrag.

  There were basically four languages in use in Palestine during the time of Christ. Greek was used by scholars, the aristocracy, those engaged in large volumes of trade with the other lands of the eastern Mediterranean. Hebrew was used by the Jews in all religious ceremonies as well as in prayer, but most Jews didn’t use it as a base language any more than Roman Catholics in twentieth century America used Latin. Latin was spoken by the Roman occupation army as well as by Roman civil authorities, and all official matters of state were recorded in it. But Aramaic was the everyday language of the
people. Everyone in Palestine spoke Aramaic, and, quite naturally, it was the language that Jesus Christ preached in. It was used in many different dialectal forms and used extensively from ten or more centuries before Christ until about five centuries after him. Even today, a form of Aramaic is still spoken in Syria and among the “Assyrians” living in Azerbaijan. In its eastern form, it’s closely related to Syraic, and in its western form, to Hebrew.

  It was tough. Learning any language is, of course. You can have all the language aptitude in the world, but you still don’t build a vocabulary by grasping a concept. You don’t learn irregular verb forms through osmosis. Sweat and drill and more sweat. But this comes as no revelation to anyone who’s ever studied any language, so I guess none of you need me to carry on about it. You get the picture.

  Meanwhile, Clarence spent his mornings sifting through the Library of Congress multimillion volume collection for background information on first century Palestine—the customs, laws, monetary system, climate, and so forth. He spent his afternoons at the White House, acting in his capacity as head of the Presidential Secret Service detail.

  Clarence and I would meet in Union Station just in time to catch the 5:27 each evening, and supper would be waiting for us at home. Supper in the Jones house was always a lively affair, and it meant a great deal to Clarence. It was the only time in the day, he told me that you had the whole family in the same room at the same time and, consequently, the only time you had to reinforce the kids’ conception of the family as a unit, a unit that hung together no matter what because each person was important.

  First, there was the grace before meals; the family took turns leading that. Then, as the food was being passed and the meal began, Clarence made a point of asking each of the kids what had happened to them that day. What’s more, he listened. I’ve had meals with many families since, but I have never seen the readiness with which the Jones kids cut their parents in on what was going on in their lives. They confided in their parents, sought their advice, and often even followed their advice. Why? I’ve given a lot of thought to the matter, and the answer is love. Simple love.