Free When Jesus Wept by Brock Thoene, Bodie

well.
    It was unremarkable except in one sense: it was empty. No one was beside the well. No children played in the street. A pair of goats badly in need of milking bawled from a pen, but no one came to attend them. No smoke rose from cook fires or ovens.
    “David?” Martha said urgently. “David, what is it? Is it plague … or something worse?” Making the sign against the evil eye, my sensible, rational sister spit between her fingers.
    “There are no bodies and no … smell,” I said, trying to sound controlled while being far from easy in mind myself. With relief I spotted some movement beyond where the street curved around a rocky outcropping that had been too large to move. “Wait here,” I directed, kicking the mare into a lope.
    Outside a hovel, sitting on a wooden stool, was a toothless, elderly woman. In her arms was a sleeping infant. At her feet a little girl, perhaps two years old, played with stones and bits of stick.
    “What happened here?” I demanded.
    The crone shaded her eyes with a palsied, withered hand. “A penny, kind sir. Adonai blesses those who help the poor. Spare a penny?”
    “Where is everyone?”
    “Gone … all taken. Except old Bethulah. Alms?”
    “Taken … how?”
    “Taken. All of them, by the Romans.” Old Bethulah madea sweeping gesture that gathered up the missing inhabitants of her village and flung them over the hill toward the sea.
    In singsong chant, the old woman’s voice cracked as she droned over and over, like a sinister lullaby: “Taken by the Romans. Taken by the Romans …”
    A chill coursed through me. What would the Romans do if a village was accused of harboring rebels? I did not need the vision of the three crosses to provide the answer, but it came just the same.
    By now Uri had driven up with the cart. “Don’t follow until I ride ahead and check,” I ordered sternly.
    Martha refused. “David, I’m frightened. I’m not staying here without you. Either we turn back or we go forward together.”
    The road curved around the hill, approaching the sea again from the southeast. As we cleared the obstruction, the incessant sound of hammering reached me. My worst fears seemed about to be fulfilled. Would the Romans crucify an entire village: men, women, and children?
    Of course they would, if it suited their purposes. They would destroy an entire city to provide an example of Rome’s stern, irresistible justice. At the fall of Carthage, Rome had pulled down every stone, sold fifty thousand people into slavery, and slaughtered the rest.
    “Turn back,” I said, gesturing to Uri.
    The trail was too narrow to turn just then. We had to drive ahead to find a wider place.
    The hammering grew louder. The drumming clashed with the rhythm of the breakers. I heard cries and shouts and demands for water echoed by the clamor of sea birds.
    Everything I dreaded to see was about to be unveiled.
    Before us the coastal plain rolled down to the water. Halfwaybetween the hill and tide, on a level headland perched above the waves, fifty to seventy people toiled with picks and shovels … building a new road.
    Under the lazy supervision of a Roman corporal, the entire male population of the nameless village scraped and raked and leveled. Children carried stones. Women toted baskets of sand. While an Imperial surveyor checked the perfection of his engineering, a squad of ten soldiers played at dice in a hollow out of the wind. They barely glanced up as we approached.
    When I spoke to the corporal, he replied testily, “The new road will help that dump of a village grow. But do you think these wretches show any gratitude? Not a chance! All they can think about is that they only have to serve for two more days and then they go back to rotting in their hovels! No gratitude at all!”
    He could not have guessed at the strange gratitude in my own heart at that moment.

    The further we traveled toward the port of Caesarea Maritima, the more nearly completed was the Coast Road.