Free Judas by Frederick Ramsay

mother’s description, but the city lived on and the people prospered. Galilee has a way of healing its own. If things had been different, if Grandfather had not responded to an ancient yearning to be free, Sepphoris would have been my home. Now, I came as a stranger. No one had ever heard of Judas Iscariot, the grandson of Judas of the Galilee. And my mother was, at best, only a dim memory.
    ***
     
    “You must talk to Nahum the Surveyor, he will know,” the old woman said and pointed south and east.
    “Where will I find him?”
    She scowled and pointed again, back toward Nazareth. “He is working out there.”
    I looked down the road I’d just traveled on my way to the city. I saw nothing.
    “There,” she said again and shook her head, “on the hills.”
    Finally, shifting my gaze from the road, I saw three or four men on the parched hillside a mile or so away.
    “Those men?”
    “They are laying out the course for the aqueduct. It will be a good thing, the aqueduct,” she said, “water.” She peered at me with rheumy eyes. “Water,” she repeated.
    I thanked her and walked toward the workers. They were handling a series of poles. One man, Nahum, I guessed, seemed to be in charge.
    As I drew nearer, I saw him sighting along a straight bar loosely fastened to one of the poles. It had another thin bar attached to it at right angles and that one pointed to the ground. He waved his arm up and then down and then held his hand out flat. A second man, two hundred paces away, stood next to a second pole set firmly in the hard clay. As the first gesticulated, the second slid a crosspiece up and down the pole. With the last signal, he placed a mark on the pole where the crosspiece had come to rest. I looked back and saw there were a series of those poles stretching across the hillsides, back toward Amatai, and each had a similar mark on it.
    “Nahum?” I said. The man looked up from the bar.
    “I am Nahum.”
    “They told me you would be the one to talk to.”
    “Yes? Talk about what?”
    “The uprising here—eighteen years ago.”
    “I do not know any more than anyone else about that,” he said and turned back to his work.
    I pointed back toward the city. “They said, ‘talk to Nahum, he will know.’”
    He mopped his brow with the back of his hand and inspected me, one eyebrow cocked, whether being careful or suspicious, I could not tell. “And you are…?”
    “Judas. I am named for my grandfather. Perhaps you knew him.”
    “Roman legionnaires crucified the Judas I knew—over there.” He pointed toward the road I had just traveled. “Are we speaking of that Judas?”
    “He died over there?”
    He nodded.
    “I would like you to tell me about that, if it is not too much trouble.”
    Sweat trickled down my back under my tunic. He squinted at the sun and at his men, then at me.
    “It is nearly the sixth hour. We will stop then and eat a little something and rest in the shade of those olive trees. Wait for me there. I won’t be long.”
    I thanked him and walked to the grove of trees. I sat with my back against the rough bark of an old olive tree and wondered if it had once been my grandfather’s. The shade provided a welcome relief from the heat and the sun.
    ***
     
    Nahum limped toward me and collapsed in the shade. He unfolded a cloth containing his meager meal. He offered to share but I declined. He had barely enough for one.
    “So, you are the grandson of Judas of the Galilee? Except for young Menahem, I did not know his sons had sons and surely none that could be as old as you.” His eyebrows framed an unasked question.
    “I am the son of his daughter, Miriam,” I said. I stared at the dusty road in the valley where Nahum said my grandfather had been crucified.
    “Miriam? But she is dead.”
    “Perhaps now, not then. Soldiers carried her off. I am the result.”
    “Ah…yes. Well…” He waited for more. I said nothing. What purpose would be served by telling him that Judas’