Twice Loved at Armageddon

Part XXII

Chapter Thirty-Two

   On Mount Scopus, Scott worked all night helping beleaguered villagers to dig their loved ones out of the earthquake’s rubble.  At least someone would have a chance for life every time that they saved yet one more person from death.  He couldn’t count himself more worthy of life, let alone happiness, than they.  His hopes were now lost, but he still had his life.

   That was more than some of them would have if he didn’t keep working at it.  He had worked with a foldable entrenching tool he still had with him.  Others were impressed when it became a small shovel.  This gave him a small advantage over some desperately working barehanded to save a buried spouse or child.  If he was angry, he never showed it but worked all the harder.  It was already Passover, but no one stopped during the emergency.  They kept at it.

   Morning came, and they continued to pull out survivors.  Perhaps it was a miracle for him of a sort.  No one was found dead.  When everyone was accounted for, they called a halt to digging.  They then sent up a prayer of thanksgiving to God.  Scott was the only one outside of their village to come to help out.  He was not about to tell them that he knew it was going to happen.  That perhaps God really did it.

   When they asked him if he wanted anything to eat, he declined their kind offer of their meager available food supply.  They would be a few more days recovering their buried grain.  They would use any dead animals still buried for food if still edible.  They said they would make an exception that the dead animals had to be ritually clean.  He said that he only wanted water.  He reached into his pocket and handed village elders enough silver to feed their small population for a day or so.

   He still had enough for his own needs as he walked away.  Without Farah it didn’t matter how much money he had.  After a short farewell, he made his way to the city below.  Even the temple seemed to be in despair of what had happened to Jesus the day before.

   He turned down toward the lower City of David to the same inn by the Pool of Siloam. The innkeeper had the same room available that he and Farah had shared before.  He wept more than he slept as the innkeeper woke him during the early afternoon as requested.  He thanked him and made his way back into the streets.  Market was carried on by foreign vendors because Jews would not work that day.  He remembered the times he and Farah had shopped there and all the things she made note of.  It had been a learning experience they had shared.  He enjoyed it as much as she.  Yet today he was not the sole source of melancholy.  It was everywhere.  It made him feel better just to walk and remember.

   Now and then Scott forgot his own feelings, as hard as that was to do that day.  Why think of himself today. All of humanity itself seemed in despair with the death of Jesus.  Jesus’ disciples would be in hiding for fear of reprisal on this day.  A few of them might show their faces in public.  They had fled while their Master needed them the most.  He thought of Jesus’ agony in the garden.  Scott’s own agony was nothing by comparison.  He himself never had never stopped thinking of himself first except when he helped out the villagers.

   While he still wandered the market, his revelry was interrupted by rumors of a suicide at nearby Gehenna.  In that place tradition identified as the place eternal punishment a man hanged himself under one of its trees.  He knew they were speaking of Judas Iscariot.   Since expressing his uncommon wisdom to Scott when they tended to Farah, Judas had played his dark role.  Now he was sorry.  The instrument by which evil came to Jesus had made his exit from life’s stage at this place of Biblical Infamy.  For all of Judas’s promise, he had chosen that the evil.  For all the plays and plots Scott knew of, he could say this was one in which the evil villain did not get the best lines.