pay the ferryman who brought souls across the river that separated the living from the dead.”
“This was in some dead guy’s mouth?” Tyler said. “ Cool.” He stretched out the word, like a fascinated gasp. He looked at both sides again, then unsnapped the lid of his utility case and dropped it in. He smiled at Jagger. “Thanks.”
Tyler gripped Jagger’s hand again, and they started down a gradual slope of wide steps that arced around a curved wall. When they descended the last step, they were standing behind the basilica, where they’d attended services that morning and Jagger had prayed for the first time in sixteen months. Across the walkway, an eight- foot-tall round wall of rough stones and sloppy mortar protruded from another chapel and acted like a giant planter. Sprouting from the top was an enormous bush, billowing up six feet and cascading down like a fountain. It hung over the walkway, within touching distance of daytime tourists who’d stripped the leaves off the last foot of its stems. Its official name was Rubus sanctus — Holy Bramble. The monks believed this was the actual burning bush through which God had spoken to Moses, still alive and flourishing. Centuries past, a chapel had been built around it, but lack of sunlight had distressed the bush, so it was moved a dozen feet to its current location.
Jagger started toward it, but Tyler held him back.
“Wait,” the boy said. He sat on the bottom step, put his flashlight into the utility case, and tugged off a sneaker. “It’s holy ground. God told Moses to take off his sandals.” He stripped away his sock and started on the other sneaker.
“We’re not Mo-” Jagger began, then sighed and sat beside Tyler to unlace his boots. Before the first one was off, Tyler was barefoot and standing, scrunching his toes on the stone ground.
“Do you think God was really in that bush?” he said, eyeing the scraggly bramble.
“ In the bush or was the bush, I don’t know,” Jagger said. “But yes, I believe the story.”
“Why do so many people come here? You know, to see it and go up the mountain too?”
“Like you said, it’s holy.”
“When they see the mountain and the bush, they’re so… so.. ”
“Amazed?”
“No… kind of like the way you look at Mom.”
“In love?”
Tyler thought about it, nodding slowly, but not quite sure.
Jagger understood what Tyler was grasping for. Some visitors had the look of This is it? That’s all? I came all this way, spent all this money, hiked and sweated in the sun-for what, a bush, a mountain? But Tyler was thinking of the others, the ones who seemed in awe of being here, so near the bush and mountain. They seemed at peace. They prayed. They had a glow about them, as people say of pregnant women. They didn’t see a brambly shrub, a rock; they saw God.
He said, “I think it’s a mixture of a lot of things: love, respect, awe, reverence…”
“Because God was here, because he touched it?”
“That’s part of it,” Jagger said, working on his second boot.
Tyler turned to face him. “But isn’t God everywhere? Hasn’t he touched everything? That’s what you and Mom say.”
Jagger squinted up at him. “That’s true too.”
Tyler thought a moment. “Then isn’t everything holy?”
“In a way… I guess.” He wasn’t sure now was the time to launch into a theological discussion about original sin and free will.
Tyler made a firm face, coming to some conclusion.
“What?” Jagger said.
“If people love what’s holy, and people are holy, then they should be nicer to each other.”
Jagger’s heart ached for Tyler’s idealism: the beauty and simplicity of it. “I wish that was the way it worked, Ty.”
“Well, I say there’s something wrong when people treat a bush better than they treat each other.”
Jagger stretched out to grab Tyler’s hand. “And I say you’re right. You’re a smart kid, you know it?”
He was smart, but more important, he had a big heart for people. At his school in Virginia, he had stuck up for kids being bullied, but also had a way of sympathizing even with the bullies (“Maybe something’s wrong at home”) that Jagger himself had difficulty comprehending.
Jagger felt pride for his son well up in his chest. And he thought about how Tyler’s praying that morning had led to his own prayer and to this conversation. He wondered if he’d find his way back into the fold of the faithful not through his physical presence in a holy place but through his family, the two people who’d stuck by him when even he couldn’t stand himself.
[37]
Jagger stood, sweeping Tyler up with him. He carried his son to the bush and held him up so he could brush his fingers along the tips of the dangling stems. Then he set the boy down and playfully stepped on one of his bare feet with one of his own.
Tyler pulled his foot out and laid it on Jagger’s. “Do you ever wish you’d lost a leg instead of an arm?”
“You know,” Jagger said, “I do. I think it would be easier to adjust to.”
“But then you couldn’t run so good, and wouldn’t it be hard walking around the dig and chasing bad guys?”
Jagger nodded. “I guess-”
An explosion boomed through the compound-a loud concussion, repeated in diminishing echoes as it bounced off the stone walls, followed by the sharp clatter of debris striking hard surfaces, raining down on roofs and walkways.
Tyler jumped, and Jagger instinctively wrapped himself over his son. Gripping Tyler’s head with his arm, he looked around. The explosion had come from the other side of the monastery, near the front gate. The basilica blocked his view of the sky in that direction, but he imagined a cloud worthy of the sound: smoke and dust billowing up, drifting away. And then a light fog did reach him, coming from the alley between the basilica and the north wall. Smoky, with the bitter odor of burning plastic.
“Dad?”
“It’s okay, Ty. Shhh.”
Someone was coming for the stranger. He could be wrong, but he doubted it, and he didn’t have time to consider any other possibilities. He had assumed the man was holed up in the monks’ quarters in the Southwest Range Building. If so, the attackers would cross through the entire complex, passing between Jagger and Tyler’s position and their apartment; he couldn’t send Tyler there. He glanced up at the top of the wall holding the burning bush. It was too high to push the boy up there.
“Come here,” he said and led Tyler to the corner formed by the rounded wall and the chapel. “Sit.” He eased him down, then went back to the overhanging bush. He pulled a folding knife from his pocket, opened it, and clapped RoboHand’s hooks onto the handle.
The sound of running footsteps bounced off the walls. Lights came on in windows overhead. Deep in the compound, someone yelled in a foreign language.
Jagger jumped up, grabbed a handful of stems, and pulled them down. He reached high to get into the leafy branches and hacked them off the bush. He did it a second time and brought the cluster of foliage to Tyler. “Hold these in front of you,” he whispered. “Don’t let them shake. Stay here till I get back, you hear? Don’t move.”
“Dad, what’s happening?” Tyler said in a small voice. “I’m scared.”
“Everything’s going to be fine. Just stay here and don’t move.”
Someone screamed, and Tyler gasped.
Jagger reached around and squeezed the boy’s shoulder. “Shhh. Be brave, son.” He moved to the stairs where they’d left their shoes and looked back. Tyler was in shadow, but the reflected glow of the bulb that illuminated the bush caught his trembling hands and the vibrating tips of the branches. Jagger would have broken the bulb, but it was twenty feet overhead. The best camouflage was anything that broke up the shape of a human
