The Gospel of Thomas

As the child drew near, his muscles tightened and his breath became shallow.

His hands and neck began to sweat, so he took off his gloves and hat and pushed them into the pocket of his mother’s hunting jacket.

At first the child had tracked the animal by something like feeling, or premonition. He had followed his father as his father followed the game trail eastward, but the child had felt something at the back of his neck that told him his father would not find what he was looking for.

The child slowed his pace to gain distance from the man, and when he had, the child turned north and mounted the ridge and then walked along its spine until he began to see sparse droplets of blood. He walked until he heard wet, panicked breathing and until, at the edge of a dense bramble, the crisp, bright air of late autumn became leaden, and carried a ferrous reek.

The trail up the ridge turned hard right at the blackberry thicket and disappeared around a large cedar tree, but the animal itself — either by guile or terror — had crashed straight through.

The child rolled up his mother’s coat and held it closely to his chest. He thought for a moment to ask God to deliver him from the thorns but he stopped short. He had been asking God for many things lately, and didn’t know when God’s good will would give out.

The child entered the bramble and emerged out the other side and saw the Elk, a nice-sized bull, on its side, head rolling, antlers dug into the ground in panic and protest. The child gagged from the smell and from the fear he felt.  He had never seen this much blood, not even during gutting, and had never seen such an expression on anything’s face as on the face of the elk.

The child walked around behind the creature, away from its hooves and away from the blood and set the coat down. He found where the blood was pumping out of the animal’s side and knelt over it. The elk craned its neck to watch the child come, but his antlers hung up and so it just lay, snorting and staring out of one eye.

The child was too scared to speak anything soothing so he just placed his hands over the wound and felt the heat of the blood mix with his own heat until the heat of the blood stopped. The child took his hands away and ran behind a tree while the animal gained its legs again and walked off.

When the elk was gone, the boy slid his gloves back on to hide the drying blood and sat down on the trail, waiting for his father to call out. He could feel the man coming.

“Thomas?” Came a hushed whisper.

Thomas, the child, called as loud as he could.

“I’m here dad. I found where it fell, but it’s not here.”

The father came and searched the ground, and lo, the trail was cold.

///

On the third day, little Tommy Bahanan told the dead to rise, and walk.

It was a Wednesday and, after kindergarten, he had come home to find a snack of apple slices and string cheese waiting for him at the kitchen table. Halfway through the cheese his mind turned to his chosen people — the Bahananites. He remembered that on Sunday, after the elk, he had left them languishing in a quaggy limbo, and his heart raced.

He put the cheese in his pocket, so his mother wouldn’t worry, and ran to the back yard and into his sandbox, which was mostly just dirt now. His parents didn't have the money for another load of sand, but it was better this way. Thomas' father had told him how the soil around their house was full of clay, which made it good for building structures and fortifications but bad for growing things.

"You just add some water, son ..." he'd say, and then his voice would trail off, working water through the soil with his knotty fingers until it the mixture became suitable for forming. Tommy had built fortifications and staged a large swampland battle in which his army had emerged victorious, leaving them encamped that night when called to supper.

Thomas returned now to his little brown world expecting to find a swamp of emulsified muck but found instead a dry flood plain, the surface flat and cracked from evaporation. It was a killing field. The bodies of his people entombed, bent knees and crooked arms poking out of the hard dirt. He clawed at them but recoiled at the feeling of clay it under his fingernails, so Thomas grabbed the hose from the house and turned on the water and flooded the land again until the clay had softened enough for his fingers to penetrate.

He searched by touch and found the GI Joe called Snake Eyes on his back with one leg buried up to the knee and his body bent around it in an excruciating way. He plucked Snake Eyes from the ground and laid hands on him the way he'd laid hands on Sally Martin when he made her knee better, and then set the figure upright.

Thomas tended to each of his flock in turn — Gung Ho, Wild Bill, Ripcord — removing them from the soil and laying them in repose while he tended to their wounds. Cover Girl and Snow Job proved difficult.  Snow Job was completely buried, and Thomas only found him by the invisible hand of God, which guided Thomas the way God had guided him to Jami Reynolds, unconscious in a drainage culvert in the the woods past the hole in the playground fence. Cover Girl was bent backward in half and Thomas healed her the way he had helped Andy Cummins feel his hands and feet again after diving head first through the hole at the top of the jungle gym.

Andy Cummins, who had betrayed Thomas afterward, calling him a devil for healing him and a fag for touching him at all.

But unlike the schoolyard, with its hovering aides and treacherous fifth graders, no one would question Thomas’ motives here, in his kingdom. When they were healed, Thomas set his people up in defensive positions around the kingdom. Snake Eyes took point, his light machine gun aimed toward the patio and the house, vigilant against marauding Hittites, the agents of COBRA, and assholes like Andy Cummins.

By the time the last of Thomas’ small band was made whole, the child had lost the light behind the white picket cliffs that stood vertical and fence-like at the edge of his lands to the east.

The security lights came on and the door opened. A human form — backlit and angelic, — beckoned him inside.

///

The meal was sparse, a bunless patty of beef with ketchup and a three bean salad whose dressing was so vinegary that it made Thomas’ eyes water. He had devoured the patty, but took his time on the salad, hoping that, if he took long enough, the rapture would come.

His father had returned from work and walked directly to the table and begun eating without saying a word.

Thomas’ mother regarded her son. “Don’t you like the salad?” She asked.

He looked at her and smiled, “The salad’s good, mom.”

“Too much vinegar, though? I think I put too much vinegar.”

“No mom, I like it. It’s good.”

“We didn’t have any Apple Cider Vinegar and I thought it’d be alright with just regular vinegar if I used less but you don’t like it. I can tell. I don’t really like it either.”

“Mom,” Thomas said, “I like it.”

His father finally looked up from the plate: “Eat the beans, Tommy.”

Thomas looked at his father and saw in the man’s face the blankness he saw before the man screamed and when the man cried. He didn’t want to see either, so he put a forkful in his mouth and tried to keep his tongue away from it. His mother gave a smile of pride and kissed his temple as she got up to put her dish in the sink.

She returned to the table with a second beef patty for his father, who forked a piece and put it in his mouth.

“Where’d you get the meat?” The man asked. Thomas could feel the heat rise in the room.

His mother met his father’s eyes and smiled her disarming smile. “Found it in that freezer they have for the meat that’s going bad. Got a good deal.”

Thomas looked back to his father in time to see the man’s face sag at the corners of his eyes. He grabbed Thomas’ hand and reached long across the table for his wife’s as well. He looked at one and then the other and said, finally. “I’m sorry. I thought I’d gotten the thing clean. There was so much blood. I don’t know how it got away.”

Thomas’ mother smiled again and squeezed her husband’s hand, “S’alright sweety. Gives you another weekend to hunt.”

Thomas’ father smiled back at her and ran his fingers through his son’s hair. “That’s right, huh?” He said. “What do you think, Rambo? You got another early Saturday morning in ya?”

Tommy saw the joy and expectation on his father’s face and looked down at his plate. He took another forkful of three-bean salad and nodded his head, yes.

///

Thomas and his father got two more weekends to hunt. They’d gotten skunked under shifting winds that blew the scent of their humanity every which way, scaring off even the dullest game. Thomas’ father kept a spray bottle of urine from the previous season’s kill to mask their scent, but it had turned somehow, and was unusable.

The second weekend the air was calm and a light dusting of snow aided tracking. Thomas’ father found a small herd at the fringe of a clearing and took a good shot at a big old cow but the herd scattered, rather than all taking the same direction.

“You see which way she went?” Thomas’ father asked.

“I didn't know which one you were shooting at.”

The man took Thomas’ hand and trudged to where the herd had been. There wasn’t any blood at the site and the tracks shot off in all directions.

“Shoot.” The man said, and stood silent for a minute. Finally, he touched the top of Tommy’s head. “You found the thing last time. Think we oughta split up?”

“Sure,” Thomas said.

“Alright, but keep your coat on this time, so I can keep an eye on you.”

They stood looking at a chaos of tracks on the ground for a moment and then Thomas felt his father nudge him. He looked at the man and found him smiling his half-smile. “You wanna give your old man a hint?”

Thomas smiled and felt warmed by his father’s words, and then pointed in the wrong direction.

///

Thomas picked up the trail as he moved diagonally away from his father. At first he saw small dots of blood and then the dots became drizzles and eventually the flow of blood was constant.

As he moved through the brush, Thomas prayed to find the animal dead, but it wasn’t. It sat on its side in clearing of ferns and a pulse of blood ran from it’s side. Low and behind the heart, probably nicking a lung. The cow heard him coming and turned her head to look at him out of both eyes. She spooked and the blood pulsed harder, but when she tried to get up she fell and her head came to rest on the undergrowth and her hind legs kicked out.

Thomas stayed put, and as he watched the last breaths rattle from the cow, he held his hands to keep them from doing what they were meant to do.