Hell Can Wait

by Theodore Judson

  Maternus would rather have spoken of nearly-black roses for several more hours, when into the garden came two sorrowing women followed by two men. He recognized his mother despite her being in the youthful condition of the woman she had been before she was a wife. In the wide nose and wheat colored hair of the second woman he saw his family’s characteristic features, and knew this was the woman named Albucia, the baby sister he had also left behind. The Roman held up his hands in a defensive posture, but the two women overwhelmed his feeble efforts to hold them off and covered him with kisses and warm tears that were quickly blended with tears of his own. The next five minutes were an incoherent riot of plaintive sobs and eruptions of words that attempted to be, but were never quite, coherent sentences. “My boy, my little boy!” he heard his mother keen. His sister drew the scarf from her hair and threw back her head to give a prayer of gratitude to the sky above. Maternus retained his usual reserved mien throughout the initial assault; the image of his mother, as healthy and contented as she had been before she knew the sorrows of the frontier camps, was soon too much for him to bear, and he bawled like a child whose fingers have been accidentally slammed in a door. He and his mother and his sister wept and embraced each other until their tear ducts ran dry and their wails had been reduced to thin, wavering sighs. Once they had a chance to catch their breaths, they wept some more. Maria observed Maternus’s emotional outburst with a satisfied smile that was not unlike the expression Mr. Worthy had displayed during the acmes of his triumphs.

  “This is my husband, Medus,” Albucia told him and introduced Maternus to a smiling, nut-brown man. “He was a Greek merchant I met in Treverorum. We were married for thirty-four years, a long time in our era, when most people passed on in their forties or fifties. We had seven children and who knows how many grandchildren. All of them are here with us. You will meet them soon.”

  The Greek merchant stepped forward and embraced Maternus.

  “Your mother speaks so fondly of you,” he said. “We are grateful to finally meet you. If you need any help adjusting to your new circumstances, we are always within the sound of your voice.”

  “This is Jacob, your mother’s husband,” said Albucia, and a jovial black man stepped up to the Roman and also embraced him. Maternus was a little taken aback by this new development, and the look of consternation on the former legionnaire’s face caused Maria to laugh softly.

  “Your mother has spoken with pride about you for these many years,” Jacob explained to Maternus. “We are, I know, going to be good friends.”

  “My mother’s husband…?” said Maternus.

  Maternus looked at his mother and sister, and they looked back at him, uncertain as to why he seemed surprised. The group had reached an unexpected juncture in their meeting when none of them was confident of what they should say next. The moment felt as difficult to Maternus as being subtle had been back on earth.

  “Meeting all of you might be a bit much for his first day,” said Maria, intervening before anything untoward was said. “Maternus needs to rest now.”

  Yes, everyone agreed, they should give him a chance to rest. The four people hugged the Roman again before they filed out of the garden. Maria was not pleased with him.

  “How dare you react that way to Jacob?!” she asked, sitting beside him on the marble bench. “He is Ethiopian, a priest among his people. He has been wonderful to your mother ever since they met at a newcomers’ mixer.”

  “I did not say anything.”

  “We’re angels. We can hear what you think, exactly as Mr. Worthy can.”

  “Oh,” said Maternus, realizing she must have read his thoughts when he was eyeing her body. “I was not objecting to Jacob’s blackness. The empire was full of people of different types. As was Aurora. I was only expecting she might, you see, pick another Roman to be her celestial husband.”

  “You mean another hulking soldier who might whack her around?”

  “I never thought that,” said Maternus. “I want her to be happy, whatever she does.”

  He fell silent and looked at Maria.

  “What?” she said.

  “I was wondering … do my mother and this Jacob, do they…?”

  She forgot she intended to present a stern front and laughed at what he was thinking.

  “I told you,” she said, “in Heaven you find everything that can be good for you. So, yes, your mother and Jacob have intimate relations. All married couples here do.”

  “Will you and—”

  “— Married couples,” she repeated. “The rules governing that sort of behavior are quite strict up here. We are most certainly not married.”

  “I was under the impression you waited eighteen centuries for me,” said Maternus, more hurt by her answer than he wanted to let her know.

  “Time here is not the same as it is down below,” she explained. “Your friends Marcellus, Casio, and dear Juanita have already undergone their tests and are waiting to see you again. I took a nap when I got here and woke up to find the industrial revolution had already taken place. You need to take a nap yourself now. Mr. Worthy brought you here in the middle of the night.”

  “I am not tired,” said Maternus. “Does one even need to do that here?”

  “Sleep and the dreams it inspires are always good in Heaven, and you are about to become very tired,” she said and reached around Maternus and with the palm of her hand touched the very middle of his back, right between the shoulder blades.

  He felt an infusion of warmth coursing through his body and before he knew what was transpiring, he had drifted off. Images of laughing children, nodding flowers, and silvery streams running over shining pebbles filled his relaxed mind. Over every pleasant thing he saw Maria’s smiling face, shining like the sun over the earth, and he felt her whisper to him he should not be afraid of anything, not ever again. He dreamed he was in a small cabin surrounded by a vast field of snow that covered the structure up to its eaves. Amid that expanse of cold he felt warm under his blankets and knew it was her that was keeping him comfortable.

  He awoke, lying in a sunny villa chamber, next to the garden. He was undressed and covered with bedclothes, and his head was resting on Maria’s lap, for she had stayed with him throughout his repose.

  “My clothes,” he said.

  “I will get you some others,” she said. “I don’t care for those. You died wearing them.”

  “Did you…?”

  “Yes, I disrobed you,” she said. “Don’t worry — everything checks out. You are definitely male. Are you hungry?”

  “Should you be looking at me?” asked Maternus.

  “I’m an angel. I don’t have impure thoughts.”

  “Angels never have sexual thoughts?”

  “We have the thoughts that are good for us,” she said and blushed. “We feel what we felt on earth, desire the beneficial things we desired then. We just don’t dwell on perverse things.”

  “I see,” said Maternus and drew some hope from how red her cheeks had become and from how she avoided his gaze for a few moments. “Why am I hungry? I thought there was no want here.”

  “You still have an appetite. Satisfying it is not a problem.”

  She touched his forearm, and they were suddenly seated on a picnic blanket, high on a cliff overlooking the sea. Maternus was dressed in a green and white robe that put him in mind of the garments he had seen men wear in Mesopotamia. Around them were baskets of fruit and vegetables, as well as pitchers of sparkling water, loaves of bread, and what appeared to be a platter of roasted lamb.

  “We have meat?” he asked and reached for a piece.

  “It seems so,” she said, and slapped his hand away from the platter. “Nothing is killed here. What you call meat simply appears to us and will taste and look like what you knew when you were alive. Now, before we eat anything we have to say grace.”

  She knelt and placed her hands together. When he did not immediately do likewise, she gave him an angry glare that let the
Roman know he had better do as she wished or there would be terrible consequences.

  “Don’t think you can get away with ignoring your religious duties the way you did in Aurora,” she told him once he was beside her. “I saw how you slept through the services in the church Mr. Worthy had you attend. If ever you wish to become an angel, that stupidity will stop.”

  She taught him a simple prayer from the Psalms 92.

  “‘It is good to give thanks to the Lord,” she said, after putting her head scarf over her hair, “to sing praises to thy name, O Most High.’”

  As she prayed and he repeated what she said, Maternus could not help peeking at her supple figure.

  You must be unfit for this place, he thought. You are in the company of an angel and your primary concern is still that.”

  He again did not notice the sly smile the pious Maria had on her lips while she bowed her head and prayed.

  “Maria is an unusual name for a young woman on the northern fringe of the empire,” he said after they had begun to eat the repast.

  “I was a slave. My people came from a place far from Germania Superior.”

  “Your parents are here?”

  “Yes. And my three brothers. You will meet them soon.”

  “I do not ask this because I object to any religion,” said Maternus. “I have wondered—”

  “—If I am Jewish,” she said.

  “Will I ever be able to read your thoughts as you do mine?” he asked.

  “In time, you will become stronger, provided you keep improving. You have already lost most of your scars, except the large one on your right shoulder, which you will keep to teach you humility. You are wiser and better behaved than you once were. If you concentrate, you will find you have some telepathic powers even now. Soon you might see glimpses of the future.

  “As for my religion, we don’t have a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy in Heaven. It no longer makes any difference in this place.”

  “I did not ask for any malicious reason.”

  “I know,” she said. “You are simply curious. I don’t resent your asking. I do resent how you keep gawking at me. Can’t you think of something else for a while? I am to be as a sister to you.”

  “I could never think of you as my sister,” said Maternus, and his words might have offended her, had she truly resented his thoughts. She merely put her arms around her knees and looked onto the rolling sea, smiling in spite of her efforts to be angry with him.

  “On the day you and I met in my master’s garden, I belonged to a family who treated me nearly as well as they might a daughter,” she said in the direction of the water. “I was sure of my place in their household. They gave me my own bed and two shifts and two dresses to wear. I could be arrogant, for a slave, when the opportunity arose, such as the day I put a certain soldier in his place.”

  “You were never arrogant. Spirited is closer to the mark. I thought you so beautiful I hardly cared what you said.”

  “You have to stop telling me how lovely I am,” she said and nervously ran her hands through her long hair, then resumed hugging her knees. “I’m an angel. You’re going to be. We can’t have those sort of thoughts.”

  “I will try, for your sake, to do better,” said Maternus. “I cannot promise you much in that regard. Wait, that was a prayer for the Sabbath your recited. Is that what today is?”

  “Every day here is,” she said.

  “How did I know that? I never read the psalms.”

  “You’re being given more knowledge,” she said. “Listen, two years after we met, my family lost their crops to a drought, and I was sold to a Roman matron on a villa in the south of Gaul. I was a gardener, but she wanted me to be one of her maids, to fix her hair and administer her bath. I could never do as she wished. The bath water was inevitably too hot or too cold. I didn’t know how to use a heated iron on her hair. I held the mirror the wrong way. Then one day her son raped me. When I complained, my mistress had me chained to a post and scoured me to death with a knotted whip.”

  Maternus took hold of her hand and thought for a long time before he spoke.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I could tell you I died attempting to make a better world, one where slave girls are not abused, still, you would know I died fighting to redeem my injured pride. I hated how the toffs treated us like cattle sent to the charnel house; my reasons were no more than that. Every day in Hell I was put to death by demons, who would bring me about again moments later. I went through that, but I can tell you my greatest torture was to think of you and the insurmountable distance between us. I could tell you that, and you would know my suffering was no more than I deserved. I was a killer and an enemy to everything normal and decent. After eighteen centuries, all I can say is I wish your life had been better, and I am sorry it was not.”

  “You were never completely lost,” she said and took his hand. “You longed for justice. You cared for your friends and were capable of love. You were a victim of your times, and now you are beyond the snares you once fell into.”

  They sat holding hands and watched the ocean together. Maternus kept on thinking the same thoughts he had entertained when he watched Maria tend her garden, and she made no further objection. Minutes later, she waved her hand over the remainder of the food, causing it to vanish, then she and Maternus went for a walk along the beach, still hand in hand.

  “You’re limping,” he said upon seeing her move across the sand. “Will they make you perfect in time?”

  “They make us whole here,” she laughed, “never perfect. Only He is perfect. Making me keep my twisted foot is to teach me humility. My foot is the same as your scar.”

  She shivered in the chilly ocean air, so Maternus took off his cloak and put it around her shoulders. He thought of kissing her as he wrapped the material around her shoulders. She did lift her face to his, and he drew back at the last moment, since he was yet afraid of offending her.

  “I will wash your feet for you,” he said, unaware of where the suggestion came.

  “What?”

  “I saw it in the lands of what the Americans call the Middle East,” he said. “Washing feet is something one does — or did — to show acceptance of a stranger, not that I consider you a stranger. They do it also to show…” He cleared his throat. “…to show humility to another.”

  She smiled at him as broadly Mr. Worthy had done whenever he was especially pleased with the Roman. He thought of the angel only briefly, for there was something else in her face not even Mr. Worthy would have been capable of matching. She inhaled so deeply her frame swelled and she appeared to rise to the tips of her toes. Maria touched his forearm and they were instantaneously returned to her rose garden; she was seated on the bench, and he was at her feet, a basin and cloth next to him.

  “I see you have arranged everything,” said Maternus and picked up her right foot, her good appendage, and placed it in the palm of his hand, which it barely covered. “My mother has small feet too, I think. So much time has passed since I last saw them.” He lowered her foot into the water. “Perhaps I am only comparing them to the giant paws I saw in the army. We barely had the leather to shod some of those lads.”

  Touching her was necessarily pleasant. Sometimes her touch was overpoweringly so. This time she made him dream of clouds and soft winds bothering the treetops. Maternus had to shake his head to rouse himself or he would have drowsed off.

  “You are very powerful, in your way,” he said. “I have to be careful or you will make me too sleepy to get this done.”

  Her twisted foot was covered by a special shoe he had to unlace and remove in two parts. Her toes and her sole were nearly perfect, as it was her outside ankle that was turned nearly to the ground and the outside edge of the foot that years of walking had deformed by flattening out the flesh there and covering it with a hide of calluses. Maternus would later wonder if Mr. Worthy were not guiding his thoughts, for the sight of her ungainly foot did not repulse him but made him th
ink of the years of suffering she had known while she was mile after mile walking the foot into its present shape, and he thought as well this was something she had not revealed to anyone else.

  Because he said these things in his mind and not with his lips, she did not receive them as flattery he had planned in advance, but accepted them as sentiments he truly felt. Maria bent forward and rested the side of her face atop the Roman’s head. She put her hands on his shoulders and did not kiss him, but closed her eyes and remained in that position until he had finished washing her. Having her touch him would have been distracting were she mortal; since she was an angel he could feel her thoughts projecting themselves in among his own, and he drifted in and out of reality like a dreamer slipping in and out of a shallow sleep. He saw images from her life, and of her hideous death; the picture of a young and bearded man he somehow knew was her brother; and he saw the man named Jacob standing in front of an altar between Maria and himself; and last he saw the startlingly erotic image of two entwined bodies making love, which made him think he must be mixing his own carnal thoughts with her holy ones. He roused himself from this reverie to finish bathing her feet and wipe them dry with the cloth. Maternus started to put her shoes back on, but she told him she would go barefoot for a while.

  “Come up and sit beside me,” she said and patted his place on the marble bench.

  They sat together for a period of time that cannot be measured by earthly terms, she leaning against him with her eyes closed. He did kiss her on this occasion, which caused her thoughts to flood into him again, and once more he saw the bearded man, Jacob in front of the altar, and the two bodies vigorously making love.

  “I don’t know if you are doing this to me, or if I am becoming able to see the future,” he told her.

  “A little bit of both is happening,” said Maria. “You are becoming stronger.”

  “You have a brother named Simon,” said Maternus. “He has a beard and is a particular favorite of yours.”

  “Yes.”