Word: hamer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Judas followed him, for lack of anywhere else to go. He lay down just inside Hamer's door with the chill spring air all down his legs, but he slept no more than a few brief spasms of sweet shallow dreaming and a few high yips at the ends of nightmares...
...yips would wake Hamer, and he'd say, "You're safe. Now go on and sleep...
...excruciating instant of dawn, when he heard Hamer's wife say "No" but yield all the same to Hamer's body and start breathing fast, Judas rose in deep silence, tied on his sandals and left for good. He knew his destination...
...Where Hamer had told him Jesus was born, there'd been a dead tree--a bare black snag above the cave. Judas had gripped it, even then, and chinned himself once; it was still firmly anchored. So just as the sun broke free of the hills and swept the fringes of Bethlehem, Judas Iscariot reached the tree again...
...grabbed a stout piece of rope from Hamer's, and he set straight to work. Throwing the rope up and over the strong limb, he started trying to recall the right knot--he mustn't fail at this too. But with all his years of studying scripture, he'd lost the knotting skills of his childhood on his father's scratch farm (Judas was the only one of the Twelve from outside the fishing villages of Galilee...