"You mean, he thinks he's, like, Jesus Christ?" Sammy asked.
"No," Weston said. "Definitely not. He thinks he's better. He's another Messiah. He thinks that... Here, is there a Bible over in that drawer?"
I opened the drawer of the nightstand between the beds and found the faux-leather Gideon Bible. I tossed it to him, and he started thumbing through it.
"I used to know my way around one of these pretty well," he said. "When Josh was a senior and I was in junior high, he got involved with a local youth ministry club, and I went with him. Our parents... Dad grew up Catholic, but then he went to Viet Nam, and he was always proud, sort of proud and mad at the same time, that he never set foot in a church again after he got back. Mom really didn't care one way or another, but when Josh and I started going sh's the one who talked to Dad and got him to be okay with it.
"After Josh went off to college, I fell away little by little. He was still strong with it, though. He joined up with some campus crusade and every time he'd come home, he'd tell me about what he'd learned and the insights he's had. He didn't just do the worship and witnessing parts; he loved thinking about the theology behind it. He never read a Bible commentary or anything, and he was proud of that. He said that anything there was to learn from the Bible, you could learn directly from the Bible and from the Holy Spirit working through you."
Weston's fingers fluttered through the onionskin paper quickly. I could see him narrowing down his search somewhere in the Gospels.
"By his second year, though, I knew he was getting a little out there. When he'd tell me what he'd figured out from the Bible, he was frustrated that people at school weren't agreeing with him and telling him he was wrong. And I could understand where they were coming from. I wasn't ever a scholar or anything but the things he was telling me he'd figured out were sounding less and less like what they'd talked about in that youth ministry. Eventually he got so frustrated that he stopped telling me very much, because just repeating it for me would get him mad all over again at being rejected. He told me when he just stopped meeting with the other students, but he kept at his Bible studies all the time. I think his grades even slipped a little because he was so busy reading the Bible over and over."
Weston now had a finger between two pages, and was flipping for a second reference.
"Tell the truth, I didn't really mind when he stopped talking about churchy stuff so much. I was in high school, and all I really wanted to hear about was cars and girls. So I'd listen to what he said, because he was my big brother and I liked him, but I didn't really pay much attention to what he was saying. I guess I should have. Maybe I could have seen some of this stuff coming."
He had found his second verse now, and looked up.
"He was always throwing verses together and showing what happened when you saw that this one said this, and that one said that, and coming up with a whole line of reasoning based on that. This here is one of the last things he told me about before he really stopped talking much about it."
He flipped to the first page his finger had marked.
"Okay. This one's Matthew chapter ten, verse thirty-four:
"'Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.'"
"Josh was always puzzled by that one, because it didn't sound much like Jesus, right? I mean, He was the 'Prince of Peace' and all that; He always preached peace, right up to the end. But not here. And one day Josh thought: 'Boy, if He was meant to send a sword, He sure messed up.'"
"And that's when the idea clicked with him.
"Jesus failed.
"He thought about it a long time, and the more he thought about it, the more sure he was. Jesus failed. He didn't do what He was meant to do. I mean, He sure didn't sound like the Old Testament God, who was always kicking the Israelites' ass whenever they did anything wrong. Jehovah was the 'Lord of Hosts,' which really means 'Lord of Armies.' He was a war god. So who was this Son of His who kept preaching peace? That couldn't have been the message He was supposed to preach."
Weston flipped to his second saved spot.
"Josh reread the entire Bible, looking for answers to that question. And this is where he thought he found it. This is in Matthew too, chapter twelve, verses forty-seven through fifty:
"'Then one said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee.
"'But he answered and said to him that told him, Who is my mother? and who are my brethren?
"'And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren!
"'For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.'"
Weston shut the Bible and left it sitting on his lap.
"So he made the connection. Jesus failed because He never severed the ties with his family, his earthly family. Right up to the end, when He was on the cross, He was talking to His mother and caring for her. And because of that, Josh said, Jesus couldn't bring Himself to be the Messiah who brought a sword, and instead tried to bring peace. And that's why He failed.
"Well, like I said, I wasn't too involved in church stuff right then, but I still knew enough to think that Josh was waaay out there. And I guess he saw it in my face, because I didn't say anything, but he shut up and stopped talking about his Bible studies. Which suited me fine.
"He didn't say anything more about any of this until years later. About four years ago. We were at the funeral for my mom's sister, she was a diabetic and died after going into a diabetic coma."
He smiled sadly. "Only it wasn't accidental. We were back at the house, changing out of our good clothes, and Joshua explained all of this theology to me again. And he told me more. He said that God had told him that he, Josh, was the Messiah, sent two thousand years later to do things right. And that part of his mission, part of his preparation, was to get rid of every relative before he revealed himself, and that God would only grant him his powers as Son of God once every single blood relative was dead. So Josh had killed Aunt Louise. He had snuck into her house and replaced all her insulin with water. He had killed Grandma and Grandpa too, a couple of years before; right after he graduated, he came over and broke into their house, made it look like a burglary, and killed them both in their beds.
"He told me this, and I just couldn't absorb it all so fast. I mean, here was my big brother telling me how he had killed those family members in cold blood, and there were others. My dad's brother's family had all died in a house fire. Who do you think started it, and made sure that nobody could get out the doors in time?
"He told me all of this, and I just stood there, trying to make sense of everything.
"And then he tried to kill me."
