Abigail's Story
Authors: Ann Burton
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Abigail's Story: Women of the Bible
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Electronic edition: September, 2005
For Mary Balogh
1
M
y father, Oren, taught me that we begin as the clay dropped on the wheel of life. That the Adonai, the Lord-Who-Protects our people, brings us thus forth so that we might know His will. Throughout the turning of our lives, we are shaped beneath faith's exacting hands, adorned by the thin slip of our dreams, and seasoned in the kiln of our years.
After forty years of creating pots from far humbler clay, my father had a special understanding of our purpose and pondered it often. “If we are strong, my daughter,” he would say, “then we are made useful.”
I, too, worshipped the Adonai, but I thought more about how to sell our pottery at market. Being strong and useful was easier when we had a roof over our heads and enough food to eat.
“Greetings, Abigail,” Shomer the rug seller called out to me as I made my way to my family's booth on the east end of the market. Carmel was not a large town, but because it lay between the wilderness of
Judah and the Negev Desert, many traveled through our region and stopped to trade at our gates; thanks to this, our market thrived.
“Greetings, Master Shomer.” Before I reached the rug maker's stall, an old man moved into my path. He was one of the gerum, people who had no kin. Because gerum also had no nahalah, the land belonging to family, they pitched tents on common land or dwelled in the caves in the hills.
I recognized the old man. He came into town often and took whatever work he could get, but when there was none, he had to beg for his bread.
As he did now. “Pardon, Mistress.” He held out a thin, trembling hand. “Have you food to spare?”
I had not yet eaten myself, but he looked very hungry. As I could only name one brother and my parents as kinâthe rest of our family had died before my birthâI felt a special sympathy toward those who had none.
“I do.” I placed half of the bread and goat cheese I had brought with me into his hands. “Peace be upon you, Rea.”
My respectful tone and calling him my neighbor made him stand a little taller. “Bless you, Mistress.” He hobbled off, following a well-trodden path to his solitary place by the beggar's gate.
Sorrow tightened my throat, for hunger, poverty, and loneliness were things my people understood only too well. I did not understand why, even when my father insisted that the centuries of suffering made us worthy of the One and True God. It was
what tempered and fired us. Those found unworthy were discarded, their souls as useless as shattered jugs.
If that was so, then I was sure that the Adonai had a mountain of Hebrew potsherd somewhere.
My people had always worshipped the One and True God, as far back as the time of legends, when Hebrews had been made to build the great funerary tombs for the Pharaohs of Egypt. The Adonai had freed us of that yoke of slavery, and through Moses had brought us into Canaan, where we spread out over the land and grew like endless fields of wheat. Our people were given the Promised Land, my father said, because we had earned it. Whatever we wanted, the Adonai would provide for us here.
My parents must not have wanted much, for the Adonai had given us little more than the gerum.
When I stopped at Shomer's stall, the rug seller immediately scolded me for my generosity. “You should not be feeding your breakfast to beggars.”
“I had enough for two,” I said.
I liked Shomer, who was stout and good-natured, the father of many sturdy sons and daughters. He also spoke for all the lesser merchants before the town's leaders at the monthly qahal, and the assembly gave his words respectful weight. He was kind, as well. His stall was one of the busiest at market, yet Shomer always spared a moment to greet me and inquire after my family.
“Still, others could better afford to feed the poor, Abigail.” Shomer gave the wealthy oil merchant at
the other end of the market a disgusted look. He had still not forgiven the other man for cheating his buyers by adding cheaper flaxseed oil to his casks.
“But they might not bring something for you.” I handed him a small sack.
“What have we here?” The rug seller peeked inside and uttered a startled laugh. “Madder root.” He took out one fat, twisted piece and held it up to admire. “Queen of Heaven, where in Judah did you find it?”
“Near the sycamore with the split trunk at the mouth of the east spring,” I told him. I had discovered it the night before, when I had taken our goats out to graze on the sweet green grass that grew there. “I saw plenty more to be had.”
Madder root produced a rich, red dye that was far easier and less costly to make than tola'at shani, the dye extracted from a scarlet worm. Red was a popular color, too, for the rug seller was always seeking out new sources to replenish his dye vats.
“For this I shall ask my wife to weave you a fine new mantle,” Shomer declared.
“There is no need.” My old mantle was serviceable enough, and the madder had cost me nothing but a few moments of digging and dirty hands. “If she has a blanket to spare, though, my mother would be glad of it.” The nights had been growing cold of late, and Chemda's old blanket had worn thin in the center.
“I shall send the softest we have made over to your father's house this morning,” Shomer assured me. “You are sure that is all you need?”
“Yes.” What I truly needed he could not give. “My thanks, Master Shomer.”
I felt ashamed that I even had to ask for the blanket in return, but my mother did need it, and I could not afford to buy one.
The poor circumstances in which my family lived had not seemed so terrible when I was a child. Small girls pay no heed to things such as the cost of food and shelter, not when there are wildflowers to pick and butterflies to chase. My parents also made what little we had seem like everything, and until I was older, I did not see how much they sacrificed to give Rivai and me nourishing meals and a decent home.
If only we could remain children forever, happy and unaware.
Over the years, deprivation and hard work shaped my parents, working on them in different ways. By the time I grew into womanhood, my mother and father had the silver hair and stooped walk of old ones. My carefree days of chasing butterflies had ended much earlier, when my mother's mind began to wander, and my father's fingers grew swollen and twisted.
When Oren grew too crippled to walk without a crutch, our neighbor, Cetura, brought me for the first time to the market outside the walls of our town to sell our pottery.
“Abigail need not go,” Father had insisted, even after exhaustion from his last trip to market forced him to remain on his sleeping mat for two days. Like all Hebrew men, he thought it improper for an
unmarried woman to sell at market. “I shall heal, and the Adonai will provide.”
“You are not injured, and the Adonai does not have to eat or pay taxes,” Cetura pointed out in her usual blunt fashion. “You do. Look upon yourself, Oren. You know the swelling in your joints will never go away. It is always so.”
As first born, Rivai should have taken over for Father. My brother was a dreamer, however, and had already shown himself to be hopeless at potting and trading. All he was really good at was whittling bits of wood and bone, and watching over our mother, who could no longer be trusted to be left alone.
“Let Abigail come with me,” our neighbor urged. “I shall teach her and watch over her, as if she were my own daughter. All will be well, I promise you.”
My father had reluctantly given his consent.
Those first weeks I had been terrified of making a mistake, but Cetura had kept her word and watched over me, and I learned the business of buying and selling.
That had been two years ago.
Now I moved with confidence as I followed the center market aisle to the end, greeting other merchants on the way to where my father's booth stood. Unlike Shomer, who hung his wife's and daughters' beautifully woven rugs and blankets from a large, permanent stall built to his specifications, my family could afford only to rent one of the flimsy trade booths at the market's end.
Such booths as ours were fashioned cheaply: rough boards laid across stacks of broken, discarded brick
to form a three-sided, temporary square nestled against the town's stone wall. There was no roof to it, but the shadow of the wall kept all but the midday sun off my head, and market ended each day at that noon hour when the heat and light were strongest.
All I did to display our wares was to place the strings of pots on top of the boards. When someone wished to buy, I unknotted the slip-looped knot binding the desired pot to the cord. At the end of the day, I gathered what barter I had taken in trade, wrapped it in my shawl, hung the cords of unsold pots over my shoulders, and carried it all home.
I had another reason for liking the booth, as it was built next to the stall of Amri, a spice merchant. His herbs and spices lent to the air an exotic, ever-changing fragrance, which I enjoyed. There were leaves of dark green mint, crumbled stalks of dill, pungent white and black cumin seed, lacey rue with its tiny dried yellow flowers, and the sharp, flavorful scent of mustard leaves. Salt, brought by caravan from the sea, glittered from small boxes like stars.
Often Amri's customers would linger to enjoy the intriguing scents, too, and while there, some took notice of my pots and bought from me.
This morning I found my market neighbor hanging braids of garlic bulbs from tall, pegged stakes driven into the soil at the front corners of his stall. Short and thin, with a somewhat scraggly beard, Amri scowled as he went about his work.
This was not unusual. Nearly everything but buyers made the spice merchant glower.
“Good morning to you, Amri.”
“What is so good about it?” He immediately glared down his smudge of a nose at me. “Olive prices are rising, as are taxes. Rainwater has seeped into my walls, and they must be repaired. For what the mason charges? I could
build
a new house.”
Poor Amri. He particularly hated anything that came between him and his profits.
“I am sorry.” I gave him a sympathetic smile. “I did bring those pots that you wanted.” I lifted the cord that held the ten juglets with wooden plugs my brother had carved to fit the narrow necks. “Ten, as you said, with cedar stoppers.” Unbaked clay balls sealed better, but the spice merchant preferred small, fancy touches that might better catch the eye of a wandering shopper. My brother had enjoyed carving the bits of cedar much more than turning the wheel for the jugs.
If only there were a market for carvings. One of the Adonai's ten sacred commandments forbade the making of pesel, however, and as a result Hebrews avoided anything with graven images. Rivai never liked selling his carvings anyway, so it mattered little.
“More for me to carry home,” he grumbled. “What do you want for them?”
We merchants always bartered with each other; as with our customers it made more sense for us to trade goods instead of silver. At home we needed garlic for cooking, and soon I would use the last of the kushtha to make the unguent that eased the pain
of my father's aching joints. It was sensible to trade for that.
Yet just this morning my mother had yearned aloud for spice curls, doughy sweet rolls with a filling of honey, nuts, and ground sweet bark. They were a luxury that I had not been able to make for her for some time.
I knew the ingredients to make the rolls were costly, and plain barley bread cheaper and more nourishing, but my mother asked for so little, and she never complained when she did without.
If I could stretch out the kushtha with warm oil and fig poultices for my father's hands . . . “Have you any sweet bark?”
“Some, but not much.” Amri wanted the best of any trade, so he constantly made as if running low on everything. “Five quills for the pots.”
“I would be beaten if I accepted so little.” Actually my father knew nothing about this order. My brother and I had made the juglets, working late after my parents had gone to sleep, but this I could not tell the merchant. Men were potters, not women, and if Amri knew the work to be mine, he would think the juglets inferior. “Ten quills and a braid of garlic.”
“You would see me starve away to a stick.” He released a heavy sigh. “Six quills, half a braid, and your father makes a new water jug for me.”
Bartering was an art of words, timing, and attitude. I said nothing but frowned at my fingernails. The frown was genuine; my hands looked deplorable, roughened by secret hours at the wheel, faint traces
of red, dried clay under my nails. No matter how hard I scrubbed, the stain of my illicit work never went away.
I fought back the guilt that clung just as tenaciously.
It is not sinful. It is necessary.
My father's hands, crippled as they were now, could only fashion the simplest vessels, such as flat eating bowls and saucers for lipped oil lamps. I would have to make the jug myself, which meant cajoling Rivai again to turn the wheel. This he hated, because it roughened
his
sensitive hands.