Abigail's Story (3 page)

I had never been courted, not even once, for my father had no zebed of nahalah land or herd animals to offer. Such a dowry was vital, for eligible young bahur expect a wife to add her portion to the family holdings.

If the Adonai had fashioned me with bold colors or a fetching shape, then I might have caught the eye of a young man. Sometimes I dreamed of myself in a different body, one of great beauty and grace, surrounded by countless handsome young bahur, treasured and admired by all.

When I woke, I was still plain, sturdy Abigail of Carmel, as useful and ordinary as a table jug.

“No matter,” I said, keeping my tone even. “One as handsome as your brother shall find another easily.”

“As you say.” Gladly she changed the subject. “You should take a rest when you get home, Abi, you look very tired.”

And old. And worn out.

“I am well.” Well or not, I would take no rest for some hours yet. Waiting for me at home was grain to grind and the garden to tend and the goats to graze and water and the evening meal to make. And if I felt as if a hundred pickling jars hung from my shoulders, what of it? There was no one else to carry my unseen burdens. Unlike Tzalmon, I had no betrothed over whom to agonize, and I was beginning to think that I never would.

Wife you shall soon be . . . but whose?

The prediction made me feel sick, sick of myself and my secret yearnings. I was fortunate that I had a little house with a patch of garden, and two goats, and a loving family. It may not have been much, but it was more than the m'khashepah would have, once Choab sold her to slavers to recover his losses. Imagining her life from there made me shudder.

“Here.” Ketina brought up the heavy bucket and before I could protest, filled my water jar for me. “That's one less task for you to do.”

I touched her arm with gratitude, but her kindness made me feel sad.
If only I had a sibling like her.
“My thanks, little friend.”

CHAPTER
3

A
fter I bid Ketina good-bye, I adjusted my strings and braced the heavy water jug on my hip, then made my way from the well to my home. Carmel was a clean and pleasant town, but it was not a very exciting place. It was neither the richest nor poorest town in Judah, with merely dirt roads and modest mud-brick dwellings, the inhabitants more industrious than friendly. They had to be; most homes contained three or four generations under one roof, along with the family's goats, sheep, and workrooms.

My brother thought our town not very grand at all.

“We should move to a city in the north, where the avenues are paved with stone and beasts do the hauling,” Rivai had told my father more than once. “They say there are fountains and two-story houses with floors of river pebble and courtyards with gardens of flowers where artists can dream. Musicians play day and night but for the joy of it!”

My father usually nodded absently, hearing but
not hearing Rivai, but during one such tirade he had given him a weary look. “We cannot dine on dreams or joy, my son. We must earn our keep.”

“The soul needs more than barley gruel and water!” my brother snapped back before storming up the ladder to the roof.

Rivai spent much time on the roof. Sometimes I wondered if he went up there to brood, or to place himself above us. Perhaps our roof was the closest thing to the balcony of the grand house in which my brother felt he deserved to dwell, where his soul could feast on the joy of creating something for nothing.

He would be good at that,
I thought, allowing myself a moment of rare bitterness.
If only idle pleasures were a trade.

Today I was home early and found my father dozing outside in his hammock. Our home was square and only a single level, with four small rooms and an open-sided niche shaded by a canopy of boughs and brushwood. Through the niche I walked to the center of the house, which needed a new roof and was really too small to be called a proper courtyard. There I checked the round clay oven to make sure the coals from breakfast were still hot, and added some twigs from a large pile of brushwood I collected on my walks and kept neatly stacked in one corner.

I carried the water jug into our front room, the largest space in the house, where we ate and worked and where I slept. As firstborn and son, Rivai was
entitled to his own room, and my parents shared the other. The fourth room opened out to the niche, so we used it to store the heavy pallets of red and gray potting clay, and to bed down the goats at night.

Automatically I washed my bare feet before stepping onto the beaten-clay floor.

“Mother?” I removed my outer mantle and head cloth and walked back to my parents' chamber, but found it empty. I heard soft singing and followed it to the storage room. There my mother sat on the straw-covered floor, between our two goats, an arm around the spotted hide of the smaller, rocking a little as she murmured an old cradle tune. The second goat lay asleep at her side, and I saw that she had draped her head cloth over it as one might over a slumbering infant.

This bizarre sight was not at all a surprise to me. I had seen many like it over the last few years.

Chemda, my mother, was said to have once been a very handsome woman, but hard work and several miscarriages had left her frail and thin. She was not feebleminded, exactly, but she had not been right, not since the last time she had lost a baby. Her thoughts often wandered in odd directions, and things she said and did sometimes made little sense. She also suffered from frightening spells of forgetfulness; on some bad days she did not know me, my brother, my father, or even her own name.

I prayed today was not one of those days. “Mother,” I called to her again. I kept my voice gentle and remained where I was, in the doorway. When
she had her spells, often loud voices or sudden movements terrified her.

Chemda looked up, her clouded eyes nearly crossing until she focused on my face. “Abigail.” She glanced at a shaft of sun streaming in through the room's small window. “You are home early.”

“Yes, Mother.” Relief made me smile as I came forward to help her up from the floor. “All our pots sold quickly today.” I reached for her head cloth.

“How nice. Oren shall be pleased. Don't do that.” She gave my hand a slap. “You might wake the babe.”

I left the head cloth where it was and did not argue with her. Over time she had told me that both of the goats, the birds that nested in the courtyard, and even some large stones were my siblings. It was easy enough to indulge her whimsies until she forgot about this day's pretend babies.

I guided my mother out to the front room and gave her a rusk spread with date honey to snack on while I swept the floor and worked on preparing the evening meal. I set a pot of broth with lentils, onions, and garlic to heat on the cooking fire, and then mixed and shaped barley flour dough to make two large lehem, the wheel-shaped rounds of bread we ate on ordinary days. I saved what little fine wheat flour and honey we could afford to make a special sweet loaf for Shabbat dinner.

“It is good of you to make the meal,” my mother said, as formally as if I were a guest. “May I help?”

“Of course.” I gave her a bowl of figs I had taken
in trade at market. Picking them over was busy work, but if she cooked, inevitably her attention wandered off with her thoughts, and things burned. Shadows stretched across the room as the sun dropped behind the hills.

“Where is Rivai?” Even if my brother had gone over to Shomer's house to commiserate with Tzalmon, he should have been home by now.

“These figs are too green, child. You shall give yourself a sour belly if you eat them.” She peered at my loaves, saw that I had pinched off a bit of dough to save in the leavening jar for tomorrow's baking, and nodded her approval. “Who is this Rivai?”

“Our son, Chemda.” My father, Oren, hobbled in, leaning heavily on his crutch.

Once my father had seemed like the strongest man in the world to me: tall, broad of shoulder, with long, tireless arms and clever, callused hands. Though he worked at the wheel every day, he held his back straight and his head high and proud. His were the eyes of a dreamer, deep brown and gentle, oh, so gentle. As a child I would tug at his thick, curly brown beard with my little hands whenever he carried me, until he would use it to tickle my neck and make me giggle.

Those memories made it all the harder to look upon my father as he was now. Age, work, and worry had caused him to shrink in on himself like a poorly thrown jug, his shoulders slumping, his back permanently curved, his head sunken on his neck. His once clever hands hung knotted and gnarled, the
fingers twisted, the joints as fat as overripe grapes. White streaked his hair and beard, and his dreamer's eyes were almost lost now in drooping, wrinkled folds.

“Dinner is almost ready, Father.” On my way to the oven stones I gave him a kiss of welcome and felt the tension in his shoulders.
The pain must be very bad today.
After I left the loaves to bake on the flat stones in the center of the oven, I asked him, “Would you like a cup of tea?” I had enough kushtha left to brew a strong remedy, which I would flavor with coriander to mask the taste of the medicinal herb, and by which he would pretend to be fooled.

Dignity was vital to my father, and preserving his was everything to me.

“My thanks, Daughter.” He came to sit on the bench by our table and saw the empty strings. “Trade was brisk today?”

For a moment, I debated on whether to tell him about my strange encounter with the m'khashepah, but he already worried over me going to market alone. “Very much so, Father. I sold all but one.”

Rather than reassure him, that seemed to make the worry lines bracketing his mouth deeper. “I shall have to spend some extra hours at the wheel this night.”

That he could not do, not without crippling himself for the next week.

“We also have some special orders from two of the merchants,” I told him, “who asked for Rivai's
work. I promised he would fill them as soon as possible.”

My father gave me a sharp look. “Your brother is out with those Egyptian friends of his.”

That meant Rivai would be drinking and gambling, two more things he did with little restraint or skill.

“He and I shall work later.” To hide my dismay, I stirred the soup. “It is cooler and quieter then, anyway.”

When our father first began to suffer from joint pain, I made a bargain with my brother. Rivai would turn the big stone wheel for me, but I would let everyone think that the pots I made were his handiwork. He had agreed—reluctantly—and only because I offered him part of what I took in trade. Profit always outweighed Rivai's sense of masculine outrage.

Lately, it had outweighed everything.

I brought in the baked lehem from the outdoor oven, set our meal on the table, and joined hands with my parents as my father said the blessing. Worry over my brother and the words of the m'khashepah slipped away as I gave thanks for the food.

What we had might be humble, but it was ours, and it was enough.

My parents went to sleep early that night, but I stayed up to tidy the house, milk the goats, and wait for Rivai. He had not arrived home by the time I finished inside the house, so I sat in the garden and watched the stars appear in the night sky.

I always watched them alone.

My parents were not of a noble line, and famine and sickness had taken all their kin. What little surplus we had was saved for Rivai, so that someday he might offer something for his future bride, if he ever found one.

This I knew, and accepted, but to my great shame, I still prayed for a husband.

It was a habit of which no one knew. Every night I sat among the herbs and vines and begged Adonai to bless me with an offer. I did not even ask for a young and handsome man anymore. I knew myself; I would be satisfied with a simple man of modest means, a companion and protector who would give me a home to care for and babies to love. A lesser merchant, a shamar, even a farm worker or shepherd would have satisfied me.

I could not depend on Rivai to look after me, not when he had no trade or wife. I did not want to die alone, an old and unloved woman begging or dependent on the charity of others. I wanted a home of my own, and many children to love, and I could not have those without a husband.

Wife you will be.

This night I had no entreaty for the Adonai; the thief's foolish words had torn a veil from my eyes. It was time I accepted my lot. I had nothing, and I could not leave my parents to Rivai's uncertain care.

I would be alone forever.

A scuffling sound came from the street, and then I heard my brother singing. With haste I tucked my
head cloth around my face and hurried out to the front of the house. There, two strange men stood with my brother, who was staggering on his feet and bleeding from his nose.

“Two days,” one of the men said before he shoved Rivai at me.

I caught Rivai by the arms and dug my heels in before his weight knocked us both over. My brother stood as tall as our father had in his youth, but thankfully was much leaner. His khiton was torn and spotted with blood, while his breath smelled of strong wine. When I looked over his shoulder, the two men had gone.

“Abigail.” Rivai clutched at me as if unable to stand on his own. He gave me a silly grin. “My favorite sister.”

“Your only sister.” I grabbed him as he lurched.
Too much to drink again.
I helped him inside, eased the door shut, and kept my voice low so as not to wake our parents. “What happened? Were you in a fight?” Someone had obviously hit him in the face, for his nose and lower lip were red and swollen.

“My ribs,” he gasped when I caught him again to keep him from falling over. “Are they broken?”

I gently touched his sides to check, but felt no ominous swelling or shifting of bone. “I think only bruised. Rivai, what did that man mean?”

“What man? Why does the room spin like a top?” My brother collapsed at the table, his breathing choppy as he gripped the edge. “Bring me wine and go to bed.”

“You are sitting in my bedroom, and I think you have had enough to drink.” I brought him water instead. “Who did this to you? Were you robbed?”

“That is it. Yes.” He sipped from the cup. “I was robbed by Maon scum.” Absently he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. The sight of the blood seemed to surprise him. “I should bathe.” He tried to rise, but his face paled and he abruptly dropped down again. “Maybe later.”

I saw fresh blood trickle from his nostrils and brought a damp cloth for him. “Is your nose broken?”

He used the cloth gingerly. “Almost. Cowards. They ganged up on me, you know. Four on one.” He felt the middle part of his nose. “Or maybe it was five.”

“I shall wake Father.” We Carmelites generally avoided people from the nearby town of Maon, and they did the same with us. If they were coming here to rob our men, then Father would notify the shofet. Choab would take quick action and ban the wretches from entering our gates.