The Eleventh Brother

by Rachel S. Wilcox

  “You will come back with us to face the vizier,” Amon ordered, looking at the stunned brothers. “All of you.”

  Holding the precious silver goblet in one hand, Amon turned and walked to where his chair was waiting with the placid, ear-flicking donkeys.

  Moving slowly, as if in a strange, disbelieving dream, the brothers bent to tie up the grain sacks as best they could with their severed cords. The soldiers stood nearby, prodding the foreigners with their leveled stares, while Benjamin was marched over to where Amon waited. His beast was given to Levi to oversee.

  “What will they do?” Issachar was whispering. “What’s the punishment?” But Judah could not answer him because he could not take his eyes from where Benjamin was standing or join his other brothers in their frantic speculation as he watched his youngest brother’s hands bound. One soldier seemed to be assigned particularly to the accused thief, while the others moved into position alongside the brothers—a dismal escort, Judah thought, for an already terrible journey. Other travelers passing by on the road now steered as far away from the accused party as the path would allow, evidently not wishing to be infected by whatever evil impulse had overtaken the bearded men with ashen faces.

  At last, Judah turned toward Reuben, who looked as though someone had struck him with a blow from which he would not recover.

  Kill whoever would do such a thing, and keep the rest as slaves.

  As Judah stood there on the side of the road, seeing his brother accused and bound and taken toward what might prove his very death—and his brothers’ death, and his father’s death, and the death of all their people—he closed his eyes.

  And remembered.

  Chapter 33

  Genesis 38:1–24

  It had come to pass during the same time of year, when the spring was growling hungrily in the earth and the sunlight swept like a fresh breath across the land, that the man called Judah set out with his flocks to have their wool sheared in preparation for the lambing. The sun rose gently the morning of his departure, the inky richness fading like a soft song into a star-speckled twilight, and the gentle blue of the horizon nudged the darkness on its way.

  While all the people were engulfed in celebrating the springtime abundance of the land and the fertility of the earth, Judah traveled quietly away from his home and youngest son, a bright-eyed lad named Shelah. Although Shelah was a man now, he would still remain behind, even if his name meant that he was one who was sent away, as he had sometimes jokingly pointed out to his father.

  It was not the first time Judah had sensed how little Shelah understood of his name or of his place in his father’s life—that the sending away had nothing at all to do with Shelah but rather with the power the boy had over the demons that had haunted his father across the desert.

  Shelah was Judah’s third and last son, broader than his two older brothers and taller than his father. He was quick to laugh and seemed to have an easy prowess with everything his father taught him—so much so that Judah began to sense a certain jealousy from his older sons, Er and Onan, toward their charming and intelligent little brother. And though he could not explain it to them—not to his boys, certainly, for he could hardly bear to think of it himself—he was quick in his anger toward the boys’ cruelty toward one another. He sent Er and Onan out to work among the flocks and the fields and guarded little Shelah safely at home. Shelah was older than either of the other two had been when his father finally began allowing him to travel with the flocks, which was to say, with his brothers.

  How many years had it been now, Judah thought to himself as he set out on the road upon that springtime day, when Shelah was already a man—how many years? For it had been many years since Judah, or at least the young man he once had been, fled out into the desert, taking provisions enough to reach the nearest Canaanite city and leaving behind an unbearable weight of sorrow that threatened to suffocate everyone entangled within it. And he had done what he had intended to do—he had traveled beyond the edge of memory, beyond where the names of his fathers were known, beyond where the shadow of his brothers could follow. He was no longer Judah, son of Jacob. He was a man with no past to which he would attach himself and no parameters of family relations to set the bounds of who he was and what he was expected to be.

  He had left his inheritance in the desert outside of Dothan, cast into a pit and left to die beneath the sun.

  And so Judah sacrificed his birthright to buy his freedom and become a new man, wiping clean the trail of memory. He found kindness with the people he met. They accepted the young man from the desert and seemed to understand his urge to distance himself from whatever destiny he had been born to beneath the endless horizon that lay outside the safety of the townships. They gave him work, and he began to toil alongside the sons of the Canaanites. Soon, it was said that the man from the desert had a special gift, for all he touched blossomed into abundance beneath his hands.

  That was the first time he realized that he had not yet escaped the inheritance he had received as his father’s son—a strange gift of prosperity, an aptitude for increasing flocks and herds and fields.

  Not all of his brothers had it. But now he knew that he did.

  He had married the daughter of a Canaanite, and they had called their first son Watchful, and their second son Prosperous. But by the time Shelah arrived—several years after Judah’s watchfulness and prosperity had established him as a man of some prominence within the community—he felt moved to give the child a different kind of name. The events that had caused him to flee into the embrace of a new people had faded further and further from his mind, and the arrival of another little life was almost enough to make him feel as though the desert really had forgotten—as if the God that had watched over his fathers would no longer threaten him with future vengeance, as if his sacrifice had finally been accepted.

  So he named the child Shelah, an invocation to send away, to let go, as he had sent himself away and as he felt the God of his fathers had now let him go. The child was proof against the demons, a shield against the memories that sometimes stirred Judah in his deepest rest. It was a name of praise, a name of decision. What was done was done.

  Yet, as Shelah grew, Judah could not but notice that Shelah looked different from his other two sons—both of whom were very much the image of their Canaanite mother and her family. Judah himself was not a large man, but Shelah was broad and strong and charmed his father utterly with his chatter and affection, even as a little boy. His face was not the face of his mother, or his brothers, or even really of his father. Shelah was the image of one of the sons of Jacob—sharing his grandfather’s wide smile and strong shoulders and the family’s rich, dark eyes.

  And so while Shelah may have sent away the demons, he also called Judah’s mind to that part of his inheritance that he carried within his very flesh, which could not and would not be evaded. And Judah began to realize that instead of escaping the heritage he had been born to, he had passed it to his own sons.

  He told himself that he kept Shelah close because the boy was younger than Er and Onan, that he was bright and eager to learn, that he needed time to grow before taking on a man’s responsibilities. When Er and Onan grumbled that their father favored the boy, Judah tried to make them understand that it was not a matter of favoritism but of practicality. But one day, when Judah came upon Er and Onan waiting for him with the flocks, he saw a look on their faces that he suddenly, frighteningly, recognized—because it was the same look he had seen Simeon and Levi give their own father and the look they had turned, later, on Joseph.

  By that time, Er was old enough to be married, and Judah tried to take the matter in hand. He approached his birthright son and invited him to seek out whichever bride would be most pleasing to him, offering a handsome inheritance for brokering the necessary arrangements. Er eagerly accepted his father’s offer and quickly set his eye upon a young girl who was one of the most beautiful to be found among the daughters of the Canaanites. Her name
was Tamar, and she was round and comely and spoke pleasingly, and Er announced his intention of having her for his wife.

  Judah was pleased and blessed the couple, and Tamar became part of Judah’s household.

  The first year of Tamar’s marriage passed uneventfully. She remained round and comely and, for the most part, happy. But then the second year of her marriage passed, and still there was no sign of children, and Tamar became quiet. Judah’s wife took the girl aside and spoke to her, offering small statues and amulets to encourage the gods who oversaw such matters to intervene. No such intervention came until the third year of their marriage, when Er was in the fields shearing his sheep, and the sharp, glinting blade slipped and sliced deep into his leg. First the wound bled, and then, as if it had taken to bleeding into his skin rather than out of it, the gash turned red and hot to the touch. The fever spread through his body and burned for three days while Tamar tended to her husband and her mother-in-law murmured charms and Judah stood outside and looked imploringly at the night sky.

  On the fourth day, Judah’s firstborn son died.

  Er was buried while his widow looked on. Judah stood quietly with Onan and Shelah while his wife kept an arm around Tamar, and they wept together. At night, Judah would rage at the open sky, unable to understand why his eldest son should be so senselessly lost—cut off as a barren branch in the height of his life. But no answers came.

  Judah had not really expected them.

  His firstborn gone, Judah passed the birthright next to Onan. As was the custom, Onan received both his brother’s birthright and his brother’s widow, knowing that their children would belong to his older brother and receive the family’s inheritance. However, there was still no sign of children on the day that Onan came inside and lay down, abruptly, at midday. He was not the first man in the village to show the symptoms of the illness that came upon him with such sudden fervor; by that night, he was unconscious and trembling. Tamar sat at his bedside, just as she had with his brother, and just as she had with his brother, she was there when Onan took his last breath.

  Shelah was still a boy, and Judah could forgive himself if he was relieved at the thought of not marrying his only surviving son to the woman who had already buried both of the boy’s brothers. When Judah suggested that Tamar return to her father’s house until Shelah was grown up to the age of a man, she agreed.

  The birthright inheritance that should have been Er’s and then Onan’s passed now to Shelah. Judah taught the boy in reading and husbandry, taking him along to tend to the flocks and watching to see if the mysterious gift of prosperity would emerge under Shelah’s careful hands. His son’s quick eye and clever mind soon mastered whatever his father taught him, but it was not until one day when Shelah approached Judah, carrying a little lamb that he had found amongst the herd, that Judah was suddenly struck with a shiver of recognition at the way his son’s large dark eyes were filled with compassion for the little creature. Shelah was gentler than his brothers had been, much as Judah liked to think he himself had been as a young man, but most inescapably, Shelah’s look was reminiscent of the brother that Judah had fled into the desert to escape.

  He felt his heart give a little tremble as he took the lamb out of his son’s arms.

  When Shelah was a man, handsome and grown, he stood beside his father on the day his mother was lowered to rest beside her two sons.

  “I am sorry that you should be so very much alone in the world now at the age that you are,” Judah told him.

  But Shelah shook his head and said simply, “I’m not alone, Father.” He smiled. “I carry the birthright now.”

  Judah had not entirely understood what his son meant by that, but at the time he hadn’t asked. Yes, Shelah would have a fine inheritance, but Judah did not see how that could mitigate the exquisite loneliness of isolation from his own family line—a loneliness Judah himself had known in all its terrible depths in the days before Shelah and his brothers had been born and which he feared he was perhaps now doomed to pass on to his only surviving son. He also feared what would happen when Shelah was married, to Tamar or to anyone else, because Shelah might forget him and become so concerned with being a man in his own right that he would have no need for the father who had raised and cared for him.

  Shelah, he mourned, my son, my son. You are all I have.

  Merely the wide-eyed stares of the natives who passed the awkward procession had become enough to make Judah wish they had never ventured back into the forsaken Divided Land. They would have been better off starving together in the wilderness of Canaan rather than standing helplessly by as their family was sundered one last time and their father’s only remaining hope taken from under their care in such earth-rending shame. He could not speak to Benjamin because the guards were marching his youngest brother up ahead of the rest of them, but surely it was not possible, he kept thinking, surely Benjamin would not have been so idiotic, surely it must be a mistake, a nightmare, a reordering of the universe that would set itself right again, at any moment, in the next breath . . .

  But the sun beat down in greater spasms of heat, and the road wound inexorably back toward the vizier’s home—the vizier, practically the most powerful man in the most powerful kingdom of the known world and the supreme head of every court of law within Kemet, where their punishment and final humiliation would come. Judah could hear his brothers whispering furtively to one another amidst the unremitting crunching of the dust and sand beneath his feet. He sensed the stares and wide eyes of those they passed, but he found himself fixing his gaze on the back of Benjamin’s bowed head.

  Not one of us is innocent, Judah thought, except him. Not one of us deserves mercy, except him.

  It was one thing to be accused of spying, or to spend the long hours of the night on the hard ground of a foreign prison, or to return shamefacedly to their father with their money in their sacks.

  It was one thing for an old man to trust the sons he had no reason to trust with the last child that he could love without fear of betrayal.

  But not this. Judah stared at his brother’s head, lowered like that of a submissive lamb. Not this.

  He had made up his mind about what would have to be done long before they came to the villa. He had decided without speaking to Benjamin, without knowing for certain whether the boy was even guilty of the accusation, for the cup had been found in his sack and that was the death of whatever mercy might have been pled in his behalf. No eloquence, no tale of a forlorn father, no beseeching by his brothers would be enough to spare him.

  Judah had made up his mind because there was only one possible thing to be done.

  And he had decided upon it with a strange, heightened sense of surety that came from somewhere beyond his own will, beyond even the promise he had made to his father.

  He would do it because he understood now what was required.

  Er and Onan had both died at the beginning of the spring, just as the time of lambing and the celebrations of the earth’s returning vitality dawned across the quiet land, and Judah could not but think of his sons as blighted crops, stopped in the cold ground before their proper time. Now the coming season and its accompanying rites of new birth and regeneration, sanctifying losses past with the promise of renewed life, circled back every year to mark their passing. But such rituals served only to mock Judah’s sorrow, his sons committed to the ground like seeds never to rise and his wife now passed on with them. All the potency of all the little god-statues and the dances and the chants fell powerless beside the stark reality of his loss.

  And of course, his sons were not the only ones who had been lost early in the spring at the time of lambing.

  Judah felt no regret, therefore, to think of traveling before the beginning of the celebrations. He would go to Timnath and leave Shelah to care for the home and the remaining animals while he took the sheep for shearing before the lambs arrived. His friend Hirah would come with him—Hirah, who had been such a friend to Judah and was a native of the
elegant city of Adullum that lay near the township where first he and then Judah had settled with their families. Sensing his old friend’s growing loneliness, Hirah had offered to accompany him, and Judah had gratefully accepted the offer.

  They set off on foot, walking with the trotting flock as the sheep moved like a great bobbing sea of wool across the open plain. The road to Timnath wound up over rocky ground, climbing in elevation. Sometimes the two friends passed the time in speaking to one another, and sometimes they merely walked, listening to the bleating of the sheep and watching the trail unroll like a great scroll beneath the horizon.

  They came to camp that first night just outside a small township. They ate over a low fire, watching the sun dwindle down toward the edge of the world.

  After eating, Hirah rose, stretching his arms. “I’ll rest now,” he said.

  “Yes,” Judah said, “yes, it is time to rest.”

  But when Hirah was gone, Judah still sat by the fire, staring into the flickering, spitting embers, feeling the shadowed heat dance across his skin.

  When he raised his eyes again and looked back toward the town, he suddenly thought he saw some sort of shadow, perhaps, over by the side of the road, standing quite still, in the dying light.

  It was unusual to see a lone traveler out at dusk, beyond the safety of the townships. Judah rose to his feet, clutching at the handle of his knife. As he moved closer, the shadow turned to face him—and Judah saw that it was not a bandit who stood watching his approach but a veiled face, with a body draped in light, flowing robes.

  “Who are you?” Judah demanded, keeping his fingers wrapped around the handle of his blade.

  “A priestess,” said a woman’s voice, her mouth hidden beneath the wind-danced veil. Judah came closer, loosening his grip on the handle as he moved. She stood calmly, watching him with her dark eyes, allowing him to approach. The night air was cool, and he could see the dim firelight from the town glowing gently against the sky. “You are traveling during the festivals.”