Abigail's Story

by Ann Burton

  I had made no slip for the pottery, and they lacked the perfection of balance and form that wheel turning gave the clay, so I did not share her enthusiasm. “Likely you could trade for something prettier, but they will serve.”

  “Pretty things do not last very long, and so we do not have much use for them. Whatever we can produce ourselves saves us that much in trade.” Leha gave me a rueful look. “We are a plain, dull people, I fear. It must be much nicer to live in town with all the conveniences.”

  “It is more convenient, but not better.” I had grown to love being in the camp, surrounded by the women and children. “I have always wondered what it would be like to belong to a big family. I envy you. At home I only have my brother and my parents.”

  “And your husband and his kin,” Leha reminded me.

  Yes, there was Nabal. The husband I had left behind, and of whom I rarely thought now. As I watched the herdsmen’s children chasing each other through the labyrinth of the tents, I wondered what would happen to me when I returned to his house. We will have many babies, and caring for them and Nabal will be my life.

  Bethel was so delighted by the pottery I had made that I promised to share the method of fashioning the pieces with Leha.

  “My husband will be pleased by what you have done,” Bethel told me one night after the evening meal. “When he returns, I shall ask him if you may stay the summer here with us.”

  The prospect delighted me, until I remembered what I was supposed to be doing for my husband. “I think I had better not. Bethel, when my husband came here last spring, what did he do?”

  “Besides drinking all our wine and eating all our meat?” She made a sound of contempt. “He slept all day, had our women haul a thousand jugs of water to his house, and made my husband and sons very angry with his constant complaining.”

  I cringed a little. “No, what I mean is, what did he do for the yearly accounting?”

  “He ordered the herds counted, divided for shearing, and then figured our portion.” She eyed me. “You have done this? You know how our portion is reckoned?”

  I could no longer keep up a pretense, not with her. “No. In truth, I know nothing about herding or the accounting of it.”

  “Yet you offered to come here and perform these tasks.” Bethel made a clucking sound with her tongue. “What were you thinking, girl?”

  “I thought I might find someone who could instruct me.” I gave her a hopeful look.

  Bethel laughed. “Such an innocent face, for one so devious. Now, now, do not take offense, girl. I suspect that you have your reasons for coming here, and I like your spirit. You fooled a man none of us like, and you have given us the gift of your skill with the clay. I shall be happy to teach you what is to be done with the herds. Does that suit you?”

  This trade was more than fair. “Yes.”

  The next day Keseke and I returned to the hill house, which now had a sound roof. The inside was damp from rain, but with the longer, hotter days would soon dry out. It took two days to clean and set the place to rights, and I missed the company of Bethel and the other women, but given their unhappiness with my husband, I did not wish to impose on them any longer.

  Keseke reverted to her former gloom. “I had just grown used to sleeping in those smelly tents.”

  “I can borrow one from Rosh Yehud and pitch it outside, if you like,” I teased her.

  After our morning chores were finished, I walked down to the camp to spend a few hours making pots with Leha and the other women. The first results were somewhat hilarious—even hand-rolling clay requires some skill—but my students were nothing if not determined. Within days the women of the camp began producing clumsy but usable pottery, and I assured them that with time and practice, their work would improve.

  Bethel kept her word and taught me how the annual accounting was done. The previous year’s count was kept on wooden disks, notched one time for twenty animals counted, and dotted for single animals. My task was to count the animals under Yehud’s care and make two new sets of disks, one for the rosh and the other for my husband. From these I learned that Nabal owned over three thousand sheep and a thousand goats.

  “So many,” I said as I stacked the disks and replaced them. “I did not know.”

  “These are the animals that were lost after shearing.” Bethel gave me a single disk with black marks counting nineteen animals. “They are to be taken out of Yehud’s portion.”

  Yehud’s portion was only one sheep out of every fifty and one goat out of every hundred I counted. That was his only pay for the entire year, so a debt of nineteen animals would lower his portion considerably. “How were they lost?”

  The old woman eyed the black-marked disk. “A few died of sickness. Most were stolen by marauders during the night, when Yehud has the fewest guards around the sheep.”

  I was confused by this. “But there are so many dal patrolling the encampment each night.” Indeed, when I passed them after dark, they seemed like a moving wall between the camp and the rest of the world.

  “I told you, those men are not ours. They—” Bethel cut her words off. “It does not matter. The dal were not here last season.”

  “I see.” I didn’t, but it was plain that she did not wish to speak of them. “In any case, it does not seem right that Rosh Yehud should suffer the loss of stolen animals alone. Why does my husband not take half from his own portion?”

  Bethel gave me a sharp look, but then claimed she was tired and the teaching would have to wait until the next afternoon.

  Keseke accompanied me to the camp every day and spent her time watching the children while I taught pot making, until the morning she stepped into a burrow hole while she was out gathering wood.

  “I shall get a stick to use as a crutch,” she told me, her face ashen with pain as I applied a warm poultice of barley mash and aromatic oil to her badly wrenched ankle. “There is no need to pamper me. I am your servant.”

  “Yes, you are, so you will stay here and rest,” I said. “I mean what I say, Keseke. If you move an inch, I shall beat you.”

  She snorted. “You cannot bring yourself to kill spiders.”

  “They eat the other insects. I do not see you doing that.” I finished wrapping her ankle and stood. “You are not to do anything while you sit, either. We have plenty of water drawn and flour made, and I shall collect the figs from the drying rack ere I return.”

  “The water is stale, and those figs will need another day in the sun,” she claimed. “You need not go to the camp today.”

  Maybe she was lonely. “Do you wish me to stay with you?”

  “I am fine.” She scowled. “But you should not walk down alone. What if you come upon a wolf or a bear?”

  “I was more hoping to meet one of those lions you told me of.” I picked up the stout length of oak that I had taken to carrying with me wherever I walked. “We could cure the pelt and have a nice rug to spread before the fire.”

  Keseke made an annoyed gesture, waving me away. “Go on, then. You will not be happy until you are beset by a beast.”

  “I shall fetch some fresh water first.” I grinned. “And if I am met by a lion at the spring, I shall tell it that I was a fool for not following your advice before it devours me.”

  Of wolves and bears and lions, I saw nothing, but indeed I was beginning to feel much at home in the hills. Everything was so open, and green. Birds sang and chattered and chirped all day, and when the sun set, the crickets took up the chorus. At other times the only sound one could hear was a lovely whispering from the wind as it wove its way through the pines.

  The spring lay near the edge of the trees behind the house. Small, and partially hidden by an outcropping of weather-scoured rock, it was a bountiful source of cool, clear water. I followed the narrow path, formed by years of bare feet treading back and forth.

 
I must ask Leha if she has a piece of leather I may have to make a soft splint, I thought as I stepped through the gap in the stones. Keseke will not be able to walk without something around that ankle.

  The sun was already hot overhead, so I removed my head cloth and loosened the collar fold of my khiton. Keseke often predicted that I would be as dusky as a Nubian if I did not keep covered up, but the sun’s warmth felt good on my hair and neck. I smiled and shook out my hair before a splash made me stop in my tracks.

  Someone was already at the water’s edge, drawing up a brimming pail with a long wooden staff: a man, bare-chested and wearing only a leather ezor around his hips. A traveling pack of food lay spread on the stone beside him. He sat back, poured the water over his head, and shook like a dog before he began singing in a deep, melodic voice:

  Adonai, Adonai,

  How excellent is Your name in all the earth,

  Who have set Your glory above the heavens!

  Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants

  You have ordained strength,

  Because of Your enemies,

  That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.

  When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,

  The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,

  What is man that You are mindful of him,

  And the son of man that You visit him?

  For You have made him a little lower than the angels,

  And You have crowned him with glory and honor.

  You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;

  You have put all things under his feet,

  All sheep and oxen—

  Even the beasts of the field,

  The birds of the air,

  And the fish of the sea

  That pass through the paths of the seas.

  Adonai, Adonai,

  How excellent is Your name in all the earth!

  As he finished the lovely song, I stepped back, but my foot dislodged a stone and made a small sound. Before I could blink, the man had risen, turned, and held the staff as if he meant to strike me.

  “What do you want?” he demanded, his beautiful voice now fierce and flat.

  A marauder. I froze. “Water.” I held out my empty pot to show him.

  Slowly the staff lowered. “Only water?”

  “Nothing more.” I averted my gaze from his bare chest, which was dripping with water, and spotted a wet cloth near his feet. Obviously he had been using the spring to wash and rest. “I did not mean to startle you, Rea.”

  “Did you like my song?”

  “It was wondrous,” I said. “I have never heard anything the like.”

  He nodded. “If it pleases you, then I shall not change the words.”

  “The song is your own? But how—” I remembered I was talking to a nearly naked, wet man and my face grew hot. “I do not mean to intrude. I shall wait beyond the stones until you are finished.”

  “No.” His voice gentled. “I am done here.” He bent to pick up his simla and shrugged into it. “This water is almost as sweet as that I drank as a boy, from the cistern at my town’s front gate.”

  “Sweet water is a good thing. To find, and to drink.” Oh, why had the Adonai stricken my tongue with such clumsiness?

  I pressed back against the stone, but I could not stop watching him. He was not very tall, only perhaps a head taller than me, but his shoulders were unusually wide and his arms brutally heavy with muscle. Years of back-breaking work could carve a man’s body so, but he sang like one who had spent his entire life doing nothing else but idling by springs and praising the Adonai.

  Who was he? One of the dal?

  He moved with a peculiar sort of ease, though, one that reminded me of something that I could not quite recall. I was sure I had never seen him before, so why did he seem so familiar?

  Like a starling’s feathers, his wet hair was straight and shiny, and of black so deep that the light brought glints of blue from it. His brows and beard grew just as dark, although his beard was very short, as if just growing in again after being shaved. The shaving of it meant that he had recently known the death of a relative or friend. His skin seemed cast of smooth bronze. Even if he never sang a note, wherever he went, women’s eyes would follow him.

  I sensed something different about him, something that had nothing to do with his handsome face, nor his garments, which were as humble as any shepherd’s. He wore no ornaments or belt, and his weapons were no different than those carried by a common shamar. Perhaps it was his long-lidded black eyes, as exotic as obsidian beads, bright with intelligence and humor, and yet calm and deep as the cool water from a mountain well.

  A shepherd, a warrior, a singer, and a poet. How could a man be all those things at the same time?

  He glanced at me. “You are staring at me.”

  I was. Being caught at it made me wish I could run to the spring, dive in and sink to the very bottom, and stay there until he had forgotten that I existed.

  “I am sorry.” I moved to leave, but the breeze caught my hair and flung a handful of it into my face. I set down the water jug I carried and tried to brush it from my eyes.

  “Wait.” He moved so quickly that the space between us was gone before I realized it. Large hands slid along cheeks and lifted the curtain of hair from my eyes. “Ah, there you are hiding.”

  I could not move. The stone was at my back; he at my front. I felt as if caught between two immovable forces, and then nearly laughed at myself for my silly thoughts. How can a man be as strong as stone?

  He was not made of stone. He stood so close I could feel the heat of his skin through my khiton.

  That reminded me of my place, which was not to be this close to him. “My thanks.” I tried to draw to the side, but he moved to stop me.

  “Don’t run away so quick, shy one.”

  “I am not shy.” I would not duck my head again, or let my lashes flutter. I would not.

  “Then why have your cheeks gone a pretty pink, little dove?” He smoothed my wayward hair back from my brow, and took the head cloth from my numb fingers. Like a father would for a young daughter, he draped my hair and folded the ends of the head cloth around my neck. “It is good that you keep your tresses covered.”

  Did he think my hair so ugly? I felt stricken by the thought.

  “I shall. It was just that the sun felt so nice, and I . . .” I was beginning to babble. “I shall keep it. Covered, I mean.”

  “It is only right. Such bright and lovely hair should be saved for your husband’s enjoyment.” He did not remove his hands from my face, but tilted it up to examine it. “Your skin is too pale for you to be one of Yehud’s women. What is your name, and where are your kin?”

  Who was I, to be allowing this man to put his hands on me?

  “Abigail.” I would have added, “wife of Nabal,” but that part did not wish to leave my tongue. Guilt piled atop my embarrassment, but I could not make the words come out. Indeed, my throat was so dry that breathing was a chore.

  “Abigail, Father’s Delight.” He nodded. “It is a name befitting one with such gentle eyes. Where is your bet ab?”

  “The house of my father is in Carmel, beyond the hills.” I pointed vaguely in that direction. Or perhaps I pointed to Hebron. With my thoughts so muddled, I could not tell east from west, north from south.

  His dark brows rose. “You are very far from home, little dove.”

  “Are you?” I dared to ask.

  “Unhappily, yes. My journey here was not of my choosing, but perhaps soon I shall be permitted to return.” His eyes went to the horizon, and he seemed to forget my presence
. “This strangeness of his will pass, as it always does. It must.”

  His words were so heavy with sadness that I wanted to embrace him. I gripped the sides of my khiton with my hands to resist the urge. “I shall keep you in my prayers.”

  “Your kindness warms a cold heart.” He looked over my head. “Now I must go.”

  I turned to see three of the dal from Yehud’s camp waiting just beyond the stones. “Oh. Of course, I shall not keep you.”

  The man reached to take a bundle of cloth from a flat-topped stone. It was a mantle spun of light blue wool, the same one I had seen on the mysterious man on the hill.

  “I saw you face the lightning, the other day,” I blurted out. “You stood atop the hill. You danced in the rain.”

  He smiled a little. “Do you do nothing but follow me about?”

  I was mortified. “I did not mean to spy on you. I just . . . saw you. It was the first time.”

  “But not the last. Someday I shall sing and dance for you again, little dove. But for now, I must work.” He tucked one last, stray piece of hair under the edge of my head cloth. “We will meet again.”

  We could not, for I was married. Yet before I could say as much, the man went to join the other dal.

  I stared after them until they disappeared beyond the trees, and only then did I realize that I still did not know his name. Who was he? Why was Bethel afraid of him and the other dal? Why did the dal carry so many weapons, for that matter, and why did they guard the camp so closely? Was Yehud their rosh?

  My heart did not care about any of that. My heart was making a knot of itself. Will he truly sing and dance for me someday, as he promised?

  The turmoil in my head was nothing compared to that in my heart. I felt dizzy and weak and excited, all at once. I wanted to drop everything and run after the man, and learn his name, and speak with him about his homeland and why he had come to Judah. I wanted to soothe the frown from his brow and spin stories to make him laugh. I wanted to hear him and talk to him and listen to more of his songs and be with him—

  No, that was not all.

  I wanted to put my hands on his shoulders, and stroke my palms down the length of his arms. I wanted to press my mouth to his. I wanted to feel his hands in my hair and his breath on my face. I wanted to hear him call me his little dove again, in the darkness as the two of us lay together in the sweet grass, with the sky and the stars as our tent, and the night air as our only garments.