by Laurie King
Mila’s Tale
a story
with commentary
Copyright 2014 Laurie R. King
Introduction
“Mila’s Tale” occupies the center ground of my life: I write fiction; I was trained in Old Testament theology. The story is the first in a proposed series that will, if I am granted the years and the wit, become a collection of modern midrashes (for a definition and comments, see below.)
First comes the story itself, then the Scripture on which it is based, with the texts followed by definitions, my comments, a closer analysis of the text, and suggestions for further reading.
—Laurie R. King
Mila’s Tale
(Jephtha’s Daughter)
The girl’s name was Mila. It is important to remember that, not because Mila means something—Queen or songbird or the clouds in morning—but because it was her name, and she was Mila.
Her father’s name was Jephtha.
Mila lived in a land of mud-brick houses roofed with scraps of corrugated metal, a remote piece of hillside where thin chickens scratched outside the doors and only the richer men owned pigs. In her village, five houses had water brought through pipes to the kitchen, four men owned trucks that, when running, belched clouds of black diesel smoke, three citizens had been away to school, two had been to university in the capital city, and one man claimed to have been to America and returned. No one, however, believed his stories; all thought he had got as far as the port, scraped a living on the docks for two years, and skulked home again. His house had been altered on his return, and given an indoor toilet, but the problems inherent in digging a septic tank in living stone had proved too great, and the white throne was used for storing root vegetables.
Mila had been one of the three who had gone away to school.
Perhaps if her mother had not died, none of this would have happened. Her mother was an educated woman; the marriage had been a scandal, when the schoolmaster’s younger daughter wed the bastard son of the local whore, a man who supplemented the income from his tiny farmstead with a touch of illicit smuggling across the border. But they were happy, and he did not beat his young wife as her mother had feared. He even showed a degree of pride in his wife’s pregnancy that the village men mocked and the women found unexpectedly endearing.
But Mila’s mother died giving her birth.
People agreed that Jephtha was not the same. Certainly he began to spend more and more time away from his home in the dusty hills, turning over the daily chores of farming to others as he built up a shady but lucrative business in smuggling—primarily guns. He married again, of course, but his new wife proved sickly, a poor stepmother for a lively young child with an inquisitive mind. She died, too, when Mila was four.
So he sent his daughter to her aunt, the mother’s childless younger sister, who lived in the capital city. There Mila lived, with a woman who loved her as her own, who educated her and encouraged her and made plans to send the girl to university—the country badly needed doctors, and the girl had the hands and eyes of a healer. Once a year, Mila travelled home to the village; once or twice a year, Jephtha came to see her. The girl preferred it when her father came to her, since at home she could not fail to be aware of the sorts of men he worked with, and the source of his increasing wealth and importance. The village was mildly surprised that he made no move to sell up and live in the city, but Mila thought he enjoyed rubbing his neighbors’ noses in his newfound wealth.
When Mila was twelve, a letter arrived from her father. She must return to the village now, to take up her responsibilities in the home and to prepare for marriage. Her aunt summoned a dozen protests, a score of them, and managed to spin Mila’s time out another two years. But then the war that had been slowly building up for many years began to break out, here and there. Worst of all was the city.
Five years ago, Jephtha came and took the girl away.
Now, Mila lived in the village. She was nineteen. Her father was the most powerful man in the district—perhaps the country—with half a thousand loyal men at his command. And yet, his only child remained disgracefully unmarried. Aloud, Jephtha blamed his sister-in-law, for overeducating the girl. She had picked up the manners of an aristocrat in the city, and had the habit of looking down her long nose at the fumbling approaches of the village boys. He had already entered into negotiations with three separate men over her, only to have her flatly refuse to have anything to do with any of them.
Privately, matters were less simple. The truth of it was, Jephtha was too soft-hearted when it came to his stubborn daughter, whose raised chin reminded him strongly of her mother. Still, he would have forced the issue, but for two things. One was the convenience of having his remarkably competent daughter at home to care for the house and farm. The other thing was the war.
When open hostilities broke out in the land, Jephtha was a known criminal whose bribes alone kept prosecution at bay. With war at hand, Jephtha’s large and highly organized criminal cartel was a tool too good to pass up. Proposals were made; counter-offers were discussed; and in no time at all, Jephtha was a soldier, his men issued uniforms.
Soldiers, even the generals, are rarely at home. With his daughter in charge of the household, there were few distractions, no urgent letters from home demanding to know what was to be done about a tenant’s roof repairs or bemoaning the loss of one of his milch cows. With her in charge, he could get on with the serious business of fighting. And everyone knew this war couldn’t go on forever; he’d find her a husband when he got home again.
The war ground on. Dutiful letters from home, one every week, reported that the crops were in, the new cow satisfactory, the roof repaired and a new farm manager taken on. He read these portions of her letters with some care, but could find no fault with her management, apart from the inevitable failings of womankind. The mentions of her work teaching reading to the village children, and worse, to the womenfolk, he read with a grimace—the Americans who ran the school paid her, and dollars were always handy, but he could foresee problems when she married and either wished to continue working, or grudgingly quit and forever blamed her husband for their lack of her income.
Still, while the war was on, he could see no real harm in it, and things would return to normal when it was over. Later, a letter describing her study of medicine with the do-gooding Americans brought the same grimace to his face, but then again, nursing skills were good to have, and might counteract the effects of that aristocratic nose when the war ended and returned soldiers were shopping for wives. So he said nothing, and tossed the letters into the campfire, and went on with the business of war.
Slowly, under the pressure of outside nations, the fighting damped down, and Jephtha’s far-ranging regiment withdrew from the negotiated borderlands. Unfortunately, being closer to home meant the fighting became more personal. These were a man’s neighbors who were threatening him, not some bastards hundreds of miles from home. The war’s boundaries contracted, but the fighting became ever more vicious. Especially in the mountains.
It was the end of a hot, dry, bloody summer. The country had known war for so long, it was accustomed to terror. Bombs flew over fields where men and women worked as their grandparents had. Snipers lurked in the streets and alleys of the cities, while women with shopping bags darted across the pock-marked pavement toward the corners where the trucks bringing cabbages and flour dared approach. Newsmen in rumpled field dress spoke urgently into camera lenses, eager for an interview with the picturesque criminal-turned-soldier. And Jephtha, with long experience in getting people what they wanted, made sure they had their pictures: brave boys in stretchers; weeping mothers; rifles propped at the doors of churches where his men attended funerals for children, then taken up again as the men retur
ned to the business of war.
Inexorably, the war bore in on itself.
In the beginning of September, word came to Mila that a woman in the next village over had been in labor with her first child for thirty hours. The intensifying warfare had driven the Americans away, tearful and swearing to return; the nearest doctor was now half a day away. The midwife was on the edge of despair, and sent to Mila: Was there anything the Americans had taught her that could help this woman?
Mila gazed at the face of the midwife’s messenger, and felt suddenly cold in the hot, dusty summer night. She was nineteen years old, could set an arm and suture a gash, she could give injections, use simple drugs, and had once successfully inserted a drip line into the back of a patient’s hand. She knew what to do in the case of an epidemic and had picked up a fair amount of herbal lore over the years since moving back home, but she was no doctor. The midwife, herself the mother of four, had been working these mountains for fifteen years; what could Mila possibly know that she did not?
The messenger replied, “She said you had helped with the operation to take a child.”
And that was what Mila knew that the midwife did not. She had—once, mind you, just once—assisted at a Caesarean operation, seen the way the American doctor had delicately slit the straining flesh of the pregnant woman and lifted the dark, limp infant from the womb into the air. It had, against all expectations, been a success, and the infant was now a round-cheeked two year-old troublemaker, the pride of his mother and father.
“She said, the woman will die anyway, that you might save the child.”
So might a butcher, Mila thought to herself. But without a word, she went to find the bag of equipment that the Americans had given her as they departed for safer lands. She opened it to make sure that the scalpels and suture kits and IV drip equipment were there, added a collection of the herbs that might help a laboring woman push or a surgical patient stop bleeding, and took up her robe to follow the messenger out into the night.
The moon was full, and the rumble and flash of what might have been a thunderstorm played over the next ridge of mountains. It was not thunder, although by now, artillery was itself a force of Nature. Mila followed the messenger through the fields and up the mountain track, which was steep and narrow but to the sure-footed, quicker than the road, and far safer. Mila knew her father was out there somewhere, maybe even where those lights flared and rumbled on the horizon, but she never thought about him much, other than when she sat down to write her weekly letters, and she did not think about him tonight.
Her father loved her, she knew that, and she supposed that she loved him: daughters did, after all. Certainly his men loved their general, who gave them everything including himself. But she could not deny what her eyes and her mind told her, that her father represented everything that was wrong with this country, the bitter ignorance and pathetic male dignity that demanded one man kill another over six inches of fence line or the rights to a well. He was, she knew in her heart, a man who had taken the shameful conditions of his birth and gathered to himself the dregs. Had it not been for the war, he would be nothing more than the successful head of a criminal gang.
She, however, had learned other ways during her years in the city, learned that the only thing a person got by hitting another was an enemy who nurtured resentment and sharpened his knives. Males were sad creatures, children ruled by their muscle-building hormones; when the village women and children came to her classes, they learned their letters, but they also learned a different way of looking at their world. One of the Americans, the young woman with the limp, had once laughingly called Mila subversive, a word Mila rolled around on her tongue with pleasure, and did her best to live up to.
Women were, she taught behind the closed doors of her father’s house, simply better than men. Oh, let men think they’re stronger, let them think war is important and that they control us and that they rule the minds of their sons, but when they leave—for the fields, for the Front, for a job in the city—who stays? Women do, filling the home in their absence, feeding the children, holding the world together.
Men seemed to rule, it was true. But that was because men were free to roam and make connections, while women needed to focus on the house and the kitchen, and sometimes forgot the links that join each house to the next. Like—not a chain, but chain mail, each slender loop joined at several points with the others to form an impenetrable blanket of womanhood.
Men were strong, certainly. One rebellious woman, standing up to an angry husband all on her own, could expect to feel a fist, or even to be thrown onto the streets to starve. Mila knew that; it was one of the reasons she had refused to marry, because her father had yet to come up with a man she knew would not raise a hand to her.
But Mila also knew that one individual is like a seed, when planted on the right soil. When she had lived with her aunt in the city, Mila had read books about Gandhi in India, the skinny man in a white cloth who had attracted the eyes of the world and toppled an empire. And in a magazine, she had seen a photograph of a solitary figure in a white shirt, a man carrying a bag, standing before a line of tanks in China, refusing them passage. Everything about the man’s posture—chin raised, shopping bag swinging, shoulders resting easy—radiated calm confidence: You can crush my body, he seemed to say, but you will never crush me. The article said that no one knew who the man was or what had happened to him, but Mila knew: this was a man on his way home from the shops, taking home his vegetables home for the evening meal, whose path had taken him by the enormous square, who had chosen to make his stand. And she had no doubt what had happened to him: he had died. But he lived on in the photograph, a powerful symbol of everyday defiance.
A hand held out in peace can strike a heavier blow than a fist raised in anger. A bag of shopping may halt more tanks than any mortar launcher. One person could be more powerful than a thousand. That was what her father did not know, would never understand.
But Mila knew.
The mountain path dipped, climbed, then fell steeply into the next village. It was, in truth, almost a town, with mud-brick walls most of the way around it and a small clinic by way of hospital. But the doctor had been killed a year earlier, and the nurse was in the capital city attending to a dying mother, and the midwife was on her own with the half-conscious woman, whose cries and groans had long since subsided into hopeless whimpers.
Mila washed her hands with the American soap and placed the buds of the stethoscope into her ears. The woman’s pulse was slow and erratic, her breathing that of an exhausted runner, her eyes sunken and focusing far away. Mila shifted the cool disc down to the woman’s belly, hearing the pittapatta of the infant heart within. Then the taut skin under her hands grew hard, and the quick heartbeat stuttered, slowed, and nearly halted altogether before the contraction eased off.
Mila stood up and looked at the half-dead woman, hearing the echo of the birdlike heartbeat in her ears. Her own mother had died in just these circumstances. It was why Mila had watched the Caesarean operation so closely, why she had learned the drugs and herbs that acted on the muscles of the womb, to slow or speed them, and on the heart of a woman in distress. The midwife waited, expecting Mila to shake her head and prepare to cut the child from the mother’s dying body. But the laboring woman’s eyes had begun to watch her, too, and they seemed to Mila to have some hidden strength there, if she could only nurture and kindle it.
She made her decision: She would do all she could to save this woman, that the child would not be born an orphan.
She turned to the midwife and the messenger, and told them what she wanted them to do.
The woman slept for two hours under the shelter of Mila’s drugs, while Mila listened without ceasing to the eased patter of the infant heart. When the laborer had rested, when Mila’s tools were ready and the area as sterile as it was going to get, she woke the woman and allowed the drugs to drip into the line leading into the back of her hand.
The woman lab
ored again, this time with two women at her side to pour their strength into her. Outside, the flashes and rumbles grew ever nearer, but such was their concentration that the noise had less impact than the sounds the woman made, the vibration of the ground beneath their feet less important than the progress of an infant head through a birth canal. Mila wiped the grime from her patient’s sweaty face, unaware that the dust from the clinic roof was sifting down over them all. The battling army drew near, the mother’s breathing turned to panting and then caught as she pushed, and pushed again. The town’s defenders drew back inside their walls, and the forces outside prepared for morning’s terrible punishment.
A civil war, brother against brother, was always the most bloody. Jephtha, general to an army, was weary of the stench of blood. He had lost friends that night, killed at the hands of other relatives, the guns of childhood friends. In the still hours of the night, he had cradled in his arms the eighteen year-old son of his cowherd, a man he had grown up with, played with as a child, given the care of his cows to, a man who had in turn handed his only son over to Jephtha for the war. When the young man coughed and strangled his way into silence, the general felt as if his own son had died. All around him, he could feel the stir of men driven to the brink of rage, waiting for dawn. He knew what they wanted, knew what they would do to the town below. He wanted it too, the death, the destruction, the absolute flattening of this last town among dozens of others.
And yet, he was sick of the stench of blood, his own and his enemy’s. And to make matters worse, the man from the news corps, smelling an end to the war, had stuck like a burr with this colorful regiment of criminals. Unless the general did something, the cameras were going to record a slaughter.
So Jephtha laid down the dead boy in his arms, and stood tall. Raising his voice, he spoke to his men, wrapping them around his will as he had done since the days when he and they had done little more than smuggle butter across the border. He spoke first to his weary fighters, voice loud and absolutely firm, telling them what they would do, and what they would not do.
