Rebekah: Women of Genesis Page 2

  Rebekah had her doubts about this. She had tried talking to Father many times, speaking slowly so he could read her lips, and at first he had tried to understand her, but most of the time he failed, or got it only partly right, and the resignation in his eyes when he looked away from her and refused to try anymore made her so sad she couldn’t even cry. “What, you’ll press your mouth into his ear and scream?”

  Laban rolled his eyes as if she were a hopeless simpleton. “Writing.”

  “That’s a thing for city priests.”

  “Uncle Abraham writes.”

  “Uncle Abraham is far away and very old and spends all his time talking to God,” said Rebekah.

  “If the priests in the city can write, and Uncle Abraham can write, then why can’t Father and I learn to write?”

  “Then I can, too,” said Rebekah, daring him to argue with her.

  “Of course you can,” said Laban. “You have to. Because as soon as I can, I’ll be out with the men, and you’ll have to be able to talk to Father, too.”

  For three days, Laban and Rebekah spent every spare moment together, working out a set of pictures they could draw with a stick in the dirt. Some of the words were easy—each of the animals could be drawn quickly, as could crops, articles of clothing, pots, baskets. Day and night were easy enough, too—the sun was round, the moon a crescent. Water was a bit more of a challenge, but they ended up with a drawing of a well.

  “What if you want to say ‘well’?” asked Rebekah.

  “Then I’ll draw a well,” said Laban.

  “What if you want to say, ‘There’s no water in the well’?” asked Rebekah.

  “Then I’ll draw a well, point to it, and then rub it out!” Laban was beginning to sound exasperated.

  “What if you want to say, ‘The well has been poisoned’?”

  Laban pointed to his well drawing and then pantomimed gagging, choking, and falling down dead. He opened his eyes. “Well? Do you think he’ll get it?”

  “That can’t be the way Uncle Abraham does it,” said Rebekah.

  “We aren’t trying to write to Uncle Abraham,” said Laban. “We’re just trying to talk to Father.”

  “What if you want to say, ‘I’m afraid there might be bandits coming but Pillel says they’re just travelers and there’s nothing to worry about but I think we should gather in the men and sleep with our swords’?”

  Laban glared at her. “I will never have to say that,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I would just . . . I would just tell him that bandits were coming and bring him his sword.”

  “No!” shouted Rebekah. “The men would know it was you who decided and not Father. And they can’t follow Father into battle anyway, so it would have to be Pillel in command at least until you’re tall enough to lead the men yourself, and anyway the whole idea of this is to help Father keep the respect of the men, and if you aren’t telling him the truth and letting him decide then they won’t respect him or you and they won’t trust you either and then we’ve lost everything.”

  It was obvious Laban wanted to argue with her, but there was nothing to say. “Some things are just too hard to draw,” Laban finally admitted. “But you’re right, we have to try.”

  “I think writing isn’t worth much if you have to be right there to make faces or fall down dead,” said Rebekah.

  “There’s a trick to it that we don’t know.”

  “If priests who are dumb enough to pray to a stone can do it,” said Rebekah, “we can figure it out.”

  “If we make fun of their gods, people in the towns will shut us out,” Laban reminded her. It was one of the rules learned by those who moved from place to place, following green grass and searching for ample water.

  Rebekah knew the rule. “I was making fun of the priests.” She looked again at Laban’s drawings in the dirt. “Let’s show Father as much as we’ve figured out about writing.”

  “I don’t want to show him until we have it right.”

  “Maybe he can help us get it right. Maybe he knows how Uncle Abraham does it.”

  “And in the meantime, how will I draw a picture of us not knowing how to draw pictures of things we can’t draw pictures of?”

  “If you draw something and he doesn’t understand, then at least he’ll understand that we don’t know how to make him understand, and that’s what we’re trying to make him understand.”

  Laban grinned. “Now you’re sounding like a priest.”

  Rebekah laughed. “The Lord is not made of stone, he is in the stone. The Lord is not confined by the stone, he is expressed by the stone. Since the Lord was in the stonecutter who shaped the image, the idol is both man’s gift to the Lord and the Lord’s gift to man.”

  Laban whistled. “You listen to that stuff?”

  “I listen to everything,” said Rebekah. Her own words made her think of Father, who could never listen to anything again.

  “I listen to everything, too,” said Laban. “But you remember it.”

  “That has to be the worst thing for Father,” said Rebekah. “That he remembers being able to hear. Being at the center of everything.”

  “What, you think it would have been better if he had always been deaf? Who would have married him, then? Who would be our father?”

  “Father would,” said Rebekah. “Because Mother would have loved him anyway.”

  “But Mother’s father would never have given her to a deaf man in marriage.”

  “She would have married him anyway!”

  “Now you’re just being silly,” said Laban. “Would you marry a . . . a blind man? A cripple? A simpleton?”

  “I would if I loved him,” said Rebekah.

  “That’s why fathers decide these things, and don’t leave them up to silly girls who would go off and marry blind, deaf, staggering fools.”

  Laban said this so loftily that she had to poke him. “But Laban, someday Father will have to find a wife for you.”

  “I’m not a . . . I don’t . . . I refuse to let you goad me.”

  Rebekah laughed at his dignity. “Let’s go show Father as much writing as we’ve got.”

  “I don’t want him to see how bad we are at it.”

  “The only way to get better is to do it wrong till we get it right. Like you with sheep shearing.”

  Laban blushed. “You really do remember everything.”

  “I remember eating lots of mutton,” said Rebekah. “I remember you wearing an ugly tunic woven out of bloody wool.”

  “You were only a baby.”

  “Come on,” she said, pulling him toward the brightest-colored tent that marked the center of their father’s household.

  They did not clap their hands outside the tent, or call out for permission to enter—what good would it have done? That was one of the things Rebekah knew Father hated worst—the fact that people now had no choice but to walk in on him at whatever hour they thought their need was more important than his privacy. Or his dignity. He had tried keeping a servant at his door, but either his visitors ignored the servant or the servant kept out people Father needed to see, and besides, it was not as if the household could afford to keep a man away from his real work just to sit at the master’s door all day. So Laban parted the tent flap and peered inside.

  Father was going over tally sticks with Pillel. Because Rebekah knew that Pillel had just been to the hills south of the river, she knew that the sticks were a count of the main goat herd, and from the number of marks below the main notch she knew that it was a good year, with many new kids thriving. Last winter’s rains had washed away dozens of houses built on land that had been dry through two generations of drought. But the hillsides were lush this spring, and the herds and flocks were fat and strong; and if there could be rains again this winter, they might not have to sell half the younglings into the towns for slaughter, but could keep them and grow the herds and become wealthy again, wealthy as in the days when Abraham had been a great prince whose household was so mighty he could defeat Amorite kings and save the cities of the plain.

  Only she would trade such wealth and power, would trade even the herds they had, would give up the whole household and labor with her own hands at all tasks, hauling water like a slave and wearing only cloth she wove herself, if Father could only hear again.

  Though of course that was a childish thing to wish, because if Father could hear, then he would have his great household and all his flocks and herds and there’d be nothing to fear. No, the way the world worked, you didn’t trade wealth to get wholeness of body. It was when your body ceased to be whole that you also lost your wealth, your influence, your prestige, everything. It could all go away—would all go away, once something slipped. Everything we have in life, Rebekah realized, depends on everything else. If you lose anything, you can lose everything.

  So do we really have anything at all? Was that what God was showing them by what he had allowed to happen to Father?

  Only Father had not lost everything. Had not really lost anything yet. Pillel was still serving Father, wasn’t he? And Pillel was keeping everything together.

  But didn’t that mean that now the herds and flocks and the great household belonged to Pillel? Out of loyalty, he served Father—but the men served Pillel. And there would come a day, surely, when Pillel would see the great dowry Father would assemble for Rebekah and wonder why his daughters had nothing like it to offer a husband, or when Pillel would look at Laban and wonder why the son of the deaf man was going to inherit everything Pillel had created instead of his own strong sons.

  Why was she thinking this? Pillel would never betray them.

  And yet how was it better that all of Pillel’s labor, all his life, should belong to another man? Why
shouldn’t he be able to pass along great flocks and herds to his sons? Instead he would give them only the yoke of servitude, though his life’s work had created great wealth. It was not fair to him, or to his sons. Any more than it was fair to Bethuel to be deaf.

  A thought came to the verge of her mind. About fairness, about the way God deals with people. It was a thought tinged with anger and fear, but also with that thrill that came when she finally understood something that mattered. But as quickly as it came, the thought escaped her without her being able to name it, without her being able to hold it.

  Wrong, Laban, I don’t remember everything. The best things, the ideas that matter most, they slip away without my ever really having them.

  Again the important thought verged on understanding. Again it fled unnamed.

  Bethuel saw Laban and Rebekah because Pillel heard them and looked up and beckoned them to come all the way in.

  “Ah, my children!” boomed Bethuel.

  His voice was so loud, now that he was deaf. Though she knew he could not help it, it still made Rebekah a little ashamed when he boomed out his words at inappropriate times. Father could keep no secrets now.

  “I’m done here,” said Pillel. He rose, gathering up the tally sticks.

  “The goats are doing well this spring,” said Laban.

  Pillel grinned. “The billies were frisky last fall.”

  “Or the nannies were too lazy to run away,” said Laban.

  Pillel glanced nervously at Rebekah. She hated it when people acted like that. Just because she was the daughter of the house and her purity had to be protected did not mean she was blind and did not know how lambs and kids and calves were made.

  “You can stay,” said Rebekah.

  “No he can’t,” said Laban, annoyed.

  “Only your father bids me stay or go,” said Pillel mildly. “And he has asked me to leave.”

  Rebekah looked sharply at him. Father had said no such thing. But there were many things Pillel and Father were able to communicate without words—there always had been. A glance, a wink, a tiny gesture; they understood each other so well that words were often unneeded. Of course that had not changed with Father’s deafness. But what was to stop Pillel from claiming that Father had told him something when it was merely Pillel’s own decision?

  Trust, that’s what. Pillel had earned the family’s trust, and just because he could lie did not give Rebekah any right to suppose that he would. When a man had earned their trust, he ought to have it, and not lose it just because a foolish girl noticed that he could probably get away with any number of small betrayals.

  When Pillel was gone with the tally sticks, Laban wasted no time. He pulled back three layers of rugs to expose a patch of hard sandy soil. Rebekah watched Father as Father watched Laban draw his pictures. He grew more and more puzzled, and Rebekah could not help agreeing with him.

  “What are you drawing?” she whispered. “This isn’t anything we worked out together.”

  “I’m trying a new one,” he said.

  “Well I can’t understand it.”

  Angry, Laban rubbed out the drawing with his sandal and began again. This time he drew the symbols that they had worked out for saying what was being prepared for dinner. The fire, the spit, the pot. Only this was absurd. They hadn’t even been to the kitchen fires today. “Laban, what are you doing? We don’t know what’s for dinner.”

  “I’m not telling, I’m asking,” said Laban. “What he wants. And then we can go tell the women.”

  He turned to Father, who was studying Laban’s drawing with an odd expression. Laban waved a hand down within Father’s field of vision, and Father looked up at his face. Laban elaborately mouthed his words.

  “Dinner,” Laban said, then pointed at the parts of the drawing. “Food. Dinner. Kitchen. Cookfire. The pot. The spit. See?”

  “If you use all the different words, how will he know what each picture means?”

  Laban whirled on her. “If you think you can do better, give it a try!”

  “Yes, I will,” she said. Taking the stick from Laban’s hand, she began her own drawing. She drew a tall man, a short man, and a short girl. She pointed to Father, Laban, and herself, then back at the drawings.

  Father nodded. That was more than he had done with Laban’s drawing, but she did not look at Laban lest he think she was being triumphant. He got huffy when he thought he had been shown up.

  Rebekah rubbed out her pictures, then drew just the boy and girl, and this time the girl had a stick in her hand and under the point of the stick Rebekah drew a very tiny picture of the very picture she was drawing—the boy, the girl, the stick.

  Father chuckled.

  But Rebekah wasn’t done. She drew a picture of an ear, then scribbled across it. Then a picture of an eye, and a dotted line going to it from the drawing the girl was making.

  Then she knelt before Father and mouthed her words carefully. “I draw. You see. That is how you hear us.” She touched the picture of the eye, then reached up and touched Father’s ear. Then his eye, then his ear again. “You see, and that’s how you’ll hear.”

  Father shook his head.

  He didn’t understand.

  No, he did understand. Because he wasn’t just shaking his head. He was smiling, then laughing, but it was a rueful, affectionate laugh, and he gathered Rebekah into his arms and then reached out for Laban as well and embraced them both. “My children, wonderful and wise.”

  “He likes it!” said Laban.

  Father must have felt the vibration of Laban’s voice, because he pulled back and looked expectantly at Laban’s face.

  “It’s writing,” Laban said. “Like Uncle Abraham.”

  Father wrinkled his brow—he didn’t understand Laban’s words. But it hardly mattered, since the next thing he said was, “It’s writing. You’re trying to write to me.”

  “Yes,” said Rebekah, and Laban almost jumped out of his clothes in his excitement, jumping up and down, obliterating the drawings with his feet.

  “But you don’t do it with pictures of the thing,” said Father. “You make pictures of the sounds.”

  Father reached out a hand. After only a moment’s hesitation, Rebekah realized he wanted the stick and gave it to him. He thought for a long moment, then made three marks in the dirt.

  “You make marks that stand for the sounds of the word,” he said. “That’s your name, Rebekah.”

  “It doesn’t look like anything,” said Laban.

  Father didn’t hear him, but explained anyway. “This mark is always ‘ruh.’ And this mark is always ‘buh.’ And this one is ‘kuh.’”

  He made three more marks. “‘Luh,’ ‘buh,’ ‘nuh,’” he said.

  “Look, your name and mine are the same in the middle,” said Rebekah.