Rachel and Leah (Women of Genesis) Read online

  Father was very convincing.

  “Was her vision from the Evil One?” asked Leah.

  “Her vision was from her own imagination,” said Father. “She thinks she hears the name of Rebekah, she dreams but the dream gets it all wrong, the way dreams do. It means nothing, but if she blabs about it to everybody it will damage her reputation and mine as well. So, Rachel, you will not tell anyone about this dream or any other dream you get. Except me. If there’s ever a clear message of some kind, then tell me at once.”

  Later, Leah reassured Rachel that this meant Father secretly believed in her vision. “Why would he want you to tell him, except that he believes?”

  “I never get clear messages,” said Rachel. “So I’ll never tell Father about it. So that’s all over. I hope I don’t have any more visions like that, now that Father has commanded me not to tell anybody.”

  “You can tell me.”

  “Father said not.”

  “I already think you’re crazy,” said Leah. “So what harm can it do?”

  But Rachel never told Leah another vision, because the next day when Leah was irritated that she couldn’t go along to watch the shearing of the sheep—too many knives flashing for a weak-eyed girl to be leaning in for a closer look, Father said—Leah’s retort was, “I may not see everything, but at least what I do see is real.”

  That’s how Rachel knew that Leah hated her visions. So as far as Leah heard of it, Rachel never had another.

  And she didn’t have many. Most of the time, the visions she saw were empty nothings. The voice only came now and then, and she only understood bits and snatches, and she never saw that particular dream again. She rarely thought of it, and when she did, she couldn’t even remember what anybody looked like, so what was the point? Mostly she tried to ignore the things she saw that weren’t actually real, and when she did see the patterns she’d dispel them as quickly as possible, and when she did hear that voice—the man or the woman, either one—she’d look for somebody to talk to.

  But on this day, returning with the flock she and four older boys and Old Jaw had been grazing up in the southwestern hills, the voice came back to her and would not go away.

  She was leading the way—nobody remembered paths better than Rachel, and Old Jaw was always content to lag behind, “watching for strays,” as he said. The dogs knew their business—they were keeping the flock together, right behind Rachel. So there was nothing in front of her except grassy hills and the unmarked path that she knew from childhood on, leading to the little well about four miles south of Father’s settlement.

  “What’s the hurry?” called one of the boys—a particularly stupid one who was always showing off for her, even though she made it clear she had nothing but contempt for his stupid acrobatics and races and clowning. She refused even to remember his name.

  Only when he spoke to her did she realize that she had quickened her pace and had led the flock at least a hundred paces ahead of Old Jaw and the boys.

  “I’m not hurrying,” she called back. “You’re just slow.”

  “Doesn’t do any good to hurry!” shouted Old Jaw. “We don’t water the flock in the heat of the day!”

  “It isn’t summer yet,” said Rachel. “It won’t hurt them!”

  “Well, if you get there ahead of us, who’s going to get the cover off the well?” shouted Old Jaw.

  The boys whooped at that. “Rachel’s going to get the dogs to do it!” said one.

  “She’s going to give it her prettiest smile and it will open up for her by itself!” shouted another.

  Rachel detested boys. They were all despicable. Why the Lord had bothered to make them, Rachel couldn’t guess. They were created in the image of God. But couldn’t he have gone all the way and given them some wits, too?

  So she forged ahead even faster, to put their jeers behind her.

  And when their voices fell away, she was aware that there was another voice that had been with her for some time, perhaps since they had set out that morning. It was the man’s voice, and it was murmuring, or perhaps chanting, and the one phrase that kept emerging in rhythm with her steps was “to the well.”

  By now, she had convinced herself that Father was right and the voice came out of her own imagination. She knew she was heading for the well, so the voice was chanting about it, pushing her along. She wished it would go away. After all, she wasn’t sitting around staring off into space. Why would the voice bother her now?

  She followed the pace it set, however, walking so quickly that the sheep seemed to catch some kind of excitement from her. They became noisier, bleating more often, and the dogs yipped and snapped more than usual, until as they crested the last hill and started down into the little vale where the well was, she was almost running.

  I don’t want to be late, she thought.

  Or had the voice said that?

  There were already quite a few sheep in the valley, two separate flocks, but down at the bottom end, almost to where it debouched from the hills. She didn’t recognize the shepherds, but that was no surprise—she knew all the major herdsmen in the area, but this close to Haran, the great houses would tend to send boys and new men … and their daughters.

  Still, strangers meant that they might not know who she was, and that she was under the protection of a great house. There might be some danger here. How far behind her were Old Jaw and the boys? Not that they would be much in the way of protectors, but they could convincingly invoke Father’s name and reputation. No one would dare to lift a hand against the flocks of Laban, still less against his daughter.

  The last thing she should do, she knew, was to show timidity. So she continued at the same pace until her flock was gathered around the well and the troughs.

  One of the strange shepherds called out to her. “It’s the heat of the day!”

  She ignored him.

  “You going to lift off the cover yourself?” The others thought this was very funny.

  But of course it was not funny. She was still too small to lift or even slide the heavy stone that covered the mouth of the well. So she sat on top of it, her back to the strangers, while her sheep milled around the well and tried to lap water from the wet spots in the troughs.

  Some of the men in the nearer herd soon began to speculate loudly upon why she had been in such a hurry to get to the well, and what it was she actually intended to do; and as the men began to get more and more amused at their own wit, their speculations became more and more obnoxious. What was keeping Old Jaw and the boys?

  Why doesn’t the voice come now and tell me what to do?

  Then, suddenly, the men fell silent.

  She turned and saw that one of the men from the farther herd was approaching her.

  She murmured a prayer for protection.

  As if in answer, the dogs ran toward him, barking, warning him away. Loyal dogs!

  Then he bent down and spoke to them, in a voice too soft and distant for her to hear. They sniffed his hands; he stroked them, scratched them, and when he arose they were his dogs, scampering around him like puppies as he again walked boldly toward her. Treacherous curs!

  Then she studied the man a little, and realized that he wasn’t one of the shepherds. The bundle he carried on his back was far more than any shepherd would willingly carry, since you never knew when you’d have to lift a lamb onto your shoulders and carry it. And he wasn’t dressed right. His clothes were too fine for a shepherd—and too dusty. He hadn’t spent the morning on grassy hills, he had been walking along a dry road. A traveler.

  “Don’t be afraid, Rachel,” he said. “Be at peace. I won’t come any nearer than this.”

  “Who are you, sir? How do you know my name?”

  “When I saw you and your sheep coming down the hill, I asked the other men who you were.”

  “I don’t know those men.”

  “Neither do I,” said the stranger. “But they know you. They said you were Rachel, the daughter of Laban. Or rather, I as
ked them if they knew Laban of Haran, and they said that of course they did, he’s a great man and his camp is not five miles away, and look, there’s his daughter, Rachel, the … coming down the hill with Laban’s sheep.”

  Rachel the what? She knew very well, and she pursed her lips. Rachel the Beautiful. That’s why they knew of her. The one aspect of herself that she never saw was the only one that anyone else cared about, while all the things that made up who she was in her own mind, nobody knew. I am surrounded by strangers, and the more well-known I am by reputation, the more alone I am.

  “If you get off the stone,” said the traveler, “I can uncover the well.”

  “I’m not so very heavy,” said Rachel. “If you can move the stone without me, surely you’re strong enough to move it with me on top.”

  “With you and three sheep, if you can balance them all there,” said the traveler. “But I don’t believe in making foolish displays of strength. It makes other men jealous and their wives covetous, and then I have no peace.”

  Rachel refused to laugh, and she hoped he did not notice the twitch of a smile that crept to her face before she could stop it.

  She got up and lightly leapt to the ground. “I can help,” she said.

  “But what if, with my massive strength, I accidently tossed the stone onto your foot? Then you’d be Rachel the cripple, and your father would have to kill me, or at least cut off my leg.”

  “My father would never do that.”

  “Then you don’t know fathers.”

  “He’s never done anything like that before.”

  “Only because no traveler has ever cast a huge stone onto his daughter’s dainty foot.”

  Rachel looked down at her calloused, toughened feet. “I’m a shepherd, sir. My feet are not dainty.”

  “I thought it was a nicer word than ‘dingy,’” said the stranger. “And ‘dung-covered’ would have been rude.” Now he began pushing the stone in earnest, and there was no breath for speech. His word was true: he slid the stone off with no one’s help, and in one continuous movement, too, no pausing to rest.

  “That’s a useful skill to have,” said Rachel. “Most wells are covered so heavily that travelers could die of thirst trying to find a well they could open by themselves between here and Salem.”

  “Have you been to Salem?” asked the traveler.

  “No,” said Rachel. “Father only lets me tend the flocks close to home. But that’s all right. I work with the lambs and kids especially, and I know them better than any of the other herdsmen. Are you going to take the first drink or not?”

  “I opened the well for you, Lady Rachel.”

  “You look drier than the sheep,” she said. “Go ahead.”

  He grinned. “You saw the test of my strength,” he said. “What about the test of yours?”

  She glared at him. “I’m just a child, but I can draw water well enough.” She lowered the bag into the well, then braced herself and drew it up, full, and without letting the rope rub against the sides of the well, either.

  “Done like a shepherd who knows the value of rope,” said the traveler.

  “Done like a shepherd who has plaited many a rope and has better things to do with her time,” said Rachel. “Now will you dip into the water bag or do I have to do that for you, too?” She tried to conceal how much she was panting from the exertion of lifting the water straight up.

  The stranger took his own cup—a rather fine one of bronze—and dipped, and drank. He did not tip his head back and pour the water over his face, the way some did, to show off how thirsty they were. Instead he sipped carefully, husbanding the water, swishing it in his mouth several times before swallowing.

  She watched him and thought, Is this the man from my vision? She couldn’t remember what that one had looked like—it had been too long ago, and maybe she had never actually seen him, in that peculiar way of dreams, where you know that a man is standing there, but you don’t actually see any part of him. And what if it was the man? This was no servant of Abraham, come to woo, for there was no chance that his bundle contained enough presents to impress a man like her father; and besides, Rachel was too young to wed, and she knew her father would never allow it.

  Then she realized that she had been thinking of this man as someone who might marry her—an attitude she never took toward any of the men who came to visit Father, even the ones who were sizing her up as a mate for themselves or one of their sons. And she wondered if that was the point of the vision, to make her think of strangers at wells as having something to do with her future.

  Having drunk his fill, he put his hands into the water and, bowing over the waterbag, brought two cupped handsful to his face, to wash. And then, before she could suggest doing it, he carried the bag to the trough and emptied it.

  The sheep, of course, were quite interested in this, and crowded around the trough. The traveler laughed. “Sheep don’t bother to hide their passions, do they. Water! Grass! That’s why God didn’t give them speech. They would only need a couple of words to cover the entire range of their desires.”

  He lowered the bag into the well himself this time, and drew it up far more quickly than she had. But she saw how he was careful to spill nothing between the well and the trough—what he drew was to be used, not wasted on the ground. He poured it out into a second trough—but the two of them had to drag sheep from the crowd milling around the first trough, because they were too intent on the water there to notice water that was much more easily reached.

  She saw how he handled sheep, and knew that though he might be dressed as a traveler, he was a shepherd after all, and a good one. He used just the right amount of strength to bring the sheep, murmuring peaceably to them as he turned them smoothly and pulled them toward where he wanted them to go. And once a few of the sheep were drinking from the second trough, it was enough simply to turn the other sheep that were not already drinking.

  He left Rachel to that task while he fetched yet another skin of water and filled the third trough. When the flock was evenly divided among the three, he continued drawing and pouring, ignoring Rachel when she said, “Surely you’ve done enough now. The work is mine.”

  “The work is Laban’s,” said the traveler, “and I want it to be seen how readily I labor in his service.”

  “Have you traveled so far, without knowing whether my father needed another servant in his household? And you’re a free man, sir, one accustomed to wealth, from your clothing. Surely you can do better than the poor wage that a free man makes from my father, even if he were to hire you.”

  He smiled and continued watering the sheep. Rachel took her turn at last, dipping with her own cup from the waterbag. When she had drunk her fill, she fastened the cup again at her waist.

  “Do you know my father, sir?” she asked.

  “We’ve never met,” said the man.

  “And yet you traveled all this way to serve him? Why should the fame of my father be known so far abroad?”

  He laughed then. “You don’t know how far I’ve traveled.”

  “Of course I do,” she said. “We had rain three days ago, and yet your clothes are heavy and white with dust. So you come from a place where the roads are dry and where the rain did not fall. That means you come from the south, because the paths are grassy to the north and east.”

  “What about the west?”

  “A man who knows animals as you do is no sailor, sir.”

  The watering was done; they both knew when there was enough in each trough to satisfy the whole flock, and now Rachel’s work was to pull off the ones who she knew tended to drink more than was good for them, while the stranger slid the stone back in place. This was harder than uncovering the well, Rachel knew, because there was some lifting, not just sliding, but he did it with no more strain than he had shown before. She hoped her father would hire the man. She would try to get home early, to tell her father what she had seen of him, how hard he worked, how strong he was, how good with the animals
. And if he didn’t have skill with weapons, too, she’d be surprised. A man who dared to travel alone, armed only with a heavy walking staff, had great confidence in his ability to wield that staff to keep better-armed robbers at bay.

  “Did you have to fight anyone on the way here?”

  “No, thanks be to the Lord,” said the traveler. “But I don’t look like someone worth robbing, do I? No pack animals laden with goods to sell.”

  She laughed. “I’ve heard of robbers setting on a half-naked beggar, stealing his loin cloth, and beating him for not having had more to take.”

  “Ah, but there you are, a half-naked beggar isn’t likely to put up much of a fight. Men don’t go into the robbery business because they’re brave.”

  So he did think of himself as a formidable fighter.

  It was only now that Old Jaw and the boys appeared over the crest of the hill. Apparently once she had gone on ahead, they had taken their own lazy time about sauntering along.

  But when they saw her with a stranger, Old Jaw began to hurry down the hill, coming as close to a run as a man that old was capable of. Rachel smiled at that. Oh, yes, Father would hear—from the other herdsmen, not from her—about how his daughter had come to the well alone, and took up with a stranger for fifteen minutes before Old Jaw could be bothered to show up, and him entrusted with the safety of Laban’s daughter! As if hurrying now would change any part of that story. Of course, Rachel would assure her father that she had deliberately outpaced the old man and was never in danger. And she would jolly him out of whatever anger he might feel toward the old man, and deny that it had been any time at all before he came.

  Old Jaw was full of challenge when he got near enough to speak. “Who are you, stranger! Why are you bothering this child?”

  Anger flashed in the stranger’s eyes. “What do you accuse me of, sir!” he said. “Have I bothered her? Have I laid hands upon her?”