Rebekah: Women of Genesis (34 page)

Isaac stopped pacing and looked at her for the longest time.

“I should be proud,” he said. “That you feel that way about me.”

“Yes, you should,” said Rebekah. “Because I love you to the point of worship, don’t you understand that? And you
earn
that love, you deserve it, not just from me but from everybody. Everything I see you do is good. You are exactly what a man of God ought to be. Until now! Until this! And this is complete madness!”

“If you knew my father better, you’d know a
real
man of God, and you’d be grateful that he wanted to help raise our son.”

“When he’s present, you step back and say little, and I don’t want our son to grow up with his papa hidden in Grandfather’s shadow.”

“Father talks to God all the time, and this is what Father believes is right,” said Isaac.

“Are you telling me that God has said Abraham should raise our son?”

“Father hasn’t actually said so, no.”

“And he’s never going to, because God did not bring you and me together so that someone
else
could raise our child. That’s your father’s own idea.”

“An idea he got from his disappointment in me.”

“He’s not disappointed in you.”

“He had Ishmael,” said Isaac, “and he had to send that beloved son away to make room for . . . me.”

“He sent Ishmael away because he was a spiteful boy and there was a real danger that if he were close at hand you would be much more likely to meet with accidents as a child, one of which would eventually be fatal.”

Isaac knelt down in front of her. “Don’t you see that every word you say convinces me that I’m right and you’re wrong?”

“What? What did I say?”

“You said the very thing my mother always said. You sound like her.”

“No, I sound like
every
mother sounds, when there’s somebody close at hand who hates her child, and when that hateful somebody is also violent and slack of conscience.”

“And whom will you teach our son to be afraid of?”

“Of his own father’s ludicrous self-doubt.”

“Enough,” said Isaac. “You’re making this harder. Every word makes it harder.”

“Only until you realize I’m right. Then it becomes easy.”

He realized she was trying to soften their argument with humor, and so he smiled, though she did not think he really was amused.

“I loved my mother,” said Isaac. “I spent my childhood trying not to disappoint her or worry her. And as a result, I ended up disappointing my father and, yes, myself. People come here to see the great Abraham, and they all come away thinking, What a marvelous man, a true prophet of God, but isn’t it a shame about his son?”

“They never think that.”

“I want my son to be a great man. A prophet like my father.”

“Why can’t our son be a prophet like
his
father?”

Suddenly tears appeared in Isaac’s eyes. “Because I’m not like my father. Great visions of the stars, the creation of the world. The inspiration I get is more along the lines of where to camp, and which of two quarreling shepherds is lying to me.”

“But, Isaac,” she said, “God speaks to all of us in different voices and tells us what he needs us to know. He doesn’t have to show you what your father saw, because Abraham wrote it down and so you have it. And when God speaks to
me
it isn’t with a voice or a vision, it’s with a sudden strong desire to do a righteous thing. Or sometimes when I already have the strong desire to do right, I don’t know what the right thing
is
until God puts the certainty in my heart.”

Isaac sank down onto the rug beside her. “God speaks to you?”

“Not for a long time,” said Rebekah. “In fact, it was mostly when I needed God’s help in ruling the women of my father’s house and I had no idea how to do it. And then again when Ezbaal came and the Lord showed me how to get out of marrying him.”

“Showed you?”

“The idea came into my head and I knew that it was right.”

“So God talks more even to you than to me. And you wonder why I know people are disappointed to meet Abraham’s son.”

This idea was so absurd that Rebekah laughed—and regretted it instantly, for the look on Isaac’s face, the way he turned away from her . . . he had meant it. “Isaac,” she said, “I’m not a prophet at all. I have no authority, I have no birthright. I’ve just . . . sometimes I’ve been led, I’ve been helped. To bring me to
you.
So I could be part of
your
life,
your
work.”

“I know.” He sighed. “I know it. As Father says—or said, back when he was still a patient man and taught
me
to be patient—the Lord doesn’t have to push you when you’re already moving forward on the right path.”

“That’s right.”

“The trouble is, that means that people who are on the right path have exactly the same relationship with God as people who are so far off the path that they couldn’t hear the voice of God if he shouted in their ears.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, I know that’s not so. I mean—my life is happy. Mostly. A good life. The life you get when you obey the Lord’s commandments and serve him as best you can. I have the knowledge that comes from studying the holy writings. I have the wife God chose for me. Maybe now I’m even going to have a son. I’ve been blessed, and it’s unrighteous of me to covet more.”

“I wish I could give you whatever it is you yearn for.”

“What I yearn for,” said Isaac, “isn’t yours to give.”

“So who has it, so I can make them give it to you?”

Isaac laughed. “You would, wouldn’t you. And I might even tell you. If I knew what it was.”

“Maybe I have what you need right here,” she said, patting her stomach.

“With all the fathers and mothers I’ve known over the years, including my own,” said Isaac, “I’ve never yet heard of any of them who said that having children was the
end
of their problems.”

“But it might have been the end of their yearnings,” said Rebekah. “At least of their yearning for children!”

Isaac sat down beside her, calm again. “Not even that,” said Isaac. “Look at Father if you doubt me.”

“I don’t even try to understand your father.”

“I wish you had known him years ago when Mother was alive. He complains about her now, how she raised me, but while she was alive, she was . . . he never . . . I don’t know how to say it. He saw people more kindly. And not because Mother was always compassionate—that’s not so. She could be quite sharp in her judgment, and she didn’t tolerate fools. It’s as if he lived his life to try to make her proud of him, and she
was
 proud of him and so he had nothing to prove. But with her gone, he’s never content. Restless all the time. Nothing is good enough. And what you don’t realize is, he’s harder on himself than he is on anyone else.”

“I wonder how that could be possible.”

“Don’t be snippy,” said Isaac. “It’s so incongruous with the sweetness of your face.”

“Isaac, he’s so hard on you it hurts.”

“If I were a better man, he wouldn’t need to be.” Isaac got up. “And before you can argue with me and start this conversation all over again, I’ve got work to do.”

“So do I.”

“Don’t you think you should rest?”

“Plenty of time to rest when I turn into a pregnant cow.”

“A pregnant goat, maybe. Too small for cowhood.”

“You just watch. I intend to be huge.”

She was joking—or, perhaps, giving voice to her dread—but as the days went on she did get larger than she had expected. Not fatter—it was all in her belly.

They finally told people she was pregnant when the baby quickened and started moving inside her, though of course by then everyone already knew. The rumors had been flying so long, and the growth of Rebekah’s belly was so rapid and noticeable, that it was almost an afterthought the day Isaac said, “You know, everyone’s still pretending not to notice, and it’s getting harder and harder for them, so we ought to admit the obvious and get the celebrations over with.”

As they had anticipated, once the rumors became official Abraham at once insisted that they come to Kirjath-arba. “When I told him you were too fragile to move, he said, ‘And you think this is going to improve? Do it now.’”

“I won’t,” said Rebekah. “I’m not going to have this baby in Kirjath-arba.”

“It would help me make him feel better about it if you weren’t so robust.”

“I still throw up every few days.”

“And in between, you work as hard as ever. And walk as far, I might add. Don’t you think word of that gets back to Father?”

“What I think is that it’s not unreasonable for a woman to want to have her baby in her own home, among her own people.”

“All of Father’s people are your people,” said Isaac.

“Someday, but not yet. These are the people I know, here in Lahai-roi.”

“We’ve had good years. Enough rain. During the drier years, the well here gets brackish and there’s not enough to grow crops.”

“Isaac, do
you
want me to go to Kirjath-arba?”

“I was just saying, don’t get too attached to this place, or these people. When Father dies, it will be
my
responsibility to keep the more difficult servants near me.”

“I’ve dealt with difficult people all my life.”

“In Father’s eyes, I imagine you’re one of the most difficult,” said Isaac.

“I never meant to be.” Rebekah sighed. “All my life I dreamed of what it might be like to live close to Uncle Abraham. To sit at his feet and hear the words of God. It never occurred to me that his wife would be . . .”

“An ambitious, annoying conniver?”

“Isaac, that didn’t sound like
you.
”

“I was helping you find
your
words.”

“And I never thought that he would be so demanding.”

“Well, if you want him to love you, maybe refusing to go to Kirjath-arba isn’t the way.”

“On the contrary, if I go to Kirjath-arba, he’ll find new reasons to dislike me every single day.”

Isaac laughed and let the issue drop, but it worried Rebekah that maybe Isaac was bearing all the criticism that she was trying to avoid. How did it make Isaac look, that he couldn’t get his wife to obey her father-in-law, who was, after all, the ruler of this household? Poor Isaac, can’t even control that wife of his. He really
is
a weakling.

The thought made her shudder. What kind of wife was she, to cause her husband shame and expose him to criticism?

But just as she was beginning to believe she ought to give in and go, the movement of the baby within her became much more frequent and violent. The baby never seemed to rest. Whenever she lay down to sleep, the baby began kicking and pushing until she could hardly stand it. And even as she moved around during the day, the baby would suddenly start lurching violently, first on this side, then on that, first at the top of her belly, than down at the root. The worst was when the baby placed a kick or a lunge firmly on her bladder—it was just too embarrassing to have to flee dripping to her tent, and she began to stay inside more and more, where Deborah could attend her.

“I’ve never been pregnant before,” she asked the older servant women. “Is this the way it is for all of you?” At first they said yes, of course, but as she began to grow haggard from lack of sleep, some of them openly wondered if something was wrong.

“It’s an angry baby,” one of them said.

“It only means he’ll be strong,” said another.

“He’s fighting the devil,” one suggested.

“He dances with angels,” countered another.

Finally, in desperation, Rebekah prayed fervently for the Lord to tell her what this meant, that the child was so busy. It would do the baby no good if Rebekah became ill from lack of sleep, and she was afraid that something was very wrong, that the child was struggling for life and there was nothing she could do to help him.

Then she tried to sleep, but again, as usual, the baby lurched and heaved and kicked and pushed and she kept waking in the middle of a dream, or dreaming that she was awake.

One of the times she thought she was awake, she saw some of her great ancestors—men she had never seen, whose names she only knew from family stories—Shem, the son of Noah, and Eber, the first to live as a wandering household, along with a few others about whom she knew less—Arphaxad, Serug, Peleg. “How is it with you, daughter?” asked Shem.

“I can’t sleep,” she said.

“You’re asleep now,” he answered.

“I’m not, I’m talking to you. The baby won’t let me sleep.”

“Which baby?” asked Peleg.