The Journey Begun (4 page)

An awkward silence punctuated the old soldier’s words. Elias averted his eyes and brushed a breadcrumb from his thin beard. Jonah leaned forward and rested his forearms on the table as he held Moshe’s gaze.

“I believe there is more for you to do, my friend,” Jonah affirmed. “Much.”

Moshe straightened. Glancing back at Elias, he dipped his head and turned to go. As he left, Jonah reckoned the man heading toward the door was more erect, his steps firmer, than the one who had crossed the floor an hour ago.

Two

ave you ever seen the sky so heavy?” Sarah dumped the last basketful of early barley into the clay storage bin and pushed the rough wooden lid across its mouth. Jonah’s stolid sister-in-law collapsed on a limestone block by the tool shed with the empty basket in her lap. She wiped streaks of dirty moisture across her forehead with a dusty scarf.

“I can’t remember a time.” Miriam shook the chaff from a large cloth into the still air, raising a cloud of grain dust that enveloped her slender form and assailed her nose and eyes. She turned her head away, coughing.

“There’s just no air at all.” Sarah dabbed her neck and squinted into the gray sky.

The overcast sagged and pressed against the earth, suffocating the land with a blanket of haze, and stifling the women’s breath as they sifted the grain. The chaff from Miriam’s cloth hung in the heavy atmosphere like a fog of porridge.

“How’s Mother getting along with the twins? Have you checked on them lately?” Sarah watched her daughter-in-law fold the granary cloth. “They’re a challenge even for you and Elias, and Mother is not as strong as she once was.”

Miriam knit her brow at the subtle rebuke. She said nothing as she tucked the edge of the cloth under her chin and finished folding. Miriam loved Elias’ family, but her mother-in-law’s sharp tongue often strained her nerves. Although she knew Sarah never meant to hurt feelings, the years had conditioned Miriam to expect the worst, and she often bristled even when the older woman intended no reproof.

Sarah paused, mopping her neck, and frowned.

Taking her time, the younger woman slapped the remaining dust from the folded fabric and tucked it under her arm. “Do you want me to take that in?” She extended her hand toward the empty basket on Sarah’s lap, but did not meet her look.

Sarah handed her the basket.

Miriam cradled the woven bowl under her arm and picked her way across the rocky yard to the house. She pushed against the door. It didn’t budge. She pushed again, harder. Muffled giggles escaped through the threshold followed by a stifled “Shh!”

“Jesse! Joshua! Open the door!” Miriam glanced furtively toward Sarah, who now watched with her head cocked and arms folded across her chest. Her cheeks flushed.

“
Now!”
A stomp of her foot accented the command.

“Let your mother in, Jesse.” Deborah’s thin voice leaked under the door, audible just above the scuffling. Miriam heard a scraping noise and the door went ajar. She shouldered it open and stood in the doorway, glaring at her eleven-year-old sons.

“It was Joshua’s idea.”

“Was not.”

“Was, too.”

“Was—“

“Enough!” Miriam’s frown deepened. She stalked across the room and dropped the basket onto the table. The boys made their break for the door, colliding with it as they tried to squeeze through at the same time. It slammed behind them.

Deborah, the beloved matriarch of the Ben Amittai household, sat by a side window with her wooden sewing chest propped open. She worked a piece of kid leather with her slender fingers, preparing a patch for one of Jonah’s work aprons.

“I hope the boys haven’t been too much trouble.” Miriam avoided facing her grandmother as she draped the cloth over the edge of the table.

“Not at all, dear.” Deborah noted her granddaughter’s terse look and lowered her work to her lap. “What is it, Miriam?”

“Oh, nothing. It’s my problem. Thanks, though.” She managed a weak smile and busied herself putting the basket away.

“Now, if it’s really nothing, how could it be a problem?” Deborah’s tone was tender, but insistent.

Miriam’s shoulders drooped. She sighed as she turned and fixed a plaintive look on her grandmother, her eyes misting.

“Sit down, dear.” It was a gentle suggestion, but not one allowing a choice. Deborah waited.

Miriam loosed a heavy sigh as she dropped into a chair. “Grandmother, I love my mother-in-law. I really do, but she’s so critical of me. Her words bite.” She choked. “I don’t think she likes me.”

“I see.” Deborah nodded, her eyes softening. “Miriam, Sarah loves you, you know that. You must remember, though, she grew up under different circumstances than you. She had to hold her own with four older brothers who often teased and goaded her. Her mother died when she was only thirteen years old, so there was no one to teach her the gentler points of womanhood. Perhaps—”

“I know, Grandmother, I know.” Suppressed impatience sharpened Miriam’s tone and her words poured out unguarded. “But just because she had a…a ‘difficult childhood,’ does that give her the right to cut at people now? We all had difficulties growing up at one point or another, so why must one person’s childhood deserve more consideration than another’s?” Her impatience collapsed into exasperation. “Why shouldn’t they have to show the same…consideration to us and…and respect our upbringings? I mean, it…it’s just that…oh, I don’t know what I’m trying to say!” She buried her face in her hands and burst into tears.

Deborah permitted Miriam a moment to release, then rose from her seat and shuffled across the floor. Easing into a chair next to the sobbing woman, she placed a tender hand on her arm.

Miriam’s convulsive weeping subsided to erratic gasps and then to short sniffs. She wiped her eyes with the hem of her apron and blinked up at her grandmother’s face. “I’m…sorry...” She took a deep breath and stifled one more sob.

Deborah smiled. “Of course you’re right, dear. No person’s past is more compelling than another’s. But it’s also true that we are responsible for our own behavior and for the way we treat others. We cannot control how they treat us, nor should we let their behavior influence ours.” She dabbed at a tear streaking down Miriam’s chin with the soft patch.

“Then what should I do when she hurts me like that? Just sit there and take it because ‘that’s the way she is’?” She sniffed and toyed with a corner of the folded granary cloth.

“No, dear. You should hug her.”

Miriam released the cloth and stared at her grandmother. “What?”

“You should hug her. Nothing will do more to bring Sarah around than love, than by displaying the gentleness she lacks.” Deborah settled back. “A goat cannot breed a rabbit, it can only bear another goat. Resentment cannot breed kindness, it can only bear more resentment. If you desire a change for the better in Sarah, show her what the better is.”

Miriam sputtered a mirthless chuckle. “I can only imagine what she would do if I hugged her.”

“It doesn’t matter what she does, dear, it matters what
you
do. You have your own life to answer for, not anyone else’s. Why allow someone to force upon you a behavior that you yourself dislike? Wouldn’t your own personality then be as undesirable as the one vexing you? Besides, how can you complain about her if you’ve become the same as she?” Deborah lifted an eyebrow.

“But she makes me so mad sometimes.” Miriam shook her head.

Deborah smiled again. “I know, Miriam, but consider that Sarah can’t ‘make you’ anything. Your response to her is yours to choose. You can control that choice. It takes some presence of mind, but until you do, well, you’re just working against yourself—and your mother-in-law.”

Miriam dropped her shoulders and sighed. “So that’s all I have to do? Hug her?”

Deborah chuckled. “Well, you can only control your half of the hug, dear. She’s in charge of her half. But it has to start somewhere, doesn’t it?”

Her granddaughter nodded, not fully convinced.

“It’ll get easier. You’ll see.” Deborah leaned forward to rise, but froze, her eyes creasing to a steady stare. Teetering for a moment, she suddenly fell back into her chair, nearly tipping it over.

Miriam leaned forward. “Grandmother?” She gasped at the dazed expression in Deborah’s eyes. She reached out and squeezed her grandmother’s hand.

The stricken woman creased her brow and worked her mouth, but no words came.

Miriam sprang from her chair.
“Grandmother
! What
is
it?” She kneeled in front of Deborah and peered into her face, but there was no sign of recognition. As Miriam reached for her grandmother’s shoulder, Deborah’s eyes rolled back and she slumped forward.

Miriam jumped up and raced for the door, screaming.

The scream reached Sarah as she placed the last of the granary tools in the shed. She jerked her head up and saw Miriam flailing her arms at her from the house.

“Mother! Mother, come quickly! It’s Grandmother!”

Three

onah’s mind tossed just beneath the surface of consciousness, struggling to sort through an array of disparate thoughts and images. The ghosts of countless goats who surrendered to his knife danced and mocked him from the parapets of Samaria as he floated through the city’s gate into an empty marketplace belonging to Megiddo, or perhaps somewhere else. Translucent spears darted by and through him while Elihu’s disembodied head bobbed and laughed. Ribbons of wine and goat’s milk streamed down the apparition’s chin, forming the silhouette of a bearded face—whose, he couldn’t tell. The face melted into a dark still pool along the banks of the Kishon River whose waters swirled into a furious eddy that threatened to suck him under. A drumming in his ears pounded the eddy into a dark strip of coarse cloth lying on a rough wooden table, which evaporated into the still pale face of a woman—his mother!

Jonah jerked his head up and cried out, his wide eyes probing the darkness. The drumming focused into the hammering of rain against the outside wall of the inn. Adrenalin squeezed his heart and sent his pulse pounding through his temples. His eyes fought the gloom of the charcoal-gray predawn, groping for coherency in the whirling threads of consciousness. Against the far wall, the doorframe coalesced and rescued him from his abstract prison. He stared at the perfect rectangle, his mind savoring its predictable symmetry, finite lines and sharp angles. Most importantly, the door remained still and he appreciated that.

“Elias?” Jonah’s hoarse voice shivered through the air.

A rustling noise across the room betrayed where his nephew sprawled on a bed of straw.

“Elias, are you awake?”

“I am now.” Elias’ words, fuzzy in semi-consciousness, nudged through the muffled pattering of rain.

“I’m getting up. I want to get an early start.”

“It’s still dark. Breakfast won’t be ready.” The straw crunched and a dull thud resounded as Elias rolled onto his back and flopped his arm onto the bare floor.

“We have fruit and bread left over from yesterday. We can eat on the way.” Jonah sat up and rubbed at the grit in his eyes.

“But it’s still raining.” Elias’ plaintive voice dribbled across the floor.

“We won’t melt.”

With hope dwindling, Elias sighed. “What’s the hurry, Uncle?”

“I’m not sure what it is. I just know it’s there.” Jonah’s knee joints cracked their disapproval as he teetered to his feet, groping for his staff.

Elias huffed another sigh and sat up, brushing strands of straw from his clothes. The grumbling young tanner struggled to his feet and shivered in the damp chill as he pulled his cloak over his head. Groping for his own staff in the darkness, he stumbled over his travel pouch. He muttered a threat against all things living, yanked the insolent pouch off the floor, and threw it over his shoulder.

Jonah, his staff in hand and his pouch shouldered, pushed through the door into the inn’s empty outer room. The clattering of stoneware penetrated the door next to theirs, signaling that Hosea and his wife had begun breakfast preparations. The two travelers felt their way through the darkness to the front door, where they stepped out onto the drenched pavement.

The downpour had ebbed to a light drizzle, but the sky remained as dark and solid as granite, obscuring any evidence of dawn. Elias shook his head as he trudged to the stable. “I can’t think what could be so pressing in Taanach that we have to leave this early.”

“We’re not going to Taanach. We’re going home.”

“Home? What about the deliveries? We still have two stops to make.” Elias pulled open the gate to Sheba’s stall.

“They’ll have to wait.”

Elias slipped the rope over the donkey’s muzzle, still muttering. “It’s freezing! I can hardly bend my fingers.”

“Try harder.”

Grumbling, Elias led Sheba into the street and squinted into the sullen sky. “I wonder if it’ll get much lighter than this the whole day.”

“We should leave the weather behind on the road out of the big valley.” Jonah took the rope and guided the donkey to the front of the wagon to harness her.

Obviously sharing Elias’ irritation at the early hour and miserable weather, Sheba laid her ears back, snorted, and whipped her head around, trying to pinch Jonah’s hand with her teeth.

“Take it easy, girl. You’ve got your mother’s temper, but you lack her aim.” Jonah scratched the beast behind the ears.

Elias glanced at Jonah’s shadowed face. “You still miss Jezzie, don’t you, Uncle?”

“There’ll never be another like her, I think.”

“She lived a long life,” Elias offered. “I believe she was happy.”

Jonah nodded. “I tried resting her the last year, putting her to pasture, but she hated it. She seemed to be happiest pulling me around in this silly cart. It was fitting she died in the harness, I suppose.” He quieted. “Some creatures are born to serve.”

Elias averted his eyes at the catch in Jonah’s voice. “And those are the ones we take the most for granted while they’re alive and miss the most when they’re gone, eh?”

“You’re wise beyond your years, Nephew.” Jonah smiled and clapped Elias on the shoulder. He shifted the goatskins and tucked their travel pouches under the driver’s bench. Clambering aboard, they began the journey back to Gath-hepher, uneasiness pricking the back of Jonah’s mind.