After Abel and Other Stories (20 page)

He didn't understand, but I did. What was the use of being born a woman, of the blood and cramps, the monthly cycle of expectation, if it ended with nothing? Within the depths of my heart, I agreed with her. She was not a whole woman. No one ever asked me, so I never shared my thoughts, and maybe I was the only one to see it, but I came to know that together we made a complete woman. I made the babies. She got his love.

She got the better part of the deal. My babies would grow and leave me. My body would stop making them, and I'd be left with nothing, just the memory of a time when I was needed. She would be treasured forever.

The worst of it came when Elkanah packed us all up—Hannah, me, the children—and took us off to Shiloh to give his yearly sacrifice. The babies cried, the children complained of boredom and aching feet, the donkeys brayed out their protests. Their tails swatted back and forth over their haunches in search of flies to scatter. And all the way, Elkanah raised his hands to heaven, sang his prayers, and tried to get the rest of us
to show some enthusiasm for our godly pilgrimage.

I was always too busy to sing. It fell to me to pack our food for the trip, to ration it out over the two days' walk, to rein the older boys back in when they ran off the road in search of lizards to poke or the carcasses of animals long or newly dead.

“Look, Mama,” they said at least three times a day, and then brandished a bleached thigh bone or dead bird, its neck bent or twisted to the side. I was too tired to ask if they had found those small bodies or killed the birds themselves.

Hannah sat silently on her plodding ass. Always. Her head hung, her eyes cast down to the ground, she seemed to follow only the shadows as they told the story of our progress. What she didn't do is offer to help.

And every year, my hair thinned after so many pregnancies and escaping in sweaty tendrils from the cloth I'd draped over my head to protect me from the sun, I came down off my donkey to build a fire in the evening, feed every one of us, prepare the beds for all my children.

All the while, Hannah sat morosely to the side, Elkanah holding her hand lightly between his, whispering in her ear.

The children saw it all. He never accounted for that, but they knew how things were arranged in our household and punished me for it. Half the time, the boys ignored me. The girls looked back and forth between Hannah
and me, clutched my wrists or handfuls of my dress in their fists, unsure if they should shield or despise me. I dreaded the day they would find the words to ask what was obvious to anyone with eyes to see.

“Will I be like her, Mama, or will I be like you? Will I be loved?”

Every year I wondered at other people's blindness. The priests saw Elkanah's piety, the flawless ewe he led into Shiloh and up to their waiting altar. They heard his psalms to the Lord and joined their voices to his and ignored the pain of his careworn wife.

Each year, the sacrifice was given, the meat cut off the bone, a portion for the priests, the rest for us. Elkanah watched carefully as the pieces were cut—one each for my children and me, a double portion for his beloved, his Hannah.

It had been years of this. Even as my brood grew and I increased our household with fine sons and healthy daughters, she found favor with him. “Look at me,” I cried out, “a vineyard full to bursting, but you water that barren field even knowing it will give you nothing.”

I couldn't help myself. I could no longer be silent. Here we were, in the most sacred of places, the Ark of the Lord as witness to our good fortune, to give thanks and pray for more. We brought the best we had to sacrifice, and in return we got so much, but not from Hannah. She had nothing to do with it. She couldn't
produce a thing.

Then I became the villain when she pushed away her meal—her double portion of sustenance and love—because I said what was only true. Elkanah shot me a look filled with more than disapproval, more than disdain. There was loathing in his eyes as he followed her away from the hearth, even as I knew he would plow my body that very night to reap the rewards of his holy devotion all over again.

It was that look. The disgust, as if I, mother to all his children, meant nothing to him, that clasped my heart and shut my mouth for another year, but a woman can only watch as if from the sidelines of her own life for so long before her silence becomes more than the lack of sound. It becomes a muzzle as on a dangerous beast. Do not be surprised, then, if the animal lunges in attack when it is removed.

So it repeated. I grew heavy and gave birth. I worked. We went up to Shiloh. Hannah sat pitying herself, drawing attention to her own misery. I spoke.

“Elkanah,” I said, more beseeching than in anger. “Have I not given you what every man desires? Look at all our children. Their faces are alight with life. See this one,” and then held up the baby, still swaddled, only his face emerging from the cloth. “See how perfect he is. Everyone comments on the way his face blends the two of us in his one form. Why then do you withhold even
affection from me?”

But Hannah had to be the center of attention. Even as I showed the world the contents of my heart, how it bent toward my husband though he pushed it away, she went through her routine, the one I had seen so many times before. She sighed, pushed her dish away, and rose to return to her bed. As always, Elkanah turned on me. “Can you not keep your mouth shut? It is because of you that she suffers.”

I wanted to protest. “It is not my good fortune that closes her womb,” but he had already run to catch up with her. They stopped there, enclosed in an embrace for all to see, while my daughters coiled themselves around me, as if to protect me from life itself.

Perhaps something snapped in her as it had in me, because she didn't lower her voice this time, didn't depend on his pity to bend his head in closer to hers so that he could hear every shuddered word.

“Don't you see how I suffer,” she wailed. She flung her hand out in my direction, as if to mark and erase me in one gesture. “Even she is given children, but I remain childless.”

“Hush,” I heard Elkanah say. “My heart is bound up in yours. You know how I love you. Come now,” he held her face between his fingers. My own cheeks ached from never having felt that kind of touch. “My love is better than a son, better than ten sons. It is yours until
the day I die.”

It was as if I had become invisible, as if I did not exist. As if the proof of all that I offered to my husband, a breathing, squalling mass of infant life, accounted for nothing. Even that wasn't good enough for Hannah.

“I cannot call myself a woman if I never have a child of my own.”

She pulled away from him, saying “Let me be,” and went off in the direction of the temple. When Elkanah tried to follow, to stop her again, she pushed him away and kept walking. He turned back and saw us all—his wife and children—looking at him, snarled at us. “Go back to your meal,” and stomped away to his room.

Hannah stayed away for hours. I rocked the younger ones to sleep, then sat with the older children as they fought then drifted into sleep. By then, the moon hung bright in the sky. When I was a girl, I imagined it was a round-faced, smiling woman. The sky was her black hair, each star a flash of light escaping from behind her as her tresses waved around her head. I had forgotten that vision until I stood from my children's bedside that night in Shiloh. The memory of it—looking up from outside my father's door—filled me with serenity such as I hadn't felt in years. I had never shared that image with anyone. I had never had anyone to share it with.

I went into my room, removed the cloth from my hair and brushed it out so that it lay against my back and
waist. I washed my face, under my breasts and armpits. I waited for Elkanah to come in, as he always did the night after offering his sacrifice, but he never came.

Instead, I heard Hannah return. Even from behind my closed door, I sensed a difference in her, an unfamiliar lightness to her tread. Our husband must have known it, too. Only a few minutes later, I heard him go into her room. As I tied my hair back up into its cloth, I was thankful for the inn's thick stone walls that kept the sounds of their love from me, at least for one night.

The trip back home was much as it always was. Elkanah doted on Hannah. I tended the children. We three barely spoke to one another. My husband, I could see, had not forgiven me for upsetting his first wife.

By the time we arrived, I could barely stand from exhaustion. It was getting harder. Every day, going about my duties, and every moment holding in everything my mind thought, my mouth wanted to say. When I caught sight of myself in the water of the well, I saw an old woman staring back. She looked haggard and sad. I hadn't even passed my twenty-fifth year.

That vision of myself stayed before my eyes. For weeks, I saw it when I rose. I caught sight of that crone reflected in my children's eyes, though they jumped on me, hung from my arms, begged me to swing them around as they always had. Only I saw the change.

All the while, Hannah's skin flushed with color. Her cheeks looked redder, her skin plumper. She laughed as I had never seen before, not saving it for her nights with Elkanah, but out in the open. Soon enough, I saw how her breasts swelled, and I knew, perhaps even before Elkanah. Maybe even before Hannah herself, who had never felt the changes that pregnancy brings to a woman's body.

There was great celebration in the house of Elkanah during the months before Hannah's baby came. He made sure she had cushions on which to sit, monitored her meals to ensure that she ate enough, placed his hand on her growing stomach. His eyes jumped in surprise when he felt movement there for the first time.

My own belly lay flat under my hand for the first time since I had entered his home. He didn't come to my bed any more.

I despaired of the future, of watching husband and wife focus on their darling child, while my children and I were left to sweep up the ashes of Elkanah's affection. During those long months of Hannah's fullness, I lost even my bitterness. Sorrow, I learned, is the stronger emotion. My invisibility had become complete. And since I could not be seen, I stopped attending to myself. I didn't bother washing my hair or clothes. I left my room only to cook and care for my children, then lay back down in my bed until evening, when I gathered
them around me again for the night. No one took note of my absence.

What I feared most was the day the midwife arrived to help Hannah with the birth. Her son would become the princeling of the house. Her standing with our husband would be elevated even more than before. I was locked away in my own lonely misery and so I missed the signs of change as they slowly came.

Until Elkanah began coming to my bed again. So many months had passed, and the only touch I had felt was from children. It seemed as if all of a sudden he was ravenous for me. I never heard the whispering and laughing from his room when Hannah went in to him. It took a few more weeks, and then one day I realized that she hadn't been in there since before her son was born.

After that, I began venturing out of my room. I washed my hair, mended the rips in my dress. My entrance back into the family was driven by curiosity. I wanted to see what had happened to drive Elkanah back to me, but this was the first thing that piqued my curiosity in so long that I snatched at it.

Hannah seemed unconcerned. She sat by the fire with her baby, whom she had named Samuel, running her hand over his down-covered head, as taken with his every sneeze, every smile, every shift of his arms or legs as any new mother. Our husband went about his
business as he always had, praising the Lord for his good fortune. He didn't approach her or take the child from her arms to cradle him. He didn't bend over Hannah's shoulder to gaze at their precious boy.

Now there were three spheres in our household. Elkanah stood on his own, Hannah and Samuel, and I with my children. The only contact between us came when Elkanah's body entered mine.

I saw him begin to speak to Hannah once or twice, to reach for her hand, but she didn't look up at him. She pulled her hand back to cradle their baby, hummed softly to him, and barely noted her husband's presence by her side. After that, Elkanah didn't approach her any more.

By then, he had planted his seed in me again. I was slowed by the sluggishness of early pregnancy. The bile of acid rose in my throat. Still, Samuel suckled at Hannah's breast.

He grew as I did, laughed for the first time, rolled over, crawled. When the midwife came to me, Hannah's boy had begun to pull himself up onto his feet by grabbing hold of his mother's lap. She laughed and clapped her hands to see him do it.

If I had ever harbored a secret thought that motherhood would change her, that we would sit together, companionable with our babies, I discarded it soon enough. I thought back to my mothers, their eyes
streaming with tears as they laughed over some silly thing a child had done, or a joke about my father that only women who shared the same man could understand. I thought back to running to any one of them, whether she had birthed me or not, when I fell and cut my shin, how she pulled me into her lap, washed out the dirt and held me until my crying had stopped. My children would know no such comfort from Hannah.

She would have nothing to do with me. Still. Even in her great joy, she let me know my place in her house. “She will get my boy sick,” she said of my latest infant, and carried him away. “Tell your brats to stay away from Samuel,” she snapped, after my older children tried to play with her son.