After Abel and Other Stories (25 page)

Even then, with her standing in front of me, in the safest place I have ever been, I couldn't force the question I was desperate to ask from my mouth. I could only sneak around it, feeling my tentative way.

“Did he sing to you?” I said.

“At first.”

“I can't carry a tune.”

“I don't want music.”

“He's a great fighter. Some say he's the best we've ever known.”

“I'm tired of warriors,” she said. “I don't want to be loved like that anymore. A warrior wants victory in everything. Even in love.”

She studied my face for a moment. “I hate him,” she said. “For what he did to me, to our nation, to my father, who was a good king until this madness overcame him.” She waded over to where I was sitting, then touched my shoulder, the indentation that divided the healthy flesh from wasted. She ran her fingers from the base of my neck all the way down my arm, my shame. The shallow muscles twitched but didn't jump, my fingers
lay as limp as ever against my thigh where I had rested them. I held still as she explored the wastes of my body that had once held such strength. She took my hand in hers, traced the shrunken flesh. It was her turn to ask what she had held back.

“How did this happen?”

“I saved your father's life. In battle. A Philistine ran up behind him, raised his spear to strike, and I threw myself between them. Not even the healers could say how I survived the wound.”

Her cheeks flushed red. “Forgive me. I didn't know. I should have asked sooner. My family has treated you with the same mercilessness it shows everyone. You saved his life. And this is how he repays you, by forcing you take on the burden of marrying me. My family has taken advantage of you too many times.”

I thought I understood her at last. “He didn't make me marry you.”

“I was in that room with you. He didn't give you a choice. A king usually doesn't.”

“I would have married you anyway.”

She laughed again, but there was affection in it this time. “The only thing my father told me about you before he sent me off as your wife is that you are a good man. Is this the secret? Are you good because you're too foolish to know better?”

“I didn't know the details, but it was no secret that
you had stood up to the king to save your husband.”

“Everyone thought I was a traitor for doing so. Only Jonathan would speak to me after that. Even my mother pretended I didn't exist.”

“They're the fools then. You showed how you loyal are, and that you make a fine wife. I hope.”

Her dark eyes narrowed, their usual seriousness replaced with something else. Wickedness, I thought, or something kinder. “Do you think I'll have to push you out a window sometime also?”

“Depends who's chasing me, I suppose.”

That was the moment something shifted between us, some chasm closed. Michel lifted my hand, as tenderly as she would a newborn baby, and kissed its shrunken palm. She held it like that, as if it were still strong and could grip her back, all the way back to Gallim.

Gallim

W
e are used to our quiet life here. Danger surrounds us, but that is the nature of life, and no different for us than for anyone else. We turn to God for protection against the ravages of man and nature. But there are no prayers to say, no sacrifices to offer when we turn against each other.

Even our little outpost is not cut off from the world.
Word of the deeds of others makes its way in. We heard that David had run to Moab. He took his family and a growing camp of followers with him, a mob of wanderers that he trained into a personal army, then sold its services to the highest bidder. Everyone in Israel abhorred him.

The news came quicker after that. David was always the topic of discussion. We stopped singing odes to him when we realized he had returned, was menacing the towns and landowners for protection and gold. Anyone who stood in his way was cut down and then, like a conquering general, David let loose his men to take lands, cattle, women. As if to make sure no one misunderstood, David buried the owners' bodies and took their wives as his own while the graves were still being filled.

We had heard, too, about our proud king's decline. How he raved, eyes wild, becoming suddenly as strong as a youth and then sagging again into the despair of old age. Time proved Saul right. David was after the crown. The civil war that followed was inevitable, unstoppable. We stayed loyal, of course. Everyone with a penny to his name did, while the outcast and bitter flowed to David, who took them all in, told them they were God's elect.

Michel had been with us so long by then that we, to our horror, forgot who she was when the whispering
started. The women sucked on their teeth and spit on the ground when David's name was mentioned, said he was no son of Israel. She sat quietly then, as still as the mountain itself. When we would come to our senses, recall that she had more at stake, that her father and brothers had to battle every day to stave off the growing threat that David presented, we shut our mouths in embarrassment, tried to turn the conversation to the state of the olive harvest or to criticize the knots in the youngest girls' pulled wool. It was no use. There was nothing else to speak of. Israel was at war with itself.

We heard more. Of David's many wives, his ravaging of the countryside. Michel sat still when a messenger, his clothes not yet stiffened with blood, ran into town with the news that Saul and Jonathan had died. She ripped the neck of her dress and put ashes on her head, as a good daughter should, but there was no change in her. She still worked beside us, still laughed with the children and walked hand-in-hand with her husband, put her head close to his to speak as all couples do, the murmured and inconsequential words that bound one to another.

Palti, too, was changed. As their love grew, their comfort with one another gave him back some of the youth he had lost. For so long, he had walked among us as a man marked. He hid behind his work, going out with the flocks as often as possible. We tried to show
him that we still esteemed him, but only when Michel came, when she began to look to him in the way of women, did his back unbend, his brow clear. She brought him back to himself and to us, and for that we were thankful.

Palti

I
watched as she slowly grew to love life in Gallim, to be among the women who sleep and wake every day in the same place, confident in neighbors who will feed them in sickness, dance with them in celebration, cry with them after the deaths they will inevitably see. Cry over them when it is their turn to die.

She still wasn't one of them, not really. At night, when we were alone, she would confide in me. “I wish I could put on the grace of their simplicity,” she said. “They send their boys off to my father's army believing that if their sons die, it is for something more glorious than the king's latest whim or folly. They wouldn't believe me if I told them the truth, that our world is driven by one man's desires and those wily enough to whisper in his ear. The rest of us get used and discarded.”

It hurt me to hear her speak this way. I wanted to think our love would erase the outside world. I thought that with enough time, she would become like the women
I had grown up among.

I still wanted a child. I wanted her to be the mother of my children, but each month she would turn me away from our bed, tell me to return the next week.

I begged her to reconsider. “I've seen how you take the babies of Gallim onto your lap. They all lean into your arms. I watch how you soothe their cries,” I said. “You would make a good mother.”

“I want to say yes.” She looked pained. “But I can't, now more than ever. Not with Saul dead and David stalking the country.”

Another man would grow resentful. He might even come to hate her, but I had lived too long without love to pull it from her. I had wrapped her in the folds of my love. Nothing could unwind it.

Gallim

S
he lived well among us for a few years. The signs of her old life disappeared. The dye faded from her hands. Her heels were round and pink. She was happy. Until we started to hear what David's ambition had wrought. How many dead, how much taken.

Something broke in her the day a woman staggered into Gallim, collapsed as if she'd run from the other end of the country. She lay panting on the ground as we
rushed to pour water over her skin and into her mouth. She had lost her sandals somewhere, leaving the soles of her feet torn and cracked. When she recovered enough to speak, she pulled herself to all fours, pushed back onto her haunches, a tattered heap of a woman, and, ignoring us all, looked straight at Michel.

“You knew me once,” she said. “I served you and your sister both. Do you recognize me?”

Michel was caught off guard. This woman was a ragged wretch. Her clothes were shreds hanging off a threadbare skeleton, her hair matted with grease and the dust of the road. Leaves and small twigs caught in its tangles. She didn't talk wildly. She didn't raise her voice, but there was something about her that made the women hold their young children close. She had the reek of death on her. It spilled out of her eyes and mouth. No one would touch the spot where she sat on the ground for fear of infection.

“They're all gone,” she said, as if they were alone in the courtyard, though we all crowded around. “They are all taken from us.” Her mouth stretched wide then, a death's mask grin, but instead of laughter, loud sobs scraped out of her throat and mouth.

“Men came, twenty at least. And my master was away fighting. It was just women and children. No one there knew how to raise a sword. We didn't own a spear between us. They ran us through. I tried to save her. I
swear.”

“Who?” Michel asked, but we all saw that she already knew the answer. She was asking for confirmation, as if she needed to hear the words to believe them.

“They grabbed her boys, down to the little one, whose legs still shook beneath him when he walked. She was inside with the baby. God save me from ever seeing such things again!” She wailed again. “I told her to run, but the door was open. She saw them butcher her children. She ran out, clutching her infant, but she couldn't save them. One of the men saw her, snatched the baby out of her arms, dashed him against a wall.”

Michel had stood impassive at every evil tiding that had been brought to us. This news made her legs go weak. We caught her, held her up between us.