Rebekah: Women of Genesis (3 page)

Father was going over tally sticks with Pillel. Because Rebekah knew that Pillel had just been to the hills south of the river, she knew that the sticks were a count of the main goat herd, and from the number of marks below the main notch she knew that it was a good year, with many new kids thriving. Last winter’s rains had washed away dozens of houses built on land that had been dry through two generations of drought. But the hillsides were lush this spring, and the herds and flocks were fat and strong; and if there could be rains again this winter, they might not have to sell half the younglings into the towns for slaughter, but could keep them and grow the herds and become wealthy again, wealthy as in the days when Abraham had been a great prince whose household was so mighty he could defeat Amorite kings and save the cities of the plain.

Only she would trade such wealth and power, would trade even the herds they had, would give up the whole household and labor with her own hands at all tasks, hauling water like a slave and wearing only cloth she wove herself, if Father could only hear again.

Though of course that was a childish thing to wish, because if Father
could
 hear, then he would have his great household and all his flocks and herds and there’d be nothing to fear. No, the way the world worked, you didn’t trade wealth to get wholeness of body. It was when your body ceased to be whole that you also lost your wealth, your influence, your prestige, everything. It could all go away—
would
all go away, once something slipped. Everything we have in life, Rebekah realized, depends on everything else. If you lose anything, you can lose everything.

So do we really
have
anything at all? Was that what God was showing them by what he had allowed to happen to Father?

Only Father had
not
 lost everything. Had not really lost anything yet. Pillel was still serving Father, wasn’t he? And Pillel was keeping everything together.

But didn’t that mean that now the herds and flocks and the great household belonged to Pillel? Out of loyalty, he served Father—but the men served Pillel. And there would come a day, surely, when Pillel would see the great dowry Father would assemble for Rebekah and wonder why his daughters had nothing like it to offer a husband, or when Pillel would look at Laban and wonder why the son of the deaf man was going to inherit everything Pillel had created instead of his own strong sons.

Why was she thinking this? Pillel would never betray them.

And yet how was it better that all of Pillel’s labor, all his life, should belong to another man? Why
shouldn’t
he be able to pass along great flocks and herds to his sons? Instead he would give them only the yoke of servitude, though his life’s work had created great wealth. It was not fair to him, or to his sons. Any more than it was fair to Bethuel to be deaf.

A thought came to the verge of her mind. About fairness, about the way God deals with people. It was a thought tinged with anger and fear, but also with that thrill that came when she finally understood something that mattered. But as quickly as it came, the thought escaped her without her being able to name it, without her being able to
hold
it.

Wrong, Laban, I
don’t
remember everything. The best things, the ideas that matter most, they slip away without my ever really having them.

Again the important thought verged on understanding. Again it fled unnamed.

Bethuel saw Laban and Rebekah because Pillel heard them and looked up and beckoned them to come all the way in.

“Ah, my children!” boomed Bethuel.

His voice was
so
loud, now that he was deaf. Though she knew he could not help it, it still made Rebekah a little ashamed when he boomed out his words at inappropriate times. Father could keep no secrets now.

“I’m done here,” said Pillel. He rose, gathering up the tally sticks.

“The goats are doing well this spring,” said Laban.

Pillel grinned. “The billies were frisky last fall.”

“Or the nannies were too lazy to run away,” said Laban.

Pillel glanced nervously at Rebekah. She hated it when people acted like that. Just because she was the daughter of the house and her purity had to be protected did not mean she was
blind
and did not know how lambs and kids and calves were made.

“You can stay,” said Rebekah.

“No he can’t,” said Laban, annoyed.

“Only your father bids me stay or go,” said Pillel mildly. “And he has asked me to leave.”

Rebekah looked sharply at him. Father had said no such thing. But there were many things Pillel and Father were able to communicate without words—there always had been. A glance, a wink, a tiny gesture; they understood each other so well that words were often unneeded. Of course that had not changed with Father’s deafness. But what was to stop Pillel from claiming that Father had told him something when it was merely Pillel’s own decision?

Trust, that’s what. Pillel had earned the family’s trust, and just because he
could
lie did not give Rebekah any right to suppose that he would. When a man had earned their trust, he ought to have it, and not lose it just because a foolish girl noticed that he could probably get away with any number of small betrayals.

When Pillel was gone with the tally sticks, Laban wasted no time. He pulled back three layers of rugs to expose a patch of hard sandy soil. Rebekah watched Father as Father watched Laban draw his pictures. He grew more and more puzzled, and Rebekah could not help agreeing with him.

“What are you
drawing?
” she whispered. “This isn’t anything we worked out together.”

“I’m trying a new one,” he said.

“Well
I
can’t understand it.”

Angry, Laban rubbed out the drawing with his sandal and began again. This time he drew the symbols that they had worked out for saying what was being prepared for dinner. The fire, the spit, the pot. Only this was absurd. They hadn’t even been to the kitchen fires today. “Laban, what are you doing? We don’t know what’s for dinner.”

“I’m not telling, I’m asking,” said Laban. “What he
wants.
And then we can go tell the women.”

He turned to Father, who was studying Laban’s drawing with an odd expression. Laban waved a hand down within Father’s field of vision, and Father looked up at his face. Laban elaborately mouthed his words.

“Dinner,” Laban said, then pointed at the parts of the drawing. “Food. Dinner. Kitchen. Cookfire. The pot. The spit. See?”

“If you use all the different words, how will he know what each picture
means?
”

Laban whirled on her. “If you think you can do better, give it a try!”

“Yes, I will,” she said. Taking the stick from Laban’s hand, she began her own drawing. She drew a tall man, a short man, and a short girl. She pointed to Father, Laban, and herself, then back at the drawings.

Father nodded. That was more than he had done with Laban’s drawing, but she did
not
 look at Laban lest he think she was being triumphant. He got huffy when he thought he had been shown up.

Rebekah rubbed out her pictures, then drew just the boy and girl, and this time the girl had a stick in her hand and under the point of the stick Rebekah drew a very tiny picture of the very picture she was drawing—the boy, the girl, the stick.

Father chuckled.

But Rebekah wasn’t done. She drew a picture of an ear, then scribbled across it. Then a picture of an eye, and a dotted line going to it from the drawing the girl was making.

Then she knelt before Father and mouthed her words carefully. “I draw. You
see.
That is how you
hear
us.” She touched the picture of the eye, then reached up and touched Father’s ear. Then his eye, then his ear again. “You see, and that’s how you’ll hear.”

Father shook his head.

He didn’t understand.

No, he
did
understand. Because he wasn’t just shaking his head. He was smiling, then laughing, but it was a rueful, affectionate laugh, and he gathered Rebekah into his arms and then reached out for Laban as well and embraced them both. “My children, wonderful and wise.”

“He likes it!” said Laban.

Father must have felt the vibration of Laban’s voice, because he pulled back and looked expectantly at Laban’s face.

“It’s writing,” Laban said. “Like Uncle Abraham.”

Father wrinkled his brow—he didn’t understand Laban’s words. But it hardly mattered, since the next thing he said was, “It’s writing. You’re trying to write to me.”

“Yes,” said Rebekah, and Laban almost jumped out of his clothes in his excitement, jumping up and down, obliterating the drawings with his feet.

“But you don’t do it with pictures of the
thing,
” said Father. “You make pictures of the
sounds.
”

Father reached out a hand. After only a moment’s hesitation, Rebekah realized he wanted the stick and gave it to him. He thought for a long moment, then made three marks in the dirt.

“You make marks that stand for the
sounds
of the word,” he said. “That’s your name, Rebekah.”

“It doesn’t look like anything,” said Laban.

Father didn’t hear him, but explained anyway. “This mark is always ‘ruh.’ And this mark is always ‘buh.’ And this one is ‘kuh.’”

He made three more marks. “‘Luh,’ ‘buh,’ ‘nuh,’” he said.

“Look, your name and mine are the same in the middle,” said Rebekah.

“But my name isn’t ‘luhbuhnuh,’ it’s Laban.”

Father was studying their faces, as usual, and saw Laban’s resistance.

“We just write down the solid sounds,” Father said. “The ones that don’t change. The Egyptians do it foolishly, and so do the Babylonians and Sumerians—the priests have a separate picture for every possible sound. Bah, beh, bo, bee, boo, bim, ben, ban—a separate picture. So you have to learn hundreds and hundreds in order to write anything. But we use the same mark for all the ‘buh’ sounds. ‘Bah,’ ‘beh,’ ‘bo,’ ‘bee,’ ‘boo,’ we just make this mark. ‘Bim,’ ‘ben,’ ‘ban,’ we make the same mark but we add this one, for the sound of the nose. See? Look, I’ll show you.”

Using just the marks from their names, he wrote them in several different combinations, then said the words. Sometimes the same two or three symbols stood for two or three or four different words at the same time. “But it doesn’t matter,” he said. “Because one word will make sense and the others won’t. So you always know which is which. And if you don’t, then you just add a word so we know which one you mean.”

Rebekah’s head was reeling. She started making sounds with her lips and tongue and trying to count them. “Kuh buh muh tuh chuh nuh guh luh . . .”

Father saw what she was doing and stopped her with a touch. “I’ll show you all of them that I remember. I learned this when I was a boy, you understand. I haven’t used it much since then. There was no one to write to, and nothing to read. I never taught it to you because it was so useless. I almost forgot that I had ever learned it.” He laughed bitterly. “It was for sacred writings. Tally sticks are enough for counting goats and sheep, which is all I’ve ever needed. Abraham had all the ancient writings. Once he had a son, I knew his boy would have the holy birthright and there was no more need for me to remember how to write. Was my son going to be a priest? I never thought of using writing for something else. For myself.”

Rebekah heard him, but her mind also raced in its own direction. “But this means we can write
anything,
” she said. “If we can make the word with our mouths, we can write it down, once we know all the marks.”

Father must have read enough from her lips to know what she was saying. “I’ll teach them all to you, all that I remember. This is a
good
idea, children. You can write to me to tell me what I need to know. It’s too hard to read lips. Too many sounds come from the back of the mouth. Everybody talks too fast. Or they shape their mouths so queerly when they’re trying to talk to me. But this way—you’ll give me my ears again!”

Then he frowned. “But I don’t know if I should teach
you,
Rebekah.”

“Why not?” she asked. Trying not to overshape the words. Trying not to say them too fast.  Trying not to show how indignant she was at the idea of being left out.

Father calmed her with a hand on her arm. “No, you’re right, Rebekah. It was always for the boys. Writing was part of the birthright. The keeper of the ancient writings had to know it. But now
we’re
going to use it so you can ask me what I want for dinner. Of course I must teach you, Rebekah.”

They set to work learning the alphabet. At first Father could remember only about two-thirds of the letters. But by the time they had been writing messages to each other for several days, Father remembered them all, or at least remembered signs that worked well enough. And as long as they all remembered the same signs for each sound, what did it matter if they were exactly the same as the ones Abraham used on the sacred books? Uncle Abraham was far away and very old, if he wasn’t dead already.