Jabez Hardcover - 2001

Excerpt

In the days of the Judges, the people of Israel forgot
their God and did evil in the eyes of the Lord.
Israel had no king; every man did as he saw fit.
And so the Lord gave Eglon, king of Moab,
power over Israel for eighteen years. Again the
Israelites cried out to the Lord, and he gave them
a deliverer —Ehud, a left-handed man, the son of
Gera the Benjamite.


Now Jabez was more honorable
than his brothers…

…and his mother called his name Jabez,
saying, “Because I bore him in pain.”

And Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying,
“Oh, that you would bless me indeed,
and enlarge my territory,
that Your hand would be with me,
and that You would keep me from evil,
that I may not cause pain!”


So God granted him what he requested.




C H A P T E R O N E
T H E N A M E
T
he first thing I remember was my mother’s crying. Some-times
I think she fed me on her tears instead of her breast
milk. Even then, long before she told me the story of my beginning,
I think I tried to guess it in her eyes. A child sees many things
that he cannot name.

And then, when I was old enough, I heard it in the taunts of
the other boys in the village. “Hey, Pain-boy, it hurts me just to
look at you.” I was small for my age and an easy target for bullies.
They tripped me and hit me and rolled me in the dirt. They told
me they were making me match my name. They said it with a dirty
laugh and an upturned lip. My brothers, especially, used my name that way.
Like a switch on my backside or a lump of dung tossed at my feet.

I liked it when the Amalekites came through. They squatted
on their mats in the square by the well with their camels tethered
behind them. On the ground they spread their trinkets, their packets
of spices, their god-totems and the shiny cloth woven with
strange designs. I loved wandering among them, listening to the
unfamiliar lilt of their words. When I said my name to the Ama-lekites,
it was just a name. On their foreign tongues, “Jabez” meant
me—nothing more. Jabez was the boy who talked to them, who
wanted to know the names for things in their own language. He
was not the boy with no father, the one who fit nowhere.

I was always sad when the Amalekites left. I longed to follow
them, my longing as dry and hovering as the dust kicked up by
their camels. I wanted to be away from the taunts, the mocking
looks. Away from the despite of my brothers. And away from my
mother’s silent, dark weeping.

How does a boy know when he is the cause of pain? How can
he give words to himself that he doesn’t have? How can he understand
why his presence is a wrongness, a hurt? I don’t know. But so
often when I heard my name in the mouth of someone who knew
me, the wrongness slapped at me. My name was better to me when
it came from the lips of strangers.

There was an old woman, Gedilah, who lived in our village. She
wandered about Beth-Zur, talking as if someone was with her, but
most always there was no one there. She would sit down beside my
mother when she was grinding grain. She would talk to her. No
one else in Beth-Zur would sit down and talk to my mother.
Sometimes I would see Gedilah on her way to the well, walking
past our plot of scraggly olive trees. Sometimes, when I was
pulling weeds from our chickpea patch beside the road, she
would stop and settle her old, dry haunch atop the stone wall
with a grunt. The bent woman would start talking to me. I don’t
know why.

Gedilah would talk like someone continuing a conversation
she had started some other time. She had a few teeth left in the
back of her mouth, but none in front. Her leathery lips flapped
around the words and made it hard for me to understand her. As
she spoke, she stared off at the horizon, at the straw-colored hills,
creased with faint green, that surrounded Beth-Zur. Gedilah told
me stories, but she never looked at me.

I knew of no one in the village older than this woman. She
talked about the days of her mother, when our people had wandered
through the desert, a time before we came to live in the
country between the Salt Sea and the Great Sea. A god had followed
our people through the desert, she said, or maybe she said
the god led them. Why this god took such an interest, she did not
explain. She never even said the god’s name. Once, when I asked
her, she said the god had no name. Or maybe her mother had told
her, but she had forgotten it. At night it was a fire god, and by day
it was a dust god, a towering whirlwind, she claimed.

“What good is a god with no name?” I asked her one time.

“How can you talk to it? How can you ask it for things?” Every-body
in the village had a few gods they kept in a safe, dark corner
of the house. They were of wood or clay or stone. People rubbed
them with oil and whispered in their ears and decorated them with
feathers or bits of cloth or daubs of paint. My oldest brother had
one that he carried out to the olive trees just before the winter rains
each year; it was a sitting woman with heavy breasts. To me it
looked like a small, fat water cup, but he said it was the Great Lady
of Moab and that her womb was the earth. He kept the basin in
her lap full of oil, and sometimes he mixed in the blood of a pigeon
or a rock badger. He said she would protect our olive trees and
make them bear. From the look of our trees most years, I some-times
wondered why he didn’t try a different god.

But the desert god, the woman said, had no name and no
image. “What would a desert god need with an image?” she said.
“He blows with the wind; he shimmers in the heat. He is. That’s
all I can say.”

Maybe that was why for so long I never heard anyone but the
old woman talk about this god. What did we need with a desert
god? We weren’t wanderers anymore. We had settled down. We
had groves and vineyards and fields. We had flocks. We needed
gods for seed and bearing, not for roaming.

Still, something in me ached for roaming. At night in the summers,
when the heat drove us to the housetop, to peel off all but
the most needful clothing and lie limp as rags hoping for a breeze,
I lay on my back and stared up at the stars. They hovered close,
glittered like tears in the eyes of a hurt child. I tried to imagine
their names, tried to call out to them. I wanted to know what they
knew, look on all the lands they could see. I lay still and listened.
Sometimes, I thought I could hear—something. Maybe it was the
heat singing in my head. It could have been no more than the
shrilling of my own blood. But it could have been something else.
My mother was neither ugly nor beautiful, though I suppose she
had once been pleasing enough to look at. She was of normal size,
but in my memory she is always small. Even as a child, I felt a need
to be careful with her, the way you have to be careful with babies
or sick people. Since I was the youngest in the household, I was the
one at her beck and call. I was her errand runner, her helper. I
fetched and held and stirred and carried for her. As best I can bring
to mind, she struck me but a single time in all my life, and I guess
I deserved that one blow. She almost never spoke harshly to me.
But neither do I remember her smiling at me or singing to me. I
think I would have endured a beating every day if it would have
bought me her smile.

Gedilah’s tiny little hut was not far from our house. Sometimes
she would come and help my mother with the spinning or the
churning. Sometimes my mother would send me to her with a little
bit of meal or some oil in a small pouch. Gedilah and my mother
would speak of times before I was born. Once I heard Gedilah
telling my mother, “If he had lived, this child would not.” My
mother motioned at me with her eyes, and Gedilah said no more.
She patted my head when she left.

My brothers paid my mother no mind. As long as there was
something in the stew pot and their sandal straps got mended,
they kept to themselves. I think they would have forgotten her if
they could. But she was there, a constant reminder. And as if that
weren’t enough, I was there too. Mostly, they looked away.
I noticed, even as a child, that when I went with her to the
well, the other women kept their faces turned from her. Their talk
melted away when we came near, then resumed again as we passed.
The other women would help each other settle their pitchers and
urns on their heads. My mother had only me.

Sometimes I wanted to ignore her too. Sometimes the silence
that surrounded her made me feel ashamed or sad or wrong. But
now I know why I could not treat her as the others did; it was
because she, at least, saw me. Even if she looked at me with eyes
full of tears, my mother would not turn away her face the way
everyone else did. Even if the most accustomed language between
the two of us was silence, that was better than scorn. A sparse diet
for one so hungry, but better than nothing.

Often, in the evening, she would go alone into the hills. A few
times I followed, at a distance. When the sun was touching the rim
of the world, she would walk out in the orange light, down the
road until she turned aside at the draw that led to the pastures of
Tubal and his sons. She would follow the ravine’s crooked climb
into the hills, picking her way among the rocks. Now and then, she
would have to stop and free her garments from the grasp of a thorn
bush or the spines of the briars that clung to the dry cracks between
the boulders. She would climb until she came out on the breast of
the Hill of Zur. She would go to the top and stare toward the west.
For a long time she would stand there, as still and straight as a
pole, until the sun had dropped below the edge of the earth and
the purpling night began to drift across from the east. I saw her lips
move, though I was never close enough to hear any sound. Some-times,
I think, her eyes would be closed. And then, after a while,
whatever secret thing pulled her there told her the time was long
enough, and she turned to go the same way she had come. I would
scamper out of sight to reach home before her.

I don’t think anyone but me ever saw my mother perform her
lonely, silent ritual. Most likely, no one else cared enough to notice.
When she came back, I tried to read her face when she wasn’t look-ing.
I tried to see if her time on the hilltop had made any differ-ence.
But I could never see any change in her.

I had a certain dream of my mother that came to me several
times as a boy. In my dream, I am walking through the doorway
of our house. I am carrying something—a jar of oil, a sack of flour,
I don’t know—and I’m bringing it to her. When I come in, my
mother is sitting on her mat, and black things are flying all around
her head. At first I think they are birds, but when I look closer I see
that they have many legs and jointed bodies, like insects. Their flying
makes a clicking noise, like dry bones rattling together. I try to
cry out, but no sound will come from my mouth.

She is looking at me and holding out her arms, but I cannot
go to her because I know that she will clasp me to her and the black
things will have me, too. I drop whatever it is I carried into the
house and run outside, but instead of the street of our town I am
running up a mountain of sand, the kind I have since seen in the
wastes of the Arabah. I had never known such a sight as a boy, but
that is the way of dreams. I am running up the side of the sand
mountain, but with each step the loose sand slides under my feet.
I cannot make any headway. When I am tired from trying to run
in the sand and my breath feels hot in my throat, I stop and turn
around. There is my mother, standing at the base of the sand
mountain, still holding out her arms to me. The black flying things
are gone now, but I am afraid they will come back. I want to go to
her but I am afraid. I sit down in the sand and weep.

Each time I woke from this dream, I felt a terrible sadness, like
a heavy bundle tied to my chest. Sometimes, in the dark, I would
hold my breath and listen for the clicking sound. If I had known
the name of a god of dreams, I would have asked it to take this
dream away and never let it come back. I would have given it oil
and some choice bit of meat. But I didn’t know the name of a god
for dreaming.