After Abel and Other Stories (23 page)

“Thank you for coming,” Saul said when I had entered. He seemed relaxed, in command of himself, once more the king I had known and served.

“I'm honored to be in your presence, my Lord,” I answered, not knowing what he could possibly want from me, why I was in a room with only him and his daughter.

“You are a good man, Palti. I can think of no one I would rather call ‘son' than you. Leave all your goods with me. I will buy everything you have brought to the capital. Marry my daughter,” he pointed to Michel. “Take her home with you.”

Saul's behavior in the dining hall earlier that evening had been shocking, out of character, but even that could not have prepared me for what he had just asked of me. Rumors that the king had become increasingly eccentric had been murmured throughout the kingdom for years. This, I saw, was proof of something much deeper.

“Your Majesty,” I said, stumbling over my words. “I am diminished.” I began again, “I am not fit for marriage. And your daughter,” I continued, unable to even say the words as they formed. I didn't see a spear nearby, but Saul was still a large, strong man who could easily hurt me if I said the wrong thing. If his sudden anger at
his own son was any indication, almost anything could set him off. He knew what I was going to say, though. He must have known that any man he brought into this room would think the same, but he brushed off my concerns. “Think nothing of the past,” he said. “Even a widow may remarry. Her former husband is dead to us all. You will marry her and take her back to your village.”

My head reeled. Had there been more light in the room, it probably would have caused my vision to blur. All my youthful fantasies were being offered to me as if on a platter. I wondered if I had not hidden my regard of Michel as well as I had thought, if the king had noticed it and allowed it for reasons known only to him. At the same time, I knew what this meant—I was to be the means of Michel's banishment. And yet, what choice did I have? He was my king. I had followed him into battle. I still believed in him.

The king called Michel forward into the dim light that the torch threw over us. She unfolded herself from the floor, stood as tall and straight as I had ever seen her, and came to my side. She was not the woman I had longed for years ago. Her hair hung lifeless against her face. Her eyes were red and swollen, the skin on her cheeks and forehead blotchy over a pale base. When Saul gestured to me, I wrapped my mantle around both our shoulders, drawing her closer to me than any woman
had ever stood. She smelled of salt and cinnamon. The king told me to take her hand in mine. I grasped my useless right wrist in my left hand, lifted it, and placed my fingers into her waiting palm.

Gallim

W
e watched her with interest, this city girl dropped into our quiet country life. Gallim is a small village, just a handful of stone and mud houses on the side of a mountain. It is too small even to have a wall around it. Even the old ones can't remember a time when we didn't need a lookout at the highest spot to watch out for encroaching enemies.

We couldn't imagine what it must be like to go from a life at the crossroads of world, where people stream in and out as they make their way north to south, east to west, to the handful of windworn faces she encountered here. The inhabitants of the capital alone numbered more than most of us lived with for the entirety of our lives. Poor girl, we thought, to go from a city, surrounded by a thousand people, to this outpost.

Any young woman brought up in a bustling metropolis would find us backward. How much more so, then, the daughter of the king? At first, she tried to hide her identity from us, but there was always something
different about her, even if she tried to tamp it down, to erase it. A person's beginnings always leave their mark. Nothing is hidden in a small town. Secrets are hard to keep.

Palti had sent word that he would be bringing a bride home with him, but he said nothing about her. We rejoiced, of course, all of us. He was our greatest son, a hero to king and country. He had taken his father's place in his home and on the council of town elders with grace, but he came back from war so different than the strapping young man he used to be. His mother despaired that no family would allow its daughter to marry him, though we all knew him to be kind, responsible, and let's not forget, rich in land, animals, and gold. He had grown too quiet, had absorbed himself in his work. He let the village boys clamber up his torso and hang on his left arm like a tree. He trained the young men, was sober and serious when deliberating the town's affairs. But he carried a bubble of solitude with him everywhere. No one had been able to pierce it.

He was the best that Israel had to offer, and yet, a moment's action determined his fate. We watched him struggle to accept his new body, the life it held out for him. We saw his anger, then his deflated resignation. We thought he had given up on himself and that others would follow his lead, until the day we learned he had married. We prepared a feast, gave a shout when we saw
them wind up the goat paths in the distance, Palti at the head of his train of donkeys, a servant at the back, and riding on the foremost ass, a woman, her head cloaked against the wind.

We only got a good look at her when they were in the center of town. All activity stopped. We were too curious to pretend this was an event like any other. It was strange, we thought, how she kept her head down, her hands tucked firmly into her sleeves. Perhaps, we thought, she was shy, as a new bride brought to her husband's home often is, but her posture, rigid as a cedar, told another story.

“This is my wife, Michel,” Palti told us, after he had led the girl to his mother, who sat with the other women around the last of the oven's fire. They had been baking a last loaf of bread, stirring a final pot of lentils. His mother, beaming, took the girl's hands into her own. She tried to pull them back, or to turn them so that only the backs would show, but her palms peeked upward just long enough for some of us to catch sight of the darkened skin, tinged blue and shading into purple in their creases.

That set us all talking. Long after everyone had eaten and sung marriage songs in honor of the new couple. Long after everyone had filed by them, each greeted with a smile by Michel, our newest villager, who sat in state as if she had been here all along and we
were the awkward newcomers, we retired to our houses and noted with raised eyebrows the curious fact of her dyed skin, glimpsed ever so briefly, but not to be denied.

Over the next few days, Michel joined the women each morning to stoke the fire, gather the water, and bake the bread. She kept her hands hidden away, and even when the other women removed their sandals to wash their tired feet before the evening meal, she kept hers on, offered to pour the water over everyone else's dusty ankles, then politely declined when we offered to reciprocate.

She was a mystery to us. Friendly to everyone, from the oldest woman who wandered aimlessly around the houses, entering each as if it were her own, to the babies still wrapped in swaddling. She sat with the youngest mother, who had also been brought to our town as a wife recently, and cooed over the infant's chubby hand, his toothless smiles, but she gave no clue about her life before the day she entered our circumscribed world. She had no stories to tell, never let slip a small detail from girlhood about her parents or some passing moment that had never left her. It was as if, we marveled, she came to us without a past.

We were equally curious about her new marriage. It was obvious that she and Palti did not know one another well when he brought her to live with us, but many brides are strangers to their husbands on the day
of their marriage. Michel was as polite with him as with us all. It was Palti who surprised us. Normally the most reserved of men, he courted her openly, bringing dogwood blossoms to her at the end of the day, a newborn lamb to live as their pet. She laughed at the animal's antics, and swept it into her arms. Still, we couldn't shake the sense that she was ready to leave at a moment's notice. That she didn't think her time with us would last.

Time passed, and she remained. Eventually, she relaxed, as people will do. There was still a faraway sense to her, which we attributed to homesickness for the excitement of her city youth. And then came the day, inevitable perhaps, when she didn't hide her palms from us, and she removed her sandals to rinse her feet. The color had faded, but it was still there. Finally, we saw what we had all suspected since that first night. Michel wasn't just a city girl married off to a wealthy sheepherder. This girl was royalty. We were sheltered here on the side of our mountain, but even we knew enough of the kingdom to know that only the wives, sisters, and daughters of the king were allowed to touch the dye used for his clothes and the grapes crushed for his wine. Before Michel came to live with us, those women were like mythical creatures to us. They filled the stories the old ones told us late at night, beautiful girls who knew nothing of labor except for the warmth
of linen on their fingers and cold grapes beneath their feet. Now we knew that they were real. One walked among us.

Eventually, the whole truth came out. Not just a relative of the king, but his daughter, who had been married to David, the man we had once adored. We looked to Palti as if he were a new man, too, someone we never knew before. He never spoke of a bride price, even though that was the kind of gossip that usually passed freely around a small community. Nor did he say how he came to have her as his wife.

Palti

I
was prepared to love Michel from the start. I had been ready since those days of surreptitious staring in the dense air of the king's dining hall. We had our first conversation on the day-long walk back to Gallim. I had tied the donkeys together and set my servant at the back to keep them in line. They were obstinate beasts who would stop to rest in a patch of shade or grab at a tuft of grass, but always out of sync with each other. While seven walked, one would refuse to move. When we finally got him going, another would twitch her ears, snort loudly, and plant her feet. As always, their saddlebags were filled with pots and spices, all the things we
didn't produce in Gallim. My return would be different than it had ever been. I could only imagine the celebration the village women would have waiting for us, but I couldn't ignore the original purpose of my trip. My people depended on me to bring these supplies. Each season, the women took stock of what we had, and then parceled it out to make it all last until my next foray to the capital.

I was more anxious to return this time than usual, both to take Michel away from the capital as quickly as possible and to bring her into her new home, so we prodded the asses when they became obstreperous and kept up a steady pace. Michel walked for most of the day. I walked on one side of the lead animal, the sturdiest and most reliable of the bunch. She walked on the other, her hand resting against the donkey's flank.

“My father has spoken of you,” she said.

I was surprised. I had always thought myself almost invisible, just one of the many young men who cycle through the capital and the king's home.

“He said you are reliable, that you've proven yourself a good Israelite.” Then she laughed, a sound I would come to know well, a deep hum from the back of her throat that indicated less mirth than knowing mockery. “Although what kind of a reward he imagined it must be to give over his disgraced daughter to you, I can't imagine.”

“Do you think he hates you?” I had to know. This was more insight into the king's heart than I had ever been given.

“Not him,” she said, waving the question away as irrelevant. “He has never given a moment's thought about me beyond my usefulness to him. It's the people who hate me. They wouldn't stand to see me in the city any longer, and so he found a way to send me away.”