After Abel and Other Stories (5 page)

“They won't see us,” she said. “They can't see us over the lip of the roof. And anyway, by the time anyone below thinks to look up, we'll already be on another one.”

“But what are we trying to do?” cried the older girl. “And why? I don't understand.”

“I'm saving you,” was the only answer her mother would give.

From below, they could hear screaming as people all around the cramped city began to notice that their streets and homes were on fire. The worst of it, they saw, was concentrated near Lot's house, where a few men had been hit directly and were trying desperately to put themselves out. They rolled on the ground, screaming in fear and pain, but it was too late for them. Their neighbors watched as they were consumed in flames.

“Help!” came the people's desperate cry. “What vengeance is this? Why does God rain down fire on us?”

Panic spread as people rushed to save their own homes, pushing others down, trampling them if they had to. By then, she and her daughters had reached the roof of the farthest home, where the poorest inhabitant of the city lived, an old widow with no family to care for her. Dependent on begging and whatever she could gather to sell in the market, the widow lived in a small house set into a narrow patch of the city wall.

The three women had to hop down to reach its roof, which had no hay pile and nowhere to sleep on hot summer nights. She was sure her daughters could jump down from there to the ground, but her own old body was already feeling the effects of the run across the city's rooftops. I've come this far, she thought. Just see them to safety. They are all that matters.

Standing at the lip of the house, they could hear the screams coming from all over Sodom. The fire had spread farther than she could have imagined, “Quick,” she told her daughters, “throw away the wool,” and she flung the still-burning torch as far as she could. “Now, jump,” she said, practically pushing them off the roof. As soon as they were off, she followed, landing hard on one ankle, but she didn't stop to think about it.

Once on the ground, she banged on the door. “Open up,” she shouted. “We have to escape!”

The old woman inside shuffled to the door.

“The city is on fire,” she said. “We'll help you out the window, but we must be quick.” The three younger women pulled the old lady to the far end of her tiny house. Through the window they could see the plain stretching as far as the shimmering lake and the distant hills beyond it. They lifted her out and set her down onto the ground outside the city walls, then followed her.

“The city is on fire!” she repeated when it became clear the old woman didn't understand what was happening. “Get as far away from it as you can.” Then, to her daughters, she shouted, “Run. Head for the lake. Don't stop and don't turn around. There's nothing here for us anymore.”

The girls took off, sprinting like gazelles across the flat land. She followed behind, going as fast as she could, the heat from the blaze growing stronger on her back. Soon, she could barely see her daughters in the distance, just two slender forms moving easily through the night. But her ankle throbbed. Her breasts pounded painfully against her chest with every step, and she struggled to find breath.

“Keep going,” she told herself. “Get them to safety. Save your children.”

Eventually, she felt the ground change beneath her feet. She had run past fields, her husband's and others'. The earth was harder, paler in the brightening moonlight than the rich soil of the plain. She was getting closer to the lake. They wouldn't be able to stay there, out in the open, even on a warm night like tonight. They'd have to go further, up into the foothills, but she felt safer now that she had run this far.

Up ahead, she could see her daughters, the surface of the water winking behind them as they waited for her to catch up. But she couldn't take another step. She was too tired. Her breath caught with every inhalation. She worked hard every day of her life, but she had not run like this since her own childhood, when there was time for games, when she and her brothers and sisters ran through the flocks, teasing the animals and running away before they could get hurt.

Bending over, her chest heaved painfully. She rested her hands on her soft thighs. Her whole body seemed to be trying to breathe. Even her arms and legs shook from the effort.

Standing back up, she reeled as the blood rushed away from her head, sent her body staggering and turned her to face the way she'd come. The plain stretched out behind her. In the distance, a few small figures scuttled away from Sodom, which was still burning, higher now than she ever thought possible.

Only then, as she watched those tiny human shapes, did the truth of what she had done hit her with its full force. Those were her neighbors, people she had lived among for decades, ever since Lot brought her here, one child on her hip, another in her womb. Images of the life she had led, of her husband and children, passed quickly through her mind. Then others. Her friends. The courtyard she'd claimed as her own. The bed she had shared with one man since the age of twelve. It was all gone. Her husband, who would have whored his own daughters out over some foolish sense of pride, he was in there too, and though her rage still flared hotter than any fire, she felt, in that moment, what it was to lose an entire life, her own history of love and of loss.

For the first time, she saw what her hands had wrought. I have killed, she thought. I have killed and I have destroyed. She had to repeat it aloud a few times
before she began to believe it. “I have killed today. I have killed to save my own.”

It was only in that moment, when her body struggled to reassert itself and her mind fought to align her pride at having saved her children with her grief at losing everything she still held dear, her whole valued life, and horror at what she had wrought, that she started to cry. Huge, dehydrated tears poured down her face, heaving sobs wracked her body. She shivered, cold sweat mingling with the heat of her long run, and she sank down, crying harder than she ever had cried before, harder even than the morning her own mother had sent her away into her new marriage and the long life ahead of her.

She could see her girls walking toward her, and though she didn't want them to see her cry, didn't want them to doubt what they had done, she couldn't stop. Something had opened within her. Try as she might, she could not close it.

“Stand up, Mama,” one of them said. “You have to keep moving or your muscles will seize up.”

And she would. She would get up. She would let her daughters, each as tall as she was now, half-carry her along the lake's shoreline and up into the hills. She
would find a cave for them to stay in for the night, her girls curled around her like lambs, would collapse into an exhausted, grief-stricken sleep. She would wake the next morning to explain to her bewildered children that they could never return to their homes, that they would have to forget all they had ever known, even their father, and look only into the future. She would calm them when the full shock of what they had done hit them, and their fear of God's wrath shook within them. She would explain that they had done God's work the previous night, or the work God should have done when a man would ask a mother to sacrifice her virgin daughters for his own stupid honor. She would tell them they were instruments of God's wrath, that God had guided her hand and theirs when they set their home alight.

And then they would all sleep again. When they next woke, she would drink the water her daughters had collected from a nearby spring and eat the figs they had picked from a tree along the way. She would face their anger when they accused her of ending their lives, of making sure that there would be no man left in the world who would have them. She would soothe them, say that the riches they had stuffed into the saddlebags before they ran from the city would buy them a new life. She would brush off their suspicion that fatherless daughters could achieve anything other than lonely
destitution. She would promise to find a way.

Within a few days, once her ankle healed, she would keep that promise, take them to a small market town where no one knew them. She would find an unscrupulous or incurious broker who would take her money and hire a man for her. Her man would go out, purchase land where the three women would live.

At first, he would ask when, as she had promised, his master would arrive. After a while, in the face of her silence, he would stop asking. She would direct him to buy sheep and goats, to hire field hands and shepherds and slave girls. And when they had enough new wealth, she would send the man out again to find husbands for her daughters. She would see them married and grow large with child. She would hold her grandchildren on her lap and know she had done something good. But for all that she would go on to do, Lot's wife, who had once been called Puha, would never rise from that spot by the side of the moonlit lake. She would never stop crying fat, salty tears for the life she left behind in flames.

DRAWN FROM THE WATER

“A certain man of the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw how beautiful he was, she hid him for three months. When she could hide him no longer, she got a wicker basket for him and caulked it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child into it and placed it among the reeds by the bank of the Nile. And his sister stationed herself at a distance to learn what would befall him.”

Exodus 2:1-4

I
have a special job for you today, Miriam,” Amma says. She woke me even earlier than usual today. Everything is black, the walls of our hut, the ceiling, and the sky outside that I can see through the doorway.

It's hard to get out of bed so early. Usually, Baba is gone by the time Amma rubs my back until I open my eyes. Not today. Baba is standing right behind Amma when she wakes me, which is how I know this is important.

Baba holds up the basket that Amma has been working on for weeks. First, she sent me to the river to gather long reeds for her. She cut those up and wove them together so that I couldn't see through them at all when I held the basket up to the light. After that, she carried it down to the river to line it with thick mud. That sat in our hut drying for days, but it didn't bother me.

It was different when she started to rub pitch on the outside. Our hut smelled so bad that I had to hold my nose every time I walked in. She tried scrubbing her hands with sand to get the sticky off. She plunged them into river water. Nothing got it off, which is why she made me hold the baby for hours. “Don't let him cry,” she told me, so I rocked and made funny faces and dipped my finger into cane water and let him suck on it. Amma fed him a lot, too, but it was getting harder to keep that up.