Rachel and Leah (Women of Genesis) (8 page)

Whether her pause and whine gave her away or not, Father didn’t notice. He had stopped cold at the mention of her vision. He took her by the shoulders—far less gently than Jacob had—and in a fierce whisper he said, “Tell that to no one, do you understand?”

She knew then that Father feared her telling that story. So she could use it to end the suspicion of Jacob. “I will tell it to
everybody
who accuses Jacob of anything improper.”

Father glared at her. “You think you’re so clever, getting me to do whatever you want.”

“I can’t help what I’m shown in visions,” said Rachel. “And none of the voices I hear ever told me not to tell.” Which
was a flat lie, the woman’s voice especially was prone to whisper, Shhhhh, don’t say it.

I lie too much, thought Rachel, but the thought soon fled, because it’s not as if she started each day thinking, I’m going to tell a dozen big old lies today. She only lied when somebody
made
her do it. She had to protect Jacob, and if she could do it by pretending that God had shown her a vision of Jacob kissing her, well, it was worth the lie. If that made her wicked, then maybe God would punish her by stopping the visions, and if the truth be known, she could hardly think of anything she wanted more.

Z
ilpah’s mother had never actually
said
that Laban was the man who had sired her. When Zilpah was six, she asked outright where her father was. Mother hushed her immediately, with tight-lipped anger, and told her that there were some things she was too young to know.

Zilpah never asked again, but she knew her mother’s answer was absurd. All the other children knew who and where their fathers were, even the ones who were younger than her, even the ones whose fathers were dead. So is my father
worse
than dead? Was he a criminal? Why should I keep still about him?

Then she heard the word
bastard
—hurled by one shepherd at another, in a quarrel—and asked one of the other children what it meant. “It’s a man who doesn’t know who his father is.”

This set Zilpah to wondering: What about a girl who
didn’t know who her father was? Was she a bastard, too? And was it an awful thing to be? The shepherd who had said the word was full of hate when he said it, and the word made the other shepherd fly at him, flailing about with his crook. Am I a thing so awful, that a man would attack a bigger fellow for having said he was one?

So once again she braved her mother’s wrath, expecting to be rebuked even more sternly for asking, “Mama, can a girl be a bastard?”

Her mother was angry all right, but not at her. “Who called you such a thing? I’ll kill him.”

“Nobody,” said Zilpah, frightened.

“Then how did you ever hear that word?”

Zilpah told about the quarrel between grown men, and Mother relaxed. “Well, it has nothing to do with
you
.”

“But Amar said that—”

“Amar doesn’t know his leg from his neck, so he scratches his knee when his head itches.”

Miserably, Zilpah confessed her worry. “Other children younger than me know who their father is.”

“That’s because it’s all right for them to know. Their father is nobody important, and so they don’t have to keep the secret.”

Ah. So her father was someone so important that his identity could not be known. That was better than any answer Zilpah could have imagined.

Of course, the most important man that Zilpah knew anything about at that age was Laban, the lord of the camp, who ruled over everyone and dispensed justice, food, and labor assignments every day. So for several years she believed Laban was her father.

But as she grew older and learned more about the world, she began to realize that this was not very likely. While Laban did not marry again after his wife died, he could easily have taken a concubine, or several concubines. Even if he had wanted to keep his liaison with Mother secret while his wife was alive—some women were jealous about their husband taking concubines among the women in the camp—there was nothing to stop him from recognizing Mother as a concubine after he was a widower.

She even asked one of the old women called Hobbler why Laban didn’t take concubines the way other powerful men did, and Hobbler only laughed. “He’s not the kind of man who can’t live without a woman. His eye never wandered the whole time his wife was alive. She never had to shed a tear because he was sleeping in another woman’s tent.”

It dawned on Zilpah then that since there were no secrets in the camp—the old women knew even more stories than were true—it was almost impossible that Laban could have fathered her, not without some kind of rumor among the women.

So her important father must have been someone from outside the camp, and that made more sense anyway. Mother must have sneaked off to the city, or perhaps a visitor crept into her tent one night. Maybe he even forced himself on her, and she had to keep it secret to avoid a terrible war between great houses.

And then, by the time she was twelve, Zilpah came to the realization that her mother was probably lying. She had only been about fifteen when Zilpah was born, and in all likelihood the only reason Zilpah’s father wasn’t known was because there were too many candidates for the title to be certain.
What made Zilpah almost sure that this was the truth was the way her mother watched over her once she started turning into a woman, refusing to let her do anything that would leave her alone with any man or boy old enough to cause mischief. “A man’s all full of talk about love,” her mother said bitterly, “but he cares less for you than he does for a sheep. Don’t trust them! Not a one of them! I want you to have a husband, a good man who’ll stand by you.”

That was as good as a confession, to Zilpah’s mind. Only now she was old enough to know that she was indeed a bastard, and there would be no fine husband for
her
. The best she could hope for was to be a concubine—a woman taken under a man’s protection, but whose children would not be heirs. A second-class wife, a wife who was a servant, a wife who might even be sold as a slave, if the man had no honor and he grew tired of her.

But better a concubine, Zilpah knew, than what her mother was. Zilpah was born into bondage because it was the only way for a fatherless child like her to have a place in the world, and with the taint of illegitimacy on her, there was no escaping her bondage. She’d be lucky if Laban didn’t simply sell her off to someone, who could use her as her mother had been used.

Laban wouldn’t do that, of course. He looked out for his people. He never sold any of his bondservants; he was a man who took in strangers and made a place for them, like that orphan cousin of Noam’s, Bilhah. Of course, Bilhah had parents, Bilhah had a father, and even a dead father was better than the nothing Zilpah had. Oh, that galled her, to watch that girl come in from the city, knowing almost nothing, having no useful skills at all, and get preferred above
her
, who had
faithfully performed all her tasks—even the absolute scutwork that was often assigned to her because, after all, she was only a fatherless girl and couldn’t refuse to get up to her elbows in filth because how dare she think there was any job she was too good for?

Not that anybody ever said such a thing in so many words. Laban didn’t tolerate unkindness to children in his household. But it was clear enough, when five children were assigned to Hobbler for cleaning, and she always chose Zilpah to bury the week’s latrine—while the other children were assigned to dig the new latrine in clean ground.

Zilpah didn’t actually mind. The smell wasn’t pretty, but in a herding camp, there was nothing unusual about having dung smell of one kind or another in her nose. If she was careful, nothing ugly got on her—and it was a lot easier to scrape loose dirt over the latrine and tamp it down than to dig a new latrine in hard, unbroken earth. Let
them
get covered with dirt and streaked with sweat, while I stay cleaner doing the “filthy” bastard’s work. It suggested that God had set up the world so even the lowest-born got a bit of mercy now and then.

When full womanhood came on her, though, Zilpah learned that a man’s eyes saw only her body, not her illegitimacy. With her mother’s fierce protection, the boys and men of the camp had learned not to attempt even a moment’s solitary conversation with Zilpah—the tongue-lashing could be heard by eagles overhead and awoke the worms sleeping in the earth, as the saying had it. But that didn’t stop Zilpah from toying with them a little, loosening her clothing a bit and bending over at her tasks so that some hapless male was afforded a lingering glimpse down her blouse. The ones who
frankly stared at her, she would ignore; the ones who took only furtive glances, though, she would confront with her haughtiest glare, making sure they knew they had been caught. Let men covet her all they wanted, was her opinion, but don’t let them get away with trying to hide their lust. It gave her a feeling of power, to control their thoughts that way, and to leave them shamefaced whenever she chose to let them know that she knew what they were about.

Zilpah didn’t hate her life—she had many pleasures and amusements, and if some kept their distance from her because of who she wasn’t, she still had her friends, and for all that her mother was so grimly protective of her, they were still close and Zilpah enjoyed her mother’s company. It was not a bad life. It was her future that didn’t bear examining. What if she never found a man who wanted her for anything other than a bondservant? Laban would never sell her without her consent, but what if that was the only way to have a man? What if she ended up like her mother, raising some man’s baby without even concubinage to give the child a position in the world? No, I’ll never do that, Zilpah resolved. I’d rather be one of the spinsters in Laban’s camp, dried up and childless, than be trapped into a position of shame like my mother, or bring up a child in shame, as I have had to grow.

Even a future as a spinster was uncertain, though. Spinsters were well-treated in Laban’s camp; no one was allowed to treat them with open contempt, despite their barrenness, their unwantedness. But Laban’s two older sons, Nahor and Terah, showed no sign of growing into kindly men like their father. They were thick as thieves, those two, always thinking of mischief and goading each other on when they were young, and now that they were adults and married, they
still took more pleasure from going off to town together than from their wives or the new babies that both of them had. It was Laban who doted on their babies—daughters, both of them—and looked after his sons’ wives while his boys went off to play. No doubt visiting prostitutes in the city, though they swore to Laban that they were there on business and were full of talk about merchants taking caravans who might bring them exotic dyes or to whom they might sell one of the young camels, if things worked out right.

What would happen when they were masters of the camp? For they had already hinted that instead of Nahor inheriting alone, the way they would avoid dividing the inheritance was to rule it together. “We share everything as it is, so why should that change?” Zilpah figured
that
arrangement would last until the first disagreement, whereupon Terah would find out just what it meant not to be the eldest son. The third boy, Choraz, who was still just a boy, was wiser than his older brothers—he was off in the service of some desert lord, preparing to make a place for himself without counting on the mercy of Nahor.

But the brothers’ future hardly mattered to Zilpah. All that she cared about was what they might have in mind for her, when she belonged to them. By then she’d probably be an old woman. But what if Laban died suddenly? Men did. And she had seen both of them look at her from time to time, not with the hopeless longing that some of the young men showed, but with cocky certainty. She did not bend over toward
them;
that was no sport at all, when she knew that someday they would own her more certainly than she owned herself.

Then Laban’s nephew Jacob came to camp.

There had been many visitors before, and some so important
that young he-goats were slaughtered and roasted. But all those other visitors had been men of business, or suitors trying to ingratiate themselves with Laban in advance of his daughters’ maturity. None of them got much encouragement from Laban; he put on a good feast because that was one way a man showed his wealth and power, but he was just as happy when they went their way.

With Jacob, it was obviously different. Instead of leaving matters to his steward as he usually did, Laban was hurrying from place to place giving needless and sometimes wrong advice to people who knew their work better than he did. And he sent two riders to the city to fetch his sons home before nightfall—two, so they might find them all the faster. Such extravagance was unheard of.

So this Jacob was important. Well, it didn’t take much guessing as to why. He was the grandson of the legendary prince and prophet Abraham, who had once taught a Pharaoh of Egypt about the stars, and the son of Isaac, who held the birthright of Abraham. There were whispers about them being the true kings of the earth, who by right should rule over all nations, and that one day an heir of their line would make good on that claim. Laban was a kinsman, but the birthright went through another line—if a daughter of his married the heir of Isaac, then Laban’s grandchildren would be part of that noble lineage.

Though Isaac had two sons, didn’t he? And rumor had it that they didn’t get along as nicely as Nahor and Terah. Was this Jacob the heir or not? There were stories that had it both ways. So Laban, no doubt, was playing it safe. Besides, elder sons sometimes died before they could inherit, and then it would all be Jacob’s by any accounting. Maybe that’s what
Terah was counting on: Nahor getting so drunk in the city that he would provoke the wrong man and find just how much of a blade could fit inside his body.