fter that business at Moriah, Isaac never spoke to me again or allowed me to speak to him except through someone else, Sarah until she died, and then Rebekah. It was almost worse than having him dead. Then maybe I could have dealt with it, closed it off. As it was, the sight of him, usually at a distance, was a constant reminder of what I had lost, a scab that is forever being scraped off so that the sore never heals.
And after Sarah's blowup when she learned what had happened, or rather the version I told her, because I knew better than to tell her the truth, our relationship never recovered beyond cool formality.
So I had solitude aplenty to think about the Promise and what chasing after it had cost me. I was rich, and my seed would be a great nation and my name would be known throughout time. But I had betrayed everyone I held dear for it. Sarah, once as close as the other side of my soul, I had alienated and embittered with my constant boasting about seed. Lot, like a son to me, I had sent away before he was ready to handle the world. Ismael, my firstborn, and dear, sweet Hagar I had publicly rejected and left to perish in the wilderness. And now Isaac.
And the irony of it was, the Promise never meant all that much to me, not the substance of it. What I wanted, what mattered to me was that God would find me worthy to receive it, that I would find favor in his eyes. In the end I had been ready and willing, even intended to betray him for it. Even so, he had put his arm around me, called me Abe, called me friend. But what was I really in his eyes? I would always be in doubt. He never showed hisself to me again. I spoke to him often, but he never answered. Sometimes I seemed to feel his presence, but it could have been all in my mind. So I guess you might say, I lost God, too. At least our closeness.
Them was the darkest years of my life. The one bright spot was that I learned Ishmael and Hagar was still alive. Ishmael was grown, now, and his notoriety was beginning to extend beyond the Negev where he and Hagar had settled. A mighty hunter, a fierce fighter, the Wild One, they called him. I sent someone to check and it was my Ismael, but he refused to have any further contact with me. My man did find out that Hagar was alive and had never married, and that she had exchanged her Egyptian name for the Hebrew name of Keturah. I begun a frequent correspondence with her and learned the details of their misadventure and of her and Ishmael's life afterward.
After a couple of dry years, the grazing dwindled in Beer- sheba and we moved back to the Hebron area. And soon afterward, Sarah died. I bought a field there with a cave. It laid on the gentle slope of a hill east of Hebron and in sight of the beautiful Oaks of Mamre where we had once lived. And there I laid my Sarah, my beloved, lost Sarah, to rest.
Shortly before she died, Sarah had summoned me to her tent, my first visit there in twenty years or more, and told me to find a wife for Isaac from among our kin in Haran. "I can't bear the thought of him marrying some Canaanite slattern or Egyptian slut" she said. "Promise me!"
I had received word from time to time of the growing family of my brother Nahor. Nahor was dead now, but his wife Milcah was still alive the last I heard. So I called in Eliezer, my old chief servant, who had been with me since I first struck out from Haran chasing the Promise, and told him what I wanted done. "It's too big a responsibility for a servant," he said.
"Who else is there? Isaac can't bargain for his own wife, and I'm not up to the journey. Besides, I have absolute trust in you. With your skills, you'll strike a better bargain than I ever could."
And he did. Rebekah was a rare gem. Beauty, presence, authority and good humor. She took over Sarah's role and our hearts, mine and all the household, and ordered them to her own sense of rightness. She was not able to bring Isaac and me together, though she tried, but she did make things easier by acting as a go between.
She was even helpful when I wanted to bring Hagar, now Keturah, up from the Negev to become the wife of my old years, after, of course, a firm understanding that Keturah would in no way infringe upon her position as matriarch of the household. She never told me what Isaac's reaction was to the idea. Whatever it was, he offered no opposition, and in the end become amiable with Keturah, and with the sons she bore me. And through Rebekah, he approved the generous settlements I made on each of them as they growed up and left the household.
And so I come to the end, scarred but at peace, as in my youth I had watched ships, battered by storms at sea, enter the calm harbor at Ur and lie peacefully at their mooring.
