old it!" God said, but I didn't hear him, didn't need to hear him because he was talking to my daddy, and this was between the two of them so I wasn't allowed to hear, no matter how much it might have eased my anguish and terror. I heard only the hiss of indrawn breath, then saw the eyes glare, the knife raise, poise, arc downward and stop just above my heart, not knowing what had stopped it or if it would start again.
"Where's the lamb?" I had asked on the way up. "I've got the wood, you've got the fire and the knife. Where's the lamb?"
"It's taken care of," Daddy had said.
I had shifted the load of wood from my back and arranged it on the stones the way I thought it ought to be, wanting to get it right, wanting to please both of them. And as I let go of the last piece, my hands was yanked behind me and tied, and my feet tied too, and I was heaved up on top of the wood.
"Wait!" I had said, because maybe there was some mistake, but I knew there was not. The knife rose and fell and stopped short. Then after a while Daddy untied me. I couldn't look at him. I turned and went down the hill to where the others was waiting. After a while Daddy come down, too, and we went home in silence.
Maybe Daddy thought I had heard and so nothing more needed to be said. Come right down to it, what more could be said, even if I had heard?--"Hey, boy, you come close to getting your butt burnt back there, you know that? Good thing God stepped in when he did, hunh, Isaac boy?"
Or maybe he understood that there was nothing, nothing at all he could say that would justify what the two of them had done. And if he understood that, then he ought to have understood that though his hand had been stayed, the sacrifice was already consummated, had been from the minute he consented to it, and I was lost to him forever. But at the time I guess he didn't understand. Neither of us did. Maybe, none of us did.
It was back in Beer-sheba that I learned what God had said, was able to piece it together from the arguments offered to appease my raging mama Sarah when she heard what had happened, when he in naive arrogance told her what had happened. Wrinkled and shriveled by sun and time, but by no means frail, she battered him with her fists, driving him back and out of the tent, flailing, frothing, dredging all the way back to her girlhood in Ur for insults and curses strong enough to serve and shrieking them to the whole encampment. And not sparing God, either, shrieking at him, too, until Daddy become uneasy and had somebody pin her arms so he could clamp a hand over her mouth.
"Hey," he said, "I never meant to actually do it. It was never my intention to go through with it. It was all a bluff, see? If he hadn't stopped me, I'd have stopped anyway. But I bluffed him, and I won!"
Maybe Mama believed him, at least she was placated enough to contain her anger. But I had heard the hissing breath and seen the glaring eyes and knew better.
"Won what?" Mama asked. "Just what was it that you won?"
"Why, the Promise, woman, the Promise! It's all locked in, now."
"Damn the Promise! He's dragged us halfway across the world dangling that Promise like a worm on a line then jerking it back and demanding something else. Here's the Promise," she said, grabbing me and clutching me to her breast. "Here's the only Promise, and from now on, you keep your filthy hands off him, you hear me, and you keep him off, too!" And she pulled me away into her tent and hovered over me for the rest of her life.
I never spoke to my daddy again, at first out of anger, and by the time that faded, out of habit. Mama was our intermediary.
I was thirty-seven when Mama died. We was living near the city of Hebron then, and Daddy went there to buy the cave at Machpelah for her burial place. There he humbled hisself before the city fathers calling hisself a stranger and a sojourner, all but getting down on hands and knees to get them to sell it to him, this from the holder of the Promise, progenitor of a mighty nation, grantee not only of this plot but of the whole city of Hebron, the whole land of Caanan, the rights to all of it reserved forever to him and his seed. In the end they made him buy the whole field at an exorbitant price, and Mama was laid to rest in the cave there.
With Mama gone, I took to the fields, spending much of my time there alone. "Still grieving for his mama," the servants told one another, shaking their heads. "Just can't seem to get over her, poor boy." But that wasn't it. Now that I no longer had Mama to stand between us, I was simply keeping out of Daddy's way. Besides, I enjoyed my own company.
And the women who had looked after Mama said, "Makes us keep her tent just like she left it. Now, that's not healthy, you know." Well, I liked the tent, its soft cushions, its rich tapestry, its subtle fragrances. It was a pleasant place to come sometimes and set. I saw no reason to give it up.
I liked to walk in the fields in the evening. It was a good way to close the day, feeling the cool wind on your face, breathing in the sweet scents of the night, watching the stars fill up the sky. One evening as I strolled along, I saw movement on the horizon. A line of camels. A caravan? I went to meet it and found it was Eliezer, our old chief servant, returning he told me from a mission to our kin way up in Haran.
"What in the world was you doing in Haran?"
"You mean he didn't tell you?" The old man couldn't believe it.
"I've been away, " I said. It was true. I had been to the south, living in the desert for awhile. But Daddy knew that I was back. There'd been plenty of opportunity to send me word.
"Then this may come as right much of a shock," the old Eliezer said and led me a little away from the caravan and told me what he had been doing in Haran. "Your daddy ought to have told you."
Ought to have. But no surprise to me that he hadn't.
"Which one is she?" I asked as we walked back to the caravan, but I couldn't miss her. The women had got down off the camels and was grouped together with Rebekah in the middle, the dark eyes above the veil bold and confident. She was a pretty thing, even in the half light I could see that. And the way she carried herself, proud and strong like Mama, was reassuring. She wouldn't be a clinger. Or a whiner. She would hold her own with the servants. And, I was confident, with Daddy, too. So what if I hadn't been consulted, or even informed? Why fight about it? It wasn't worth the effort. Besides, I was forty now, a third of the way through my allotted span. It was time to take a wife.
I clapped the old man on the shoulder. "Don't worry about me not knowing. You've done well, old friend."
And to Rebekah I said, "Come. There's a tent all ready. It used to be my mother's. Now it's yours."
Rebekah slipped easily into Mama's role as matriarch and as buffer between Daddy and me, handling Daddy and the servants, and me, too, with no-nonsense good humor and grace. And when Daddy took another wife, Rebekah made it clear from the first that her role as matriarch would not change, that she would still be in charge of the household. When Daddy's decided to give up running things, she smoothed the way as I took over. I depended on her, become fond of her, who knows, maybe I even loved her.
