Jabez: A Novel–Chapter 10, The Blessing

In my dream, I fell to the ground. I wept for the mere sound of it, like all the oceans and winds of the world, gathered together inside my head. I was afraid I would die with the terror of it, the beauty of it. I knew I would die. And I knew it would be worth death, and more, to hear what I now heard. I stretched myself on the ground like a defeated man. I waited for the stroke that would destroy me, even as the utter love, the breathtaking power of the speaking ravished my soul.

I have remembered you.

The words were live coals in my ears. Remembered me? For what? There was nothing in me worth remembering, nothing that deserved even the tiniest corner of the glory that now poured through me like a flood of molten gold.

You will not be forgotten. No more shall you be known as “Pain.” Your name shall be a word of blessing to many, to generations yet unborn.

Is there in the tongues of men a song that is equal parts shame and glory? If there is, it is that song that now broke open inside my soul. That I, who had never known my father or the love of my brothers, should be thought of at all by those yet to come, much less remembered kindly—it was too much. I could not contain it.

I have heard your prayer, the requests you have placed before me. Arise now, and see how I will do what you have asked.

The glory left me. In my dream, I lay on the hillside and sobbed, I don’t know how long. My face was wet from my tears, it was crusted with dirt. I rolled onto my back and covered my face with my hands. I was weeping for the joy of what I had heard. I was weeping because the dreadful beauty had gone up from me, and I thought I would die from the emptiness.

Someone was shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes and saw, not the sky above the Hill of Zur, but Ahuzzah, leaning over me. There was something like concern in her face.

“Someone is here to see you,” she said.

I wiped my face and sat up. Ehud stood in front of me. I blinked at him. I looked at my mother. Still her chest rose and fell in short, broken movements.

Ehud held out his hand to me. I stood.

“Let’s walk outside,” he said.

“Again you have come here unlooked for,” I said when we went through the doorway.

“Again I have come to seek you,” he said. “I owe you a debt of thanks.”

“For what?”

“For taking me to the men of this place. The overthrow of Eglon began here, in Beth-Zur.”

I shrugged. “It was little enough to do.”

“But of such little the Most High sometimes makes much.”

The dream. The Voice. The blessing …

His hand was on my arm. “What is it?”

I pulled in a deep breath. “A dream I had.”

“When I came in you were asleep. The woman said you had been sleeping for an entire night and a day. She said you cried and called out strangely. I heard you myself, just before she woke you.”

“A night and a day?”

He nodded.

I looked toward the west, toward the crown of the Hill of Zur. “I dreamed of the Most High.”

He looked at me for a long moment, then nodded. “Yes. I see it in you.”

There was a quiet space, then he said, “I am sorry about your mother.”

“She was taken ill when I returned from Jericho.”

“Yes, so the woman told me.”

We walked a few paces.

He had stopped walking. He was staring into the distance.

“What’s wrong?”

He looked at me. “Jabez, I … There is something I must tell you. You told me once in Jebus that you had no father. How much do you know of your mother’s life … before?”

Something like fear prickled at the nape of my neck. I couldn’t speak.

“Let me tell you a story,” he said. He put his arm around my shoulder and we walked, round and round my house as the day faded into afternoon, round and round as the darkness settled onto the world, round and round as his voice opened a path into the past, into places I was not sure I wanted to go.

There was a man of Benjamin, he said, who was always getting into trouble. He was hotheaded and quick-tongued and often in the wrong place at the wrong time. For all that, Ehud said, he was a good friend, and a true one. He might wound with his words, but he was quick to repent, extravagant in his atonements.

He made enemies of the wrong people, though, and found it easier to leave the territory of Benjamin than to continually watch his back. He traveled south, into Judah. He traveled until he came to a small village in the hills, a place called Beth-Zur.

“You have maybe heard of the love that sometimes happens between a man and woman,” Ehud said. “Sometimes when the eyes of two people meet, it is as if they have known each other already, as if they are meeting the other part of themselves. Father Jacob knew such a love for Rachel, it is said. The stories say he was so moved by his love for her that he lifted a heavy well stone so her flocks could drink. They say he wept aloud for the beauty of her.”

Such a love, Ehud told me, fell out of the blue sky upon this Benjamite and a young woman of Beth-Zur. But the woman was betrothed to another. Her name was Libnah.

The Benjamite knew it was a sin to look upon a woman promised to another, Ehud said. He knew speaking to her was wrong. Each night before he slept he promised himself and the Most High he would leave the next day and never return. But each morning he went to the well and waited for her to come and draw water. Each morning she would see him waiting, see the love in his eyes. He would see the way she looked at him, and he knew. They both knew. And they both knew it could never be.

On the day she went into the house of her husband, he left Beth-Zur. He felt as a man feels when he has lost an arm. He felt as if the joy had been drained out of him and replaced with brine. He vowed never to look at another woman. He vowed to seek death rather than embrace someone he could never love.

“For he had given her his heart, Jabez. He could never get it back.”

The Benjamite traveled around Judah. In his travels, he crossed paths with an old friend from home, another Benjamite who had gone on to other places. The two men traveled together for a while. They had adventures. But something was gone from the first man, Ehud said. A light was extinguished inside him. He told his friend of the woman he had seen in Beth-Zur, the woman whose name meant “Brightness.”

“He began to take bigger and bigger chances,” Ehud said. “He would make thoughtless boasts, then take terrible risks to make them good. He fought more, drank more. He looked for trouble. And then, one day … you can guess the way of it.”

We sat for a long time when he quit talking. The moon was rising, a fat, orange melon on the eastern horizon.

“So you think the Libnah in your story is the woman lying in this house on her deathbed?”

He shrugged. “I gave you a story. You have to decide what to do with it.”

I looked at him. His eyes were sad, like one who looks down a long, narrow passage and knows he must travel its length, willing or not.

“Tomorrow I will go back to Gilgal,” he said. “But maybe I will come again to Beth-Zur.”

“Maybe I will come to Gilgal,” I said. “Who knows?”

We went back into the house. My mother’s eyes were open.

Ahuzzah looked up at me from beside her mat. “She has been calling for you.”

“I was just outside,” I said. “Why didn’t you—”

“Not you,” Ahuzzah said. She nodded toward Ehud. “Him.”

Ehud kneeled beside my mother. He placed a hand alongside her cheek. “Are you Libnah?” he said in the tenderest voice I had ever heard him use.

Her eyes fluttered, but held. “The Benjamite,” she said in a voice like the whisper of a moth’s wing. “You … remind me of him.”

“He died for love of you, rather than dishonor you,” Ehud said. “That is a thing not every woman can say.”

“No. Not every woman.” I thought she tried to smile. Her lips moved.

Ehud beckoned me. “She wants to speak to you,” he said.

I put my ear to her lips, straining with every fiber to catch the faint breath of her words.

“You were born in pain,” she said, “but not in shame.”

“Yes, Mother. I know. I understand.”

“On the day you were born, they told me of the death of my beloved. I named you from the hurt of that. I cursed you with my pain. I am sorry.”

“Do not speak, Mother. It is all right. It is—”

“Peace, my son. Peace … ”

The last word sighed from her upon the ending of her breath. She was gone. I placed my fingertips on her eyelids and closed them. Behind me I heard quiet sobbing. It was Raboth. I held out my arms to him, and he rushed to me. We held each other. We wept. What else was there to do?

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This chapter is from Jabez: A Novel, by Thom Lemmons. The complete novel is available for your Kindle, Nook, iPad, or other e-reading device. Download it at http://www.homingpigeonpublishing.com