Pearl in the Sand

by Tessa Afshar

  “Y-y-yes.” What was this, a peace offering? Encouraged, Rahab dared a slight smile back. But the burgeoning hope proved short-lived. How long would his approbation last? How long before she ruined it with a wrong word or action? “Would you like help with the food?”

  “I can manage. Thank you.” Rahab trudged with slow movements as she put together a bundle, stuffing it with warm barley bread and fish and soft cheese and a wooden cup for water. She didn’t want to go. It would only end in disappointment. She knew her reluctance did not escape his notice. He was frighteningly perceptive. And yet he did not seem perturbed or annoyed by it. He sat on a rug, whistling a jaunty tune under his breath as he changed into sturdier sandals. When she couldn’t delay anymore, she came to him and dangled her bundle.

  “Lunch is ready.” She tried to make her voice sound carefree.

  “Oh, but this won’t do.”

  “What?” she asked, alarmed.

  “Your shoes. Much too delicate for a serious trek outside the camp. You’ll get blisters in those flimsy things. Come here.”

  Rahab went to him, heart pounding. He made a motion for her to sit near and she obeyed. He fetched her walking shoes, and she extended her hand to take them from him.

  “I’ll take care of it.” He knelt before her and lifted her foot. Gently, he undid her sandal.

  Rahab’s throat went dry. She tried to pull her foot free. “My feet aren’t clean.”

  He held tight to her ankle, not letting go when she struggled. Seeing the determination in his eyes, she grew still. He gave her a small smile full of approbation. He pulled off her sandals and, after wiping her feet with a damp cloth, strapped on her sturdy shoes.

  “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” He took a moment to rinse his hand in a pitcher before rising. “Well, wife, are you coming or are you going to cling to the rug the rest of the afternoon?”

  Rahab had forgotten she was sitting. A kind of openmouthed confusion dulled her mind. Had he truly done the work of slaves—washed her feet and tenderly strapped on her sandals for her? What was he up to, this husband of hers who was an utter mystery to her? What was he doing here at home in the middle of the day, acting like naught was wrong between them? Where had he spent the previous night? Why did he want to spend time with her? From the stubborn angle of his jaw she suspected that she wouldn’t discover any answers until he was good and ready to tell her. She scrambled to her feet and almost jumped out of her skin when he took her hand, lacing his fingers through hers. Bending to pick up the bundle of food she had made, he flashed a smile. “Be a shame if we forgot this. I feel hungry for the first time in days.”

  Salmone set the pace, ambling with his long-legged gait until he realized that Rahab was scrambling to keep up. He slowed his steps immediately. “I’m sorry. I often do that to you. Force of habit, I suppose. Miriam complains that I walk like a mountain goat.”

  He slowed down to a relaxed speed that was easy for Rahab to navigate. As they walked, he began to regale her with stories from his work, discussing the challenges of settlement and farming that faced their community in the immediate future. With flattering frequency, he asked her opinion, considering her responses with serious interest. By the time they had made their way out of the perimeter of Israel’s boundaries, Rahab found herself calmer.

  Salmone chose a path that led to a narrow brook flowing out from the Jordan. “Let’s cross to the other side. There are some pretty acacia trees if I remember aright.”

  Rahab stepped forward, intending to submerge her foot into the water. Without warning, Salmone grabbed her around the waist and swung her high into his arms. “No need for us both to get wet,” he said, grinning.

  Without her volition Rahab felt herself tense. Being this close to him was torture. Salmone’s handsome face softened. “Be at your ease. I won’t harm you, Rahab.” His voice, low and quiet, held no edge, no irony. Relief flooded her. Relief that her stupid uncontrollable reactions were not turning him away from her as they often did. She let herself go limp, but could not bring herself to raise her arms and clasp him about the neck.

  On the other side of the brook, Salmone lowered her to the ground, letting her body slide down against his in slow motion. Heat rushed to Rahab’s cheeks, but if Salmone noticed it, he made no comment. “What do you think of this spot? We can sit on that low rock with the acacia tree over us while we eat.”

  Rahab nodded. She would have agreed to sit down on a dunghill if he had led her, she was so utterly befuddled by his actions. He handed her bread and fish, which she could only play with. Her stomach churned at the thought of food.

  “You need to put that in your mouth and start chewing. You’ve lost too much weight.”

  Rahab was deaf to the concern in his words and could only focus on the implied criticism. Did he think she was losing her looks? Did he find her unattractive? She shoved a piece of bread in her mouth and swallowed with determination. It stuck in her throat, choking her, and she began to cough, doubled over.

  “Drink this,” he commanded, holding a cup filled with water from the brook to her lips. She managed a sip. Then another, until the coughing began to subside. “It would help if you chewed before swallowing. You know of chewing? It’s when you move your teeth up and down on your food.”

  Rahab smiled in spite of herself, feeling gawky before this together man. “Must be out of practice. Anyway, you’ve lost weight yourself. It’s good to see you eat.”

  He grew earnest and thoughtful at her words. “It hasn’t been an easy time for either of us.”

  “No.”

  “Rahab, I brought you here because I wanted to talk about us. Home holds too many hard memories for us to feel at our ease. I wanted us to come to a quiet place where we could talk openly.”

  She felt a wave of nausea at the thought of one more conversation with Salmone. He would now press her for answers, answers she could not give. “Oh, must we, Salmone? We are having such a lovely day. Let’s not ruin it.” She rose up and turned her back to him. Everything in her strained to run—from this place and from this man with his probing questions.

  From behind her Salmone spoke, sounding calm and unperturbed. “We can’t hide from this. We must face it together. I don’t fault you for feeling as you do. I’ve made many mistakes, Rahab. I ask your pardon.”

  Rahab’s heart contracted. A painful certainty began to creep over her. He wanted to set her aside—divorce her. That was why he was apologizing. That was the mistake to which he referred. No wonder he had stayed away all night and arrived home in good humor. He was resolved already. And who could blame him? The entirety of Israel would sigh with relief. Oh God, I cannot bear it. I cannot.

  “Please don’t, Salmone,” she cried, her heart in her mouth.

  In a flash he was beside her. “Don’t what, Rahab? What is it?”

  She almost begged, begged for him not to leave her, not to abandon her. But she had gulped down a lifetime of entreaties, knowing them useless. Why belittle herself further by starting now? One thing she could try to salvage was the vestiges of her bruised pride. She hung her head in defeat, beseeching God in the silence of her agonized thoughts. Give me courage to let him go. “You’re right,” she said, her voice cracking like dry tinder. “Divorce would be best.”

  Chapter

  Twenty-One

  The silence that greeted her outburst held an ominous thunder. Rahab was surprised to see an expression of despair on Salmone’s face. His skin was pale, and a sheen of fine perspiration clung to his forehead. “Why do you bring up divorce? I never said aught about it.”

  “But you were thinking it. It’s all right. I don’t blame you. I suppose I see no other solution myself.”

  “I never thought it. Never even considered it. Never will.”

  He had never thought about it? It occurred to her with a kind of astonished wonder that she had wounded him by her suggestion. He was hurt. Hurt that she would wish to end their marriage. And why had she made such a b
itter suggestion? In order to spare her pride. She had reacted as she always did to the horrors of life. She had hidden her real feelings behind a pretense of strength and in the process wounded the man she was supposed to cherish and protect. To save face, she had hurt him.

  “I … I didn’t mean it,” she murmured, her voice hoarse with regret. “I thought you wanted it; that’s why I said it.”

  He took a deep breath. She saw the air fill his chest, expand it, held there like an inner bubble of stretched time, and then he expended it, and with it, she could see some of the tension leaving his features. “Come with me. Come and sit by my side.”

  As she followed him, it began to sink into her benumbed brain that he didn’t want a divorce. He didn’t mean to set her aside. Relief flooded her until she grew weak with it. She loved this man beyond any limits she had set for her heart. She loved him so much that the thought of losing him hurt worse than death.

  “Rahab,” Salmone began when they sat face-to-face. “What made you think I wanted to divorce you?”

  “Things have been so difficult between us.”

  “Yes, and part of that is my fault. But just because our relationship is difficult at present doesn’t mean that I want to end it. What I want is to work it out, make it into the marriage God intends for us to have.

  “Some of our trouble is due to me. I’ve done wrong by you, Rahab. I didn’t mean to, but that doesn’t change the outcome. I placed an unreasonable prohibition on you, and I am deeply sorry for it. I should never have said that I didn’t want to be reminded of your past. It was foolish of me. I now realize that I placed you in an impossible position. What I want is to start over.”

  Rahab covered her thoughts beneath lowered eyelids. What he had said on their wedding day had been a glimpse of his true feelings. He had shown her by those words that he could not bear her sins, or the sins done against her. Those words captured Salmone’s real sentiments. “I wish that were possible,” she said with slow deliberation. “But I see no way. You can’t change your heart. You can’t alter your feelings just because you want to. My past won’t disappear. How I wish it would! But it will always be between us.” Saying the words aloud made her feel more hopeless than ever.

  Salmone leaned toward her. “Who says my heart can’t be changed? Didn’t God change yours? I can’t alter myself; it’s true. But God can transform me as much as He did you.”

  “I’m the same as I always was. How am I altered?”

  “A life lived differently shows a change in the soul. Can’t you see that your very desire for God shows how He has transformed you from the inside out? Trust God if you don’t trust yourself. You certainly don’t trust my love—I know this. You expect it to fail. To come to an end and let you down eventually like your father’s did.”

  It had never occurred to Rahab that her father’s failure to love her would reflect in her relationship with her husband. Was she, as he hinted, incapable of trusting Salmone because having trusted her father she had learned all loves fail in the end? Was she punishing him for her father’s sins? She put her head in her hands and sighed.

  He reached out and cupped her chin. “This is going to take more than words, I see. My little Jericho, I’ll have to be very persistent to win you to me.”

  “What did you call me?” She pulled away from his hand.

  “It’s my own special name for you.”

  “I don’t want to be called that,” she objected in frigid tones, offended at the comparison, remembering a city decrepit in its character.

  “Don’t you want to know why I call you that before you forbid me?”

  “No! Yes.”

  “It’s a picture God gave me. You don’t know this perhaps, but for Israel, conquering Jericho represented an impossibility. Those high walls.” He shook his head. “How were we to climb them? Smash them? In the end, God did the work. Our job was to show up, day after day, ignoring every discouragement, persisting in what He had asked us to do. Those walls came down not because of our strength, but because of God’s.

  “You are that walled city, Rahab. Because of my own prejudice and hemmed-in love, at first I didn’t have the resources to win you. But God is dealing with us both. He is transforming me as much as He seeks to transform you.”

  “So you see yourself as the one God will use to pull down my defenses. Is that what you mean?”

  “If I let Him. And if you let me.”

  “It sounds painful. You forget I was there the day Jericho’s walls came down. You want me to go through that?”

  “Yes, if it means you’ll be restored.”

  Rahab leaned back, her heart beating fast. She drew her knees to her chest and held them tightly in the circle of her arms. “What do you mean to do?”

  Salmone gazed at her, his eyes unflinching, boring into her with the precision of one of Zuph’s knives. “Whatever I must.”

  Dread grabbed hold of her and she felt herself turn pale. “I don’t know if I can do this, Salmone.”

  “There is nothing for you to do but learn to trust me. The One who parted the Jordan has more than enough power to heal our marriage. I don’t intend to give up. You’ll learn to believe that in time.”

  There was an unrelenting resolve that clung to him like a second skin. Its force struck Rahab dumb. She had a feeling that her life was about to change permanently.

  Salmone stood and stretched his hand toward her. She grasped it without thinking. He pulled her up in one swift movement, dislodging her equilibrium so that she was thrown against his chest. His arms wrapped about her for a precious moment, steadying her, and then as soon as she found her footing, he released her. The distance came as a relief to her. She needed the safety of some room between them. As though cognizant of her emotions, he did not insist on carrying her across the shallow stream this time, and forbearing comment, he let her splash in, wetting her feet.

  Rahab thought with relief that he was finished for now, that his grueling program of destroying her defenses had been shielded in its scabbard at least for the rest of the evening. She found she had misconstrued his easygoing mood.

  “Months ago, when you were first seeking to join us, Miriam told me about your father. He is the one who asked you to become a zonah, as I recall. When you were fifteen. Am I right?”

  Rahab stiffened near him, almost jumping out of her flesh. Why did he have to bring that up? “Yes.”

  “Will you tell me about it?”

  As her husband he had every right to ask her. What would be the harm in telling him? He knew the worst, anyway. Hadn’t she been the one to insist on disclosing the facts of her life before joining Israel? Hadn’t she risked her future for the sake of honesty? So what held her back at this moment?

  With Miriam, she had been in the position of disclosing only what she wanted, she realized. She had remained in control. She had spoken the truth, but painted by a broad brush. The bare-bones facts that she had disclosed didn’t reveal her inner struggles and shame. And that had been hard enough. She had felt like she had cut herself just by telling that much. But Salmone asked for more. He wanted to glimpse her soul.

  She thought of her father’s decision that fateful day, the decision that had turned the tide of her future. It still made her tremble to remember it. Her own father had thought her expendable. With unexpected clarity, Rahab saw that she had learned to agree with him. Her mind held him accountable for his sin against her, held him responsible for a violation she would never have committed against a child of her own. But in her deepest heart, she realized that she believed her father’s conclusion. She was expendable. She was worthy of being discarded. And she feared that Salmone would realize it once he heard her story. If her own father thought her of no consequence, wouldn’t Salmone, in hearing it, come to realize this was his wife’s true worth?

  As they walked through the wilderness toward Israel’s camp, she could feel the heat of his body as his arm brushed against hers, feel the solid dependability of his streng
th. He waited for her answer with uncharacteristic patience.

  He wanted her to trust him. Even though he had confessed that his love was limited and perhaps unable to withstand the ravages of her former life, he wanted her to trust him. No, not him. God. He wanted her to trust God at work in him and in her.

  Was this a matter of faith, then? Once, she had risked her whole life for the sake of her faith. She had been utterly convinced that the Lord would bring down Jericho’s walls and wrest victory from Israel’s enemies. Could she not have faith that this God was big enough to conquer her heart and Salmone’s too?

  Here were her choices then: to trust God or to trust the monstrous fears of her heart. And Salmone had the same choice before him. It would take both of them for this marriage to have a chance at anything like fulfillment. She could not control Salmone’s choices, but she could control her own.

  She stopped in the middle of the path. “I will tell you, Salmone. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know about my father.”

  Salmone’s eyes turned liquid with softness. He drew her to a rock and they sat, shadeless in the afternoon sun, for there were no trees nearby. With slow, broken sentences, Rahab told her story. She avoided her husband’s eyes, petrified that she might find coldness or detachment in them. She spoke of her father, and of the circumstances that had forced his betrayal. She didn’t mention much about Zedek, the man who had purchased her untutored favors when she was merely fifteen, knowing that he would have his own day of reckoning. Salmone would not leave that stone unturned, she guessed. For now, however, she only had enough strength to speak of her father’s choice and her own role in the ensuing events.

  Salmone listened without interrupting, except for a few exclamations. When she revealed that she had refused to join the temples though it would have made her existence so much easier, he burst out, “Even then you resisted idolatry. No wonder God set you apart for Himself.”