Now they are both dead and united with God. It does not especially matter whether her son died of thirst in the desert or somewhere else later on, because he is united with God now, and when you are with God you have always been with God, so it does not matter what has or has not happened to you. I mean, it matters, of course, as all aspects of what has been planned matter, but it does not matter to you, or at least that’s what I’ve been given to understand from what I’ve read. But it was nice to make someone as happy as I made the woman Hagar, because I had never made anyone happy before. I had not intended to make her happy—please don’t misunderstand. Her happiness was incidental to the task at hand, but I don’t think it was wrong of me to enjoy the results of my work. At all times, whether they live or die, whether humans obey or flee, whether they offer worship or blaspheme, I maintain a strictly professional air. I have never once been reprimanded for how I comport myself under the sun.
I would also like to take the opportunity to clear up a matter that I think has often seemed unclear: We all take turns at being the Satan. If you are assigned to oppose, to withstand, to stand up against the people of God, or to level accusations, or to offer temptation or to take possession, you have been assigned to contend against your colleagues, and you take your turn as the Great Adversary with a cheerful spirit and a right good will. Everyone understands this as part of the great work, and does not take it personally if we are periodically at odds. Each of us has spent time in outer darkness, and we have always come back in.
I don’t want to talk very much about the other one, the brother to Hagar’s boy, Isaac, who was not killed. People are very tiresome about that, and very pleased with themselves for having no stomach for the story, as if they have accomplished something significant by preferring life to death, or for begrudging the things God asks of them. It is not a new thing, to not wish to die. So they complain, but they do not listen, when if they would listen, their suffering would be allayed. And so their suffering continues.
I should add, it was very difficult, in those days, to keep anyone from stretching their sons out on altars and offering them up as burnt sacrifices. I was kept quite busy then. There had been talk of an official demonstration, to remind people that burning sons was not strictly necessary unless explicitly called for and that God did not need to be anticipated. But I’ve talked about this already more than I meant to. I will confine myself to this: God did not ask of Abraham anything that God was not willing to provide for him.
I had wondered if Abraham might become happy at some point when I spoke to him, as Hagar had become happy, but the incident did not seem likely to repeat itself. I was not disappointed by this, as I was not disappointed when people used to die at the sight of me. I simply logged the event and did my job to the best of my ability. I have never held myself responsible for outcomes.
But what I want to talk to you about now is a misunderstanding—I think the only misunderstanding I have ever suffered. I mean what occurred was misunderstood in an administrative sense. I do not claim never to have been misunderstood by the recipients of the messages I have delivered. Such a claim would be impossible to verify, and I would not make it. It concerns the man Jacob, and what happened in the place of Mahanaim, when he went there to see his brother, Esau. I had no instructions about what was to take place between the two of them. My concern was strictly with Jacob, and I had no interest in either aiding or hindering reconciliation. It is my understanding that he divided his party into two camps. I have no idea what happened to either of them, as I was never charged with their keeping.
I was sent to wrestle with him until the breaking of the day. I’d never been sent to wrestle anyone before. I’d never been told to touch anyone before, and I’ll admit to you that I shuddered a little at the prospect. In my opinion, you can see the blight in them when you get too close. Maybe that’s a little superstitious. I don’t mind it so much when they’re fully dead, you understand. Something that’s supposed to be dead, and is dead, that’s no surprise, but there’s something about a creature that’s going to be dead but isn’t yet, something that knows it’s going to be dead and doesn’t want to be. I’ve never liked that. When they’re still walking around and looking out of their skulls and you can just see the rot and the grave that’s coming, I’ll admit that unsettles me, and the thought of getting close enough to wrestle one still living, flush from shoulder to hip—I just didn’t like it. Well, they’ve never liked the look of me either. So I call that fair.
But I had done worse things, and anyhow it was only until the break of day, and then I could discharge my duties and go back. I was sent here to wrestle and to release him; whatever else God had in store for him was none of my business. I didn’t say anything—I mean, there’s not much point in telling a man to “Fear not” only to lunge at him, is there? Half of me expected him to go trembling all over and die before I could even lay a hand on him. I won’t say I hoped for that. I would have been relieved, but I won’t say I hoped for that. Even if I don’t like what’s being asked of me, I’ve never not wanted to do my job. You can check my incident report history. I resolve everything. If things don’t work out on an assignment, it’s never been because I left my post or failed to do what was asked of me. So I kept my mouth shut and drove my foot down into his kneecap, and we started wrestling.
God was with him as well as with me, I think, because otherwise I just don’t see how a person would be able to stand up against me for so many hours. But he did. If I had had kidneys to bruise, they would have been bruised by the end of that fight. He struck his way in immediately and jabbed the heel of his hand into my throat. That was something that had never happened to me. But that’s not to say the man was winning, mind you. I hadn’t been sent there to lose, so I touched him on the left socket of his hip and shoved the whole thing out of joint. He made quite a sound at that, but it didn’t stop him from coming at me for more than a minute. It did look funny, though, the way his leg drooped.
The sun was coming up, and I was supposed to check back in with the helpdesk once I was finished, so I said, “Let me go, for the day has broken.” But he didn’t let me go. I suppose I sort of wished then for the days when people used to die at the sight of me. No, I don’t really mean that; those were disorganized times. But it seemed to me that there ought to have been a balance between everybody keeling over dead at my approach and one of my assignments countermanding a direct request. Either way, no one listens to me, and I don’t care for that. It’s my job to be listened to, after all. I didn’t like that he could keep hold of me either. He didn’t seem big enough to be able to do it, but I had to admit he had me caught fast.
“I have striven with God—if you are not God, as I suspect, you have at least been sent by God, for there is nothing quite right about you,” Jacob said, “and I have prevailed.” He was breathing quite heavily by then, and I could smell the red in his lungs.
Then he said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me,” which I’ll admit took me by surprise. Well, I’m not authorized to give blessings like that, and no one had told me to go down and bless him. I was supposed to wrestle with him until the breaking of the day, no more and no less, so I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t let go of him either. If I’m honest, I suppose I didn’t really want to bless him at that point. I think I may have been offended.
After a little while had passed, Jacob spoke again. “Please tell me your name.” Well, I hadn’t been authorized to do that either, even though ordinarily I’m cleared to speak the true names of most things, including seven of the most private names of God. But I didn’t believe Jacob had any jurisdiction over me—I still don’t—and so I said nothing. And then he said nothing, and I still said nothing, and he didn’t let me go, and I didn’t let him go, and that went on for quite some time. It grew very tiresome after a while, and he wept and shivered a great deal. Finally he stopped weeping and shivering. I left his body where we had been wrestling, when it was over; presumably he is
buried there now, or else in some other place. Ultimately he has been reconciled to God, so there’s no point in speculating what other outcomes may have been possible. God reconciles everybody.
You are probably thinking I must have violated some ordinance, as I am not normally authorized to deal out death. I want to make it very clear that I do not believe I have broken any rules, and no one in my chain of command has ever expressed anything other than satisfaction with my methods. I am not rebellious. If I had overstepped my bounds, someone would have said something. I was not authorized to either kill the man or bless him, and so I did neither. He died because he would not let go of me. It is not my fault that a man cannot prevail against a principality and a power. No man ever has. I keep telling them not to be afraid, and they shouldn’t be, but nobody ever listens to me; I don’t think that’s my fault either. Anyhow, that was all a long time ago now.
FOUR
The Six Boy-Coffins
Once there was a little girl who tried very hard not to be born. Her father, the king, and her mother, the king’s wife, had six children already—all sons. Together they were happy. As the boys grew and took their first steps from the schoolroom to the field, the king realized that they would someday turn into men. Six sons were one thing. Six men were quite another. A king could love his little children; but what could he do with deep-voiced, straight-backed men? And what could a kingdom do with six kings? (He was thinking, perhaps, of his own brothers.)
So one day, the king said to his wife, “If the next child you bear me is a girl, then let the six others die, so that our wealth need not be divided and that she alone may inherit the kingdom.” He tousled the hair of their youngest son, who was called Elyas, and who always sat nearest to him, as he said it. And the king’s wife said, “It shall be as you say,” because it always was.
“Had my own brothers lived,” the king said, “they should certainly have tried to harm our own children and stifle our peace.” His own brothers, however, had not lived. It was an important task of kingship, determining when brothers and sons were no longer necessary.
And his wife said it was true, what he said, because it was.
The king ordered six small coffins to be made of yew by the city’s finest carpenters, and fitted each with a fine goose-down pillow and clean-smelling wood shavings. Even dead, the boys would be king’s sons, and he was unwilling to spare any expense.
He ordered that the boy-coffins be placed all in a line in a high-off room, distant from all other rooms in the castle. He ordered the door locked, and the only key given to his wife, whose chief employment was the production and maintenance of any of the king’s children, living or dead.
“Cheer up,” the king told his wife. “You may bear me another son yet, and then we won’t need the key after all.”
After this, at every meal, the king’s wife turned aside her plate for the king’s dogs. At night she took to walking the halls of the castle in her slippers, so that no one could hear her footsteps, fingering the iron key at the bottom of her dressing-gown pocket and whispering to the not-yet child curved like a scythe inside of her, “Don’t be born, please. Go back, if you can. There is no welcome here; find another door. Don’t be born. I cannot mother you, so please don’t be born. I would make it up to you, if I could, but I can’t, so don’t be born. If you love me, as a child should, don’t ask me to birth you.”
“The king’s wife looks drawn and pale,” the king announced over supper, looking her over carefully, “and not at all well.”
“I feel fine,” the king’s wife said. She tore off the crust from her bread and put it in her mouth. It had been so long since she had chewed and swallowed that it lay dead and heavy on her tongue. She smiled with her lips closed. “I feel very well.”
“But your health is not only your own now,” the king reminded her. “It is our child’s, and mine. A queen,” he reminded everyone else at the table, “is the foundation a king uses to build a future.”
The king’s wife was thereafter served all her meals in her room, under the king’s jolly supervision. “Eat up, my love,” he said, hands folded behind his head. “Check her pockets,” he instructed the steward. “Check her napkin and under the table. We’ll make sure she fills out yet. My daughter”—Not yours yet, nor yet a daughter neither, thought the king’s wife—“my daughter must have plenty to eat. She is a king’s daughter, and must be afforded the care a king’s daughter merits.” The king’s wife had never been a king’s daughter. She was outranked by her belly.
One day, as the king’s wife sat outside the locked door on a little stool, her youngest son said to her, “What is in this room?”
“Your father is making new beds for you and your brothers,” his mother said brightly. “Lovely new beds for grown-up boys.”
“Then why are you crying?” he asked.
“That,” his mother said, “I cannot tell you.”
But he would give her no peace until she told him. At last she took the key from her pocket and unlocked the door, showing him the six coffins in a row, well glossed and warm to the touch, already filled with sweet-smelling pine shavings.
First she had to explain death to him. Then she explained the rest. “If this child is a girl, you will all be killed and buried together in here.”
“Could you try not to have a girl?” Elyas asked.
“I cannot help it,” she said.
“Could you try not to have it at all?”
“I have tried,” she said. “It is a hard thing to stop, once it has started.”
“Could I help you stop it?” he asked, and she fell about his neck and wept for the sweetness of him.
Then he begged her to lay off crying. “We will take care of ourselves,” he promised her. “If the child comes, we will run away, and find something less dangerous to be than king’s sons.”
So his mother gave her son this advice: “Go to the woods with your brothers and find the highest tree you can. Climb it, and keep a watch on this tower every day. When the child comes, I’ll contrive to raise a flag out the window—white if it is another boy and safe for you to return. Red if it is a girl. And if you see a white flag, I pray you will all come home to me and let me see you again. But if you see a red flag, run as fast as you can and stop for nothing, and I will pray for you.
“And—I hope,” she said, “that you would never be too hot in summer, nor too cold in winter, that the sun would not burn your faces, nor the wind tear at your clothes—that if I could not see you again, that you would not be lost from one another, that harm would not find you, and that death would not learn your names.”
So her sons left with her blessing and fled into the woods. Each day, another of them would climb the highest tree and keep watch on the tower, but no flag appeared. On the eighteenth day, Elyas climbed the tree and saw a hand thrust a trembling flag through the topmost window of the castle.
“I see a flag,” he shouted down to his brothers.
“The color,” they called back. “Name the color of it, brother.”
“I see red,” he said. He knew it meant death, and he knew what death was, for his mother had told him. One of his elder brothers spat in the dirt by his feet. “Then we are to be turned out into the woods, and even die, for the sake of a girl?”
“The next girl I see,” said another, “I’ll kill it.”
The hand and the flag vanished back inside the window, and Elyas came down the tree. “We’ll move deeper into the woods,” he said, “where none of us can be found, and none of us will be killed. We’ll go so deep into the woods, we’ll never have to see a girl, nor kill one neither.” The rest of the brothers agreed with his plan, and set off in the direction where the oldest and tallest trees grew thickly together, where the only sunlight was filtered green and vanished early in the afternoon.
Here they built a house, a crudely hewn boys’ house. The first winter they did not know to chink up the cracks with mud and straw and were bitterly cold. They did
not know how to tell bad water from sweet and were sick for days. They did not know how to build a fire so that the smoke did not roil and blacken the ceiling, coating the whole house with soot. They did not know to follow deer to find salt for their meat. In short, they suffered. “All this for a girl,” they said to one another in those days, and they swore again to kill the first girl they met. The next winter, they daubed the corners of their house to keep the wind out, and dug a well where clear water gushed up from the earth. And in this manner twelve years passed.
* * *
The king’s wife had given birth to a king’s daughter, and he named the girl himself. Her hair and her eyes were black, her voice was as clear as the waves breaking on the shore, and she was as lovely a king’s daughter as anyone could wish. She ate from a little golden dish and drank from a little golden cup that he had made especially for her and placed right next to his own seat at the table. The king’s wife again turned her plate out for the king’s dogs, but now that she was not growing a daughter, nobody minded.
The king loved his daughter with all the ease and joy with which he had once loved his sons, and then some—he simply transferred the love he had felt before to her and added that which she merited through her own goodness to it. The king’s wife loved the girl in spite of herself, and her love carried with it six times its weight in grief.
The girl knew she grieved her mother and tried to be less than she was so as to lighten her mother’s burden. Once she chanced down a small corridor and saw six small rooms, with six small beds, and six small pairs of shoes arranged neatly in them. She asked her mother, “Whose are these rooms?”
And her mother told her the story of her birth, and took her up to the locked room, and showed her the six coffins with the goose-down pillows. Then the girl said, “Then I should never have been born.”
The Merry Spinster Page 5