After Abel and Other Stories (10 page)

He was a happy child, moving back and forth between the two women who adored him. He would tease Hagar the way the neighbor children used to at home, but she didn't mind it from him. Because she knew he needed her. Even if he got confused about what the word “mother” meant.

Her mistress was getting older. The boy's infancy and toddler years tired her out, aged her. She lost her patience more easily, criticized everything and blamed Hagar for her own increasingly aching body. As if Hagar's hands had changed when she gave birth, as if she could no longer press and rub, although Hagar didn't think they had. She looked at them when her mistress was yelling at her, but they didn't look any different.

So she tried harder, because Hagar still kept her secret faith. She still believed that if she was very good, if she did as she was told, if her master and mistress liked her, she would be sent back home. No one told her, but the more she saw, the more she knew it to be true. Other girls had disappeared from the families they served. One day they'd be gathering firewood or carrying water back from the well beside her, and the next they'd be gone and never spoken of again. She knew of nowhere else they could go other than back to their homes.

She still wished for it, her riverside home, even though she had forgotten what her brothers' faces looked like. She could no longer name the smell that attached to her mother's hands and hair. She had grown used to living in this rocky land. Now there was the boy to think about. He was growing taller and stronger. He pulled her hair sometimes and laughed in her face when she spoke to him. But she loved him and forgave him every time, continued to make his favorite dishes, to make sure his fire was lit during the cold winter nights. She wanted to go home, but she didn't want to leave him. Here was another thing Hagar didn't understand, how she could have two wishes at the same time.

Not like her mistress, who doted on her boy, treated him like a prince, heir to his father's home. Hagar felt proud of being part of that. All these flocks and land,
these beautiful leather tents, would go to the son she had given them. Sometimes, Hagar caught her mistress looking at their boy. Was it sadness she saw there? Or regret? Whatever it was would disappear before she had time to study it, so she never knew. She continued to try to do a good job, to figure out how to go home and stay here, to return to her mother and to be with her boy.

Until the day she knew she had to leave. Things had changed. Her master had begun inviting her mistress into his tent. In all the years she had been there, she had never seen that before. They lay their old bodies together the way he used to do with Hagar. After, Hagar would hear her mistress sighing, telling her master he was a fool to believe that nature could be denied, and then she would return again the next night.

Her master was different from any man Hagar had ever known. He wasn't like her own father, who had stormed around their little house, with his demands and his tempers. Her master didn't stick out his chest like her father had, or sit with the other men down by the river talking loudly of his youth. Maybe her master was too old for that, Hagar thought. Or maybe he just liked sitting in his tent, waiting for the local men to come to him to try to make trades, and he opened his hands wide, as if to encompass the whole world, and thanked his God for his good fortune whenever anyone asked how he came to have so much wealth.

But Hagar watched him with those men. She saw how he waited to hear what they wanted and how much they were willing to give. She saw him weigh out their offers and give back only enough to satisfy both. It was nice that he credited his God. The traders who brought her here had told her it would be a good home because of her master's faith, that no one would hit her anymore. And she supposed this God must be very nice to help her master out as he did. But she remembered her parents' gods. They brought the rain and the floods to the Nile and made everyone happy. Those were nice gods, too, she thought.

Things were different once her mistress began to get fat. Her stomach blew up like the bladder Hagar filled with water to amuse their boy. How her mistress laughed and laughed, even though she could hardly stand up and her legs swelled up. She called for Hagar to rub her joints more than ever, and stopped complaining that she was doing it wrong. Hagar was happy, too, because her mistress was pleased with her again.

When her master explained that his God had worked a miracle, Hagar wondered anew at the strange ways of this land. She had never known gods who could change the ways of nature. Her mother had taught her to revere the gods because they made the sun rise and fall every day, made the river flood its banks in the proper season. At home, gods made sure nature's design
remained unbroken. Here, her master's God broke all the rules for his benefit. For the first time, Hagar was afraid of her master, how powerful he must be, but she was happy that her boy would have a playmate, wouldn't be left alone with just the old people and her anymore.

But he didn't have a playmate. Her mistress got angry with her again after the new baby was born. Hagar wasn't allowed near the baby. Her mistress shouted for food and water and then told her to get out of the tent. She stopped paying attention to their boy, too. He didn't seem to care, because her mistress had always kept him from doing what he wanted, which was to run as fast as he could into the wadis and then jump from rock to rock until he reached the bottom. Her mistress was afraid he would hurt himself, called him down from the trees he climbed, kept him from chasing after the sheep when they ran away. Now that she was so taken with her baby, he could roam as far as he wanted.

It bothered Hagar. Her mistress didn't talk to their boy, or fawn over him as she used to. More than that, Hagar saw her mistress eye him as if he were a stranger, a trespasser on her rightful property. She didn't seem to like Hagar anymore, either. Hagar still tried to be good. She kept her knife sharp so it was ready whenever she was needed. She ran to the well and back as fast as she could with the day's water. But nothing satisfied her
mistress. Hagar even heard her complain to her master, saying that they would have to get a new slave, that this one had outlasted her usefulness. Her master hadn't said anything then, just touched her mistress's hand and asked to see their baby.

There was a lot Hagar didn't understand. But when her mistress lifted her skinny arm and struck their boy across the face, she decided she had learned enough to know they wouldn't be missed if she picked up and left.

She couldn't see that he had done anything wrong. All boys are curious about their baby brothers. And children don't know their own strength. She knew that all he wanted to do was hug the baby. He just squeezed too hard. But her mistress got angry, and when he laughed at her and wouldn't give the baby back, she called him terrible names, slapped him, and then turned her anger on Hagar.

“This is all your fault, you stupid cow. I should have known better than to think anyone normal would come out of a half-wit.”

Hagar hurried their boy out of her mistress's tent. Her mistress was old, and now she had a baby to look after, although there was a young woman who came and nursed him every day and slept next to him all night, so that her mistress could sleep as long as she liked.

Hagar thought back to the old people she had known at home, how they seemed to curse life with every breath,
angry at still being alive or at their own diminished strength. Maybe that's what her mistress was feeling. Then Hagar felt some pity for her. Not enough to forgive her mistress for taking it out on her boy. Her boy. Hagar's boy, she thought. Not theirs. Now that her mistress had her own son, this one could be all hers. And so she decided to leave. She would take some bread, water, and the knife they had given her. She had lived with them for ten years. It was hers now, she figured, the only gift anyone had ever put into her hand.

The next morning, Hagar woke while it was still dark. She had to get to the well and back before the other slave girls arrived to see her with a small jug instead of the huge one she normally dipped down into the well then balanced on her head for the walk back to her master's tents.

The path was damp under her sandals. Usually dust spiraled around her ankles, even if she left the tent just after sunup. By then, whatever moisture the earth had made for itself overnight was already seeping back in. Hagar thought those beads of water were smart to hide during the day and only come out at night when it got cooler and the sun wouldn't bully them as it did her. She pulled her cloak around her shoulders against the cold and walked quickly, afraid of the beasts that might be out roaming. Her mistress had always told her to stay in when it was dark, that the mountain lions would want
to take a bite out of her, that she'd be tasty to them. And it was too dark to see if scorpions, their fat black tails curled up, were out scurrying around, ready to strike her innocent heel.

Hagar was afraid, but she pushed her fear away, setting her jug down to make a shoving motion with her hands out in front of her, just as her mother had shown her to do when she was a child and was scared of going down to the river by herself to wash their clothes, or of her father's return at the end of the long workday, his face covered in rock chalk, his temper flaring.

After a few pushes, she felt calm again. She picked up her jug and began the long walk to the well. She hoped to have it to herself and make it back before first light, so she could hide away the water and pretend that today would be like every other day she had spent for the last ten years. She would bring food to her mistress, cut firewood, and lug water. Her mistress would probably shout at her for making a mistake with the stew, because try as she might, Hagar never did get the hang of cooking here, where they ate strange foods and let their meat sit in the pot for so long.

Hagar knew there were things she should think about before the trip, things to plan for or worry about, but she couldn't think of what they might be.

That night, she fell into a deep, exhausted sleep. Still, she rose early again the next morning. No one was
around. Not even the sun had lifted its big red eye to stare at her. She moved quietly through the tents to where her son lay sleeping, his mouth open, skin spongy and slack. She picked him up out of his bed, tied him to her back, and began to walk southwest toward the desert. South toward home.

At first, she felt strong. She knew she was saving her boy from a life of misery. Mothers don't like to share their sons unless, like her, they have to. Her mistress would turn even her master against her boy. Hagar was sure of it. Though the new baby was soft and round and smiled at everyone who lifted him high into the air, he would grow into his mother's love and turn on his older brother, too. It's what brothers do. Didn't she see her brothers fight? When they were all young, her brothers had invented games together and played in the reeds and river. But as they got older, they began to eye each other with distrust, to take a tally of who had what—girls' attention, number of coins collected from working the shores of the river, their father's esteem.

Hagar could see the future in her master's tents as clearly as if it were happening that day. The slow campaign against her boy, the way her mistress was already turning the things they had loved about him—his playful tricks and high energy—into signs of mischief and wickedness. Hagar would have to sit by and watch as he lost even his father's love. A slave girl could say
nothing against her mistress, who was, everyone said, wise with age, and had her husband's ear.

For the first time in her life, Hagar didn't want to be good. She felt angry, which kept her feet steady and her back strong for many hours. Eventually, she burned with the heat of the day and realized that she would have to find a shady spot to wait out the worst of the day and then continue her trek until nightfall.

By then, her boy had woken, demanded to be untied and allowed to stand on the ground. He called for his mama, his other mama, and Hagar had to explain that she was the only one he had left. Then he screamed at her, the same insults her mistress had hurled, “You're too stupid. You don't know anything. I want to go home.”

Hagar had a lifetime of being shouted at. She was not going to be shouted at any longer. “Shut your mouth, boy,” she said, shocked that such strong words could travel out of her own mouth. “I am the woman who birthed you. It was my body that fed you for the first years of your life. I kept you alive. Not her. Not that shriveled-up old woman. She's not your mama. I am.”

He was taken aback too, that the mild-mannered slave who had always smilingly been the butt of his practical jokes and cruel barbs was talking to him like this, but he was still a child, and the blows he tried to strike her with were easy enough to deflect. She let him
flail until she had had enough, then pinned his arms together with her work-hardened hands, squeezed just hard enough for him to yelp that she was hurting him, and warned him, “No more hitting now. We have a long way to go.” She fed him some bread and water, then curled up with him under a spike-leafed tree, inhaling the piney smell and letting her tired muscles wilt in the afternoon heat. The fight seemed to go out of the boy, too.

He whimpered by her side for a time, then whispered, “Why doesn't she want me anymore?”

“She loves her new baby more,” Hagar answered. “You were born of a slave, and he was born of a rich and free woman. I wasn't always a slave, though. I had a family, too. Now, we're going home to them. To our real home, where you can play in the marsh by the river like the other boys.” She saw that he was trying to be a little man, hold back his tears, but she had never understood what good that would do. “Cry now, boy. It's okay. I cried when they took me from my home, too. But you'll see. It will be better where we're going.”