Free No Lasting Burial by Stant Litore Page B

weak. She faced the priest.
“God will provide for my sons and for me, Bar Yesse.”
    He
glanced back at her, his eyes full of so many things that he must have wanted
to say and couldn’t. Then he looked at her son, and Shimon met the priest’s
gaze with quiet resolve. It was as though a weathered old tree were facing a
tall rock.
    The
priest looked away first. “It is your house, Bar Yonah,” Zebadyah said quietly.
His shoulders tensed. Then he stepped past him to the door, Yakob moving aside
to let him past.
    Rahel’s
heartbeat did not slow until the sound of the priest’s footsteps, and then his
son’s after him, had faded in the street. Not until she held the baby in her
arms, holding in tears that she would not shed where her son could see. Not
until she felt the cool cloth against her cheek and Shimon’s words soft by her
ear, promising that he would care for her and for his crippled brother both,
whatever might come. That she would never be hungry. That she would never need
to go to the priest if she didn’t wish it. That she was his mother and he loved
her. And then she did cry, and it was a long time before she was done.

FIRE
ON THE WATER
    The
stone steps leading to her roof were cold under her bare feet, but for once
Rahel didn’t mind that; the shock of sensation each time she set her foot
carefully down—so carefully, because she was sore, and carrying her child in
her arms—reminded her she was alive.
    It
was after dark now; the first panic of Zebadyah’s visit had dulled, to be
replaced with a throng of small, sharp fears, each of them nipping at her like
wolves harrying deer. She felt that each step might send her body crashing to
her knees in fatigue, yet her mind was fiercely wakeful. In any case, she
couldn’t bear finding a place to sleep in her open atrium or in the small
winter rooms around the inner walls of her house. The house was too empty; the
family they had once shared it with had not survived the night of the dead.
Shimon had succeeded in scrubbing most of the blood out of the walls, but Rahel
thought she could still smell it. And Shimon had also boarded up the
outward-looking windows of their house, which made it worse. She understood why
he had done it; many had died that night because the dead had climbed through
open windows. Other houses throughout the town were boarding up, too. But in
seasons past, she had often leaned out of those windows and talked with the
town’s other women as they passed by. Now those other women were gone, no one
left to sit shiva with her and mourn with her for her husband, and even
her windows were gone. This no longer felt like her home.
    Only
the rooftop felt the same.
    Reaching
it, she stood still for a few moments, just breathing. The wind from the sea
was chill against her face, but she didn’t fear the shedim . Let them
come. What more could they take from her?
    She
gazed out at that sea, where she could see the white chop of the waves and a
few dark shapes rocking on them: the boats moving out to gather the night’s
fish. They looked so few, so few. Only a week before, the boats had set out
like a flock of great birds, fast over the water. Now she could count only ten.
In one of them was her older son, setting out with Yakob and young Yohanna in
his father’s boat, on the sea without him for the first time. Tears burned her
eyes. She blinked them back and made her way to the little bed of cushions
Yonah had made for her during the early months of her pregnancy, knowing how
much she loved the open air and the sky and the scent of the sea.
    Her
infant stirred slightly as she settled with a groan and a sharp ache where she
had torn in birthing him, but she held him close and drew the shawl in which
she’d wrapped him up over his head until he fell asleep again. She held him to
her, kissing the top of his head with the softest brush of her lips, again and
again. She smelled baby, and she smelled her husband, for the shawl she’d
swaddled him