No Lasting Burial by Stant Litore Page B

she’d shared with his father, and handed her the baby, that small,
crippled baby, that shattered hope. He covered them both with blankets. Rahel
was shaking, but her son didn’t know if it was with cold or fear or grief or
shock. He rubbed his hands together a moment, trying to think. Swallowed
against his own fear. This was too big for him. They
needed his father. Where was his father?
    “Shimon,”
Rahel whispered. “There.” She lifted a trembling hand, pointed.
    He
looked. It was his father’s white tallit , the four-cornered prayer shawl
he wore to the synagogue, still folded over its peg in the wall, miraculously
undisturbed by whatever chaos had struck their small house.
    “Bring
that here, please.”
    When
Shimon pressed the tallit into her hand, Rahel took the folded shawl and
brought it to her lips, kissing the rough fabric. Glancing toward the roof, she
whispered fiercely, “Adonai, find him, bring him home to us. Please. Let him be
breathing. We need him. The boys and I. We need him.
Bring him home.”
    Her
voice wavered. She kissed the tallit again, her eyes shining. She sang
softly:
    Though the fig
tree does not flower,
    And no grapes
are on the vines …
    She
closed her eyes, fell silent. After a moment, she ended her prayer as prayers
were always ended in Kfar Nahum: “Bless us and keep us, O God. Until the navi comes.”
    At
those words, Shimon straightened. He recalled the rough way his father had
shoved him to the door, uncaring of his own safety. If God were watching, he
would not bless him or his town for shaking in the dark. He heard the soft
sounds of his crippled brother mouthing, reaching for a breast.
    He
went to the bin in the atrium beneath his mother’s olive tree, took up a clay
bowl from the stack beside it, and scooped some of the last of their grain from
its bin. He brought the bowl back to his mother and saw the relief in her eyes.
He realized from the way her hands shook as she accepted it how fatigued and
hungry she actually was. He glanced about, made sure
the waterskin was within her reach. Then he met her gaze.
    “You
are safe,” he said. “I’ll go find father.”
    Rahel
nodded, her eyes closing. “The boats, my son. The boats. He would have gone to the boats. Gone out on the
water, to get to some other shore where there were no dead. So he could circle
into the hills and come back to us. See if his boat is here.”
    Shimon
took his mother’s hand quickly and kissed it, his eyes filling with tears that
he blinked back. Then he turned and hurried to the door and flung it open, nearly
ran across the packed dirt of the narrow street outside before stopping himself
and turning to shut the door, putting his weight against it. Again he saw the
blood on his father’s hand. Breathing raggedly, he leaned a moment against the
door, gathering his courage. Then he hurried through the battered houses and
out to the wild grass. He saw the sea, open and vast with its horizon of far
hills, and he ran for the line of boats, the long row of wide-beamed fishers
moored above the tideline.
    It
took him only a moment to be sure. Some of the boats were missing. His father’s boat, others. The tide had come and was now
receding, and had washed away whatever track Yonah’s boat had left in the sand
when his father dragged it out to the water, a task that normally took two men.
It was not a small boat, and his father never brought in small catches.
    Swallowing,
Shimon straightened and looked out over the waves. A few cranes glided low over
the water, but he could see no dark shape of a boat out there, nothing but the
blindness of the sun’s fire on the sea.
    A
fear took him then, and he walked out onto the sand and planted his feet there
among the shells and lake-weed the tide had left behind like memories the sea
refused to carry. For no reason he could have given, Shimon was certain in his
heart that if he went back to his mother now, he would never see his father
again. That he must wait,