No matter how many times he heard Rebekah tell the story of the great fight inside her belly, Jacob would get sucked right in. After all, he was its star.
“I think I remember a little,” he said. “There was light in there.”
“You remember,” Rebekah said. “You’re such a genius.”
His mother was always telling him that. If he drew an X in the sand it was more perfect than God’s creation. Made pottage without burning the pan—a hero.
Rebekah would explain, sometimes laughingly and sometimes not, what it felt like to have her belly pulled in opposite directions.
“It was like my lungs were wrestling. From the very beginning you two never got along. My name, Rebekah, means ‘she who binds’ and how I wished I could bind the two of you to keep you apart. I would rub my stomach to calm you. ‘My babies,’ I would say. ‘What is there to fight for? You are both as close to the one who loves you as can be.’ But your brother Esau was never satisfied. He wanted to get in closer. For him, it was not enough to be in me. He wanted to be a part of me. He wanted to swim in my blood like a tuna.” She scrunched up her face with distaste and leaned into him.
“Needy,” she whispered.
“You were on the left, Jacob. I knew this, and when I stroked you, you became very still. I called you ‘Lefty,’ which means ‘he who is on the left.’
“ ‘Lefty,’ I cooed, ‘outside in the world I am waiting, my heart bursting with love.’ Even then you knew to listen to your mother. Even then we had a special bond. I’ll never forget the day you were born.”
She never spoke of it as the day they were born.
When he thought he was remembering, being in her belly was something like being underwater. Everything was red. It was a whole universe in there, but wherever he swam, there was Esau. Sometimes they bumped heads. Sometimes Esau would grab him and hug him too tightly, making it hard for him to breathe. He sort of recalled he and Esau chewing their mother’s bones and trying to stand on each other’s shoulders, trying to use the other to get higher. It was a part of some bigger inside joke, but he couldn’t quite remember what it was.
“Then I had a dream and in this dream, God spoke to me. And even in the dream I thought, ‘How can this be? God doesn’t speak to women. Maybe Thou art leaving a message for my husband?’ My knees were shaking. ‘Wait until your father hears about this,’ I thought, because you know about him and God! Isaac’s been waiting to hear from Him—has been afraid to hear from Him—since he was a little boy, so a part of me felt bad that I was the one He called out to. But it was funny, too.”
Whenever his mother explained this part, she would put the palms of her hands on her thighs. She would imitate the sound of God by making her voice stern and serious, like a nursery teacher’s.
“So he says to me, he says, ‘Your sons will each father a nation and these nations will not like each other, at all, at all.’ ”
She threw her hands up in the air as though to say this was all beyond the intellect of a simple shepherd’s wife.
“The old women told me that I had a couple of kickers and kickers were healthy. ‘But,’ I told the old women, ‘what I have is more than kickers. They’re trying to kill each other!’ I feared for your lives and for my own. When I tried to stand still you both knocked me from one end of the house to the other. One night I dreamed that you were both at it again. In the dream I stuck my finger into my belly button to try and separate you, and someone in there tried to pull me in. I woke up screaming. I had begun to give birth.”
* * *
“We named Esau Esau, which means ‘he who is hairy.’ When he was born he looked like a wet little monkey— or one of your father’s hairy fists! He was cute,” she allowed, “but you! Jacob, you were the light of my life. When your father put you on my belly I just laughed and laughed and cried and laughed and cried some more. My cheeks were raw from where the old women slapped to calm me down. One hundred, two hundred slaps and still I laughed and cried. I was out of my mind with ecstasy. Making you was the best thing I ever did.”
“And Esau, too?” Jacob asked.
“I love all of my children,” she said soberly.
The way Jacob heard it, he had been born with his hand gripped on to Esau’s foot. It was like he was holding on to the string of a balloon that was slowly rising out of the red universe.
In those days being the oldest was serious business, and since Esau came out first, everything was to go to him. The birthright, the Big Blessing. Everything.
As children, Esau would always make sure to introduce Jacob as his baby brother.
“How can you call me that?” Jacob would ask. “I came out five minutes after you. Five lousy minutes!”
“And so I will always be five minutes ahead of you. Five minutes wiser. Five minutes more seasoned. Doesn’t it make you feel safe? Like you have a battering ram pushing on ahead of you into the future? I would tell you what it’s like here in the future, but you know I’m not very good with words.”
Esau acted like it was a photo finish at the derby. There he was at the finish line, carrying flowers and posing for portraits, Jacob’s hand still clamped desperately on to his foot.
Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, and Esau would all lie in bed. They were a bed family. With Isaac lying down all day, it was the only way they could all spend time together.
Jacob and Esau would rub Rebekah’s back.
“See if you can tell if it’s me or Jacob,” said Esau and, every time, Rebekah was able to tell.
“Your touch restores me,” she would tell Jacob afterward. “I don’t know why. You’re so good, Jacob. Please don’t be mad. I know you love your brother.”
When Esau was alone, he would sometimes pack things up his nose—barley, grass, pebbles. It was his hobby and Rebekah found it gross. She would turn away and gag, or pretend to gag. Isaac said packing things up or picking things out of the nose were signs of a deep thinker. But one day Esau packed too much sponge up there and couldn’t get it out. Isaac had to pull back the tip of his nose to get a look. He held Esau in his arms as he screamed and pleaded.
“It’ll be okay,” Isaac said. There were tears in his eyes.
Rebekah and Jacob turned away. Rebekah started to laugh, just a little, and then so did Jacob. It was just too ridiculous.
Afterward, Esau spent the day breathing really loudly through his nose, like breathing through wide-open nostrils was a treat—a gift from God. The sound drove Jacob crazy.
“Let me tell you a secret,” his mother would say. Jacob would go over and sit in her lap. She would whisper in his ear: “It is you I love best.”
He would look at his mother and it was like looking into the void. It was from where he sprang and sometimes it felt unnatural to be so close to the source of his own existence. Sometimes he couldn’t understand why he didn’t run as far away as he could—just leap from the dinner table in midbite and run. To stick around and chat with the person that encircles the hole from which you crept out of the infinite was just sort of— awkward.
But his mother loved him so much. She told him that Esau had come out first for no reason and that she didn’t want the big dumb universe making important decisions for her and him.
“But maybe it was God’s decision for Esau to come out first,” Jacob said.
Rebekah scrunched up her face.
“Please,” she said.
When they were kids, Esau liked pretending. He talked in high-pitched voices and walked all over on his all-fours like a cat.
There is no sadder word than “family,” thought Jacob.
For Esau, Jacob’s heart was always just about to break. He imagined little cracks in it, the guilt leaking out like gray egg yolk flowing through the pristine white tubes inside him.
“You did this to me,” he imagined screaming at Rebekah. “Everything.”
Jacob had this memory of every single child in the neighborhood chasing Esau down the street. They threw rocks and brandished sticks. How is such a thing even possible? They were only four. How could they organize themselves into an angry mob, and why would they?
But Jacob remembered being with them, telling them all the things that only a brother could know. “Esau cries like a baby when I sing certain songs. Esau smells his own toes. Esau lies on his stomach and pulls his ass cheeks apart and laughs.”
“Esau. Esau,” the crowd chanted and Jacob was among them. Esau ran through the streets weeping, a mustache of mucus. It was like he was being chased back into nonexistence.
“You’re the Cain,” Jacob said when they were playing alone. It just popped into his head—a genius thought.
“You’re the Cain,” Esau answered uncertainly. No one had taught Esau how to believe in himself, how to fight.
“No. You’re the Cain.” Jacob said it with so much calm certainty that Esau just gave up. Every mother has one Cain and one Abel. That’s just how it goes. Jacob knew this.
During his adolescence, Esau went through this period where he decided that Rebekah would love him more if he wasn’t so hairy. So he cut and pulled the hair from his body.
Jacob walked in on him. Esau stood naked and shaking, fistfuls of hair clutched in his hands.
“The air feels so weird on my skin,” he said. There were patches of white flesh polka-dotting his body.
It got so bad that Isaac had to talk to him.
“Look at me,” Isaac said. “Being hairy hasn’t kept me from achieving any of my goals.”
Esau had no idea what any of his father’s goals were. Wandering the forest? Lying in bed? Still, he appreciated his father’s effort.
“Look,” said Isaac, putting his hairy forearm against Esau’s hairy forearm. “The same.”
As Esau got older, he grew into his hairiness. He became large and outdoorsy. He even began to like the way he looked a little. He said body hair was practical, that he could feel bugs crawling on him and swat them before they could bite. He made jokes about Jacob’s smoothness and Jacob defended himself by saying he was more streamlined—that it helped him run faster.
“If you oiled yourself up, sanded your nipples down, and tucked your serpent between your legs, I could shoot you into the sky like an arrow!” laughed Esau. When Esau laughed his face just froze, his eyes half open.
He was having fun and wanted to keep the good times rolling.
“You know how Mom gets that weird thing when you’re out with her at the market where she insists on having you call her by her name? ‘Stop calling me Mom,’ she says. ‘My name is Rebekah.’ What’s that all about? She trying to pick up men?”
Esau’s laughter started in his loins and blasted out through his nostrils. His mouth, open wide. His head tilted to the side. His eyes not laughing.
“Lighten up and have a good time,” Esau said when he saw Jacob silently studying him.
“By your telling me to have a good time—it doesn’t make me have a good time. In fact, it only makes me have less of a good time.”
Esau was always trying to be a party animal. It was painful to watch. He would put his arm around a stranger’s neck and bob his head up and down to some song only he could hear, one of his hands holding on to a chicken leg and the other a beer. This was not joie de vivre. This was something else, something that made Jacob’s stomach ache.
“Whoo,” Esau would say. “Ha ha.”
Jacob looked at him, his brother’s sadness sweating out of his pores, stinking up the night.
“You were so easy,” she said. “Never a problem. Never a day of heartache. I could have had a hundred of you.”
He tried to imagine it. A hundred Jacobs, all trying to fit into the bathtub at the same time. All smiling painfully, his mother scrambling from Jacob to Jacob, whispering in each of their ears.
“I love you more than any other Jacob,” she’d say to each one as she made her rounds.
A hundred Jacobs unable to look each other in the eye. A hundred Jacobs sighing so loudly, in unison, that it would shake the heavens like a lion’s roar.
He wanted to sway her. He thought about some of the things that made Esau likable. He couldn’t think well under pressure.
“You should just let him know you like him. Because I know you do.”
“Oh, Jacob,” she said. “You’re so compassionate. I could have had a thousand of you.”
“He’ll waste his birthright,” she said. “He’s so stupid.”
She scrunched up her face.
“You’d be doing him a favor,” she said.
Esau came in from hunting, dragging behind him carcasses, beaks, and tusks. It left a trail of greasy blood and made the house smell like sweaty back hair and death.
Jacob was by the stove mixing a small pot. He was wearing Rebekah’s apron.
“I swear to God when I walked in here and saw you in that thing I thought you were Mom,” said Esau.
“It keeps my clothes clean,” said Jacob, stirring and bristling.
“Whatever you say, m’lady. Pass me a little pottage. I’m about to drop dead from hunger.”
Jacob thought for a moment.
“I’ll give you a big heaping bowl,” said Jacob, “but there’s a little something I’d like from you in return.”
“A pair of oven mitts to go with your apron?” asked Esau, letting loose what he believed to be the good hardy laugh of a man who’d been hunting all day. “I’ll tell you what: In my pockets I’ve got a couple hedgehogs I’ve slaughtered. You can stick your pudgy little ball-handlers in each of their arses.”
Esau’s laughter filled the room. Goosing Jacob, wrapping its hairy arms around him, sticking its fingers into his heart and trying to pry stuff out.
“I want your birthright,” said Jacob.
“The parchment?” For that was what Esau called it. Jacob had seen it around—lying among Esau’s underwear.
“What do you want with that old thing?” asked Esau. “God knows where I even put it.”
“Find it and I will feed you.”
“Everything’s a hustle with you,” said Esau. “Here I am, starving to death, and you’re working an angle.”
Esau tramped off to find the crumpled little ball. Years later, when Jacob recalled the transaction, he would see in his mind how fast Esau had tramped off. As eager as his brother was to eat that day, he was even more eager to simply be liked.
* * *
“You know,” said Esau, shoveling back the stew, “how Mom gets that look when she looks at you? How she wrinkles up her face like she’s just smelled spoiled goat milk? She was just doing it to me this morning. I was telling her about my plans for the summer, about the summer hut I want to build, and she was doing the face. Do it for me. You do the best Mom.”
When they were kids it was one of the only jokes they shared. Jacob imitating their mother.
“You throw your shekels away on nonsense,” Jacob would say, his hands on his hips. It didn’t take much to get his brother rolling around on the floor.
“Just do Mom,” Esau begged. “With the apron on it’ll be perfect.”
“You talk too much about Mom,” Jacob said.
Jacob felt sorry for Rebekah. He knew Isaac couldn’t have been an easy man to live with. He was always off to himself, removed. Ruminating. Wandering the woods. Considering climbing a tree. Deciding not to.
“You don’t come within two seconds of having your father murder you and have your life end up a big party,” said Rebekah. “That little boy was broken that day.”
Rebekah said that when she was young she was a good dancer, but Isaac never wanted to dance with her.
“He’s too heavy to dance,” she said.
At parties she would dance while Isaac sat watching from his chair. She would wave to him. He would smile and wave back.
“As he’s gotten older, all he does is wait around to hear from God all day and he’s afraid it could happen any moment so he doesn’t want to be doing something undignified when it does. He’s in and out of the bathroom in five seconds flat and he’s careful never to get food in his beard.”
Then she stopped, leaned forward, started, licked her lips, stopped, leaned back, and started again.
“Don’t ever get married,” she said, her eyes full of love.
When Jacob heard the story, it was never from Isaac. It was usually from old friends of the family, sometimes from Rebekah. He always wanted more details. He wanted to know if Grandpa Abraham had said anything to Isaac first. “No hard feelings,” or something to explain that he had no choice—that he was just following orders. He wondered if they had walked back home together afterward and what they might have talked about along the way.
He wondered if Isaac had ever said to himself, “I’m never going to do stuff like that to my kid. Me, I’m just going to lie in bed all day. Wander the woods. Keep to myself. Stay out of trouble.”
Jacob was glad God never bothered trying to get in touch with him. It was always bad news with That Guy.
As Isaac’s health got worse, he started to disappear into himself. He’d lie on his side in bed, the sheets drawn up past his chin. Rebekah said he was afraid of the angels. He saw tiny ones all over the walls. They were like moths, but with faces. His eyesight was failing him, and aside from the angels he could hardly see a thing.
“Now is the time,” Rebekah said. “He hasn’t much longer to live. I’ve sent Esau out to hunt for him. Go to your father now.”
She had been bugging Jacob with her plan for weeks. Esau was supposed to get Isaac’s Big Blessing, the one given from the deathbed that goes to the firstborn. But Rebekah had other plans. She thought that if Jacob dressed up in Esau’s clothes he could get the blessing instead of Esau.
“Let him have the blessing,” said Jacob, waving her off. “He needs it more than I do.”
“Believe me,” she said, “you’d be doing him a favor.”
“How would stealing our father’s final blessing be doing him a favor?”
She waved her hand dismissively.
“He’d waste it on whores.”
Jacob tried to talk her out of it. He tried to talk himself out of it.
“But if he touched me,” he said, “he’d know I’m not Esau.”
“Please,” she said. “We’ll stick some goatskin to your arms and neck and stink you up a bit. You’ll be fine.”
Jacob wondered: if you tricked a blessing out of someone, did it devalue it? Inverse it? After all, the universe’s workings have always been more than somewhat ironic.
* * *
It smelled like eucalyptus and sweat. Out of the dark all he could hear was “Esau. Esau.”
Jacob timidly walked toward his father’s bed. He feared that Isaac, so close to Heaven, could sense his fear the way animals could. He tried to relax himself. “This wasn’t your idea,” he repeated to himself. Somehow this notion soothed him. He was just doing it for her. He was being a good son. He pretended he had no will, that he was a golem—a blessing-stealing golem brought to life through the force of his mother’s will, through incantations whispered in his ear.
Still, the thoughts came: This is the worst thing anyone has ever done to anyone in the history of all creation. Even when Cain killed Abel it was probably a crime of passion. Who goes on to bigger and better things after a stunt like this? He moved closer. He stood over Isaac’s bed.
“Sit,” his father said.
They sat, not saying anything, Isaac’s heavy breathing filling the room. The goatskin was scratchy against Jacob’s skin.
His father stared at him with wild eyes that really looked like they could see.
“My son, my seed, my life, my joy,” said Isaac, and then Jacob just zoned out. He stared into his father’s eyes and blocked out the sound of the world. Maybe Isaac was blessing Esau anyhow. Maybe it didn’t matter that he was holding his hand.
When he was done, Isaac kept raising his forearm to him and smiling.
“The same,” he said.
Jacob had no idea what the gesture or the words were supposed to mean. He grabbed his father’s forearm with his hand and, making his voice as gravelly and outdoorsy as possible, told his father to rest.
When Esau got home from the hunt he saw Jacob in his shawl of goatskin. He started to laugh, but then he understood and his laughter stopped. It frightened Jacob how quickly his brother understood. He began to talk and Esau ran past him.
“Let him,” Rebekah said.
Esau went to Isaac’s room. Then Isaac understood. He still wanted Esau to have a blessing, too, but his strength was diminishing and his blessing-power was weak. After the passion of the Big Blessing with Jacob, he was burned out.
Still, he took Esau to his side and gave him what he had left.
“Bless thee. Bless thee. May thine health be passable and thine income middling. May thou find a bride of so-so looks and mediocre bust. May thine days pass with relative tolerableness.” And so it went.
Rebekah saw the look in Esau’s eyes and knew he would be out for blood. She told Jacob that he must flee.
Jacob was nauseous. He was not the fleeing kind. He told her he wanted to try to talk to Esau, but Rebekah said it was past all that.
“Now there is only running,” she said. “You know how he gets.”
Rebekah had a brother in Haran named Laban. She told Jacob to go to him.
“He’ll take care of you,” she said. “He’s just like you. You’re both my favorites.”
“What about your husband? And Esau?” Jacob asked. He didn’t know why he even bothered.
“I love them, too,” she said evenly. “I just have a very special place in my heart for you and Laban.”
Apparently Laban was the other light of his mother’s life—a demigod who could do no wrong. Jacob hardly remembered him. They had only met once, years ago, when Jacob was a small child. He had been building a tower of blocks when Laban walked in and kicked it over.
“Make no Babels,” he said.
“Laban, you’re wicked,” his mother laughed.
Jacob stood at the edge of the field with Rebekah.
“Do you remember when I was a child and you told me that you liked me better than Esau? Why did you do that?”
“Because it was true.”
“But why did you think I needed to know this? Did you think it would make me happy?”
“I guess I wasn’t a very good mother,” she said, her hands twisting up.
“You were a very good mother,” he said, backing off.
“I couldn’t help it. I tried my best.”
“I know.”
“It was different back then. I see how modern mothers are now. I didn’t know any better.”
Jacob sat in silence, thinking about his brother. Before he left, his mother hugged him tightly. She looked at his face.
“I love you more than life itself,” she said.
“Ma, please. Why do you have to tell me these things?”
“I just want you to be happy,” she wept, her whole body shaking.
After Jacob moved away, Esau took care of Rebekah but still, she wouldn’t give in, wouldn’t give him her full love the way she did with Jacob. Esau knew it and she knew he knew it. It was a thing they shared. She held on to her love as though holding on to it was a mark of character, as though love was gold that you had to be thrifty with. And so every second she spent with Esau, it was like there was some part of her, deep down, that was shaking its head and saying, over and over, “Nope.”
Still, Esau couldn’t help but try. He even put her whole role in the blessing thing out of his mind. He put all of his hate on Jacob and in this way, Jacob got a double share.
Rebekah talked about Jacob all the time and Esau let her. He even made an effort to keep the conversation going. If he had anything Jacob-related to say, he was guaranteed his mother’s full attention.
“I will concede that he had an above average singing voice,” said Esau, “but he did not have blond hair. Light brown at best. Blond it was not.”
And the whole time, Esau knew that Jacob was out there.
“Gamboling, sashaying, waving the parchment— bathed in the ever-blondening halo of our father’s sweet deathbed blessing.”
Then came the pain. It started in the balls and twisted its way into his stomach. On some days it was so bad that he’d get afraid he’d have to spend the rest of his life walking around doubled over, holding on to his groin. God forbid he should become one of those guys! He was not even sure if there were such guys. He would be the first.
Not only had Jacob destroyed his life but his memory continued to destroy it a little more every day—breaking off a new piece of his soul here and there. That was the true miracle of life: whenever you thought you’d been completely crushed, there was always a little something left to get creamed.
It was one day while sitting on a log, indulging his new hobby of twisting his beard until the pain became unbearable, that Esau met a girl from Canaan named Linda. She was into the dark, brooding type and soon she and Esau began dating. Linda was a good companion and she took Esau’s mind off his troubles.
After seeing Linda for some time, Esau finally presented his mother with the burning question.
“Do you like her?” he asked.
“I like her if you like her,” she said, never looking up from her chicken plucking.
Linda came from a family of idol worshippers. Rebekah referred to her as “the Little Idol Worshipper Girl.”
“There’s more to her than idol worship,” Esau said. He tried to come up with one or two things—how she was really nice to him, how she loved him—but he knew his mother would find all of that stuff corny.
Meanwhile in Haran, Jacob’s life was no bed of roses either. His uncle Laban worked him like a red-maned pack mule. And after he fell in love with Laban’s youngest daughter, Rachel—that was when his troubles really began. It was then that he stupidly, drunkenly— blue-balledly—agreed to work for seven years in Laban’s service in exchange for her hand in marriage.
The next day, waking up flaccid, he tried to renegotiate the deal.
“Seven years?” he asked incredulously. “It doesn’t strike you as excessive?”
“Afraid of the smell of your own work sweat?” asked Laban. “Rebekah always said you were a pussy.”
Jacob had never loved anyone like he loved Rachel. Sometimes it was a nice feeling, but often it terrified him. She felt more real than anything in the world, even himself. Sometimes he would get so insecure, he’d ask her ten times in a day, “You still love me, right?”
“No, I hate you,” she’d say, smiling. She was so young and didn’t know her strength. It scared Jacob to death. He felt like his life was not his own. His life felt like it was being batted around by a baby. At night he dreamed she was a kitten that he chased through holes and under the ground, crying. It was like there was always the risk of her wandering off, his heart in her teeth. In this way, Jacob was made humble by coming to know what pain really was. He wanted to marry Rachel even if it meant nothing but pain. He would sit on a chair made of cactus needles for the rest of his life if only to have her with him, seated upon his lap.
So for seven years, Jacob tended flocks and raised cattle and finally, at the end of the term, his bride was presented to him. But after the marriage ceremony, when Jacob lifted the bridal veil, he discovered not Rachel, but her older sister, Leah.
Jacob was furious. When he asked Laban what was going on, all he got was a shit-eating grin.
“Let’s not get hung up with details on such a day of rejoicing.” Then, closing the book on the whole thing, he scrunched up his face.
Jacob didn’t push it. In a weird way he felt he had it coming, having been a proponent of the old switcheroo himself. There were Leah’s feelings to consider, too. She felt so low.
“My father,” she had wept in explanation.
So Jacob just married Rachel as well. Then he had two wives. Just thinking about the cousins that would be brothers and the daughters who would be nieces was enough to give him a headache. But at least he had Rachel.
It was around this time that Jacob heard the voice of God. He heard it in a dream and, oddly, the voice took the form of Rebekah’s imitation of the voice of God.
“Mom?” asked Jacob, “is that you?” His mother had been dead several years.
“It is God!” spoke Rebekah’s voice. “If thou heard my actual voice even for half a second thou would instantly go mad and then be of no use to anyone. Maybe some day thou might be ready for it, but not now.”
The voice commanded him to go back to Canaan. But Esau was in Canaan. What would going back home accomplish?
“My brother will only kill me there,” said Jacob. “Thou knowest how he gets.”
“Go and I shall watch over you.”
So Jacob packed up the family and went back to Canaan.
When he got to the outskirts of town, Jacob sent a messenger to seek out his brother.
“Wha’d he say?” asked Jacob when the messenger returned.
“He shall come with an army of four hundred.”
“Did he actually say army? He didn’t say welcoming committee, or coterie? Chefs? Musicians? Tell me exactly what he said—to the word.”
“ ‘I shall come with an army of four hundred.’ ”
“Where does he get a figure like that? Doesn’t that seem a little excessive?”
Later that night, unable to sleep, Jacob tried to do the arithmetic: Five men to torture each finger and nail. Five per toe. One to rip open each nostril and one to stick fire in. Three to pull head hair and three to do beard hair. Two to eye-gouge, two to ear-stab, ten to backpound. Fourteen for charley horses. And ten of the more eloquent men to admonish him for being such a bad brother. That still left over two hundred men with nothing to do but stand around drawing a salary. His brother had always been prone to high-rolling and flash.
Still sleepless, he went over his calculations again. This time, including torture of the joints and flaying of the skin, he accounted for three hundred and nine men. When he opened his eyes Jacob saw he was not alone, for squatting beside him was an angel.
The angel smiled beatifically. Then, drawing his wings back like the ears of an angry cat, he dropped his elbow onto Jacob’s groin. After that it was all nonstop pile drivers and headlocks.
All of Esau’s murderous rage and hatred had come to life in the form of a heavenly wrestling angel! Or maybe he’d decided to just hire the angel instead of the army. Either way, Jacob was getting his ass handed to him. Hiding beside a rock in the darkness, he caught his breath. Once it was caught, he ran toward the angel, screaming and crying, his arms doing a Dutch windmill. The angel caught him by the throat and bear-hugged him. His flesh was cool and Jacob noted his breath smelled of daffodils. He wondered: In Heaven, do they eat flowers? Breaking free of the angel’s hold, he reared back his fist and punched him in the nose. Maybe his dad was the one who saved my dad’s life. The angel flew into the sky and immediately Jacob felt ashamed. What kind of a person punches an angel in the face? He had never even heard of anyone touching an angel. He looked at the angel blood on his fist—red, almost purple—and felt like a sleazebag, but not for long, as the angel flew back down, stomping his foot onto the top of Jacob’s skull.
And so it went. Throughout the night, they wrestled like a couple of schoolyard kids. As the hours went by, Jacob tried anything to get the angel to leave him be— tickling him, screaming in his face, biting his wings— but there was no stopping him. Sometimes Jacob would start to laugh, thinking, This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but then he was right back to inverted face-locking, camel-clutching, and mandible-clawing.
When the morning came, the angel had to get back to Heaven, but Jacob wouldn’t let him leave. He felt that he had gone too far to just back off. He gripped on to the angel’s foot.
“Bless me,” demanded Jacob.
Still smiling, the angel punched him on the Adam’s apple.
“How many blessings does one person need?” asked the angel. “Do not be a blessing hog at the Lord’s trough.”
Still, Jacob would not let go of his foot. He wanted to at least get one normal thing out of the whole experience, something that wasn’t embarrassing to tell people about.
The angel flapped his wings and kicked his legs but Jacob’s grip held firm.
“All right. I bless thee. Thy new blessed name is Israel.”
Jacob released the angel’s foot and watched him flap away into the sky. He wanted nothing more than to get some sleep, but there was no time. Israel had to meet his brother.
Jacob had his people send forth to his brother a gift.
“Make it munificent,” said Jacob, and his people sent out camels, cattle, and sheep. Esau, as it turned out, was very warmed by the gesture and when the brothers met, Esau bowed and Jacob bowed back. There followed a great deal of bowing. It started off sheepishly and slowly but became more and more heartfelt. In the end the two brothers were practically belly flopping at each other’s feet. All the while, Esau’s army stood around them in a huge circle. Jacob could not help thinking of the money their just standing there and not painfully killing him was wasting.
Finally, Esau spoke.
“I received your gifts,” he said. “They were really munificent.”
Esau introduced his brother to each of the four hundred men in his army. Jacob gave up trying to remember their names after the fourth one.
“Everything I told you about this guy,” said Esau, his hand on his brother’s shoulder, “forget it.”
“There’s one more thing I have for you.”
Jacob handed Esau the flattened-out piece of parchment.
“It’s really yours,” he said.
Esau protested but Jacob, who was still all wrestly from his match with the angel, started to get physical about it—awkwardly shoving it down his brother’s toga.
Later in the evening, once they had begun to loosen up, a spread of food was prepared. As they ate, and Esau got into the warmth and spirit, without thinking, and under Jacob’s stunned gaze, he pulled out the rumpled parchment and used it to wipe a spot of gravy from off his chin.
“Dad would be so happy to see us like this,” said Jacob.
“For a long time, all I wanted to do was murder you,” said Esau. “On some days it was the only thing that kept me going.” He motioned a chicken leg toward the army. They were playing dice and drinking merrily.
“I wanted to kill you well—everything just so. Now I have four hundred men to feed. For what?”
Jacob smiled.
“You’ve changed,” he said. “Your shoulder hair is practically white.” He stopped, not wanting to disrespect him. “Like snowcapped mountains, I mean.”
Esau laughed.
“You seem different, too.”
The angel’s thigh punches had given Jacob a slight limp. It helped him to come off as less of a hotshot.
Jacob told him about how he had fallen in love and how it made him see life differently. From love he quickly wound his way toward the subject of his father-in-law. Once he got going, Rachel joined in with extra details about her father’s douchery—just to keep the party vibe going.
Esau listened with a serious look on his face. He liked the way life was now able to get his brother worked up.
“I wrestled an angel last night,” said Jacob, happily jumping from subject to subject. They were learning to converse. It was like learning to walk—together, bound to one another under one toga.
“You know,” said Rachel, “it’s crazy how much you look alike.”
The twins looked at each other silently, their faces relaxed. It was like gazing into a clear pond on a summer day.
“Sometimes I wake up screaming at her,” Esau said. “My wife tells me I’m crazy.”
But then their conversation turned to other things, cattle and the weather, and they did not talk of Rebekah. They did not speak of the hand that had wiped away their tears, how now it was bereft of flesh, how now it wore a bracelet made of worms. It would have done no good to have spoken of any of it.