2. Where was your Baal when our well went sour?

The drought had not been confined to Israel. From its beginning, cloudless skies had crowned the coast of the Western Sea along its length and even inland, through Aram. At the port of Zarephath, between the greater ports at Sidon and Tyre, crops had failed, cattle had died and wells had dried up. Even shipping had ceased. Some families had abandoned their homes while others stayed put simply hoping not to die before the rains returned.

Here was the odd part. The drought had begun in a place called Israel, where Israel’s god put a curse on the people for worshipping other gods; the same gods Yashar’s people had honored forever.

The people of Zarephath blamed Jezebel, daughter of Tyre’s king, for their weather. When she married Ahab of Israel and became his queen, Jezebel took hundreds of priests to live with her in Samaria. No one had expected a disaster, Baal worship was nothing new down south, but disaster came all the same. As the drought spread and grew more crippling, Yashar and his mother remained in their little house in the city and rested for hours at a time. They ate crumbs, sipped tainted water and prayed to many gods for rain.

After six unrelenting months of dust and heat their time seemed up. Yashar’s mother, Adella, had begun to hear voices. “He will be an extremely hairy man,” Adella said one afternoon. “That is what I heard.”

“Who?” Yashar asked.

“The man whom we must feed.”

Yashar checked his mother’s cheek for fever. “We cannot feed ourselves,” he said, “and our well is sour. These voices…?”

“One voice,” Adella said, “the voice of God.”

“Which god?” Yashar asked, an honest question at the time.

“As you and I have endured this curse upon the land,” Adella said, “I’ve come to know that there is but one god, Elohim, the holy God of Israel.”

Yashar laughed, having heard that name before. “Even Israel has abandoned him,” he said.

“That is why,” Adella said, “the world now burns with drought.”

*

More weeks passed with no rain and almost nothing to eat yet Adella insisted that they would soon have an important visitor to whom they would be required to give food.

“If we share the little we have,” Yashar said, “we will only die sooner.”

“He will be covered with hair,” she said, “thatched thick on his arms and legs and across his shoulders and neck.”

“I’ll be sure to watch for him,” Yashar sighed.

Adella snapped her fingers, remembering something more. “He will wear a wide leather belt about his waist like those worn by the men who work the quarries.”

Yashar covered his ears, tired of his mother’s foolishness, but Adella only smiled and wrapped him in a hug. “We are dying, child,” she sighed, “I confess it only because you already know, such a bright boy and so young. Would it not be wonderful if, in a mystery, son, I had truly heard God’s voice and he had promised that we would survive?”

“If something so odd might happen,” Yashar said, “I suppose it would be good.”

“Have faith, then,” Adella said. “We’ve flour and oil for a last meal, as it seems to have come to that, so let’s go to the city gate to hunt for kindling.”

Yashar refused at first but, when Adella left for the gates, he followed her from a distance, hiding behind a fence here, a busted wagon there, hating his excitement because her peacefulness had persuaded him to hope.

*

Oh, yes, Elijah was a hairy man. Hair tumbled from his crown and curled about his neck. It bloomed at his brows, splayed about his ears and caught the afternoon light in glowing coils about his powerful arms. He had strode up to Adella at the city gate out of nowhere, nodding as if he had expected to meet her. Yashar watched from behind an empty barrel. Elijah, like everything only more so, was covered with dust. Some of the caked gray powder that stuck to his face fell away as he smiled (leaving scores of fine lines about the corners of his mouth and the rims of his eyes). His clothes, his mantle, his sandals… Everything was soiled.

“I hid from the king of Israel in a wadi for six months,” he said.

So that explained the dirt.

“Raven’s fed me.”

Yashar stood up and blinked.

“Now fetch me, please ma’am, a little water in a vessel that I may drink.”

When Adella tilted her head, smiling but confused, Elijah repeated his request. Yashar, having heard enough, stepped forward to pull her away but Adella stopped him, saying, “Behold, son, the hairy man whom the God of Israel promised us.”

Elijah asked for water once more as if asking for nothing at all. “And please,” he added, “also bring me a morsel of bread in your hand.”

“As the Lord your God lives,” Adella said, “I have no cake, sir, but a handful of meal in a barrel and a little oil in a cruse.” She pointed back toward the city. “Just now, prophet, we came to gather sticks so that I may go home and prepare the flour and oil for my son and me. It is my thought that he and I might eat it and then die.”

“Fear not,” Elijah said, odd to say during an ongoing disaster, “go and do as you have spoken but, out of what you plan to prepare, make me a little cake first. Then bring that to me and, only after, make something for you and your son.”

The man had surely lost his mind.

“Thus says the Lord God of Israel,” Elijah said, “the barrel of meal will not waste neither will the cruse of oil fail until the day the Lord sends rain again upon the earth.”

Yashar laughed aloud. Zarephath’s fields had turned to dust and blown away. Streams had gone dry. Suffering was everywhere and yet this strange fellow… Adella touched his shoulder, interrupting his thoughts. “This is certainly the man about whom God whispered to me,” she said. “I will obey him. You will too. We have nothing to lose.”

The three walked home together. Yashar carried the sticks. At their cottage, Adella went to the kitchen to prepare what would be their last meal. Why not share it with a stranger? Yashar thought, there was not enough to eat to save one of them anyway. As they waited to eat, Elijah stretched in the small front room of their little home, emitted a quick series of grunts, sat on the floor and told Yashar all about the wadi beside the Jordan where he had hidden from the king.

“Ahab still wants my head,” Elijah said, “but I stayed alive in that place because, as I told your mom, God sent ravens in circuits bringing flesh and bread.”

“It sounds disgusting to eat from the beaks of birds,” Yashar said.

“Then the wadi dried up and the Lord sent me here.”

“I know,” Yashar told the prophet. “He warned my mom.”

*

They ate well that evening; big portions from just a handful of meal, all of it tasty. Though he could not fathom how the portions had stretched so far, Yashar enjoyed every bite. While they sat at the table, Adella asked Elijah, “You have walked across Israel to bless us, prophet. Is the drought in the south as awful as it is here in Zarephath?”

“Much worse,” Elijah said.

Yashar did not believe him. How badly could Israel have sinned? After dinner, Elijah excused himself with a thank you then slipped outside to lie beneath a small, struggling tree.

“You may sleep in the upper chamber, prophet,” Adella said. “It has been made up and waiting for some time.”

“Not tonight,” Elijah said, and he curled up under the withering sapling and shut his eyes.

Yashar went to bed too, having eaten well for the first time in months, dreaming of more food, blowing grass and falling rain. Early the next morning Adella shook him awake. “Come see,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. She pulled him quickly though he staggered from sleep, into the kitchen where she lifted the lid on their meal barrel. “Look inside.”

Inside was more flour than there had been the night before.

“I knew it,” she said. “And look here.”

The cruse was full of oil. Adella grabbed Yashar’s hand, led him to the doorway and pointed out. “And there,” she said.

Sunlight marked the ridges in the east. Pale yellow light spread low across the sky.

“I see a sunrise,” Yashar said, stepping out, “and our hairy friend here, snoring in the dirt beneath the tree.”

“Yes! And above where he lies?”

Yashar squinted at Elijah’s tree. Overnight, the branches under which the prophet slept had sprouted shoots along their length. Its bark had somehow bent in hue from dust gray to pleasant brown.

A prophet from Israel. Growth from stagnation. Food from thin air.

“The world, my son, is not as it seems,” Adella said. “Do you see?”

“I see but do not understand,” Yashar said. “If you and Elijah are right…?”

“Then, yes, son, your father and I were wrong. I’m so sorry but how, except for this test, could we in little Zarephath come to know the God of Israel lest he came here and bothered us?”

Yashar shrugged. It had just been one meal.

“Do not try to understand now,” Adella said. “I am certain in my spirit; someday all God’s purposes behind this prophet’s visit will be clear.”

Yashar nodded to be polite, not convinced at all.

*

Elijah lived in Zarephath with Yashar and his mother for three years. The prophet moved into the upper chamber soon after arriving but the tree under which he had slept the first night continued to grow, eventually casting a broad cone of shade across the yard within which the prophet often sat and prayed. Yashar built a bench for Elijah but he rarely used it. Some evenings (some days too), Elijah would curl up and sleep outside as he had the first evening though Zarephath often suffered awful heat.

“It was much the same at the wadi,” Elijah shrugged one day, not making much of his stay. But something special had happened. Though hunger, disease and death were everywhere in Zarephath and growing worse each day, Elijah behaved as if their survival was a given, and it seemed so! Water had returned to their well, sufficient and sweet. Elijah’s tree continued growing, the barrel remained full of meal and the cruse upon the shelf always brimmed with oil.

“I feel guilty,” Yashar announced one evening after a meal of warm bread and cool water. He looked out the window and found the courage to say more. “Except for that strange tree under which the prophet sometimes sleeps,” he said, “the world is dying and brown. Our neighbors suffer while we do not.”

Elijah was a man of many noises. Often as he walked about the yard or worked at a simple household chore he would yawn, sniff, wheeze, cough, mumble, grunt…all sorts of sounds. He even sang at times with a surprisingly pleasant voice. But he sat silently after Yashar spoke that evening, exercising another of his talents, the ability to stare for long periods while never averting his eyes.

Yashar met his gaze squarely, equally determined to not look away.

“So you feel guilty, boy?” Elijah finally spoke.

“He has always been a bright boy, prophet,” Adella said, “quick to learn with a gift for speaking and expression, always thinking and so burdened by a surplus of opinions.” She sighed. “Everyone agrees he’s much too clever for his experience and bound to pay as he grows. Forgive him, sir. My son is concerned that others have so little while we have so much, thanks to you.”

“Thanks to God,” Elijah said, “but my question remains for the boy.”

Yashar had grown taller since Elijah had come to live with them, cleverer too, but Elijah always made him feel like a child. “You said yourself, prophet,” he answered, “that your god brought this drought because Israel strayed.”

Elijah nodded.

“Yet there must be many families in Israel who never turned their backs on your god yet suffer in this drought alongside their neighbors who follow Baal.”

“I feel in my spirit,” the prophet sighed, “that what you say is true.”

“So how can I sit and smile, then,” Yashar asked, “when I eat well and do not suffer? I benefit from your god’s miracles yet I have in my heart remained loyal to Baal.”

“Perhaps you should not remain so, then?” Elijah said.

“He does so to honor his father’s memory,” Adella said, reaching across the table to take her son’s hand.

“Who I honor is not the point,” Yashar said, withdrawing his hand.

“What is your silly point then,” Adella snapped, “is it not enough for you that we’re alive?”

“Please, boy, speak,” Elijah said. “What is it that you seek?”

“Justice,” Yashar said, folding his arms across his chest.

“Ho, justice!” Elijah said “A wonder and a glory, justice. So too are mercy and kindness. And so, recognizing those noble needs, son…” He coaxed Yashar to go on.

“There is nothing fair about this drought,” Yashar said. “It harms pagans and those who follow your god alike. You cannot deny it. My argument is strong. What is right about a calamity that destroys crops and starves innocents and dumb animals? Even you, your god’s own prophet, cannot answer.”

Adella rolled her eyes but Elijah only laughed. “Who are you to measure him?” the prophet asked, suddenly serious. “How can any man who supposes himself wise, much less a mere boy, weigh the ways of the Lord?” He spoke as if reciting, “Where were you when he laid the foundations of the earth? Declare it if you understand. Where does light dwell? And as for darkness where can it be found?”

Elijah meant to trick him.

“You have answered my questions with more questions,” Yashar said, “so you have not answered at all. True, no man knows where light begins or whatever may lie in the dark, but even an understanding of these things would not explain innocent suffering. Your miracles saved us, sir, but our surviving has only confused me more. Surely, a good god would not allow what I have witnessed, therefore your god cannot be good.”

Adella stood then sat again and apologized. “I have no idea, prophet, how my poor child arrives at so many strange thoughts.”

“I am not a child,” Yashar said, though he regretted that he was.

“His questions testify to his unusual wisdom,” Elijah told Adella, “and commend his sweet soul.” He turned to Yashar. “But leave God to his work, son, for he alone is God. Attempts to understand him don’t work out. I myself remain confused about my time in the wadi with the ravens and all. Why do I, a son of Tishbe, sit now at a table in pagan Zarephath chatting with you and your mom? I do not know.”

“You are simply here to protect us,” Adella said.

Everything was simple to Adella.

“But Baal never acts mysteriously,” Yashar said.

“Where was your Baal, boy, when our well went sour?” Adella asked.

“So it makes sense to you, Mother,” Yashar came back, “that Elijah’s god nearly killed us with drought so he could then send Elijah here to save us?”

“That seems very reasonable to me.”

Yashar groaned and that seemed to end it. Elijah nodded at them as if the evening had gone well. What a frustrating man the prophet could be, impossible to unsettle; sniffing, winking, puffing…unconcerned about every logical problem no matter how weighty.

“Faith, son,” Elijah said, reaching across the table and, with the knuckles of his burly hand, stroking the few hairs that curled on Yashar’s jaw.

How insulting, Yashar thought, yet he secretly liked the attention.

*

That evening Adella found Yashar struck with a fever in bed. “Prophet,” she called out, “Sikarbaal is stricken. What have I to do with you, O you man of God? Have you come to call my sin to mind and slay my son?”

Elijah hurried down from his chamber and joined her at bedside, checking the boy’s forehead with his hand. “A great fever,” he said, which was no revelation.

“I worry,” Adella said, “concerning all he said about your god at mealtime.”

Elijah patted her shoulder (having never so much as touched Adella before) then dropped to his knees to pray. Adella joined him, praying best she could, murmuring repeatedly, Please, Lord, do not let this child die.

*

Yashar died immediately after. He remembered dying, counting it (with no hard feelings) as the work of Israel’s God. Most of his life had been painful or boring anyway, a difficult childhood followed by drought. Why not accept what seemed to be the god of Israel’s decision?

The prophet had been right after all, Yashar thought just before he passed; who was I to question the Creator of the universe?

The room grew blacker than Yashar had imagined black could be. He thanked Israel’s god for his mother and the good that he had seen then asked to be forgiven for his doubt. If I had it all to consider again, he remembered thinking… But something odd happened before he finished the thought.

*

As if from the depths of a cave, Yashar heard a voice say, “What have I to do with you, O you man of God? Have you come to call my sin to mind and slay my son?” It was his sweet mother’s voice scolding Elijah! Yashar tried to speak and defend the prophet but could not.

He heard Elijah say, “Give him to me,” then a sense of Adella’s presence faded as Elijah’s grew stronger. Yashar floated upward, or so it seemed, leaving him unable to hear or see or feel or smell and yet…

“O Lord my God,” he heard Elijah say, his deep voice tolling from a distance, “have you brought evil upon the widow who has taken me in as a guest by slaying her son?”

There came no answer. Yashar had feared as much.

“What are you doing up there?” Adella cried out three times, each time more desperately.

“O Lord, my God,” Elijah said again, “be pleased to let this child’s life come back to him again.”

Yashar was right, he had died. Someone, something, punched his chest. His eyes opened and he woke gulping air under two dark orbs, hairy nostrils, looming much too close. Before he could complain, they shot away upon a burst of light and there Elijah stood, hands raised in praise, that same light all about him, sniffing as was his habit and smiling like a loon. The prophet scooped up Yashar and bounced down the stairs to where Adella stood wringing her hands. Yashar had grown taller in the three years since Elijah had come, and put on good weight too, but Adella stood fast like a rock when Elijah dumped him in her arms.

“My precious Sikarbaal!” she crooned.

“No,” Elijah shouted, “Yashar, his name shall be from this day forth.”

Adella seemed not to understand.

“Yashar,” Elijah said again, “meaning straight, honest, direct, level and true.”

“Yashar, then,” Adella sang out, so happy just then she might have agreed to a girl’s name, and she bounced around crushing the living breath out of her newly named son until his legs flopped wildly in the air. With her tears flooding Yashar’s nightshirt, Adella turned in silly circles murmuring praise, kissing, nuzzling, squeezing and refusing to put him down.

Love for their children makes mothers strong.

“See,” Elijah said, “your son is living.”

Adella began to cry.

“I accept the name you have given me, prophet,” Yashar said when Adella put him down. What choice did he have, having been dead?

To celebrate, Elijah punched Yashar’s shoulder, a manly shot.

But one round of emotion had not been enough for Adella. She fell to her knees and balled like a lamb, squeezing Yashar’s legs until he stumbled, how embarrassing. Yashar allowed it after Elijah urged him not to struggle, whispering, “It’s always wise to let a woman’s joy run.”

“Now I am certain that you are a man of God,” Adella proclaimed when she had finished her spell, “and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is true.”

Elijah bowed a bit, perhaps embarrassed, then ambled out to the yard. Adella followed Yashar to his room and tucked him into bed leaving a wet spot on his forehead with yet another kiss. All next morning no one mentioned what had happened the night before but, later that day, they discussed what they had witnessed in hushed tones, for miracles are no small things. And from that day forward they never again mentioned Baal or Yashar’s former name.