Chapter 16

Judah

Judah, son of Jacob, stood at the edge of his father’s camp. He watched the sun disappear over the horizon, and the sky sink through bruised shades of deepening violet into a night the color of dried blood. He had endured the weeping, the cursing, the torn clothes and the dust and his father’s raging—he had endured it silently, refusing the companionship of his brothers, afraid to speak to Dinah, unable to bear the sight of Benjamin.

Please, Reuben had said, don’t hurt the boy. He is our brother. He is our father’s son—

Simeon had not listened—none of them listened—and Judah had stood there, frozen, watching as the brothers gathered around, not knowing what to do, knowing suddenly and horribly what was about to happen and yet he did nothing, nothing, until someone knocked Joseph over and the others set on him and stripped him and struck him and he cried out, and they were beating him, shaming him, tearing his coat to pieces, tearing him to pieces, and it happened so quickly, and they were hurting him, they were hurting him—

Sell him.

It would buy time. Simple mercy had no sway, neither he nor Reuben nor anyone else was strong enough to control the mob, and so—

Sell him.

Joseph had heard him say it, he knew, because Joseph had looked up and stared at him, as if confused—not understanding, Judah knew, feeling the tightness in his throat, that he was trying to save his brother’s life.

Sell him.

When Reuben had made his way back alone to the pit with the rope that would draw his brother back to safety, he had fallen to his knees, gazing down over the side, calling out and looking around, wild-eyed, crying the boy’s name over and over again—

But there was no answer.

The pit was empty.

Joseph was gone.

We killed him, Judah thought. We took his coat. We tore him to pieces.

The brothers were supposed to go to Shechem—the place that had witnessed another slaughter, another violation of one of Jacob’s children—but they had moved the flocks on toward Dothan, and still somehow Joseph had found them, still somehow he had come, as if the desert meant for them to find each other in the scorched and wind-swept emptiness.

Judah had promised his father that he would protect Joseph. He had given Joseph the assurance of his friendship.

Then he had watched while Simeon beat him.

It didn’t matter that he had not known what to do. He had witnessed it. He was guilty. They were all guilty.

A flash, and he saw Joseph’s face again—his wide, red eyes, his skin purpled and broken, not at all the way a sacrificial lamb ought to be treated. He saw Joseph staring up at him, wondering why Judah, Judah, of all of them, stood there and did nothing, only said—

Sell him.

Now it was done. The sacrifice was over. There was no ram in the thicket, and no angel. Joseph’s brothers simply returned from the desert, bound together by his blood.

Two of the brothers had slaughtered a goat with the same knife that had been used against Joseph and his beloved robe. They dipped the fragments of the garment into the sticky, slippery gore. All of them stood together to present the robe to their father, leaving him to draw his own conclusions. Not one of them said another word about it. Not one of them knew what to say.

Standing beneath the dark night sky, Judah still did not know what to say.

Crossing his arms tightly, protectively, he raised his face toward the emerging stars. The horizon stretching beyond the camp was full of ghosts—whispers, shadows slipping in and out of the heat and the chill, lost travelers, and eternal sojourners—but as long as they were not his brother’s ghost, he could face them. He could face anything now.

Anything, except what he would see if he turned back to the camp.

Anything, except what they had done.

He might have asked for forgiveness, but he knew there could be none. The birthright was destroyed, the covenant shattered, and the brothers themselves had done it. He had done it. There was no God of his fathers who would embrace them now in mercy. They were exiles, wanderers, cast out into the briars and thorns, doomed to wander the world as shadows.

Judah lowered his head and took a slow, deep breath of soft desert night.

If he was doomed to wander, then he would go to seek that horizon, the ever stretching-out boundary of the known world, and he would go beyond it to what was unknown and had no recollection of what had been done in the wilderness at Dothan. He would become a severed orphan like his betrayed brother, make no claim on his father or fathers or their all-seeing God. It was not penance, but freedom did not have to be complete to allow its seeker to at least dip his hands, splash his face, let the trickles run over his skin for momentary relief.

There were places where the power of what had been did not extend. He would seek them out and blend away.

He would escape beyond the edge of memory.