Milk and Honey
Milk and honey. We were promised it. We were promised happiness and prosperity, and in some ways we found it. Our life was good in Ashkelon. Our house was high on a mountain in Ephraim, goat territory. We had a flock of thousands, milk for more people than lived in the world at the time. And we had honey too. Papa loved to fulfill prophecy, to do God’s work.
The year the oil came, Papa said it was God coming to save us. The Bible said the sun would go black, but I think John meant the ocean. When the oil came, we thought it would stop. The televisions were black with news of the leaks. Two months into the spill, Papa moved Momma and Grandma and me to Israel. He had been working a government job and I think he knew things were getting worse. We all knew.
We watched the world crash from our farm in Ashkelon. There were great earthquakes, and with them, waves. We watched people get swept into the blackening ocean on the television. The day I learned to milk the goats was the same day The Powers went to war. Bombs and explosions and more earthquakes, and through it all, the cameras, capturing every second of it. Papa got rid of the TV once The Powers began to fall. I still remember him ripping the plug from the outlet and pretending to get rid of it for good.
But I knew he and Momma would still watch late at night. I did not mind these times. Grandma would stay with me when they shut themselves in their room. She would wrap me in her arms and press me to her chest where I could breath in her sweet scent and listen to her quiet heartbeat thunder, with my ear pressed to her breast.
When grandma died, I was left alone while Momma and Papa watched the television. And then, one day, there was nothing left to watch and no power left to watch with, so Momma and Papa would loaf in the living room every night, trying to entertain themselves with the few books we brought from America. But our small library just reminded them of all that we had lost. For me, it was every story I knew.
*****
Without the television, we only had Israel. Twelve regions came to power in the same year. Most were Christians, and those who were not converted to Christianity disappeared within the year for there was no reason to keep someone alive who was not saved. Those converted surely saw that Revelation had been fulfilled and those left, those that we knew about, were waiting for rapture. And because we loved God and He loved us, we were safe in Ashkelon.
In accordance with the history of our people, the twelve rose as such: Reuben, Simeon, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Benjamin, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Ephraim and Manasseh, each possessing their own regional specialties: corn, wheat, metal, citrus, and sorghum. We kept goats for they loved our rocky pastures. Our Ashkelon hills were quiet with livestock in those days.
“Puskos!” my father would yell to me when it was time to come home. Our house sat in the valley of the mountain, and I played in the rocky, vertical pastures. “Puskos,” he would yell, “little shepherd girl, it is time to eat.”
On special nights, our neighbors would come to our home. Grape growers, they would bring fresh wine and their salvaged instruments. Their daughter who was just a few years older than me would play a fiddle with her yellowed bow. I would dance to her tune and the sound of Papa’s timber voice. My grandmother would call me a “gypsy child” and the adults would laugh for their memory of America was still fresh, gypsies still sexual, mystical and fleeting.
Ephraim was all I knew in childhood. I loved the pastures and the stones that rested on the hillside. I knew the mountain caves and where the deer lived and the logs under which the beetles found shelter. Most of all, I knew about the honey. Papa said that when the bees die, we die along with them. He said that bees were the only science he loved, angels of nectar, necessary to all good life on this earth, devils with thorns for the skin of the unappreciative.
Grandma was the first to bring me to the caves. She pulled me through the mountains, her frail and aging body strong enough to show me something beautiful. As we got close, I heard the hum.
“Move slowly,” she said, “and don’t be scared. We were promised honey and God gives it to us freely.” She pulled a slide from a wooden contraption that my father had surely made. And from it spilled golden honey, coming out in long drops like stalactite. “God shows us beauty in the midst of pain, gypsy child. If you are stung, thank God for he values your life more than that of a creature who feeds flowers and brings sweetness to our lives. He loves us sinners more than something as beautiful as a honeybee.”
In the weeks after grandma passed away, I was stung a lot. I went to the cave to cry. I licked honey from the dripping wooden slides and bees stung my cheeks, and I thanked God for the stings like Grandma told me to. Those red blemishes were a way to feel loved by God but also a way to remember Grandma and how I cried the first time I was stung, how she wiped my tears and fed me honey and loved me hard in her arms while my parents watched the television.
*****
The day the Evildoers came to Israel was the worst day of my father’s life. The hungry ones entered through Reuben and ransacked the corn fields. They slaughtered the cows and goats and made bloody the townspeople before their eventual capture. Upon hearing about the attack, my father, the chieftain from Ephraim at the time, brought my mother and I to Shiloh for the conference, afraid to leave us for fear of attack.
While our orchard-growing neighbors watched our flock, we traveled by donkey to the center of Israel, to Shiloh where decisions were made. At the assembly, all twelve tribes of Israel gathered.
There was fighting in those first days. The women of Reuben sobbed in the halls of the assembly, clutched their children and wailed a widow’s call. At the first day of trial, we sat in silence like Eliphaz did for Job. But, when it was time to speak, there was rage in every heart. The representative from Shiloh could not speak for grief for his brothers overtook him, so a man named Cleophas of Naphtali was appointed for the defense of Reuben. And, because he was quick in word and deep in spirit, my father was to defend the Evildoers.
The second day of trial, after the silence had been kept, Cleophas and my father were set to speak before the jury. I wondered if they felt nervous in these moments, if my father feared for his life at times like this.
“You do not capture to kill,” I heard Papa assure Momma the night before he spoke.
That night I snuck out from our inn and walked the Shiloh streets, amazed at the peace outside with all the anger in the houses and inns. As I walked, I heard singing, and I followed the voice, timber like Papa but sweet and raspy too. And as I came over the hill, I saw it, men shackled to one another, lying in the streets of this city I did not belong to. They were singing or sleeping or using the restroom, sprawled out like decoration in the middle of the square. Their chains stretched to the hills, man after man, connected by metal and hunger and certain death. And in this chaos, I heard something I remembered.
A land flowing with milk and honey
God loves Israel
Honey in caves, flowing from mountaintops
God loves me, loves Israel
My grandmother would sing this song to me as I would lie in her arms at night, held tight in her love. And before I knew where my feet had taken me, I was standing before the man, a scruffy brown being with teeth of pearls. His hair was like tree branches stretching black from his scalp.
“My name is Hod,” he told me.
“Dinah,” I replied. “My father is going to protect you,” I told him with certainty.
“God protects me,” he replied. And then, he sang.
On that night, we shared honeycomb from Ephraim and he sang songs I had never heard from Grandma. I danced while he sang and he called me a gypsy like Grandma used to say. While all of the other men looked away, he stayed with me that night, a man and a girl, free and chained in the rapture of music and honey. And as the sun began to rise, I saw angry men come from their houses in a great mob and Hod told me to go. And as I left for the inn, I gave him my honeycomb.
And that night I had hope for my father, hope that he could save my friend. And before I went to bed, I asked God for forgiveness, for people as kind as Hod did not deserve death.
Two men were burned alive that night by the mob I saw at sunrise.
*****
“In end times, we are changed. Where we were once slaves to Christ, we are now awaiting salvation, deemed to be of a certain kind of character worthy of eternity. And, in this time where we wait for the Year of the Lord, I am in mourning for the distractions that surround us, for the Evildoers who defile our land and ransack the wealth which proves our covenant with God. Diotrephes will try and convince you that these invaders deserve grace. But times of grace have perished. We have received the grace that we were promised, and now we await restoration. Remember your anger, oh tribes of Israel. Remember the wrongdoing we suffered in times past, and ask yourself if you wish to return. At last, we have entered the promised land, and beyond this one, lies another one, more beautiful than words have the ability to describe. Do we have mercy for those who have wronged us in the past, for God chose us! Let Diotrephes speak, but do not become foolish and soft with sympathy. If we let horses trample now, they will come again later. Remember your anger, brothers of Israel. Remember the promises made to us.”
And with that, Cleophas killed my new friend and taught me that the fear of men is greater than any love they can know. But my father was not shaken or deterred by the anger of men. Rather, I think he found strength in it, for his speech at its core was an apology from Israel.
“Cleophas, you are wise in war, but poor in spirit, for these are men just like us. Have we forgotten how to forgive? Do you remember how to love? These men have not survived the end of this world to be finished by us. I too am angry. I too am grief-stricken for Reuben, but in our rage we must ask what is best for our country, for this promised land. It is of more expedience to utilize these men for the good of our land, as slaves and laborers. We are what we have endured, but we also carry the wisdom of the people before us, our ancestors. Where is their spirit of love in all of this anger? Hatred is rooted in the past, but anger, anger is rooted in the present. We must recognize this difference in order to make the right decision in this case, for letting our emotions take hold is to let the devil take control of us. Men of Israel, do not make decisions with haste, make them with thought, with the knowledge that out of this tragedy we can find use.”
And with that, my father had said his piece, had spoken for the afflicted. And yet, his wisdom was lost on the tribes. The final vote: eight to four that the men must burn.
And alas, my father did his best to give dignity to the women and children who were hungry at our borders, that without their husbands they would surely die. And Cleophas, the most violent man I have ever known, assured us that they would feast with us.
And on the night of the feast, the women and children ate first for they had an appointment with death. And as they finished, they were led off, and our places at the table reset for our own dinner.
And there was wine and meat and honey from our cave in Ephraim. The women and children ate, for the men of Israel had business to attend to. And as we prayed, I heard it, quiet in the background, like the hum of the bees. Screams of women, their husbands inside them. And Papa was crying and Momma was pregnant and I ate my friend as Cleophas killed the babies.