Veil & Face – Leah
"Leah had dull eyes, but Rachel was shapely and beautiful."
Genesis 29:17
"Reuben!" I call, ducking beneath the lintel and squinting in the golden light breaching the last bent acacias before the wilderness. Through the haze I think I catch dust scattering in the air, but I don't need it. Of course he went that way.
Lifting the empty jug to my other hip I step into the heat rising from the shadow-spread ground and dart after him, leaping on bare toes across the baked earth.
Past the acacias I fly, past the homecoming goats with the laughing silhouettes of my sister and our husband together behind them, past the slave women with their backs to me, singing quietly over the well as they raise their vessels. I don't stop, hugging my jug to my chest.
The voices and bleating and laughter crumble in the dust, until as I reach my hill only the wind scratches in my ears.
There they are, on the next rise away from me. I let the jug sink to the sand and raise my hands to my face, feeling the warm, sweat-sticky hairline, where a veil would fix. I remove the veil that's not there, tracing fingers around eyes called dull.
That's because no one sees my eyes out here.
Out here as I watch my son offer dusky succulent flowers to his best friend, daughter of my father's son, as the sun fills the horizon with colours and then empties it of itself, as the sand swirls and shadows stretch.
Out here I am who I am meant to be.
I am a face, not a veil.
"Bath time, Reuben," I whisper, letting the sounds disappear as they leave my tongue. "Here, my son, or your father will be displeased. Come here, my young ibex."
Of course the two of them continue their play, shrieking and laughing as they tumble and chase in the sandy dunes. I smile, rubbing at cheeks that were once slapped in disappointment, letting myself dream of the wonder if their play could have been my partnering with a man. In the red and golden shadows I can almost see him at my side, neither of us alone as we watch our child, the radiance in my eyes out here not unseen.
And then I lift my jug and take one last searing inhale of the vanished sun's gifts, patting my hairline down.
Those dreams are now not mine, not for me, but that is not to say I am not who I am meant to be.
"Reuben!" I call, turning back towards the well.
He scrambles to his feet and the two bound after me. I smile. Some do know the face, not the veil.
As I stoop close over the well, my eyes shine as bright as the evening stars appearing behind my head.
NOTES:
I like to think that even, perhaps especially those with dull eyes in the world's sight are radiantly special in their Creator's. Leah never had the chance to experience the human romance of another seeing that in her, but I hope that some way she came to see it for herself.
This is set before they left Laban's. Reuben I imagine to be around five.