Chapter 14 · Chapter 14

The five ewes were in his fold at dawn, and I knew them before I knew anything else that morning, because my mother's notches are cut in their ears and because their udders were full and swinging and nobody had milked them.

They had come in the night, over the west ridge, down out of the thorn scrub where the flock had grazed the day before, and they had come to the one fold in the camp with water set out and a hurdle low enough to be an invitation.

My cousin was there before me, with two men at his shoulders and their hands on their belts, and the boy who watches the fold at night standing well back from them, holding the hurdle he had meant to mend three days ago.

"Ask him," my cousin said when he saw me. "Ask the Egyptian how five ewes choose a stranger's gate."

"They did not choose a gate," I said. "The gate was lying flat on the ground."

He did not look at me. He looked at Shimon, who had come up from the far end of the fold with the water skin still in his hand and his sleeves wet to the elbow, and who had not put the skin down.

"Five milking ewes out of this camp's herd," my cousin said, "and a man three weeks among us who folds his animals wherever he likes and sleeps through a night of them crying at his rope."

"My mother's herd," I said. "Say whose they are before you spend the whole morning being angry about them."

Then he drew the blade.

It was bronze and short, and he brought it out of his belt and drew a line with it in the gravel, from his own feet across to Shimon's, and set the point in the ground at the far end of it. It was not a good line. The gravel here is loose and the line broke twice in the middle. But it was a line, and a line is a line, and by then forty people had come out of their tents to look at it.

Shimon's hand went to his own belt. He did not draw. He did not even take hold; his fingers were on the hilt and his knuckles had gone white, and he was looking at my cousin the way a man looks at a page he is being made to read a second time.

Aber came through the crowd with his stick and stood in the middle of the broken line and looked at one of them, and then at the other.

"Hands," he said.

Shimon's hand came off his hilt first. He did it at once, without moving his eyes, and after that there was nothing left for my cousin to do with his blade but put it away, and every person standing there had seen the order the hands came down in.

Aber looked at the line in the gravel for a while.

"The line stays where it lies," he said. "The man who drew it may stand behind it. He will not stand on it in my hearing."

Then he turned to me, because the ewes were my mother's, and asked me what I had seen.

I had walked the ground before the sun came up, and I said it flatly and said it once and did not make a story of it. The tracks came down off the west ridge five abreast and unhurried.

There was thorn seed in the fleece of two of them, and the thorn it comes from does not grow within a mile of this camp; it grows on the slope where the flock was grazed the day before yesterday. Nothing had driven them. Nothing had frightened them.

They had walked away from a flock that had been left standing while the boys ate, and they had walked until they smelled water.

"You have counted these five three times this morning," I said, "and found six faults. Choose one and be done."

He said something then about strangers, and about what a man who cannot hold five ewes might be trusted to hold. He said that part to the crowd and not to me, and the morning went still and cold the way it does when a man says a thing in front of everybody and then pretends he has only been talking about sheep.

Aber asked what was owed for the milking that had been lost. My cousin said the milk and the morning both. Aber asked him what he wanted for it, and my cousin looked at me, which was a mistake, and then at Shimon, which was a worse one, and did not answer.

"The milk of five of mine," Shimon said, "for the rest of the season, to her mother's tent."

He said it to Aber. He did not look at me while he said it, and he did not say it loudly, and the men at the back had to ask the men in front what had been said, which is how a thing gets said twice in this camp.

"No," I said.

It was out of me before I had chosen it. Every head turned.

"He is not paying a fine," I said, "because there is nothing owed. But if milk is going to be given in this camp this morning, it goes to the two tents past the last well, the ones with no animals. From my hand. I will carry it there myself this afternoon, so that nobody has to guess whose giving it is."

My cousin started to speak and Aber's stick came down once, flat, on the gravel, and that was the end of the morning's talking.

Shimon put his hand flat on his chest, to me, in front of all of them, before he stepped back out of the line. He did it the way he did everything — once, and without waiting to see whether it had been received.

The two fat camels that had stood in the sun for two days were led home before noon. I watched them go. The boy who had been afraid to touch them walked at the head of the first with the rope over his shoulder like a man carrying a rank.

In the afternoon I carried the milk. It is not a light thing, a jar of milk, a quarter of a mile, in that heat, and I would not let anyone take it from me. Coming back I passed the fold, and Shimon was mending the hurdle the boy had not mended. He did not stop. I did not stop. There was nothing between us in the open but the width of the path.

He held out the cup, though. He had a cup in his hand and he held it out at the width of the path, and I took it with my right hand and drank and gave it back.

"It was a bad line," I said. "Any fool could see it was a bad line."

"It was a bad line," he said.

"One day," I said.

"One day," he said, and went back to the hurdle.

That is all of it. He did not defend himself this morning and he did not need to, and I have lived in this camp all my life and I know what it costs a man to lower his hand first, and what it buys him.

At dusk my mother found me at the rope of the tent with the milk jar washed and turned upside down on its peg. She stood beside me and looked out at the fold, and the ridge, and the light going off the gravel.

"The talk will be that you gave it away to spite a man," she said.

"Let it be."

She was quiet for a while after that. Then she said, "Good," and went inside.

There is a day and a night left. My cousin has not crossed the line in the gravel and he has not rubbed it out either. He walks around it. Everyone has noticed that he walks around it.