Chapter 18 · Chapter 18

The light came up grey over the wadi, and by the time the embers were being stirred I had washed at the basin and put on the same linen I had worn the day before and gone out to the open ground to wait.

They gathered the way camps gather, in twos, then in a line, then all at once. A rug was carried out and spread at the head of the ground, and the Sheikh Abir came and sat at its middle with his stick across his knees. The elder men went down to his right. The young men stood behind, and my cousin stood with them at the outer edge of the standing, where the unmarried are put, and he did not look at me either.

Nobody looked at me. That was how I knew the whole camp had been told before I was.

My mother came last, and she came carrying the cloth.

She had it folded over both arms as it had been folded in the night, the corners matched and pressed flat under her palm, and she carried it the way a woman carries a child too young to hold up its own head. She had not washed it. She would not have washed it. It was the only thing in the camp that had not been washed.

She stood at the edge of the rug and waited to be told to come forward, because that is the order of such a morning, and no one told her.

Then Shimon came.

He came around the line of the cooking fires instead of through the middle of the ground, so that he arrived at the edge of the rug from the side and had to walk its whole length to stand at the center. He walked it slowly.

He was dressed as he had been at the contract, his knife at his belt and his hands empty, and he did not greet the Sheikh first, which was noted, and he did not greet him second either.

He simply stood, and the weight of the standing ranks came off them by degrees, the way a fire goes out, one corner and then the rest, until there was no sound in that ground at all.

"Shimon ben Zakhari," the Sheikh said at last. "The cloth is brought. It is the custom that it be opened before the men of the camp."

"It is the custom," Shimon said.

"Then open it."

"No."

Someone at the back of the ranks said a word under his breath, and the man beside him put an elbow into him, and the sound went out of the ground again.

My cousin spoke then. He had to say it twice before he was heard, and the second time his voice carried further than he had intended. "She was promised to me first."

Shimon turned his head and looked at him, and took his time about it. "She was," he said. "And you were promised a cloth. You may have the cloth. You may not have my wife."

He said it pleasantly. That was the worst of it. There was no heat anywhere in the man, only the flat of the thing laid down, and the men at the back of the standing ranks heard the pleasantness and looked at their own hands.

"Bring it to me," he said to my mother, and his voice toward her was a degree lower, one note off the iron. "If you will."

She carried it to him. She was crying and made no sound of it, and she held it out with both arms straight, and he took it from her fingers without touching her hand. Then he folded it once to bring the corner up, laid the corner flat along his knee, and drew his knife.

The blade went through the folded corner in one pass, and the wool gave without argument. He turned the cloth and cut again. Then he laid the blade down on the rug beside him, opened what he had cut, and set the two halves flat on his knee where the assembly could see them, so that every man there could see the cut had gone through both folds and that neither half was the whole.

"Her honor is whole," he said. "It was whole in her mother's house and it is whole in my tent, and it did not need a cloth in either place. Since the camp requires a cloth, the camp may have this. One half goes to the Sheikh, to be kept with whatever else the camp keeps. The other half goes into my own keeping. Neither will be shown, and the two will not be joined."

He held the first half out.

"And no man in this wadi will ask this woman for a proof again," he said, "because there is no proof left in the camp to ask for."

The Sheikh Abir looked at the two halves for a long while, and at the men to his right, and at the ground. Then he took the half that was offered him and put it inside his jacket without a word, and that was the end of the matter, and everyone in the ground knew it was the end of it.

"This is not how it is done," my cousin said. His voice had gone thin.

"It is done now," Shimon said, and did not look at him again.

He turned to the tent that had been raised for us and stood before the door of it. He did not go in. He took the edge of the black goat hair in one hand, lifted it a little, and let it fall, and the flap came down straight and shut the room off from the ground, and the stay-ropes took the weight of it and held.

Then the assembly broke. It broke the way these things break, without a word said, men rising and shaking out their cloaks and moving away in the direction they had come from, and the rug was folded, and my mother stood with her arms empty for the first time that day and did not seem to know where to put them.

I stayed where I was, before the fallen flap, with the cut edge of the morning behind me and the closed tent in front of me.

I did not lift it.