Pages 4 final Towards Bethlehem.qxp_Towards Bethlehem 22/10/2020 18:31 Page 12
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Towards Bethlehem
AN ARROW IN THE HAND I did not think that I would live so long, long enough to see him grow to manhood. So many years! But I know that very soon now, he will leave, and he will never return. As an arrow does not return to the bow. Since he was scarcely able to walk without a mother’s hand to hold him, he would go to the edge of the village and beyond, and gaze out over the bare hills as though the scrub and thorn had already snagged him with their fingers, the graze of the rocks had brothered him with rough touches of comradeship. He was always alone, and the wind’s voice called him more urgently than mine, even from infancy. At the breast he would startle, stare at me as though he were a stranger, and then his head would turn to the breeze hushing through the window, or to the white light of the moon. I sometimes thought that he drank more than my milk. He drank from the wildness that called him: the air that played on his skin, the sounds of the distant herds of goats, the starlight that burned in the blue-black sky. He knew his father, but only for those years when a child grows towards early manhood. My husband was older than I, always gentle and faithful. I remember him, long ago in the first weeks and months of our marriage, teaching me how to read the letters he wrote with a twig in the dust of the yard behind our house. So that, long after, I could speak when they asked me, and say the name. But years had passed since those early days, and we had ceased to dream, ceased to play at letters scribbled in the dust. But we did dream together once, long ago, before my body dried up and failed, and there was no more hope of spring. We did dream of children who would come to complete our lives, to bless and honour us: sons to
