Lot’s Luck

I wrote “Lot’s Luck” a long time ago, after teaching GENESIS as literature in a freshman English class.  I was fascinated by Lot, who pops up often during the story of Abram/Abraham.  It’s something of a scandalous story, and I wrote this version, supplying dialog, to try to make it all hang together.  One wonders how the fundamentalists make sense of it all:  homosexuality, rape, incest, adultery.  These foibles are all here, some deemed okay, some not, no matter what we think today.  I was quite proud of the piece when Rabbi Everett Gendler, the Jewish chaplain at Andover, used it in an Old Testament class he was teaching to seniors, and invited me to sit in.

Lot’s Luck

            — I talked with Yahweh yesterday, Uncle Abram declaims, spreading his hands like wide tents across the table.

We are sitting in his kitchen, eating a mess of Aunt Sarai’s pottage, famous family recipe. Over by the sink she is banging at the pots and pans like a fishwife. Maybe she really was once a feast for the eye, but years of childless knocking around Egypt and Canaan with Uncle Abram have wizened her, dried her up like an old fig. We have heard about Yahweh’s conversations before. When neither she nor I say anything, the old man grows even more expansive.

— What promises, Lot! We are chosen! Such a God, who promises us the very world!

— And we are supposed to pay for it with our foreskins? I ask. What does He want with our bloody foreskins?

Hagar, slant-eyed and pout-lipped servant, sidles in, baby Ishmael at her breast, and stands by the door breathing softly.

— For you, not such a big deal, eh? Ha, ha, Aunt Sarai titters, the thinnest of veils draped over her barren and frustrated bitchiness.

#   #   #

The two of us are standing on the hills overlooking the plains, shifting our eyes from the azure-lidded rocks down the greening earth — it is spring and the Jordan has painted the bursting land — our vision darting among the slant rays of the morning sun. Panting, I have followed his broad beam high into the mountains. Far away the cities lie against the horizon, white and tiny and clean and impossibly flawless. Distance clarifies, removes imperfection; everything shrinks as it recedes from us, turns perfect just before it disappears altogether.

Anyway, beside me Uncle Abram carries on with spittle-flecked pomposity about this land he claims is promised to us, while I am wondering who else has been informed of Yahweh’s generosity. Surely people live in those white cities and call them home.  Great-handed Yahweh, I think. Have You told the natives?

— Left or right, says Uncle Abram grandly. Take your pick.

— What about the fucking Canaanites, I say, but he isn’t listening.

— It’s all good land, he prattles. Trust Yahweh. We’ve just got to give ourselves some space to get out of each other’s hair.

He’s right enough about that. The cattle have all run amok and the herdsmen are at each other’s throats. So I look close and hard at him but there’s no guile in his face, not a drop, just his jaunty old arms thrown out to east and west, his robes and that waist-long beard flapping in the swift sweet breeze. And eastward, far below his outstretched right hand spread the emerald plains of the Jordan Valley, and those twinkling cities.

— What the hell, I say. I’ll take the plains.

— You know, Sonny, he says, quick as a blink. I’m not one bit surprised.

#   #   #

We love the house in Sodom: white and high-beamed and airy, light falling through the upper windows and angling across the floor. Reclining on pillows, I wonder how Uncle Abram is making out among the sons of Canaan. I can see him earnest and expansive, explaining that his god Yahweh — Yahweh, you know him, don’t you? — has promised him, Abram, son of Terah of Ur, all the fields and hills and rivers and streams that the Canaanites have called their own ever since old Canaan, son of Ham, staked them out. I can see the Canaanites listening to Uncle Abram, see their dark faces growing darker still.

— Fuck you, Grandfather, I can hear them say, some of them snorting in amusement or amazement, others picking up sticks or rocks. And he gets the message in an instant and jerks his thumb reflexively at old Aunt Sarai sitting just at the edge of the firelight:

— No, no. Fuck the woman. My sister. Fuck her.

Fortunately, Sodom is painted fresh; the goats and sheep in the street are groomed and brushed and occasionally beribboned; and the surly sulky Sodomite men don’t look twice at my beautiful family.

#   #   #

It is a bright warm spring noon in Sodom when the angels appear on the corner before my house. There are two of them in pure white robes walking toward me right out of the shimmering air. Their eyes are black, flecked with gold. The odor of cinnamon or cloves, I’m not sure which, surrounds them. They are beautiful: a beauty that fills my eyes and my heart so full that both might burst. I would offer my daughters, indeed, would offer my wife, to either one. I would even offer them my own body for their least pleasure. I do not realize they are angels.

Holy shit, I think to myself. These guys are beef on the hook in this town.

— Come inside, gentlemen, I say, my heart pounding. Meet the wife and family. Have some nice pottage.

— You are very kind, one says, looking deeply into me. My heart heaves, hammers. The other looks away, casting a perfect profile, studying the streets and the clean white buildings.

— Nice-looking town, he says.

— Yes, I say. But things aren’t always what they seem.

— We know, they both say at once, and then the first one continues, but we’ll try the streets for a while.

Suddenly I hear the clatter of many feet, no voices, and up and down both streets — north east south west — we see men running toward us, their faces flushed and firm. All of Sodom seems to be gathering on my doorstep.

— Please, I say. Come in. No trouble, really.

And I hustle them inside and slam the thick door to and drop the bar in the iron hasp just as the first set of brawny shoulders crashes against the wood.

— Gosh! says one of the angels.

My wife and daughters are clustering around them, instantly smitten. I am trembling at the door.

— Send them out! shouts the mob. You miserable asshole! Send out the meat! We want the meat!

The cries are deep and harsh and cruel. I open the speaking port and peer through the coarse grating at a set of furious black eyes, which is knocked away and replaced by another. Hundreds of men are outside.

— Look! I cry. I have daughters! Beautiful. Lovely. Virgin. I’ll send them right out.

Behind me the girls are pressing forward, eagerly, willing and anxious sacrifices for the angels.

— Fuck the daughters! the men scream. Send out the meat!

All at once I feel a hand on my shoulder. It is the first angel.

— Don’t worry, Lot, he says, and I know then that he is an angel and that we will be all right.

— Exactly, says the other. But we had better get out of here.

I begin to weep at the sweet salvation I can hear in their voices.

#   #   #

Quick and lively with fear my family trips toward Zoar, the Little Place, the two girls ahead of me with their downturned heads and their bodies swaying beneath their gowns. I love them impossibly, have offered them to men just the once, to redeem the angels. Just beside me, at the least periphery of my sight, hurries my wife, her softness and pliability stretched taut in our rush. I can sense her near me, hear her, catch the merest glimpse of her dark curious, inexpressibly lovely eyes.

— Leave, said the angels in their filmy voices. Don’t look back.

So we scuttle toward Zoar, this small ugly place that grows surely uglier yet inexplicably smaller as we approach, so tiny now that I’m not even sure we are moving in the right direction.

None of us speaks as we mount a small promontory.

Suddenly a sound overtakes us, a wave of heat and noise blowing over and past us like a sandstorm, yet the sand and stones and grasses lie still at our feet. Booming across the plains to the hills before us, echoing back: the sound wraps and rewraps us in its majesty. And then a profound silence. I freeze in terror, my daughters also, staring straight ahead at tiny Zoar.

But beside me I feel my wife shift, and start to turn, to look back.

— No, dear, I say.

Then a harsh rustling like thousands upon thousands of cicadas writhing and clattering beneath the sun. It is over before I have heard it through, this sound, and my heart is struck as bitter as salt.

— Go on ahead, girls, I say quietly and swivel my downcast eyes to the side, to the base of a bright new pillar, which I bathe with tears. Then I hurry after my lovely obedient daughters.

#   #   #

Our cave is small but snug, wind-scooped from the cliffs that hang above Zoar. We found it by chance, really, while our vision was blurred by the tears we were shedding for my lost wife. The girls supported me, held me up, guided me to a narrow path that rose along the cliff’s face. We almost fell into the cave; a hole appeared like a mouth in the rock and we lurched away from the sunlight into the soft gloom.

My daughters leave me during the days, returning in the afternoons with food and drink. Zoar has little to offer us, not much more than a small cantina and a mom-and-pop variety store; but somehow the girls keep themselves and me fed and happy, carrying home bread, cheeses, and vessels of the local wine, a vintage fermented from fig juice, a bit muzzy and pop-bubbly perhaps, but certainly adequate, maybe even a trifle presumptuous.

This life is not easy for the girls, but they bear it with grace. Far from well or stream, they can seldom bathe. Their tresses hang in thick ropes about their dusky heads and necks, and their robes have grown tattered, flapping around their bodies like careworn bats.

Sand is everywhere, in our hands and hair, between our toes and teeth.

But my daughters remain lovely. Even yet untouched by men — indeed, there are no men in Zoar to touch even their sandal-thongs — they ripen full beneath their skins of dirt and pain. Oh, Yahweh, I think, where are your honey lands now? And I grind the grit between my teeth and I ache with the loss of my wife and, most of all, I curse my fatuous, fatassed uncle.

#   #   #

Sometime before I die, I will receive a messenger in the cave. He will approach my straw pallet where I am lying, his eyes winking through the dark, his nose wrinkling in unmasked disgust.

— I work for your Uncle Abraham, he will say.

— Who?

— Yahweh changed his name to Abraham. Get it? Father of Multitudes.

I will lie there, looking up at him like a scarecrow.

— He has a son now. Isaac. Yahweh delivered, came through.  Your Aunt Sarah — we call her Sarah now — was old, and we had all given up hope. All but Abraham. So when she bloomed, ballooned with sacred life, we called it a miracle, praised Yahweh, and laughed like loons.

He will stop suddenly, in a combination of condescension and embarrassment.

— But you. Your uncle wants to know about you, about your family. Your wife?

— Transformed. Lost.

— Ah. Bad luck, no? But you had daughters?

— Two.

— No sons? His voice will thicken, like blood.

Moab will scamper in from outside, naked, offering a small dead rodent recently snared. Ben-ammi will skitter in behind him. They will look at the messenger silently, with large luminous eyes.

— Ah. Wonderful. Grandsons.

— A bit of both, I will say, but he will not understand.

#   #   #

We are drinking fig wine, my daughters and I; and outside the sun is setting over Zoar. The shadow of our cliff has reached the horizon. My head is already a-buzz, as it was last night. In fact, I cannot remember a thing that happened after supper, though all today my heart has been light and joyful.

My older daughter is acting both languid and giggly as the wine dances inside her. Her sister is quieter, though she is drinking more freely.

— Slow down, girls, I say. We don’t want to lose our heads. Have some fresh bread and cheese.

Their teeth are sharp and white and gleaming in the dim flickerings of the fire, and they smile in mysterious joy at each other. I laugh aloud. My older girl kneels behind me and kneads my stiff neck, then brushes her cheek against my ear. I feel her breasts, soft against my back.

The younger girl moves beside me, strokes my chest, then moves her hand down to my thigh. I am inexpressibly happy. For no reason at all I am back in Sodom, crazy Sodom, standing at the door with all my angels at my back, and I hear my voice repeating in bewildered amazement the words of the furious Sodomites.

— Fuck the daughters.

— No, no, Father, says my younger, pulling me to her. Love us. Love us.