Sinope's Fiction: In the Shadow of Her Wings

Title: In the Shadow of Her Wings
Author: Sinope at (no spam!) gmail dot com
Rating: R
Pairing: Ruth/Naomi, Ruth/Boaz
Summary: Ruth, Naomi, and the stories women tell.
Author's notes: A stocking stuffer for Ari in Yuletide 2006. The italicized sayings are from the Gezer calendar, an ancient Israelite inscription. Background information came largely from Anchor Bible Dictionary, but all errors are my own.
Disclaimer: This is an unofficial fan work. No profit was made; no ownership is implied.

Ruth's mother never had time to tell her stories about Kemosh and his chesed loving-faithfulness to their people. Ruth had clumsy hands, and too many things to learn before she'd be marriageable to any man with enough livestock to care for her properly. Storytelling was reserved for Ruth's brothers, though she clung to the fragments of tales she overheard while learning how to carry a full vessel of water without spilling a drop, or how to pound barley grains into flour as smooth as her mother's kiss.

Naomi always had time to tell stories, though. With two grown sons and a still-strong husband, and the fertile land with which Kemosh had blessed them, the family always had enough food to eat and hands to prepare it. In the mornings, as the three women shaped bread loaves and baked them on the cooking-stone, Naomi would tell Ruth and Orpah about YHVH, the god of the people across the valley, in a strange lilting accent. Her stories sounded nothing like the stories of Ruth's brothers. She told them about Rivka, brought a thousand miles from her home to the man who cherished her as a queen, and about Dvorah, the prophetess with strong arms and a tongue sharp as a sword. Always, in every story, YHVH loved Naomi's foremothers - not the impersonal benevolence of Kemosh, but the love of an old grandmother, whose odd quirks and quick temper could never change her deep pleasure in her grandchildren.

Ruth walked into Naomi's room, the evening they buried Elimelech, to find her staring at the wide, empty bed. "You must miss him," she said, quietly, and embraced her mother-in-law.

"YHVH gives, and YHVH takes away," Naomi said, a glib proverb Ruth had heard from her too many times to think that Naomi believed it.

She kissed her on the cheek and wiped away the dampness around Naomi's eyes. "You're still not alone. Your sons love you as much as seven husbands."

After Mahlon and Kilyon both took ill with the same disease, a wasting sickness that made them pale and weak as children, Naomi distracted her mind by telling her daughters-in-law stories. They'd heard them all over the years, but it seemed to give Naomi comfort to retell the one about Yitzhak, whom YHVH loved enough to save miraculously from a ritual death. Orpah and Ruth listened and pretended they couldn't hear the tremble in Naomi's voice.

When YHVH took them both, on the same night, Naomi had no strength for platitudes. "I am like Hagar in the wilderness," she breathed, a curse and a prayer in one.

"Leave me, I beg you," Naomi told the two women, standing on the road to the border of Moab. "YHVH will bless you with other husbands; do I look like I have anything more to give?"

Orpah, always the sensible one, turned homeward, with an eastern wind at her back.

Ruth and Naomi watched her go until her body became a black line, shimmering with distance and heat. The silence gave Ruth time to choose her words carefully, when she clasped Naomi and looked into her eyes. "Give me the one thing you have left. Let me follow you, and I will hold fast to you. Only death will separate us."

For once, Naomi was silent.

In Bethlehem, Ruth learned the stories that Naomi never told her. One day, as she gleaned grain from a picked-through field, two local girls chattered about Lot's daughters, just loud enough to show they meant to be overheard. At the end of the tale, punctuated by giggles at every mention of sex and wine and incest, the taller one concluded with a flourish, "And the child of that disgusting union? Became the father of the Moabites."

Ruth dug her fingernails into her palm, but said nothing. YHVH cared for the widow and the orphan, providing her with leftover scraps of grains and grapes from a people who owed her nothing. What right had she to complain?

She didn't tell Naomi about the girls, that night, but she knew Naomi could sense the tension in her limbs, the shadow in her eyes. "You need a husband," Naomi said the next morning. "You deserve more than life with this much uncertainty."

Boaz's voice was kind, and his faith in YHVH was true, and his hands as they touched Ruth on the threshing floor, barley stubble poking into her back, felt as gentle as a woman's. "Tell me anything you want," he said to her, "and I'll give it to you."

"My mother-in-law, Naomi, has no other kin," Ruth said slowly. "I vowed I would care for her in her loneliness. Will you let me keep my vow?"

They married at the ripening of the summer grapes, and the whole village celebrated with them. Ruth wore a dress of linen finer than any she'd ever worn before, with gold jewelry dripping from her ears and neck, and the proud love in Naomi's eyes glowed, reflected, in her own. They sang songs of praise and joy to YHVH, late into the night, and Ruth kissed Naomi when the time came for her to join Boaz in their wedding chamber. "I will not leave you or forsake you," she said. "Where they tell stories of my name, your name will be there also."

Fig trees filled Bethlehem's air with floral, green sweetness, their fruits tasting as plump and tender as Ruth's breasts felt. The midwife said she was with child, and somehow word had spread to every house in the village, so that smiles greeted her from every window. The whole world seemed to sing YHVH's praises.

Lying on the rooftop in the warm summer night, Ruth placed Naomi's hand on her barely swollen belly, then covered it with her own. "Everyone will be so glad to see your family line continuing in your homeland. It's really your child, as much as it is mine."

"No," Naomi laughed, "it's a child of the gods. If it's a son, call him Obed, 'worshipper.'"

"Not Obadiah, 'YHVH's servant'?" Ruth said teasingly. "Who will he worship, then?"

"God," Naomi said simply, her fingers stroking Ruth's stomach. "The same God who led you to me."

Night-birds called in the darkness as a warm wind washed over the rooftop, and Ruth felt as though, tonight, she knew what it meant to nestle like a gosling under the wings of God.

finis.