man must be an important Levite, Beulah thought, watching his figure get smaller and smaller and then disappear into a gathering of people outside the door of the tabernacle.
What did they mean? Her entire soul felt blotted and gaunt as she picked up her sewing. Should she tell her mother? Moses had led them out of the promised land, she remembered. But he wasn’t their leader. God was their leader. So what did they mean that Moses shouldn’t be in charge? Moses wasn’t in charge. God was.
Beulah lay there, her face blotchy, her mind confused, waiting for her mother to come back as the drowsy moments flaked away. Her mother and father always left to help with the herding, the manna-gathering, and the watering, early in the morning breezes. Her older brother, Jubal, always went with them to help, because he was fourteen. Beulah was twelve, and all her friends went to help. But she stayed in bed, sometimes hacking as if her whole lung would come up, and breathing with difficulty. Her other sibling, Enoch, who was only four, would always go over to the neighbor’s tent to play with their littler children while the neighbor lady’s mother watched them all.
The sun felt even hotter today, beating down on the crumbling nothingness of the wilderness around them. Beulah wiped sweat off her brow. It soaked the pillow under her head. Why were they waiting so long to get traveling for the day? Usually they left around sunup.
Beulah peeked out the hole in the tent again, waiting for the morning to elapse. There weren’t many people walking around. Here and there a mother with little ones would hustle on by with a water pot, or a little girl would go by carrying something. There were tents everywhere, pitched close together. Where had all the people gone? She looked toward the direction that the younger man had disappeared into. There they all were! There at the front entrance to the tabernacle, the crowd had gotten bigger. More people were coming toward the gathering, too. Beulah couldn’t see much, and she couldn’t hear what was being said. But she watched for many minutes as the people gathered under the hot sun. Then, tired of holding herself up by the arm to see through the hole in the tent, she lay back, her heart filled with a shadowy fretfulness. The air in her family’s tent was still, and flies buzzed around her. The little pot of manna that her parents had gathered for the day’s meals stood on the rug.
I’ll just close my eyes for a moment, Beulah thought. And she began to pray, “The Lord bless us and keep us . . .”
3.
“Crash!”
Beulah awoke with a start. Something had fallen outside the tent. “Is he okay? Is he okay?” It was her mother’s voice, scared. Beulah’s veins tingled.
“I’m fine, mama.” That was her little brother Enoch.
“You gave me a great scare. I shouldn’t let you ride on mules.”
“Oh, mama, you’re no fun,” Enoch said. He scampered into the tent, and ran to Beulah. She weakly tried to hug his little lively body close to her.
Her mother came in.
“Hi, Beulah.”
“Hi, Mother. Where are Father and Jubal?”
“Coming.”
“Where were you all?”
“Over by the tabernacle door.”
“For what?”
Beulah’s mother came over with her silent watchingness and leaned over her pale daughter. Beulah knew that outside, around them, the camp activity hummed. Nearby little children played a game in the desert sand with sticks and rocks. The older children carried water and tended animals and little children. And everywhere the faces of the adults were weary but hopeful, like you are after a long and fruitful week of work on the evening before the Sabbath. Beulah’s mother smoothed Beulah’s hair back. “How do you feel, honey?”
“Good enough, Mother. Why did you all gather?”
“There’s no need for you to have anything more to worry about. You worry enough as it is.” Beulah’s mother got up and began to straighten the tent, preparing it for taking down and traveling. She could do the entire process in fifteen minutes.
Beulah sighed to herself. She thought about asking her mother again why they had all gathered so long instead of traveling, but instead she asked, “Is Moses proud?”
Beulah’s mother whirled around and stared at her. “What?”
“Is Moses proud?”
“Where did you get that question from?”
Beulah was quiet, pallid, remembering the Levite’s liquid-flowing syllables. “Does it matter? Is he?”
Beulah’s mother walked back toward her. Her eyes were a troubled gray. “We are all proud, honey, every one of us. Nobody can say that one person is more proud than another.”
“So why would someone say that about Moses?”
Beulah’s mother would not answer. She seemed to be in some kind of transfiguration of annihilation, a durable soul-illness. She turned away, and went out the tent’s front door to begin the process of pulling up stakes. For some reason Beulah thought of something she had learned long ago: stars are bright still, though the brightest may fall.
Beulah settled back in her bed in the blistering heat. She listened to her mother’s sure movements outside the tent. Enoch had gone to the neighbor’s tent. As she listened, she could hear others coming out of their tents and pulling up stakes. With her thin hand she reached over and picked up her sewing. She was making a little doll out of animal skins. She tried to thread the needle. Over and over she took the thread and tried to get it through the eye of the needle. Her hands shook. She rested them for a moment, then tried again. The end of the thread filmed before her eyes, blurring, and she dropped her hands down to her thin chest. She set the sewing down on the blanket in front of her and folded her hands across her stomach, staring up at the skins above her head as tears rolled down her cheeks into her dark brown curls.
4.
They were finally on the move again. Beulah’s bed of animal skins was attached by ropes to a cow. The cow dragged Beulah behind her. Ahead of her, her cousin Zillah’s rich blue and purple hem dragged in the dust. It was Zillah’s job to be Beulah’s companion, and to make sure the ropes didn’t get tangled, and to make sure the cow walked at a steady pace. Zillah also watched out for rocks that might catch on the animal skin bed that held Beulah. Zillah was glad to help. Normally she would have been helping her mother with the smaller children in their family, but because she had other older sisters to help, the family could spare Zillah to be a helper friend to Beulah. Beulah’s family had only her mother, father, Jubal, Beulah, and Enoch. There had been other children, six of them, but they had all died, either in a plague, or after birth, or from miscarriage. They were all buried in Egypt. “God will remember them even there on the day when he raises us all up unto himself,” Mother had told Beulah. Beulah knew that was why Mother had named their last child Enoch. He was named after Enoch, a man who had lived very long ago, even before the time of Noah, and God had taken him up unto himself. Beulah’s mother had expected God to take this little boy from her too, so she had named him Enoch.
“Did you finish sewing your doll?” Zillah asked Beulah, sweet as always, like a little brown kitty in a basket. Even her eyelashes were dusty, because the animals kicked up so much dust. With so many people and animals on the move, the whole desert around them had a little dust cloud
