Hasidah slept outside the family’s wagon while Joseph and Lucy lay awake next to their dreaming son. Joseph watched his wife’s chest rise and fall; one moment, her movements were calm, and the next, tense. He twists her hair into small stalks. He selects a new bunch, organizes the strands, analyzes the hair between his fingers, and then lets it go, brushing it with his fingers back into the whole. He absolves each section of hair before returning it and wonders if God feels similarly as each soul comes before his glory. Sectioned off, examined, returned, and repeated. A simple process and one Joseph has spent countless hours on without tiring.
Lucy lies drifting in and out of sleep. Joseph’s touch calms her, but the change in monotony is at war with his attempts to soothe. Change is life or death. With her eyes closed, she wished Joseph to think her asleep; however, her mind was alight with activity. She fears her initial hope has endangered them all. And so the three of them lay.
There comes rustling outside the wagon, scratches, and long, sustained, quiet noises. Hasidah’s hand appears on the edge of the wagon bed; Joseph watches, assuming Lucy is sleeping through the last bit of the night. Hasidah pulls himself up with the edge of the wagon. His face in all manner wrinkled up with pain, struggle, or grief; impossible to tell and perhaps all at once. He locks eyes with Joseph, and his face goes as deadpan as possible through the anguish. Neither speaks. His shoulders barely show over the top of the bed, and they’re covered in sweat.
The two men were suspended in the moment, neither moving nor breathing noticeably. Joseph’s mind went blank, as it did while hunting as a child, but instead of going for his prey with lethal force, he did nothing. Joseph opened his mouth to speak, but at the same moment, the young brown man turned and ran, disappearing quickly into the pre-dawn light. Joseph let out his breath and fell to sleep moments later, only to be woken by his wife.
“Joseph,” she said while nudging the sleeping man, “Josheph, wake up. The sun’s out,” nudge, “please wake up.”
Before the sun hit Joseph’s eyes, he felt his ribs straining the cloth around his chest as he took the aggressive inhale of a nearly dying man. It was less than an hour since he saw Hasidah run away into the morning. Lucy felt relief at the sight, a return to normal, where her husband was awake whenever she was. But after they locked eyes, she grew concerned.
“Our friend is gone,” he said.
They prepared the horses and set out that morning like the morning before and all the others since they left home. The routines were the same, but now everything was different. Lucy and Patrick were unsettled by the events surrounding Hasidah, but Joseph was not. Instead, Joseph was profoundly disturbed and thought back to a night that happened years ago.