When I Was A Girl, I Loved Esau

When I was a girl, I loved Esau.

At night when the work was done and we were all gathered around
the fire Father told us our stories. I listened, I listened with all my
self. I stored them up inside in neat bundles of books and chapters.
Each story the living memory of a person, newly breathing with
each telling.

I was a contrary child and so the other stories, the silent ones that
grow up inside and around the spoken memory like bindweed, were
counterpoint inside my heart.

Esau was not so clever. He was big and hairy and strong. He
loved God’s world and went out into it to make his way. Esau
would hunt, running and leaping, climbing and lifting and
crouching, until at the end of the day he was empty of reserve his
very essence in danger of being consumed. He would return to the
tents trembling and sweating like a horse that has been whipped
across the desert sands long after it should have been given rest and
water.

Esau was not so clever but he was filled with passion. He would
rather work beside the slaves then sit in the shade and talk. Esau
lived life. He did not store it up and use it in tiny bits to gain
advantage.

In my mind I could see him, huge and red, striding across the
encampment. He was not his mother’s favorite, but his wives loved
him. They relished the feel of his arms around them and when he
went out to hunt they sent a piece of their hearts with him. Esau
did not care that his wives were of a different peoples, had different
languages, even different gods. Eassu’s God was big enough for
them all and the language of love has never suffered from a lack of
words.

But Esau’s mother did not love him. He was not sleek and brown
and smooth like Jacob or her people. He was not like his father
either. Had he been born alone I think she would have smothered
him so no one would wonder at his red hair and green eyes. But
Jacob came second, the correct child, beautiful and familiar to her
eyes, and so saved from reproach she did not kill her firstborn, but
neither did she love him.

Jacob was like her, small, dark and mean spirted. He wanted the
birthright, but more, his mother wanted it for him. Together they
conspired to cheat Esau, and they did. My heart breaks for him
still, even though he long ago returned to the earth. Afterwards he
went out with his wife and made for himself a kingdom where he
was Pappa and Lover and Chieftain. A world full of fierce little red
headed children who loved to hunt and whose mothers’ fondly
compared them to their father.

Then, Father tells the part where Esau and Jacob meet again. Jacob
is afraid, but Esau is big. He welcomes Jacob, and lets him live.

When I was a child, I loved Esau. I prayed that God would send
me someone like him, big, strong, passionate and wild and that God
would pass over to other girls, girls who did not weep for Esau’s
broken heart, all of the Jacobs, the smooth, scheming, clever
favorites.