She's wrapped in headdress, concealing her Moabite features, her dark eyes hid beneath cascading veil, and all limbs and visage undisclosed for vanity. She hovers still in black, robed in mourning, her head still cautious, heart guarded from the wounds of hurt and burden that carry so closely with burial. She does not speak of him, Kilion, the look of lost bewilderment in her eyes.
For ten years she knew him and watched him and lived with him and loved him. For ten years she forsook her own family to marry from out, to marry a Judean. For ten years she learned from him, followed him, and gathered customs of him.
And now he lay: dead. Now he abode the grave.
No questions are asked, for her eyes hold all, the dark dressings over them like thick Arabic coffee swirling with doubt and darkness and concealed desperation. As if thoughts evaded words and spoke through:
Years of her mother's chiding, enamored for this Judean man. Words of her father, as she left and married him. Begging and wishing Kilion, eluding him not to go to war. Haggard men returning, her husband lost from line.
Naomi gave her words. Her wavered strength pouring through, tight hugs of known commencement, fathers and sons and husbands that both she and they too, the three, knew heavy. "Go back...to your mother's home" (Ruth 1:8). Like love, she tried to set them free.
But both Ruth and Orpah clung, like sisters and daughters to she.
Her eyes moisten, her lips bitten to close. As if she watches them again, like two souls of hers on dirt.
And she stood there alone.
Naomi gave her permission, but was her mother now too. And now she walked away, down the road with Ruth. Her quiver still Orpah heard, "Return home, my daughters...find rest in the home of another husband" (Ruth 1:11, 9). The words stung, in senile truth. Another husband?! Like blasphemy, the words catapulted her, piercing with Kilion's depleted existence.
I want to ask her about him. I want to ask her of her mother's hug, or if she even offered one. I want to ask her if her heart made room for another, if her fallen grief revived, if her Moabite family took her in.
But her veil keeps her from him. Her dark, quiet eyes shelter her secrets.
I sit with Orpah for coffee. But am afraid I will not find the truth.
