She kept telling him the story

And after five years her father had been writing less frequent letters home and begun sleeping with at least one of the women with whom he’d fallen in love. And he said things to her when they were lying in the heat afterward, sweating, that if he was to suffer eternally for a sin such as they were committing, he would count it a blessing rather than to suffer one more second without her, which felt like a thousand infinities piercing his skin. He said and believed things like this, because he really was in love with the woman, who he called Rachel.

And after three more years he’d had a son by Rachel, and nobody in the village had said anything about it, well aware that the pastor Dan had been carrying on for a while with Rachel. And they’d applied a system of non-judgmentalism that he’d rigorously taught them, that Christ was the first to forgive, that he said to the Sanhedrin who stood around the adulteress woman, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” And most of them remembered the sins of their former lives, which were now rooted firmly in the past, and they saw that they could not call Dan to account for things, which they, in their heart of hearts, would have done as well. Rachel really was quite beautiful and a number of the men wished that they’d been the pastor themselves, wasting away the afternoon between her legs.

Rachel, for her part, thought that the priest was silly, but she liked the things that he said to her, the poetry that he said to her as they were nearing the end, or shortly after they’d finished. She wasn’t using him precisely. She just found the elocutions beautiful. And she’d have him read to her from the Song of Songs, “Like a lily among thorns, is my darling among women.” And she’d stop, and have him explain just what a lily looked like, it’s precise parameters, and she’d ask him if he truly regarded her as a lily amongst thorns, and he’d tell her that he did, and she’d be reassured that he thought so little of the other women in the village.

And as he walked by the shores of the water that day, on the sun scorched earth, cracking in the sun, as in images he’d of Africa that he had as a boy, he appreciated the smooth curve of his beloved’s back, bent like a swan in the water, the descent of her hips into the water, the round curve of her back when she stood up from the water. And next to her, was a little boy, his son, swinging a stick into the water, making it splash up on the shore, fighting some imaginary war.

The boy mostly took after his mother. Though is father had tried to begin teaching him from a young age about the old church fathers, Origen and Tertulllian, if just so the boy would have some knowledge from whence he came, he was interested instead, as most boys are, in walking about with a stick of some size and whacking rocks with it, which he pretended were lions or elephants, or occasionally whacking other boys with it, and having it taken away, because that was not how a civilized person behaved, though it was obviously, sort of universally how boys behaved.

And so the little boy stood in the muddy ground beneath a green leafed tree beating the water, arcs of it lifting out and splashing down in the distance. And Dan thought of calling down to the boy, of asking him to come up and read a passage of the Scripture with him. He felt somewhere in his heart of hearts that this boy would be the death of him, and he wanted to know why. The feeling was Greek, and it was tragic.  Instead he called down to Rachel, who was, for all intents and purposes now his wife, reminding her that the grandeur of God was made manifest in all things, and she smiled back up at him, and he was happy.