'You must not think I am frigid,' she edified me. 'It's just that I don't ever like being unclean, not even for a minute. You must have noticed that I bathe every day.'
By that time, so did I.
And even in those first disenchanting months of our marriage, I quickly discovered that I had much bigger problems to contend with than bathing regularly or a nagging and fastidious wife. Specifically, there was my father-in-law, Saul, who was yet the more afraid of me than formerly and had become my enemy continually. Saul was not so determined as his daughter that she be mother to a great race of kings. He was more obsessed with seeing me dead, consumed as he was by the dilemma my sanctified existence personified for him: he could not bear having me alive, he did not dare harm me. His teeming paranoid mind found testimony everywhere that the Lord was with me and that he would have to arrange for my slaughter himself if he wanted me out of the way. Certainly against the Philistines I seemed to have a charmed life. God was not going to let him off the hook.
It had to happen, I suppose, that he would finally round the bend, and the day inevitably arrived when he lost self-control and spoke to Jonathan and all his servants that they should kill me. Now how do you like that for a development? That was some fortunate marriage I had made, wasn't it? Jonathan, who delighted in me much--why shouldn't he delight in me much?--was the first to tip me off, exhorting me to take heed of myself until the morning and abide in a secret place and hide myself. Did Saul care at all that his daughter would be a widow? All night long I lay huddled in my cloak, sleepless and trembling, and dreamed of someone as caring and as tender to me as Abishag the Shunammite turned out to be too late in my life. I thanked God fervently when I learned at dawn the next day that Jonathan had been triumphant in remonstrating with his father and inducing him to rescind his drastic orders against me.
'Let not the king sin against his servant, against David,' Jonathan reported to me he had said, 'because he hath not sinned against thee, and because his words toward thee have been very good. He slew the Philistine and did put his life in thy hand. Thou sawest it and didst rejoice at first.'
'The Lord loves him, Jonathan.' Saul was perturbed.
'So much the better, my father. Wherefore wilt thou sin against innocent blood, to slay David without a cause?'
Saul hearkened unto the voice of Jonathan and spoke with a radiant face, as though the scales were dropping from his eyes and he was all at once illuminated from within by the most enlightening of insights. 'As the Lord liveth,' Saul burst out, 'he shall not be slain. I swear from the heart. Bring him to me this same evening and it shall be with him as in times past. There shall not be bad blood between us again.'
Jonathan acquainted me with all these things and brought me into Saul's presence that day, and it was better than it had been in times past. Saul sat me at his right hand, honoring me. He looked with favor on me throughout my dinner, helped me to food, addressed me constantly, paid me compliments, catering to me throughout as though I were his most beloved son and he was making amends. Never in my life had I felt so complete as I did that evening. Never had I felt so serenely at one with my king and master and with the fulfilled miracle of my existence.
There could be no doubt in my mind that our reconciliation was whole when, afterward, he took me alone to accompany him on a walk through a field of reaped wheat on a descending incline just outside the gate of the city. In a rich atmosphere of mutual good feeling, we walked beside each other in silence along a path of turned soil between rows of broken stalks whose sheaves had already been bound and borne away for threshing and winnowing. A prize of some kind should be given to the person who first figured out what could be done with grain. The aromas of the earth were as good wine. There was something mystical in that starry night, the gigantic orange harvest moon so low and pregnant, the lush black, depthless sky brilliant and shimmering with hard flickers of white and gold as numerous as the sands of the sea. The heavens were so close a part of the density of our air that I felt I was sucking immortality into my lungs with every breath. An exquisite surprise came when Saul lifted his huge, gnarled hand to lower it ever so lightly upon the back of my head. And I felt for the second time in my life that I had been touched magically by someone godlike, fatherly, and immortal and brought somehow to a life that was now new and preciously enhanced. Beginnings of that kind are incredibly sublime: falling in love with Bathsheba was incredibly sublime. Just once before had I experienced that same profoundly satisfying feeling of being born afresh, when they brought me from Bethlehem to play for Saul and he took my face in his hands afterward to gaze into my eyes with such transfixing intensity and make me those deepsworn promises that were forgotten by him and everyone else in the morning. I had never suffered such dismal disappointment.
'David, my son, I have a thing I must reveal to you,' he began hoarsely as we walked in starlight that balmy evening. 'Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. Believe me, I know.'
Continuing in low voice embarrassingly frank in its bare contrition, he imparted to me a good deal about his history. Much of it was untrue. When I reflect on the candor with which we addressed each other in that conversation, I am astonished to recall that it was our longest and our last.
Saul had never aspired to be a leader of any kind. For most of his young life he had thought of himself as ungainly and clumsy, because of a great height that stood him head and shoulders above others about him.
'Maybe that's the only reason I was picked,' he conjectured dolefully, as though ruminating over a familiar mystery. 'From my shoulders and upward I was aways higher than any of the other people. They used to ask me how the air was up there. To tell you the truth, I never gave much thought to God, and I was as unprepared as anyone to hear from Samuel that I was the one whom the Lord had chosen to be captain over His inheritance,'
'You believe Samuel?' I inquired.
'What choice do I have? He thinks about the Lord, I don't. I believed him then. I believe him now.'
And to tell me another truth, Saul confided that he had not been all that happy with his selection then and was not too pleased with his situation now.
'I don't always know what to do.'
His sole ambition the day Samuel plucked him out of obscurity was to find those lost asses of his father, which had been gone for three days. And Saul, unlike his daughter Michal, made no bones about the fact that he was from one of the least of all the families of the tribe of Benjamin. I effectively used this knowledge in marital disputes with Michal long after he was dead and I had succeeded in replacing him. When she sought to demean me by calling me a shepherd, I retaliated that her father had been an assherd, and from one of the least of all the families of the tribe of Benjamin to boot. Invariably, these arguments came down to the same basic disagreement, whether it was superior to be the daughter of a king or to be the king himself. I always won: I always proved my point by having her dragged from my room back to her place in the harem.
'Power corrupts, I've noticed,' he observed, and averted his eyes as though in shamefaced confession. 'And absolute power corrupts absolutely. I can have done whatever I want to. No one now interferes. Not even Samuel. Jonathan will try to talk to me sometimes, but even he will submit to my commands. Would you believe this, David--I've never told this to a soul-- would you believe that the thought once crossed my mind, just for a second, you must know, to have you killed? Can you believe that?'
'No.'
'We must never breathe a word about that to anybody.'
'Why were you going to have me killed?'
'To teach you a lesson, I think.'
'What lesson?'
'I sometimes have trouble figuring things like that out. The trouble with me,' Saul resumed after a pause, 'is that I almost never have more than one idea in my head at a time. Once I can think of something to do, I do it. People give too much credit for the way I responded to the news of the siege at Jabesh-gilead. It was all that came to mind. There was this yoke of oxen r
ight before me--I had just come after the herd out of the field-- and all I could think of was to hew them in pieces and send them throughout all the coasts of Israel as a warning to the people of what would be done to the oxen of those who did not send people to aid me. My only hesitations were over who to send pieces to and how to hack up the oxen to make sure there'd be enough. I didn't want to use more than two.'
'What would you have done if the threat failed and the people had not responded?' I had long wondered about that.
'I'm not much good at looking ahead,' admitted Saul.
Saul's first action as king, overcoming the Ammonites to lift the siege of Jabesh-gilead, was his best, and nothing in his life after that became him so much as the leaving it; he fell upon his own sword at the battle of Gilboa, by one account, when he found himself too sorely wounded of the archers to flee, and his armor bearer, sore afraid, declined his request to thrust him through and finish him off before the Philistines found him alive and abused him. The armor bearer, seeing Saul dead, fell likewise upon his sword and died with him. Something like that happened to Brutus at Philippi, didn't it, and to Marc Antony after Actium, according to that gonoph William Shakespeare, who pilfered from Plutarch too, as well as from Saul and me. A bard of Avon they called him yet. Some bard. Him I have to be measured against? In my day, a bard like him would be rolling out pancake dough in the street of bakers in Jerusalem or shrinking cloth in the fullers' field. O that mine adversary had written a book, instead of that mulligan stew of jumbled five-act plays with stupid plots cluttered with warm bodies and filled with sound and fury and signifying nothing. You watch. You watch. To him they'll give a Nobel prize for literature yet someday. And I still won't have a book of the Bible named after me, unless I rewrite the whole thing myself, and who has so much time? While nobodies like Obadiah, Nehemiah, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, and Zechariah do. Believe me, it's not what you know, but who you know. But fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise, and I don't give up hoping. At any rate, Saul did die gallantly--stupidly but gallantly--and I pay lofty and eloquent tribute to him in my famous elegy. I did better by him than he ever did by me. I immortalize him. Why criticize? The good that men do lives after them, while the evil is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Saul, I decided, and made no mention at all of his killing of the priests, that bloody nut, and his occasional spells of looniness with the prophets.
Saul looked at me askance a moment on that enchanted night when I made bold to allude most gingerly to his weird episode with the prophets, about which all of us had heard.
'I still don't know what came over me.' He shook his head disconsolately, affirming with embarrassment that reports of the epileptic religious seizure into which he had fallen were not unfounded. 'Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.'
It did happen to him once more since, when he was engrossed in wild-eyed pursuit of me and just about had me captured in Naioth in Ramah, where I had fled with Samuel after escaping out my window in the nick of time with the skin of my teeth. What followed seemed a miracle. Just when we had abandoned all hope of evading him, Saul was possessed once again by an irresistible need to prophesy. And he stripped off his clothes and lay down naked in a swoon all that day and all that night. Crazy? You tell me. Regaining his senses in the morning, he was a man of weakened resolution, and he turned tail and retreated to his house in Gibeah to ponder the mystery of the fit of religious ecstasy by which he had been so helplessly overwhelmed. Freud and his followers could explain that naked swoon--and would probably be wrong.
As Samuel had foretold in that first encounter with Saul, which was so fraught with consequences for the future, Saul did meet a company of prophets coming down from the high place of a hill of God with a psaltery, and a tabret, and a harp. And as Samuel had instructed, Saul did go up to prophesy with them, to allow the spirit of the Lord to come upon him and to be turned into another man.
'I can't really explain what happened to me after that.'
The next thing he knew, he was lying on the ground at the bottom of the hill, surrounded by the small crowd of gaping onlookers who had been attracted by the unusual spectacle. He was mortified and disoriented.
'My memory of the whole event is still the most terrifying of my life.'
Only from the derisive comments of the people gaping at him was he able to reconstruct what had happened--that he had done the dervish in company with these fanatical enthusiasts, howled out the mantras, harmonized the Hare Krishnas, stripped off his clothing, and gone tumbling down the hill with the others to lie thrashing about in the dust in a foaming, spastic, orgiastic frenzy.
'My chin was still wet from drooling. I did not know how to go about finding my cloak to cover my nakedness. I have never been so ashamed in my life.'
Of course he was recognized as the son of Kish by disbelieving neighbors astonished to see him in such a state. He was further disconcerted by the murmurs of ridicule resonating among them with the facile repetitiveness that transmutes conversational statements into tiresome proverbs.
'Is Saul also among the prophets?' he heard more times than he could count.
'What then? It's not Saul among the prophets?'
'Can Saul be among the prophets?'
'Saul can't be among the prophets?'
'How can Saul be among the prophets?'
'Go give a look.
''With my own eyes I saw Saul among the prophets.'
Is it any wonder there were many opposed to accepting Saul the son of Kish as king?
'I would have had trouble enough without that. After all, I was only the son of Kish, a Benjamite, of the smallest of the tribes of Israel, and my family the least of the families of the tribe of Benjamin. What did I know about management, religion, or warfare?'
Filthy children of Belial, Samuel called the people who rejected Saul because they did not see how such a man could save them. These despised Saul and brought him no presents, and Saul went home to Gibeah and held his peace until the Ammonites came up and encamped against Jabesh-gilead.
'That was my chance,' observed Saul.
'As Goliath was mine,' I could not help reminding.
Saul went on without bestowing upon me the moment of acknowledgment I had fished for.
When Nahash the Ammonite came up out of the desert and encamped against the city, all the men of Jabesh were ready to surrender and serve, and they sued for peace. As a condition of peace, Nahash wanted to thrust out the right eye of all of them. This seemed not unreasonable to me.
'I saw it as a sign of weakness too,' Saul agreed. 'So I took that yoke of oxen, and hewed them in pieces, and sent them throughout all the coasts of Israel by the hands of messengers, saying that whoever cameth not forth after me and after Samuel, so would it be done unto his oxen.'
The act to me seemed less effective as threat than as drama; yet the fear of the Lord fell on the people, and they came out with one consent. Dividing his men in three companies, Saul moved into the midst of the host in the morning and slew the Ammonites until the heat of the day. Those that remained were so scattered that no two of them were left together. It was a famous victory.
'When I was growing up in Bethlehem,' I disclosed shyly, 'we often used to play at war, and one of our favorite games was to play at war as Saul against Nahash at Jabesh-gilead. We loved the part of hewing the oxen into pieces.'
'And which role did you play?' Saul asked quickly, fixing a searching gaze upon me.
I felt a fleeting chill. 'None of us ever took the role of an enemy.'
'Did you ever wish to play the part of one of the oxen?' It seemed bizarre that he was not joking.
'All of us wished to take the part of the king.'
'Do you still wish to take the part of the king?'
The jarring presence of something dangerous in the atmosphere was now unmistakable. 'All of us wished to play the part of the hero, my lord,' I replied as tactfully as I knew how. 'Of our hero Saul, the great man who was made king
before the Lord in Gilgal by all the people, because he gathered an army as he did and saved Jabesh, and all of the men of Israel could rejoice greatly in him.'
My flattery was disarming, and I watched his face soften and his symptoms of apprehension recede. Everything for him after that, he recounted, was downhill. His impressive victory over the Philistines at Michmash was blighted by his quarrel with Samuel over the performance of the sacrifice and by the implacable resistance after the battle of the people serving him, who would not let one hair of Jonathan's head fall to the ground when Saul sought to make him die. His success against the Amelekites led to his second quarrel with Samuel and the final breach in the relationship.
'What was I supposed to do when Samuel failed to arrive before the battle of Michmash to sacrifice the sacrifice?' Saul wondered out loud, haunted anew by a quandary which eternally confounded him. 'Was it my fault or his? He was late in coming and my men were beginning to tremble as they saw the number of Philistines increase. We could have swept them away easily if we had struck right away. No Samuel. I had come with an army eager to fight, but steadily they beheld the Philistines gathering themselves together in greater and greater numbers, with chariots and with horsemen and with people that began to look like the sand which is on the seashore in multitude. Still no Samuel. When the men of Israel saw the strait they were in, they were distressed, and they did scatter from me and hide themselves in caves, and in thickets, and in rocks, and in high places, and in pits. And some of my Hebrews even went back over Jordan to the land of Gad and Gilead. We weren't supposed to fight until we had first made supplication to the Lord with a sacrifice. We couldn't sacrifice without Samuel. ,No Samuel. When the seven days appointed passed and there was still no Samuel, I finally offered the burnt offering myself. No sooner had I made an end than, behold, Samuel was already there. He told me I had done foolishly and that my kingdom would not now continue, that the Lord hath sought Him a man after His own heart and had commanded him to be captain over the people instead of me. "So fast?" I cried. "The burnt offering isn't even cold yet!" "He built the world in seven days," Samuel answered.'