Eloi, Eloi or: Caleth for Elias By Matilyn Paul

“Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour. And about the

ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? That is to say, My

God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me? Some of them that stood there, when they heard that,

said, This man calleth for Elias.”

- (Matthew 27:45-54)

“All women become like their mothers, that is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”

- Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Part I

The Old Testament

Abeline’s mother, Mary Grace, ingrained in her from the very start that the little things a

woman does to present a feminine veil should be treated as scripture. But Abeline never much

believed in the Bible, for she couldn’t understand how a man whose last words were “My God,

my God, why have you forsaken me?” could be painted as having chosen that way to go. And

even if he did, even if he begged for the nails to pierce the faint blue lining of his veins, even if

he inwardly smiled and thanked his father as he was crowned, she figured if, after all that, there

were no sinners and the world was good, a good man died for no good reason and was no longer

saving anybody. There isn’t any real choice when assumption rules supreme. In other words, in

this corner of the world, you were either Christian or you were dead and such was existence.

For Abeline, it seemed the only sin she was paying for at all was the inheritance of being

a woman who was reared on Midwestern soil, and for being precisely that. So as a result the

paint on Abeline’s nails was always chipped, and stains like rust spread slowly across the front

of her skirts as she withered away under God’s eye and the mystic Nebraskan storms of dust.

Unlike Mary Grace, who was famous for saying ‘a woman listens with her eyes, a man

doesn’t listen at all’, (one of the many charming Midwestern abuses of language she

acquiredfrom her own mother), Abeline lacked a certain knack for observation that, to Mary

Grace,defined the epitome of womanhood. For what was a woman who didn’t notice the smudges on

the silverware, who didn’t think to scrub the grout as well as the sink, who put 3 cups of salt into

the cherry pie instead of sugar? Blasphemous, impious, a heretic to the divine law of effeminacy!

Call it what you want, ‘mother’s intuition’, but from the moment Abeline was born Mary Grace

had a sense that the feminine ideal would be a struggle to uphold for her baby girl.

Yet, to what woman is it not? A hill you must battle, an upward climb, just to find no way

off but through resignation, then the ease of the downward slope.

To avoid the sentencing of her dear Abeline to the depths of patriarchal hell, Mary Grace

pasted into the kitchen cabinet beside the yellowed diagram of measurement conversions a list of

guidelines for her dear daughter to follow. This was purposefully tucked away from the eye of

the Father, Eli, (a man older than Mother who had a bad habit of holding his wife’s wrists a little

too long, a little too tight), who would be disappointed to acknowledge his daughter was failing

in any way, straying from the duties the gift of her birth bestowed upon her. Perfectly even,

crooked in no way, the list hung tight to the wood, and read as follows:

1. Mother knows best.

2. You should look presentable always, never let yourself be seen as aesthetically imperfect.

3. It is best not to disagree, especially with your husband.

4. Always leave room for God in your heart.

5. Do as you are told, especially by your parents.

6. Always allow the man in your life to do as he pleases, don’t kill his desires.

7. Your man is your man, forever and always, AMEN!

8. Stay in your womanly lane. Let the man do the man’s work, don’t steal his honor.

9. You get what you get and you don’t get upset. Don't like what you see? Close your eyes.

10. Honesty is the best policy, but love can’t exist w/o a little truth-stretching.

As reality had it, Mary Grace saw the archive of protocols and conventions more than

Abeline ever did, who didn’t enter the kitchen’s sacred ground nearly as much as her mother, and

only ever opened the cabinet to steal the big glass pitcher Grandma Annie had given her daughter

on her wedding day to use as a vessel to refill the pig troughs with fresh water. But to Mary

Grace, it didn’t matter. She was made proud by her own knowledge of feminine expectations and

felt validated by such epiphanies. That was enough for her. She thanked Eli for giving her a

child, she thanked God for giving her a girl (truly unordinary), which gave her at least the

potential to instill the subject she knew best onto someone else, as well as someone to share in

her struggle. She was grateful, for a boy would have been too antithetical, and men with their

brawn and their loudness tended to scare her.

❖

She never expected to end up on a farm, Mary Grace. She had big dreams, as all little

girls do. Of knights and dragons, of being carried off on great white mares (expensive cars) to

live in castles (city skyscrapers), and marry handsome princes (men to love and embrace her

womanhood rather than putting up with her in spite). But that is simply the human experience, is

it not? Ashes to ashes, dreams fade away, and before you know it you’re married to a jailbird you

barely know with a god complex and a knack for agriculture.

“At least he still has his hair!” Mary Grace laughs out amongst her friends at their garden

parties, sipping tea none of them could really afford, raising their pinkies, and pretending to be

more than they are. She cries herself to sleep at night, clutching the bible in her arms. ‘Have

faith’, she tells herself. And that’s all she wrote.

❖

It was an unnaturally warm Sunday in February when Abeline first met Jude. Grandma

Annie’s glass pitcher in one hand and the hose in the other, she looked almost righteous in her

flowing white skirts. Her hair, never quite laying flat where it should to the dismay of her

mother, was wrangled into two thin braids which flowed down her thick back and danced in the

wind. Afraid of being caught doing “man’s work” once again and having no good excuse to be

standing among the pigs in her mud-stained slippers, Abeline stood tense against the heat and

sweated in spite of herself. She could hear her mother’s voice echoing in her mind, shouting:

‘She’s devotional to nothing but the pigs! I swear, we’d ought to tie her down to one of

those pews. I ain’t never seen God in a pigsty and I sure as day don’t ever intend to. I swear on

my mother’s grave if I see her out there one more time I’m throwing her over my shoulder like a

potato sack and you’re sending all those pigs early to Hades. I don’t understand the obsession!’

And her father would stay quiet, she knew, because he didn’t much mind the help on the

farm, and his useless wife was unable to provide him with a son to replace Abeline’s strong

hands and silence.

It wasn't an obsession, Abeline just liked the company of living things that didn’t look

down on her, didn’t judge her, they were pigs for God’s sake! In her mind, and in her mind only,

Abeline fought back and crafted an argument. It was a dirty pleasure of hers, a secret rebellion,

cathartic and true. She was in the middle of articulating her response, carefully choosing her

array of cuss words like finding the best pumpkin in the patch, thick and round and begging to be

cut into, when Jude walked up behind her and did nothing but stare. He was tall and too thin for

his height, and in the wind, his hair looked like the feathers of the chickens pecking at his shoes

that he attempted to kick away, but he was a boy Abeline’s age and they were alone. Nothing

more to say.

After staring for what felt to him mere seconds and what felt to Abeline’s back to be

years, he finally cleared his throat and began to speak in what would come to be a recognizable

deconstruction of grammar (by no fault of his own) and one of the thickest Nebraskan accents

Abeline would ever come to know.

“Pretty lady, let me take the hose from you. You ain’t meant to lift a finger, not now that

I’m around. And say, your dress is gettin' all dirty. Hell, what a shame.”

Abeline turned, looked at his face, and for the first time in her life willingly let a man

complete a task she knew well and sure she could easily accomplish herself. Bright smile...sharp

teeth? Without a word, she handed Jude the hose, who grinned at her politely, and nothing more.

For he too was ingrained with rules, but rules from his father. Never let a lady lift a finger,

always smile and tip your hat. He’d forgotten that last one in the moment, but he wasn’t ever

quite on the money when it came to women anyways.

Having given her plenty of space to respond and realizing she wasn’t going to take

advantage of that gap, Jude introduced himself as he poured the water from Grandma Annie’s

pitcher into the troughs, outlining the fact that he was hired by her father to work the farm a few

days a week, help out with the heavy lifting that the aging Eli didn’t find so easy to accomplish

any longer. Abeline nodded and tried to conjure the list from the cabinet into her mind:

2. You should look presentable always, never let yourself be seen as aesthetically

imperfect

8. Stay in your womanly lane. Let the man do the man’s work, don’t steal his honor.

Abeline smoothed the fabric of her skirt and blushed with the realization that he had

noticed its staining and that she had already failed regulation number two. She ran a hand across

the top of her head, thanked Jude for the help that she knew she hadn’t needed, and recognized

by looking in his eyes that from this moment on she was going to be worshiping more than just

the company of the pigs.

Jude’s smile was disarming, his eyebrows soft, his eyes glinting in a way that betrayed

his tongue and let you know that he was slicker than he appreciated letting on.

“Little lady, anytime. I would be happy to,” Jude said, nodding and finally tipping his hat.

He cleared his throat and continued on.

“Usually I find workin’ in the sun to be a damn chore, but I suppose with you bein' here

and all, I could manage workin'...if it were side-by-side”. Only Abeline heard him say ‘I

wouldn’t mind it, you know. Marry me, and I won't complain, I’ll be good for you, I’ll set you

free, and we’ll be equal. Side-by-side.’

Abeline, who had never seen the ocean before, or tasted any liquid salt on her lips apart

from her own sweat, felt as though she was drowning, drowning in the dry grasses of Nebraskan

farmlands, drowning under the rushing and unstoppable presence of her mother’s asking, of her

mother's determination to make her more than she was. She needed someone to pull her out and

her gentle, trustworthy heart pleaded for Jude to be that someone. And so Abeline dove headfirst

into a puddle, while her eyes convinced her it was a lake.

❖

They were married the following April on a little stretch of land the family owned down

by the creek that was nicknamed generations earlier to be the Arnold Rivvy for a reason that

escaped even the oldest members of Eli’s bloodline. Standing under a willow tree in a dress that

wasn’t quite white beside Jude who wore the same boots he was wearing on the day she met him,

Abeline vowed in front of God that she would belong to him until she died. All this to the intense

astonishment of her mother who was losing faith that this day would ever come to fruition, and

to the disappointment of her father who knew he was now going to be losing not one but two

good farmhands. She left the base of the willow tree as Mrs. Jude Isaac, unknowingly

condemned to a life of household captivity, forever bound to his name.

It was a bittersweet finality for Abeline, who always quietly maintained that she would

never belong to anyone but herself and had now become a heretic of her own denomination.

However, Abeline was made positive by the hope of at the very least new scenery, and felt

mature as she abandoned her childhood fantasies of independence, becoming a martyr for her

own curiosity. A true Joan of Arc, marching into the war of marriage, no shield but for a false

mask of naivety that her gender provided and the personal secret knowledge that she wasn’t the

average woman turned housewife, but a fully formed human individual with value beyond her

ability to be bred.

Part II

The New Testament

As is often the case, the progression of their marriage saw Jude become mean and

Abeline become indoctrinated into the language of a woman’s world, enduring indignity to retain

company, not that she realistically had a choice in the matter anyhow.

Jude had built them a new house stretching many endless dirt roads from the land that her

family owned, making her not only isolated by her landscape but thrown into a completely

unfamiliar environment, a child entering this strange and evil world with no means to brave it.

Abeline kept to herself mostly, speaking with the mother in her head who reminded her not to

mix the sugar with the salt and to look as if she stepped out of a salon every waking moment her

husband could possibly lay his eyes on her. Unfortunately he couldn’t afford Abeline the same

decency, often arriving home from the fields in mud-slung rags smelling of cow shit and tasting

of the same dust that seemed to infect every single crevice in Nebraska until you couldn’t breathe

without inhaling it.

She felt betrayed by her own stupidity, by her own willingness to succumb to the first

man who called her pretty. But that warm February day something in Jude Isaac’s eyes

convinced Abeline that he was something worth sacrificing for, and it was too late for salvation

when she discovered he was not.

❖

It was in the dog days of their third Nebraskan summer that the snake finally reared its

ugly head, dragged out of its burrow by the suffocating heat of the sun’s rays. Abeline, settled

into her role as a quiet maid and sharer of her husband’s bed on nights he wanted to feel the

smoothness of her skin and praise her for being so submissive, was washing Grandma Annie’s

glass pitcher in the sink when Jude walked into the house, dragging old hay across the threshold

and breaking her only haven, the sanctity of her solitude, disrupting her Eden until the songs

caught in the throats of her birds and all was silent except for the scripted “Welcome home

darling” that somehow escaped from Abeline’s throat, followed by “Sit, sit. I’ve almost finished

dinner”. Most days, Abeline had no idea how she reserved enough energy to utter the words, let

alone raise the pitch of her voice to reflect a familiar yet false exuberance.

Some days she felt she was being unfair, for he wasn’t a cruel man. He didn’t overstep

the boundaries of anything she watched her father do himself, he didn’t cuss at her without

reason, and he never raised his hand against anything but her cheek or chest. He didn’t make her

go to church and actually preferred not to go himself, a man who used the Lord’s name in vain as

if compelled by some undisclosed hatred buried deeply in his being. The truth Abeline wouldn’t

let crawl from her own chest was that he simply wasn’t who she pictured when she was young

and asked the stars, the dandelions, the birthday candles, and even the unconvincing God to give

her a husband who wasn’t like the rest and allowed her to be a true woman. Some days she felt

an apology scraping against her breastbone but she refused to acknowledge it, knowing it was

only grown from desperation. She wanted to abort the thought from her head, the devilish child

of her impetuosity, before it ever had the chance to live and walk the dust-ridden ground and be

mocked by the unfulfilling stars.

But even so, as she heard his entrance with her hands in the sink, the too-hot water

turning her delicate skin scarlet, and he arrived behind her as he did the day they met, the words

of ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll do better’ danced on her tongue and ached like a melting pill she

either had to swallow or expel, the acid melting away the soft flesh until she couldn’t stand it,

she needed a glass of water.

He made his way to the old wooden chair, his place at the head of the table, and picked a

strip of peeling paint from the left armrest, grimacing as he did, for it was another project to add

to his ever-growing list of improvements and work that repeated in a cycle he found to be not

only worthless but a waste of his abilities, on a small farm in the middle of nowhere with nobody

to recognize his accomplishments but his very average and very quiet wife. He stretched, she

served dinner. He commented on the dryness of the chicken, she shrugged. He asked for a glass

of milk, an act he was certainly well and able to complete himself. ‘Then why don’t you get it?’

ran through her mind, swaying like wheat in the wind, distracting her momentarily, before she

caught hold of herself and obliged. Suffocated by her ability to know better, the constricting

scarf of servitude strangling her neck. Watching him sit there and chew his chicken, feeling

glued to the seat, weighted and bound by a chain named ‘inevitability’, she wanted to spread her

lips and growl. Bare her teeth and speak into the air, ‘I would rather sit here and watch you

choke as you try to swallow me whole than ever cut my soul into smaller pieces just to help it go

down easier’. But the conversation, as it always seemed to, turned towards the expansion of

lineage, another branch on the family tree.

“Pregnant yet?” Jude asked in his brutish way, with no trace of delicacy. She could

appreciate his constant precision of language, never a hidden meaning, never a trace of nuance or

mystery. She bit her lip, braced for the disappointment she knew her response would cause, a

consistent repetition of ‘no, no not yet’, a failure to complete the one task she was created for.

Abeline sighed, looked at her plate so as to not see his eyes change color, and was quiet

for a moment.

“Hold faith, dear,” she said. “God will bless us when we are meant to be blessed.”

Grandma Annie’s pitcher, sitting in the middle of the table, now used to hold water for

her husband instead of the pigs, created a reflection. Dim against the intricate raised patterns, but

creating reflection nonetheless, the pitcher became a mirror in which Abeline could see her

features become her mother’s, against which Abeline could hear the echo of her mother’s voice.

The recognition she was no longer her own made her want to vomit across her plate of chicken

and solve the issue of it being too dry. Instead, she inwardly grimaced as Jude made a few

orthodox and impatient comments such as “Well it sure would be nice to have a hand around

here sometime soon” and “Come on now pretty lady, will you try for me? You know how much

it would mean to me” and “We can’t keep going on like this” as if holding her body close to his

and caressing her warm folds was such a chore. She didn't apologize but she nodded, agreed, and

asked Jude if he would like a second portion, to which he responded he had lost his appetite for

anything but her. With a false smirk on his face, more false than she knew, the pair moved on

from dinner rather quickly after that.

❖

Abeline came to learn the true meaning of blasphemy, of disregard towards sacredness,

of the hollow unimportance of the band of gold on her left ring finger, and of her mother’s 10-

item list taped onto the inside of the cabinet door. In an unexpected way, sure, but an

unavoidable one, for nothing survives the heavy fist of Time, not even a promise, not even a

God.

It was simple. She went to the farmer’s market to replace the produce her garden failed to

provide, begging for a supply of water she couldn’t keep up with. A human trying to battle the

sun was David versus Goliath. What followed was even simpler, a typical tragedy.

Scene One: The return. Abeline drops the paper bags onto the counter, wipes the thin

sheen of sweat from her forehead, and prepares to put the groceries away.

Scene Two: There is a can of tomato soup in Abeline’s hand when she hears odd noises

coming from her usually uninhabited house. As a superstitious girl, she fears a haunting, and her

irrationality glues her to the kitchen tile.

Scene Three: Grandma Annie’s pitcher is in Abeline’s hand when the voices multiply,

and she gets her feet to start moving. Sometimes all you need to start anew is a strike of sudden

bravery, a few short wild seconds of courage. She makes her way toward the noise.

The Climax: Abeline is led by her ears to the thick oak door of her bedroom, the one she

shares with Jude, which appears to now host two grunting demons, incessantly exuding strange

noises. She opens the door.

The Finale: Inside her bedroom and under the sheets, Abeline’s husband Jude is

fornicating with their closest neighbor, Lizzie Magdalen's husband, doing what the shy girls

Abeline attended school with preferred to call ‘the cowboy shimmy’.

The curtains draw over the scene as Abeline’s eyes shut and she takes a deep breath. The

noises stop, and she hears her husband, for the first time in his life, transform into the one

pleading, to be the one offering up apologies, to be the one begging in his submissive position.

Grandma Annie’s glass pitcher slips from Abeline’s hands and crashes at her feet, sending shards

all over the sun-bleached hardwood of her bedroom floor. Intense guilt so full it makes her

nauseous enters her bloodstream, questions of why and how and who.

‘Am I such a failure,’ thinks Abeline, ‘that my husband finds more pleasure laying with a

man than he does me?’

Her thoughts shift. ‘Am I so unwomanly,’ thinks Abeline, ‘that I could begin to appease a

man with an obvious taste for masculinity?’

But at the end of the day, it didn’t really matter. A man, a woman, a cow. What bothered

Abeline was that it wasn’t her, that he caused so easily this cavern in the pit of her stomach that

bubbled with the consciousness that she simply wasn’t enough, after each inch of herself she had

offered to him, whatever the reason being insignificant. Atonement for the ease of her acceptance

into this life with him? Atonement for her recklessness? Atonement for her initial reluctance,

atonement for the time ‘before’ when she vowed to forever be her own entity. The universe

scoffing at her, laughing, ‘you were built from his rib! Dust to dust, bone to bone, you will return

to him regardless’ and she did. Oh God, she did.

Judas.

‘He’s crucified me,’ thinks Abeline. And history repeats itself, her crown of thorns rests

on her forehead. The false prophet, the king of the fools.

‘Forgive me, Mother, for I have sinned,’ thinks Abeline, realizing all her mother, the

womb of her conception, must have withstood to craft such a list of commandments, to be able to

declare that ‘love can’t exist without a little truth-stretching’’. She should have understood, she

should have thanked her. Glorious retrospect.

❖

Oh, the curse of womanhood, grief as your birthright, condemned to bereavement before

conception, their names echoing with each heartbeat: Pandora, Lilith, Eve. Mother, daughter,

unholy spirit. Womanhood, the Devil’s gateway. Open the box, steal his seed, bite the apple.

Feel the juice drip across your breast and smile. Doomed from the start, sealed fate, not even

offered the decency of enjoying it. A suppression of power, a manipulation of truth. You are less,

you are small, you belong to me. You are woman and you are mother, and then you are dead;

There is nothing more.

❖

Abeline did become mother, in the middle of a great snowstorm, the worst Nebraska had

seen in years, in the same bed and on the same sheets, in the same room in which she confirmed

that there was no God and there was no hope for deliverance. If a second life existed, and in

Heaven she was still a woman, she was sure she had no interest. If Jesus came for a second time

and walked the earth and allowed her entrance into the afterlife she would spit in his face and

call him a fucking liar.

❖

Abeline did become a mother, in the middle of a great snowstorm, as she studied the

water stains patterning the ceiling, vaguely shaped like islands, baring her teeth to a God she

knew wasn’t there. She has never forgiven whatever it was she was staring at, and she can count

on seeing the pattern of the water stains each time she closes her eyes. In that cold bed, her

husband standing beside her silently with furrowed brows, she gave birth to a little girl and

cursed at the sky, felt anguish rip through her chest. The circle of life, the cycle continues. Out

the window, the night drew still, the snow cleared enough for her to witness the night sky. To the

stars she wished on when she was young and dreaming felt useful she screamed “My God, My

God! Why have you forsaken me?” and the words ripped her raw as they clambered their way

from her throat.