Moses, Man of the Mountain (25 page)

The people had missed the whole point of his forty-odd years of work. He loved freedom and justice with a fierce love and he wanted Israel to be free and just. All that he had done to them and for them was intended to bring them to his viewpoint. And here they were wanting to be like other halted people that they touched along the way. They despised their
high destiny. They misunderstood him so far that they even offered him a crown! As if he could not have had that from the very first. He could have led them to Midian and with Jethro to help him, set up a kingdom within a few weeks after leaving Egypt. He need not have experienced a wilderness, and deserts and hunger and thirst and misunderstanding and sacrifice to wear a crown. The hem of the sky ran in close around him and oppressed him. It took a long time to thrust it out again. Well, anyway, he could hope. He had produced the physical base for greatness.

These young Hebrews were something. They were bound to get somewhere if only they fell into the right hands after he was gone. And that put him to thinking back. The mood stayed on him for several days. Then the cloud of fire lifted from above the tabernacle and moved the Israelites to the plain at the foot of Mount Hor. And it rested there so Israel camped awhile.

As soon as they had gotten settled down, Aaron sent a delegation of Levites to Moses to protest a decision Moses had made about the services. Moses listened until they were through and then he said, “The words you have brought here in your mouths are not your own. Somebody else made them and loaded your mouth up with ’em. Go back and tell Aaron to come and tell me what he’s got to say his own self.”

Aaron came, but he took his own time about it. He explained to Moses that his beard-boy was looking after his beard so he could not come right away.

“Your beard-boy?” Moses exclaimed.

“Now, Moses, you know the Lord has given me as a sign of special favor the longest and the finest whiskers in all Israel. And me being who I am I don’t really have time to do for it like I should. So I had to sign up one of the young men around the altar to wait on my beard and tend to it. I give him the responsibility and if it gets out of shape and careless looking he’ll have to suffer for it. The Lord don’t want His gifts to be despised.”

It all sank into the mind of Moses and he thought it over well before he spoke.

“Aaron, do you think that if you had of stayed back there in Egypt that the Lord would have bothered about whether your whiskers was greased or not?”

“We don’t need to waste time over that because I ain’t back there in Egypt. A smart man like me couldn’t be kept down like that nohow. I got too much brains for people. You don’t meet my kind every day. I let folks think they are using me for a tool when all the time I’m using them for a step-ladder.”

Moses felt an acid wind from Aaron’s words blowing across his face. He didn’t need to look at the man to read him. He had been reading him for forty years or so. He didn’t need to look for interpretation. He knew the meaning before he heard the words. So he went on to conclusions.

“Aaron, we’re here at Mount Hor—not too far from the Jordan, but still a little distance off. I’m going up in the mountain to ask the Lord what He wants me to do next. Would you like to go up with me this time?”

“That’s all goodness been begging righteous to do all these forty years. I should have been up there to meet God at Sinai. It made me look like a fool before Israel. The high priest his own self can’t go to see God!”

“Well, you can go with me this time, Aaron. We won’t have no hard words about all those other times you didn’t go. But if God had of asked for you, Aaron, I would have come straight back and told you.”

“I hope you would have, Moses.”

“All right, come on and let’s go. But let’s take your oldest boy Eleazar along with us. God might want to see him and talk with him, too. No telling, he might make a fine priest when he gets a little older.”

“I ain’t got the least doubt about that, Moses. I done my best to bring him up right. He’d look noble in the robes, too—after I am gone.”

The three men went up the mountainside together. Aaron and Moses walked a little ahead and Eleazar followed respect
fully behind. Moses wore a short robe belted in at the waist with his traditional short sword at his side. He walked with his rod in his left hand, and now and then he helped Aaron over rough places with his right. They went up and round the mountain and then up. The huge camp of Israel below them began to take on a pattern. Moses saw that Aaron had stopped stroking his beard and was panting hard. So he paused and turned to Eleazar and told him, “Eleazar, you wait here until I call you. Your father is going higher up. He’s got to listen to God.”

Moses could see the tired old shoulders of Aaron stiffen with pride at that. He almost stood erect. They traveled on up the mountain for some time yet. Nobody tried to talk because both of them realized it was useless then. At last Moses stopped before a cool grotto in the mountainside with a rude stone seat inside. Aaron practically dragged himself to the seat and panted a long time before he could measure out his breath.

“Do you always have to climb this high to talk with God?” Aaron asked when he got his breath back.

“Higher than this, Aaron. Sometimes men have to push through the sky to reach Him. We stopped here to rest a minute, that’s all.”

Aaron groaned out loud.

“Supposing we talk awhile then, Aaron. I’m the leader of Israel and you’re the high priest and we ain’t had our heads together since way back there, Aaron, before Sinai.”

“That’s right, but it ain’t no fault of mine. I been kept back in the background and I been kept in the dark about things. You don’t never tell me nothing. Joshua is the only one that gets any information around here.”

“Well, Canaan is right close now and we ain’t got too much time to talk and plan. You know things won’t be the same over there that it is out here in the wilderness.”

“Don’t I know it? I been waiting for it for forty years. I’m getting pretty old, but I think I can make it. It won’t be so hard
over there as it is in the wilderness nohow. Then Israel can reward me for my labors.”

“But the Lord said, Aaron, that all the old folks who came out of Egypt had to die in the wilderness, all except Joshua and Caleb.”

“Oh, I never took much stock in that, Moses. I’m not the people, you know. I believe I’m going to make it and when I do, I mean to be folks over there. The thought of it has kept me living or else I would have gone like Miriam. She fretted herself to death about who was going to get us there. That was foolish. I let who can get us there, then we can see about things after that. I know how to handle people.”

“You think so, Aaron?”

“I sure do, unless I’m mighty mistaken.” Aaron sat stroking his beard with a little gesture that was smug and flourishing at the same time. He knew he was important and he knew his clothes were fine. He looked just as satisfied as the snake that lives under God’s foot-stool.

“Yet and still, Aaron, you have never done anything that I could not have prevented if I had wanted to and you never done a thing that I didn’t undo.”

“It’s not too late, Moses. We’re born but we ain’t dead yet.”

Moses stood up suddenly and looked Aaron straight in the eye. Aaron unveiled his eyes for the first time in front of Moses since the law was given at Sinai. There was neither love nor mercy in his look.

“You got your power and your brains, Moses, but you ain’t never made the people happy like you said.”

“I never said I’d make them happy people. I promised to make them great. Anyway, happiness is not something you can catch and lock up in a vault like wealth. Happiness is nothing but everyday living seen through a veil.”

“Well, I can give ’em what they want better than you ever did, and I’ll show you when we get over there. You can’t scare people away from what they want over there. We won’t need you any more. My time is coming just like I always knowed it would.”

He gave Moses a look full of triumph and old hatred.

“Take off those robes, Aaron,” Moses said shortly.

Aaron acted as if he didn’t hear Moses right away. Then he gave Moses a scornful look. Then he chuckled slightly and crossed his legs and smoothed the skirts of his priestly robe.

“Aaron, take off those robes.”

“I ain’t going to do it, Moses. God put these robes on me and He’ll have to be the one to take ’em off. I know you been begrudging ’em to me for a powerful long time. I just wouldn’t step down for you.”

“God didn’t put no robes on you, Aaron. I put ’em on you and I’m taking them off, because they don’t fit you.”

“You mean God never called me down there in Egypt at all?”

“No, Aaron.”

“You told me He did.”

“Yes, I did, Aaron. I thought I needed you for the big job I had to do because you were of the Hebrews. I did need you too, but you didn’t do the job I picked out for you.”

“You always held me back. You—”

“No, you got the wrong idea altogether. You held yourself back. You didn’t think about service half as much as you did about getting served, Aaron. Your tiny horizon never did get no bigger, so you mistook a spotlight for the sun.”

Aaron began to crumble. He didn’t look at Moses any more. He began to finger his garments in different places all over himself and to dwindle and shrink.

“Those robes don’t belong to you, Aaron. I planned them for a bigger man. Take ’em on off.”

“What would I do without my robes?” Aaron wailed in anguish. “They’re mine! They belong to the high priest. How do I know that God didn’t call me? You said so yourself.”

Moses snatched Aaron to his feet and Aaron looked into the eyes of Moses and lifted off his high headpiece and set it down on a stone in a soft, regretful way. Then piece by piece he shed his robes to his last undergarment and stood with his old corded arms and legs protruding from the short garment.
Moses stooped and collected all of the rich regalia and laid them carefully on a rock. Aaron watched him without daring to move his feet out of his tracks until Moses turned back to him again.

“Aaron.”

“Yes, Moses,” Aaron whimpered.

“Aaron, you can’t go over yonder with the people.”

“Why, Moses? You know I always done the best I could.”

“No. Not for the people, Aaron. You are blind. You didn’t see Miriam and her face. You didn’t see the graveyards in the wilderness. You didn’t see the significance of the Ark of the Covenant nor the Tent of Testimony. All you saw was the gold and silver vessels and the robes and the power that goes with it. No, Aaron, you can’t go over there and make a fool out of Israel’s graves.”

“What am I going to do then, Moses? You can’t leave me looking like this. “How can I go back before Israel?”

“You can’t go back before Israel, Aaron.”

Aaron looked hard in Moses’ face and fell to his knees.

“Moses! Moses, please. I’ll be a lot of help to you from now on. Moses, spare me, if you please.”

Moses looked way off across the plain where the tents of Israel stretched for miles and held his eyes for a long pause. Then he said, “I haven’t spared myself, Aaron. I had to quit being a person a long time ago, and I had to become a thing, a tool, an instrument for a cause. I wasn’t spared, Aaron. No.”

“No, and you didn’t spare my two sons at Sinai—just for dancing and making a little ceremony before a god of Egypt which we had always known. My poor boys—you killed them!”

“I didn’t kill your boys at Sinai, Aaron, though I know that you have always accused me of it, and hated me. But you know just as well as I do why they died. What they signified had to die if Israel was to be great.”

“Let me be high priest over there, Moses, in the big new tabernacle with—”

“No, Aaron.”

Aaron crawled to the knees of Moses and clasped them. “Moses, looks like pity and mercy would—”

“Aaron, the future of Israel is higher than pity and mercy. And why should I spare you? I did not spare the first-born. I did not spare Pharaoh. I did not spare myself. I did not spare my wife and my friend. Jethro is dead and I might have spent several more happy years with him instead of out in the wilderness leading a people and being reviled for doing what was best instead of what was popular. No, Aaron, nothing and nobody has been spared to make this nation great. And since you wouldn’t give yourself in any other way, Aaron, you will have to do something for Israel by denial.”

“Moses, you don’t need to take me along. Just let me go up here in the mountain and let me shift for myself. Please, Moses, don’t kill me.”

“You don’t mean that, Aaron. You mean to double back and appeal to the people to back you up on account of your age and place. No, Aaron, fifty years of work can’t be destroyed to give you a tomb in Canaan. God called you on Mount Hor. The tomb of Aaron the first high priest of Israel will be huge and fine, high up in this noble mountain. God has built you a pyramid greater than Pharaoh, and generations of Israelites will make pilgrimages to the grave of Aaron, the patriot. God will remember your sacrifice and guard your memories.”

The knife descended and Aaron’s old limbs crumpled in the dust of the mountain. Moses looked down on him and wept. He remembered so much from way back. “Is this my brother? Is this pitiful old carcass blood of my blood? Maybe this is me myself in other moods. Who am I to judge him?” Moses looked down the mountain at tented Israel and shook his head. “I have made a nation, but at a price.” Then he buried Aaron and marked the place. “Poor Aaron, he died so hard for God!” Then he picked up the robes and walked firmly down the mountain to where Eleazar waited.

“Put on these robes, Eleazar. You are high priest now.” The young man seized the robes eagerly. Then he halted for
a moment and looked back up the mountain the way Moses had come down. He looked back the second time and then he looked into the face of Moses and began to undress himself. He dressed himself in the priestly scarlet and purple and set the breastplate of twelve stones upon his bosom. After that he never looked back again. He straightened his figure to set his garments well and fell in beside Moses and they started down the mountain side by side.