For Noah (an oldie and not necessarily so goodie)
For Noah
Noah lifted the bird, his two hands cupped around its warm body. It felt incredibly light, more a thought than a thing. The feathers were sort of soft and powdery, like the finest linen but even finer than that. It seemed to slip from his fingers like water, and he watched it fly off over the water of the Flood.
“Will it come back?” asked Ham, his eyes wide as he watched the bird fade into the hazy sunlight.
“Of course it will come back,” declared Japheth with certainly. “Father says it will come back, as God has promised.” Noah felt ashamed at this, at Japheth’s credulity, at the way his son mimicked his, Noah’s, words. “It will bring a sign that there is land once more.”
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Shem glanced at him and rolled his eyes, but Noah did not share his eldest son’s cynicism. Noah still believed in The God, but his opinion of Him had changed since the water came. He no longer believed in a benevolent or just God. This God punished.
And so, when he used the name of The God to keep up the spirits of his younger sons, he felt a measure of dread, as if he were being watched, and would be stricken down with lightning, or fire, or…or anything, really. He still couldn’t forget the screams of his neighbors, the pleas.
“You may not offer them aid, Noah,” the Voice of The God had told him. “They are unworthy, and can not be allowed to stain the line of men with their seed.” So he had watched as the waters rose, and had wept as his neighbors screamed as it closed over their rooftops, and finally over their heads. Noah would never forget their curses as they died.
So what if they hadn’t believed him? So what if they didn’t totally fall into line and accept the fact that he was a representative of the One and Only? Did that mean they should die?
“What if they don’t believe me?” he’d asked.
“They must, for I have put my mark upon you.”
As he always did, Noah looked down at himself. He held out his bare arms, saw nothing but the dark skin, the curly hair and the tiny flecks of sawdust caught there. “You know, you’re always saying that but I can’t see anything…”
“Your mark, Noah, is your belief.” And, because the voice had said something that Noah couldn’t ever have actually thought of…again, Noah believed him. Again.
Even so, he’d felt more than a little guilty about it. He’d never really been that persuasive, had inherited most of his wealth, and had a reputation, frankly, as a bit of a drunkard.
“Where are you going, Noah,” they’d asked him. “Where are you going with those two goats?”
And to them he would reply, “To my home, where I am building a boat, a boat that will save my family from the coming flood.”
They would look up into the clear blue sky and laugh. “There is no rain, Noah, no flood,” they would say, “Go back to your jar of wine! Have another beer!”
“The One God has told me that it will rain,” he answered, with all the sincerity he could manage. “He has told me to build the boat that will protect my family against the rising water.”
“A boat?” they would say, and laugh some more. “The sea is tens days’ journey south! You’re a farmer, not a sailor!”
“The One God has told me how to build it,” he would reply with conviction, “right down to the very last cubit.”
“What’s a cubit, Noah?” they jeered.
“I’m not really sure,” he always admitted before scurrying off, goats, or whatnot, in tow.
And now they were gone. All of them, right down to the last temple prostitute. Noah glanced at his wife, a genial enough woman who’d arrived with a sizeable dowry, and sighed; he’d particularly miss the temple prostitutes.
The rest of them, though… Well, it was better to just forget it, wasn’t it? They hadn’t seen a body in quite some time, thank the Not So Merciful Lord; for a while they were as numerous as grains in a wheat field, and it seemed that they were afloat in some vast, horrible stew. People and animals, animals and people; nothing had lived but the fish and the ducks.
And the things that The God had told him to save.
A tiny voice caused him to look down. “Father, dinner. Dinnertime.”
He smiled down into the brown eyes of his youngest daughter. She was only four years old, the apple of his eye, and her potential husbands, like those of her sisters, had been whittled down to her immediate male kin.
“And what kind of solution is that?” he muttered beneath his breath. He patted his daughter upon the head, felt her soft hair, reminding him of the feathers of the dove. The bird would not return. The bird who, like him, had been sent on a fool’s errand by a capricious lord. If the bird found land it should stay rather than return to this ship of the damned.
“What was that, Father?” asked Shem who was old enough to think that he should be included in every conversation. Noah loved his son with a fierce passion, but he didn’t want to be Japheth or Ham once he, Noah, had passed into the Everafter promised him by The God. Shem, who envied Noah because The God spoke only to him, and who wished to learn everything about their divine benefactor.
But some things Noah would keep private, and let his son discover for himself. “Nothing,” said Noah, his hand still on his daughter’s head, his eyes on the deep blue of the water, the white line of foam that fled like spreading wings behind the boat. The world was gone, covered in water, and with it the jeers and taunts of the others, the way they had discounted him.
The way he hadn’t measured up to his father.
If it wasn’t for the temple girls…
He turned away from the railing, saw his children looking at him expectantly, saw the pride and the belief in their eyes, and he realized that, in all the world, there wasn’t a tougher man alive than he. He could outdrink, outfight, and outfart any other man alive. The Flood had done that much, at least.
And he was really glad to be alive. Seeing so much death did that to a man.
He bent and lifted his daughter in his arms, smelling the clean innocence of her, the life in her. She was light as a feather in his grasp, and her eyes glowed as she looked at him, radiant with purity and love. It seemed that he could see a thousand generations, a thousand other eyes in hers. His sons clustered behind him, jostling and bumping like boulders in a landslide, impatient and too eager, heedless of the sudden impacts awaiting them.
“Dinner!” called Noah’s wife.
“Come,” said Noah, moving toward the awning his wife had erected, and where she was setting out the roasted meats. “Come, we will eat.”
“Good,” squealed his daughter, burying her face in his beard. “I’m starved.”
“What’s for dinner?” asked Ham. Noah’s youngest boy trotted along, his hand clasped in Shem’s.
“Dragon eggs, I think,” answered Noah.
“That’s tomorrow,” said Japheth with certainty, “Today’s unicorn.”
“MMMmmmmm,” they said and settled onto the cushions, and the platters were set before them, the meat smothered in a tangy sauce of sesame and chilies. In the corner a second spiraled horn had joined the first.
He licked the grease from his fingers with a sigh. If the damn bird didn’t come back soon, they’d have to eat the Yetis.
His wife sat down beside him, her broad rump resting against his leg and he felt the old familiar stirrings. He set his hand on her thigh, and stroked it absently, his hand moving unconsciously with the rhythm of the waves. Her smile was a promise.
“Things could be worse,” he said under his breath. “Things could be much worse.”
And, as the ark drifted upon the choppy sea, Noah realized that, for him at least, life was pretty good.