Noah's Wife

by Lindsay Starck

  If Noah’s face loses some of its enthusiastic color at her words, Mrs. McGinn does not notice. She is gazing instead at the town that lies below her, the buildings battered and weary. She knows that many of the town’s former inhabitants—indeed, even many of those malcontented souls still living here today—would tell her that it would be wiser to give up on this place, to pack her bags and try her hand at life in a place that isn’t forever haunted by its own past, that needn’t live within the shadow of its former glory. But who among us is not haunted by her past? Mrs. McGinn would like to know. Who among us is as bright or as full or as strong as she was, or as she could be?

  three

  In the town where Mauro grew up, the showers were brief and radiant.

  When he remembers Italy now, he remembers the sun beaming through sheets of rain that slid in colored panes from the clouds to the ground. He remembers indigo skies and salty gusts of wind and the crisp, clean air at the end of thunderstorms, when standing water shimmered in piazzas like small and shallow wishing wells. He has been to Rome many, many times, and he has heard the legend the tour guides feed the tourists between slices of street pizza and cups of handmade gelato, so he is well aware of the connection between water and wishes.

  What he wouldn’t give right now for two scoops of pistachio!

  The legend goes like this: By throwing one coin in the fountain, the tourist is guaranteed to return someday to Rome. The second coin promises marriage; the third is for charity.

  When he was a child, so cynical of superstition, it was easy to scoff at the foreigners and dismiss the legend. As he has aged, however, and as his return trip to Italy has become more and more unlikely, he has found himself wishing that he, too, had the assurance of knowing that he would one day set foot again on Italian soil. When he thinks about the untossed coin, he realizes that this simple act of faith, the flinging of the token, would have been of great comfort to him. Perhaps it would not even have mattered whether he returned, as long as he could remain happy in his hope. Now that he is older and, as he would say, wiser in the ways of the world, he tends more toward the superstitious beliefs initially impressed upon him by his grandmothers because it reassures him to feel as though he has some control over his fate, as if he possesses the knowledge necessary to crack the code of an enigmatic and exasperating cosmos.

  How was he to know what fortune had in store for this place? When he arrived here, the future shone like a silver river in the sun—and now all the hope that is left in this town is rotting in the rain. Mauro tries not to think about it, for what good does it do to dwell on these things? He makes wishes on puddles and wards off bad omens. He has been betting on this town for years, and when the situation begins to go from bad to worse, he has little choice but to hold his head high and continue to bet on it still.

  True, he also has a plan that is more concrete. At the end of every month he transfers the remainder of his profits from his cash register into sealed plastic bags, which he then carries down to the river and tucks under the seat of his old fishing craft. He knows this is a senseless place to hide his life savings, but that is what he likes about it. It is illogical, unreasonable. No one would think to look for it there. He has not yet saved enough to buy a ticket to Italy or to reestablish himself at home, but one day he will. He is sure of it.

  In the meantime, he has the general store. Perhaps he shouldn’t have it, but he does, thanks to one of the few lucky hands he’s been dealt in his life. The owner of the store was drunk on Mauro’s wine when he made up his mind to gamble it, and the day after he lost it to Mauro he packed up his wife and his kids and took off. No one has heard from him since. Mauro believes that the man was planning to leave anyway, that there must have been some other, underlying reason for his behavior, something else that was distressing him—why else would he have been so careless with the store?—but Mauro never found out what it was. And then he was gone. Mrs. McGinn blames Mauro for the family’s departure, but Mauro tries not to let this bother him. That woman is always blaming somebody for something.

  “But only because she is loving this town,” he explains to the minister and his wife when Noah tells him what she said to them. “Her love is a rough love.”

  “Do you mean tough love?” asks the minister, a bit perplexed, but Mauro has already ambled away.

  It is the day after the burial, and Mauro is walking through the old church with Noah. The new minister requested his advice for fixing up the building, which has fallen into disrepair. Rain is seeping in beneath the windowsills and dripping through a leaky ceiling. As he goes, Mauro marches through the moss sprouting plush from soaking carpets, swinging his arms through cobwebs, stepping over broken glass, and compiling a mental inventory of everything that needs to be cleaned or repaired. He speaks aloud for Noah’s benefit.

  “The benches, they are seeming okay,” he says, rapping the back of the pew with his knuckles. He climbs the steps to the altar. “The carpet up here, maybe we need a new one, because of the things that are growing. Painting, we do that. We fix the windows and dry the basement and check the pipes and the wires and the fans.”

  “But the birds?” asks Noah’s wife from the back of the church, gazing up into the rafters. “What will we do with them?”

  Mauro glances up, and then down. The ceiling is high and dark and the white plaster is cracked, crossed with oaken beams that are lined with scraps of leaves and hollow pieces of yellow straw that the birds have carried inside to construct their nests. The floor is littered with twigs and halves of broken blue eggshells. Some of the birds perch on the backs of empty pews and peck at hymnals while others fly from beam to beam in great swooping arcs, diving at Noah’s head when he accidentally steps below their nests. He ducks and hurries to join Mauro at the altar, where the Italian proceeds to point out the warped wood of the pulpit and the rust eating away at the chain that bears the eternal flame. The flame has long since gone out.

  “There’s certainly a lot to get done!” exclaims Noah, lifting a hand and wiping it across his brow. It is cool in the church, but his forehead is beaded with sweat. He turns to Mauro with a smile so broad that his face could have buckled with the weight of it. “Well, as Solomon would say—let us arise and be doing! Fear not, be not dismayed!”

  “What?” says Mauro.

  “First Chronicles,” cites Noah’s wife, still at the far end of the aisle.

  “Ah,” says Mauro. He shoots a toothy grin back at the minister. “What the optimist! How full are your glasses!”

  “I’m sorry?” says Noah.

  “It’s an expression,” Mauro explains. He loves nothing better than a good idiom. “You and me, Minister, we are like the two beans of the pod. We are the happy ones, the hopers. I am hoping that one of these days I will be going home, and you are hoping that if you can be fixing the roof and the lights and the carpets and the windows and the pipes and the—”

  “Yes, I get it,” says Noah, a little more sharply than before.

  “You are hoping that if you are fixing those things, then everyone will be coming to your church!”

  “Why wouldn’t they?” presses Noah. Mauro sees him glance toward the silhouette of his wife, her face tinted blue in the wet light of the stained-glass window. “Why wouldn’t they come for me, if they were coming for Reverend Matthews?”

  Mauro shrugs, waves at the moss in the carpet. “Why do you think this place is looking this way? We have not been coming to the church for a lot of time now.”

  “But you did once?”

  “Of course,” replies Mauro. “But then the rain was coming. And then it was raining here for a long time. So long that nobody now is remembering when it was starting. And finally one day the old minister said, enough and enough, we will all go to the church and we will pray for the rain to end. So, we all went to the church for the praying. Even the people who were not really believing in God were praying because why not? And we prayed and we prayed. For a long time we were going up
to the church every day, and we were praying and we were singing and we were lighting the candles. It was beautiful, the church with all the candles.”

  “And what happened?” asks Noah.

  Mauro shoots him a wry grin. “Look to the windows!” he says. “What do you mean, what happened? Nothing happened. No one heard the singing, no one answered the prayers. After many days some people stayed home, and were not climbing up to the church anymore. Then more people stayed home, and more, and finally no one was going to the church at all.” He peers at Noah, his gaze keen and kind. “It is good to believe about your God. It is a beautiful dream, and it helps some people, it gives them strength in heart. But it is harder to believe about your God when we are asking and asking and asking for help and it is turning out that no one is listening to us. Then we are thinking: What is the bother? Maybe there is no God up there, or maybe He is there, and He is hearing us, but He doesn’t care.”

  There is a pause. Noah moves to the splintered bench behind the pulpit, his limbs heavy. He drops down to the bench and takes a long, slow breath. His wife is by his side before Mauro has a chance to speak, flitting around her husband with worried hands.

  “Noah,” she says. “Are you all right?”

  He shakes his head as a dog would shake off water. “Of course I am,” he says briskly. “Of course. This church will be even more of a challenge than I had expected—but it’s nothing I can’t handle.”

  His wife agrees. “Right,” she says. “It’s nothing we can’t handle. You helped double the congregation in the city, remember? People here will love you just as much as they did there.”

  She slides into place beside him, opens her leather satchel, and removes a pen and a softcover notebook. While Mauro watches, the two of them sit together with their heads bowed over the paper, speaking in soft, low tones to each other. After a few minutes they seem to forget that Mauro is there, and although he considers leaving, he remains where he is. He whistles to the birds in the rafters and pulls a stale cookie from his pocket to tempt them down, and when they alight calmly on the railing right in front of him, he wonders if this is how the old minister filled his time throughout all those rainy months while he was waiting for his congregants to return to him. When one of the birds pecks the crumbs from Mauro’s palms, Mauro feels a quick stab of guilt. Why didn’t he come up here to check on the man? Why didn’t he invite him for a glass of wine or for a meal? What was the old man thinking about as he watched his church disintegrating around him, as he waited for the rain to cease its pattering against his leaky roof?

  When Noah and his wife rise from their bench and approach Mauro with a list of supplies they will need from the general store, Mauro nods at them and accepts the list without comment. He shrugs, shakes Noah’s hand, and promises to deliver the supplies tomorrow morning. Who is he to tell them that their plan to rebuild this congregation is a futile one? Would they even listen if he told them to get out of here while they still could?

  The truth is that Mauro is not certain what he believes. He will not pray to Noah’s God, but he will throw salt over his shoulder if he spills it and he will only have his hair cut at the new moon. His neighbors find him ridiculous, but that hasn’t stopped him yet.

  If, in order to avoid bad luck, Mauro refuses to set his hat on the bed, or step on a spider, or place his bread upside down on the table—where is the harm? If he deliberately does not tell a mother who enters his general store that her baby is beautiful because he fears calling a hex down upon the poor child’s head—should that mother not be grateful? When Mauro left Italy for America he did not believe in any of this because he was immature and impressionable and he believed instead in things like justice and science and humanity and friendship. If he realizes now that these ideals are harder to come by in this country than he expected them to be, if he sometimes feels friendless or heartsick, why not place some faith in the other powers that could be? Why not allow himself to feel as though his small human choices (the placement of a hat or a feather), the actions that no one else notices or cares about, are not unattended but instead are witnessed and remembered by a highly responsive universe?

  In any case, if he had thrown a coin into that Roman fountain, at least he would have more hope of returning. He didn’t always love the rain in Italy, either, but at least there it didn’t feel so heavy, or so dark. At least there, the sun shone through. This is how he remembers it.

  He has never yearned so much for home.

  four

  The zookeeper became a zookeeper in the first place because even though he doesn’t like animals much at all, he likes people even less.

  He finds animals dull and people tiresome and the only person he can bear to be around for more than ten minutes at a time is Mrs. McGinn’s daughter. If truth be told (as the zookeeper always believes it should be), she has her faults. For example: she sneezes all the time. Her toes turn slightly in. As an only child she is spoiled and aggressively competitive. She talks with food in her mouth. Finally, and not least, her mother has instilled in her a sense of distrust toward the world in general and lovers in particular that the zookeeper has had to work hard to overcome. If ever he speaks too long to a pretty visitor at the zoo (these are few and far between), to one of his female neighbors, even to a woman of the McGinns’ own clan, he will catch in his fiancée’s eye the same fierce gleam that he sees in the eyes of wolves or predatory cats. He is not afraid of much, but sometimes he is afraid of her.

  “Don’t even think about it,” she’ll say to him, her voice needlelike and cold.

  “I’m not!” he says. “I’m not thinking about it at all!”

  She will then plant a proprietary kiss on his mouth, satisfied. He watches the fluttering of her hair as she stalks away from him, certain that if she ever caught him with someone else, she’d take one of the toothy bread knives from the diner and come after him. He loves how perilous she can be.

  Sometimes when she turns up to see him at work they will lounge together on the banks of the silver river where it runs through the zoo. Lately she has taken to bringing an oversized beach umbrella that she stakes into the mud beside them, providing makeshift shelter from the rain. He likes to examine her there, to trace his finger through the red-gold down that runs along her limbs, to watch one of her hands toy with the end of her meager braid while the other rests on the zookeeper’s knee or on the knuckle side of his hairy fist. If she is there after hours he will often take her hand and lead her back to the long-abandoned gibbon enclosure, where he will push her up against the hard stucco wall and make love to her right there, the gray wolves howling in the woods and the rain rushing through the eaves above them, her feet off the ground and her legs wrapped halfway around his back, which is as far as she can reach. The zookeeper is not a small man. He is bulky and muscular and covered in a coarse dark hair. He towers over his neighbors and shows no fear of the animals, not even at feeding time when the wolves lunge toward the buckets of raw red meat that he hangs from thick, fleshy wrists. Mrs. McGinn’s daughter licks the ridges of his ear, calls him her grizzly bear.

  On his rounds he whistles in the rain and swings a pail of oats and overripe vegetables back and forth through the air. Later on he pushes a wheelbarrow full of hay from the barn to the cattle enclosure, one hand shielded over his face to keep the water from falling into his eyes. He dumps the hay over the fence while the highland cows consider him without fear, their gazes half hidden beneath their shaggy locks, their coats soaked. Behind them the antelope and the gazelle are grazing, their silhouettes soft and gold against the charcoal sky. The reindeer stands stock-still beneath a dogwood tree, his antlers caught once again in the branches. The zookeeper heaves a sigh, straddles the fence, and strides over with his garden rake to untangle the stupid beast. His boots sink several inches in the mud and it requires some effort to lift them. He grunts at the rain, exasperated and disturbed. The zoo was built in the lowest part of town, a piece of ground that used to be marshla
nds until it was filled in before construction. The triangle-shaped park juts out into the water, bordered on two sides by the river and on the third by a small creek that runs in front of the main entrance. At the time, the city planners believed that the site would attract native waterfowl and that the arching bridge to the entrance would soon become iconic. Now the zookeeper wonders how many more days he has until the entire zoo sinks back into the swamps from which it rose.

  He trudges through the rest of his tasks while he waits for Mrs. McGinn’s daughter to join him. As the daylight fades she comes to find him where he stands in the aviary, listening to the parrot and watching the toucan swoop in yellow-green arcs. In the corner is a mesh enclosure filled with butterflies, and on the far side of the room is the pen with the lone eagle. The bird shifts on its perch when she enters, and the zookeeper turns to greet her.

  “Adam!” she says. She takes several swift steps forward to embrace him.

  He pulls her against his chest, feels her heart hammering through her coat and her breath blowing warm on his neck. She presses her lips briefly to his and then pulls away.

  The zookeeper reaches for her hand. Lately, she has been increasingly restless.

  “Are you all right, Angie?” he has asked her, five or six times a day for the past week.

  She will shrug and tell him she is fine. But a few minutes later she will inevitably ask him: “Adam, do you think it was an accident or not?”

  To be honest, the zookeeper does not particularly care. He considers himself something of a fatalist, having shoveled out enough exotic animal carcasses to be more aware than most of the ever-present pressure of mortality.

  “We’ll all be gone sooner or later, Angie,” he will tell her, “whether we walk into the river or not.”

  The zookeeper finds a strange kind of comfort in the thought, but his fiancée has not seemed reassured. Now she extricates her hand from his, stooping down to lift the pail of fish he has set out for her. As he follows her out the door and over the flat wooden footbridge into the simulated savannah, he notes that the water has risen high enough to cover the planks. When he catches up to her on the path he glances sideways at her, nodding without listening to what she is telling him. Like her mother, the girl is a serious talker—and yet he appreciates the simple fact of her presence, loping along at his side with her words running quick as a hummingbird’s heart.