The Sinners and the Sea

by Rebecca Kanner

  People were taking our lumber. I recognized a few of them as Javan’s brutes.

  “What have you done?” I yelled at them. “The brothers, cousins, and uncles of this beast will come back to trample you like tiny ants beneath their giant feet.”

  “We will soak them with wine too,” one boy said.

  “Do not worry, old hag—he is not dead,” another boy offered. “He only needs some water and a little rest, perhaps a whore or two, and he will be ready to celebrate again tonight.”

  The mammoth did not rise by nightfall. Zilpha and I stood staring into his shiny, fear-filled eye.

  “I have never seen one on his side before,” Zilpha said, “and now I know why. Once they are on their side, they can never get up.”

  The weight of the beast was already carving a shallow ditch into the ground. I did not like to see something so big be afraid. “If we feed him and give him water, we will figure out a way to help him stand.”

  My sons tried to push him off the ground. The beast was too heavy; we could not raise him even a hair’s width. He drank little and would not eat.

  “If we can just keep him alive for a few days, he will grow light enough for us to lift.” I was deceiving myself and nobody else, except perhaps Zilpha, whose eyes clung to mine to make sure that I was certain.

  The beast never slept. His visible eye stared around him at the place he would die, until finally the sight left his gaze, and we knew he was gone. Ham pressed his thick eyelid down over his eye and said, “He is at peace.”

  Zilpha went into the tent and lay upon her sleeping blanket. Even there, she made her slave hold the parasol over her. It was no longer the sun that she wanted to be shielded from. It was us.

  She despaired too greatly to journey back to her home with one of Noah’s cousins who came with more gopher wood. The cousin made six of his men ride back upon three beasts so that three could be left. Not even Javan could get enough wine to inebriate that much flesh.

  CHAPTER 24

  THE TOWN’S LAUGHTER

  Within a few days of measuring and cutting the new lumber the cousins brought us, it was not just the townspeople who came to jeer. Soon there were more faces I did not recognize than those I did. The small mob turned into a crowd and then into a throng many times larger than that which had gathered outside my father’s tent.

  “Only I will speak to them,” Noah told us, and glared at where he thought our eyes were.

  We obeyed. Even Ham. But being ignored did not seem to have any effect on the hecklers.

  I had never known what a terrible sound laughter can be. It is many times worse than the sound of hammers banging away day and night. After a while you grow accustomed to hammering.

  I stuffed wool in my ears, but their voices found their way past it.

  “Where is the sea you will sail?” yelled a man with two black eyes and a dagger twice as large as Ham’s in his belt.

  Noah heard the man, and he answered: “It waits in the sky for the ark to be finished.” Had he given up on the sinners, or did he still hope to sway them to righteousness? Though he was my husband of nineteen years and I usually knew what he was thinking, this time I could not tell from the tone of his voice. Perhaps he himself was just as uncertain of the flood as I was.

  His response caused the crowd to become even more unruly. Someone shouted, “Then put down your hammers and leave the sea where it is!”

  If they had truly believed the unfinished ark was delaying the rain, surely they would have helped build it. This would have been a great relief for Shem, Japheth, and Ham. But it was hard to believe there would ever be rain. The sun beat down like fists of fire upon the backs of my boys as they did what Noah commanded from sunup to sundown. Sometimes I could see Ham’s lips moving, and I knew he was cursing under his breath or uttering insults he did not speak aloud. Japheth scowled at the more blasphemous shouting, and Shem only looked into the crowd if he heard a woman’s voice.

  Noah was consumed with thoughts he did not share. He was the first to rise each morning, and even after the sun went down at night, he would talk quietly to himself until he fell asleep. Because he did not see as well as he had when we first met, I could not watch to see where he looked in order to better know what was on his mind. He might be gazing upon one son, thinking he was gazing upon another.

  When the time came to knock copper into nails, Noah did a demonstration for the boys. I heard the banging of hard, heavy objects. Not long after this, I heard another sound—a single bang that was muted. Then Noah’s voice, not at all muted, calling out to God not in praise but in anger. “God of Adam!” he cried. I looked over to see him holding his thumb.

  He knew how a ship should be built, but he could not have constructed one without my sons. He could not see well enough—not even as far as his own thumb.

  “Will you sail as keenly as you wield your hammer?” a man yelled.

  “Maybe you should build yourself a new thumb!” cried another.

  “Or a pair of eyes!”

  This last voice I recognized: the drunken whore who had been an unusually beautiful girl, Shem’s mother-in-law, stood heckling the boat that her daughter should rightly be on when the flood hit. That is, if the flood hit. Which I was beginning to hope it did. It seemed the only way to put an end to the laughter.

  I thought of setting down the lentils I was sorting and hurrying over to bribe the woman with food or goats. But I did not dare hazard the crowd. I was afraid my head scarf would be ripped away and my secret revealed. Besides, the woman likely held little sway over Ona. Javan was the one—the only one—in charge of her girls. She had not returned since covering the ark Noah had drawn in the sand with rocks, and I was grateful for this. Perhaps she was too busy with all of the travelers. Though I was sure she had not forgotten about us.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE RUDDER

  A merciful thing happened to my sons. They stopped hearing the laughter. In fact, they stopped hearing anything, and they saw only lumber, saws, hammers, and nails. They did not flinch at the insults thrown at them like sharp rocks from sunup to sundown. They did not even hear when I called them for supper. I had to step over wooden planks, watching the ground for nails, and stand in front of them waving my arms. Perhaps the hammering had rendered them temporarily deaf. Or maybe it was the exhaustion. They appeared to be in a trance. Only occasionally did one of them seem to startle awake, as if at that instant the banging of hammers had entered his ears. He would go still, all but his eyes.

  Of my three sons, it was Ham who gazed up the most, searching for clouds. After one of these futile searches through the sky, he jerked his gaze back down and stared in dismay at the vast mounds of gopher wood that were turning into a ship and at the three small shapes dwarfed by these mounds—his brothers and father. Perhaps he was thinking they were all mad. Or maybe he had just realized how tiny we all were. Laboring to build the ark left no strength with which to defend against not only the immensity of the cloudless sky and the great ark, so far from the sea, but also whatever lay ahead. The future had opened before us like a crater whose size and depth we could not know until we fell in.

  Though Ham’s arrogance seemed to fall away a little more each day, Noah went unchanged. “When will you instruct our sons to build the rudder?” I asked him.

  “The Lord is our rudder.”

  Once in a while, if I did not guard against it, my eyes moved like Ham’s—with greater and greater disbelief—over the great long skeleton of the ship. Sometimes when this happened, my legs forgot to hold me. I felt both elated and terrified. If Noah is right, once we get in, we will never see the world we know—both good and evil—again.

  But we did not know if he was right. We were following a blind man into the unknown. And so it was that even before getting into the ark, as my sons constructed the ribs and cross braces, already we were floating without a rudder, not knowing where we were headed and whether we were obeying a prophet or a madman.

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bsp; CHAPTER 26

  HELPING HANDS, STRANGE TONGUES

  The more our lumber began to look like an ark, the more numerous were the people who came to laugh at it.

  Noah snorted when the new arrivals yelled to him, asking where the sea that the ark would sail upon was. He told them that God was holding the sea in the sky. This caused the men to mockingly hurl their spears at the cloudless sky in order to pierce it.

  “The clouds will come,” Noah told them. “They will come for all of your lives.”

  “Then we had best make our lives good. Fill them with battle, wine, and girls for the God of Noah, who does not come down and take these things for Himself, like a real god.”

  “Yes,” another man shouted, “if Noah’s God is too old and weak to enjoy the flesh of young girls Himself, we must do it for Him!”

  Soon there were as many people as I had ever seen in my entire life standing around the ark. Men came from farther and farther reaches of the desert. This was good for the trade in town, for Javan especially, but not so good for us. Not all of the men spent the night in flesh tents. Some had families, and they put up tents all around the ark. My sons had to build a little round wall of stones to keep me safe while I cooked and wove blankets for our journey.

  One day Manosh himself came with his slaves and mammoths pulling yet more gopher wood. By this time the path to the ark was gone. People, tents, and animals covered every cubit. The people were drinking, shouting, and sometimes swinging at each other with great force but little accuracy. A few of the children were not drunk, and they must have felt the ground shaking when the mammoths approached. The shaking grew more violent and then, suddenly, stopped. The children looked back to see why.

  They watched Noah’s cousin carefully rise up on the back of his mammoth, with the reins in his huge hands. Manosh steadied himself and stood as tall as possible. “Disperse!” he cried.

  The whole crowd turned to look at him. I don’t know if they would have moved of their own accord. Manosh did not give them a chance. He stomped his foot upon the back of the mammoth, and it started walking. He stomped with more force, and it walked faster. The mammoth was too large to run but large enough that it didn’t need to. It easily gained on the people who could not get out of its path quickly enough to live. The ground trembled as if thousands of lightning bolts were falling from the sky. People screamed and pushed. Men, women, children, mules, donkeys, and goats were trapped by tents and fences and even by each other. What little there was of the ark did not move a hair in any direction.

  Manosh came to a halt in front of it. Behind him lay a trail of huge hoofprints full of blood. “Cousin! We have generously brought more gopher wood for our ark. This is the last from our lands, but we can get more.”

  What was Noah to say? He needed the wood. He could always tell himself that the people Manosh had trampled would otherwise have died in the flood. “Very good,” he said stiffly.

  After this episode, there were a few days when he did not meet anyone’s eyes. He became quite occupied with supervising his sons and rarely looked up from their hammers.

  Manosh never again had any trouble bringing lumber through the crowd. People cleared a path while he was half a league away. Though the crowd was quieter when he was around, my heart beat wild and panicked in my chest. I had a bad feeling about him—not just about what he had done already but about what else he might be capable of.

  “Surely Manosh and his cousin do not need to bring the lumber themselves,” I said to Noah one night when I couldn’t sleep for fear that Manosh would return soon. “Cannot they just send the slaves?”

  “No. They come to see the ark.”

  • • •

  “What is this?” Manosh asked us on one of his visits, looking at the ark as if he had never seen it. And in fact he never had seen it as it stood that day, with the entire skeleton stretched long over the desert and part of one side built up so that it looked like something a family might be able to live in someday. I could not help but feel proud of my sons.

  Manosh continued, “Our lumber has only been molded into the barest ribs? Ribs as bare as those of a carcass that the flesh has completely rotted off? Ribs scrubbed barer than time and sea and man can scrub them?”

  The sun was directly overhead so the ark did not cast a shadow over Manosh. I hoped one day it would. I looked up at him and tried to keep my voice steady. “You are free to bring a hammer with you the next time you come.”

  “This is the ark exactly as God commanded,” Noah said. I could hear that he also was straining to control his voice. “It is built in His time and no one else’s.” After this, he did not let more than a few breaths go by each day without saying, “Hurry. Hurry!”

  The ark was already being built as quickly as any three humans could build it. Even without perfect vision, surely Noah could see this. Otherwise he would not have said that the God of Adam was the hammer in the boys’ hands and the strength in their hearts. Sweat poured in torrents down their thickening backs. Calluses formed on their fingers, thumbs, and palms. Aches and pains tossed them around at night as if they were many times older than they were.

  Only when the sun disappeared, taking every last drop of light, did they put down their saws and hammers. By this time they were empty of all feelings besides hunger and exhaustion. They raised their dinner bowls to their sun-chapped lips with shaking hands. Then hands, bowls, and bodies fell to the ground. My boys slept so deeply, I worried they would never wake. At least then they would never have to see for themselves what was already clear to me: The ark would take years to build, many more than any of us would live. The flood would carry us away, along with the skeleton of our salvation.

  • • •

  It took two moons for Manosh to return. When the townspeople abruptly picked up their tents and hurried from their positions around the ark, I looked to the north. There were men with him—men who did not ride mules, men who had no sandals and walked barefoot across the burning desert with heavy sacks slung across their backs. Their chests were bare and divided by muscles more rounded than any I’d seen. Some had skin the same desert-dusk color as that of most people I had seen in my life, and some were a color that made me think they had never known the merciful shade of a tree.

  As usual, Noah did not journey far to meet his cousin. He walked no more than a few cubits from the lumber pile. He glanced unhappily at the slaves and then up at Manosh.

  “They will build our ark,” Manosh said.

  Noah pressed his lips together before whatever words had gathered on his tongue could leave his mouth. After a few breaths of silence, he said, “We do not have food for so many mouths.”

  “What little they need, I have brought.”

  Shem came up beside Noah and began to whoop. “Hallelujah!” he cried. “Japheth, Ham! Put down your hammers—put them down for good! We are saved.”

  Japheth was so tired that when he looked up, he seemed surprised to see the many men standing on either side of Manosh. Ham was tired as well, but it did not weigh down his tongue. “Perhaps one day we will be slaves too, Shem. If so, I hope we will not know the language of our captors. Surely it’s better not to hear people cry ‘hallelujah’ at the thought that you might break your own back doing their work.”

  “Better their backs than ours,” Shem said.

  “God blesses us,” Japheth said. “May I rest now, Father?”

  “Sleep, son,” Manosh said. “Your burden is lifted.”

  Japheth did not move from his place beside his father. Everyone waited for Noah to decide whether he would accept the labor of slaves.

  I did not like the thought of slaves being forced to build our ark, but neither did I like to think of my sons working themselves to death trying to complete such an impossible task. “Husband,” I said, “there is no other way.”

  “Do not tell me what I already know. Make use of yourself. Go look at their rations, then count their heads and tell me if it is enough.”
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br />   “No need to weary your feet, woman,” Manosh said to me.

  I could have almost forgotten that I had no name. I had grown accustomed to Zilpha calling me “Mother,” and the people of the mob would not have called me by a proper name even if I’d had one. They preferred “old hag,” “wife of the madman,” and “sea woman.” I liked all of these more than “woman,” because they did not remind me that I had no name.

  I looked to Noah to see his reaction to the insult. I hoped it might convince him that it would be better for me to have a name than to give his cousins a means of disrespecting him. Is not the wife of a great man worthy of a name? Then again, perhaps Noah’s greatness was the reason he thought I needed no name other than “Noah’s wife.”

  But his face showed nothing besides his usual disgust with Manosh and perhaps also with himself for accepting Manosh’s help.

  Manosh clapped his hands, and overseers brought forth a large flock of goats from the rear flank of his procession, along with three oxen pulling carts full of nuts and dried dates. I looked over the flock and carts and counted as many slaves as the fingers of twenty-one hands.

  “Yes,” I told Noah, “there is enough for at least three moons.”

  “Three very large moons,” Manosh said, “or several of the usual size.”

  • • •

  That evening, while Zilpha lay in the tent with her slave holding a parasol over her, Noah called his sons and me around him. “Manosh’s slaves will help us build the ark, but they will not finish their work. Before the hull is complete, we will send them away. Do not think to put down your hammers while they are here.”

  “Father,” Shem said, “why wear down our own strength when we have theirs?”

  Noah continued, “Do not allow a day to pass in which you build less than the strongest slave.”

  “Father,” Shem implored, “please.”