by Rebecca Wait
It began as a scream and ended as a whisper, but then Ruth was there, kneeling beside her, feeling Stephanie’s forehead with her hand. Over her shoulder, Stephanie saw Nathaniel and realized that of course he hadn’t left her – he had simply gone to get a woman, because a woman would know what to do.
Ruth was already lifting Stephanie up and calling for Rachael to get some towels.
Stephanie let them do what they wanted. Dimly she was aware of someone bringing a bowl of water and beginning to clean her, someone else peeling off her nightgown and pressing a towel between her legs. Another cramp made her whimper and curl up on her side. Someone pushed the damp hair off her face and murmured, ‘Shhh, it’s alright.’
The pain was coming in waves now, starting each time as a dull ache and becoming a blaze of agony. She felt something give within her, something come loose, and wondered if this was what death felt like: if you actually felt the moment your soul was pulled from you.
She heard someone say, ‘Don’t let her look,’ but the voice seemed to come from a great distance and she wasn’t sure if they were talking about her or someone else. And now something was being bundled up in a towel. Stephanie craned her neck, but Ruth was already on her feet and moving towards the door with the bundle of towels in her arms.
‘Is that—’ Stephanie tried to say, but Deborah cut in.
‘It’s not a baby, darling. It hadn’t grown properly. It wasn’t a baby yet. I’m so sorry.’
Arms around her. Stephanie closed her eyes. She felt herself being lowered back down onto the mattress.
‘You need to sleep now, Sarah.’ Nathaniel’s voice.
She closed her eyes and did her best to obey him. It wasn’t a struggle in the end.
She knew she was awake at times over the next few days, but she felt as though she had been wrapped in thick material. The world had taken on a strangely muted quality; sights blurred, noises muffled. They washed her again, Rachael and Deborah, and put her in the chair by the window, wrapped in blankets, whilst they changed the sheets on her bed. They brought her soup, and when she stared at it, unsure what to do, unsure if she’d ever seen soup before, Rachael brought the spoon to her mouth for her, coaxed her into swallowing. They talked to her soothingly, and told her it would be alright. (What would? she thought.)
The first time she woke properly, it was to hear her daughter’s voice. Perhaps this was what brought her back: that familiar, strident tone. Because of course Judith was arguing. She’d been born arguing.
‘She’s my mum,’ Judith was saying. ‘Just let me see her.’
‘Do as you’re told and go away.’ Ruth’s voice. Stephanie had opened her eyes now, but there was no one in the room with her; they must be just outside the door.
‘She’s my mum,’ Judith said again.
‘Please, Ruth.’ A more timid voice backing up Judith’s. Moses, of course.
Stephanie wanted to intervene, but felt too tired to call out. She was relieved when she heard footsteps, and then Rachael’s voice joining in.
‘Perhaps just for a minute, Ruth? Judith’s been very frightened.’
And then a moment later, Judith was in the room, and Stephanie was trying to sit up so she could hug her.
‘It’s OK, Mum,’ Judith said. ‘Lie down. You need to rest.’
Stephanie did as she was told.
‘I was worried about you,’ Judith said. She sounded accusing, but Stephanie knew her daughter too well not to see she was holding back tears.
‘I was spared,’ Stephanie managed to say. But this reminded her who hadn’t been spared, and she couldn’t breathe for a moment.
‘Are you feeling better?’ Judith said.
‘A bit.’
Judith reached down and awkwardly, a little too heavy-handedly, stroked Stephanie’s hair, the way Stephanie had used to do for Judith herself when she was very little. Stephanie closed her eyes at the touch.
Judith said softly, ‘Mum? I’m sorry about the baby.’
Stephanie nodded, tears leaking from her eyes. ‘It wasn’t meant to be,’ she tried to say, but only the first two words came out.
Ruth appeared in the doorway. ‘Time’s up,’ she said.
*
Nathaniel didn’t come. It was clear to Stephanie now that she had been unworthy of carrying the child. It had been taken away.
She drifted in and out of sleep, but sleep was no longer a safe place. Often it rose up before her, the dead child, crying for her. Later she remembered Deborah’s words – ‘It’s not a baby. It hadn’t grown properly’ – and the child was reduced to an ugly clot of blood.
Forgive me, she tried to ask, but when God spoke to her, all He said was this: The wages of sin is death.
By the time Nathaniel did come, she was hysterical. She had woken from another nightmare to find him kneeling beside her.
‘I’m sorry!’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.’ The words became distorted as she sobbed.
He let her cry, watching her steadily. She wished he would shout. She longed for him to shout, to punish and finally absolve her.
‘Forgive me, Nathaniel. Will you send me away? Send me anywhere if it’s better for the Ark. I don’t deserve to be here.’
She felt his arms go round her.
‘Hush, little one,’ he said. ‘Calm down first, then we’ll talk.’ He rocked her gently as her sobs became quieter and eventually she rested her head against his chest, exhausted and silent.
‘Where is he?’ she whispered.
‘Who?’
‘The baby.’
‘We buried him in the woods,’ Nathaniel said. ‘He’s with God now.’
‘What was his name?’
‘What?’
‘His name.’
‘He didn’t have a name. He was taken from us too soon.’
‘He must have a name!’ The panic was returning. ‘He can’t be buried there on his own, all on his own, with no name.’ She began to cry again.
‘It wasn’t God’s will,’ Nathaniel said. ‘God didn’t send me a name for him. We weren’t allowed to make him one of us.’
When her sobs became wails, he seemed to relent.
‘God knows his name, Sarah. Let that be enough for you. In heaven, God calls him by his name.’
She rubbed her hands into her eyes.
‘Sarah,’ Nathaniel said, ‘this wasn’t your fault.’
‘It was.’
‘No, my poor darling. Other people did this. Infected the Ark with their sin, turned us rotten from the inside. Brought punishment down on us.’
A prickling in her flesh. ‘Who?’
‘You already know.’
She would save it for another time, thinking about Esther and Thomas, and what they’d done. She wasn’t strong enough yet. For now, she couldn’t look beyond the outcome to the cause. The outcome was death: not just the baby’s, she began to see, but her own. A kind of death that took you apart, and then sent you back, bloodied and broken, forced you to live on in the mess of your own defeat. Men, she was certain, couldn’t understand this kind of death. Perhaps women weren’t as weak as people thought. Men held the power, of course, and that was how it should be. But didn’t women deserve some recognition too, for their endurance? Men were made for war and heroics, to fight and conquer for God. But women were made to suffer. And suffer they did, because the blood and the battle were within themselves, always within themselves.
2
A few days after they buried the baby, or whatever the thing was staining the bundle of towels with blood, it began to rain.
They’d never seen rain like this before. It came down in wide slices with no gaps in between, no pause for you to get your breath. The drops were heavy and fell hard. A wall of water.
Moses and Judith fled to the barn because it no longer felt safe in the big house. People were becoming unpredictable. Moses’ mother had snapped at them when they interrupted her and his father talking softly in the kitchen. Rachael
never snapped.
‘Let’s go to the forest,’ Judith said, seeing his face.
But they were soaked before they’d gone a few steps, hair plastered to their foreheads and clothes sticking to them. The barn was closer. The roof leaked, but only in some places. Sitting with their backs to the wall, pulling at their wet clothes, they shivered and listened to the rain on the roof. It sounded like a rattle.
You must wash yourselves clean, the prophet said. You are filthy with sin.
The moors were waterlogged, and they’d been banned from walking on them. Flooding and bogs. The Ark had shrunk around them. The rain came down so hard you could barely see in front of your face.
A few more days of this and even the forest floor would be spongy and sodden, the rain sliding in amongst the dense branches and the water level rising. Moses pictured it: rising and rising until it lapped at the tops of the trees, finally swallowing everything. Then perhaps God would be satisfied. All that remained would be a pure, still surface of water.
‘How long do you think it will last?’ he said to Judith.
She shrugged. ‘As long as God decides.’
He was surprised; it wasn’t like her to talk about God.
He thought of the rain churning up the fresh earth on the grave, uncovering the dead thing. They’d said a prayer together as they put it in the ground. Strange to remember what it was like to stand there in the dry air, the wind lifting their hair, no warning of the rain to come, except perhaps for the slightest chill – or was he only adding that now? Judith’s mother had been too ill to get up, but everyone else came to the burial, except for Esther. She had been told to stay away. She was tainted now. Moses wondered if this meant she would get a stain on her face like his. But perhaps that only came if you were marked from the start.
The prophet said to them as they stood around the grave, ‘Sin will destroy us. You allowed it into the Ark. That’s why God took the child.’
In the barn, Moses said to Judith, ‘The only way to stop it is to cast sin out of the Ark. Otherwise we’ll all be drowned.’
‘Do you really think this is Esther’s fault?’ Judith said.
He knew it wasn’t a proper question, but he still tried to consider it carefully, the way Judith always did. ‘I don’t know.’ Then, ‘The prophet says so.’
‘So,’ Judith said, which seemed to mean nothing and mean a lot at the same time.
And Moses felt something strange happening, as though he could stand outside the prophet’s words and look at them instead of living in a world made of the words. ‘He says so,’ he said again, to make the feeling go away, to put himself back on the inside of the words where things were less frightening.
The rain came down like a rattle.
They began to get used to it, the sound of rain accompanying everything they did. There were leaks all over the big house and the small house. They kept buckets and pans under the drips but they were running out of containers. During lessons, it was difficult to hear Ruth speaking over the hammering on the roof and the steady drip-drip into the pans on the floor.
Moses wasn’t sure what the adults were waiting for, why they were so tense and quiet, but he thought that like him they must be afraid the rain would never stop. It became more unsettling the longer it went on. No weather should last so many days without a break. Even the wind rested occasionally. Where was it now? It didn’t have the energy to compete with the rain, not even the raging moor wind that at other times could lift you off your feet. Still the water fell in straight sheets.
Judith’s mother came back downstairs after a week, but she looked pale and she often seemed to be crying. It was unsettling, coming into the workroom to find all the women in there but nobody speaking. Moses hadn’t realized until now how it had set the rhythm of his days, the chatter of his mother and the others in the background, a soft swell of sound. Now it was gone and below the silence was a low beat of fear.
God said, I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights. Moses knew a thing or two about punishment. Plagues, curses, scourges. After ten days, he began to think this had been coming, always coming, rolling towards him since the day he was born with the mark on his face like he was bleeding beneath his skin. Nobody was forgiven because nobody had earned it. With the rain coming down – was it getting stronger every moment? – it was difficult to think at all.
And what would God send them next? Darkness or locusts? A hail of fire and brimstone?
What could follow death, which had already come?
On the eleventh day, the prophet called them back to the prayer room. It was a Saturday, but the children had been kept in the schoolroom all morning, writing out Bible verses under Ruth’s watchful eye. We must show the Lord we are sorry, she said.
The harvest is past, Moses wrote, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.
He looked over Judith’s shoulder to see which verse she’d been given.
Thou hast forsaken me, saith the Lord. Thou art gone backward: therefore will I stretch out my hand against thee, and destroy thee; I am weary with repenting.
His own father appeared in the doorway.
‘The prophet wants us in the prayer room,’ he said to Ruth.
‘Even the children?’
‘Even them,’ Seth said.
They were all gathered, every member of the Ark, including Esther. Perhaps this was a session, Moses thought. They’d all felt it over the past few days: Esther’s session, hanging in the air. She would be made to suffer for Thomas, to endure his punishment, long overdue, for betrayal, as well as her own for not preventing it.
But the prophet stood alone in the middle of the room, and didn’t lead them to the barn. Instead, he addressed them.
‘For eleven days, God has made it rain. For eleven days, we have seen His disappointment and fury. This is our second punishment. Peter, what was our first?’
Moses looked fearfully at his brother, but Peter was ready with an answer. ‘The death of the baby, prophet.’
Moses heard a muffled sob from behind him, so he knew that must be where Judith’s mother was standing.
Then he realized the prophet was looking straight at him.
‘Why, Moses, are you fortunate?’
He tried to take a breath, but couldn’t seem to get the air inside his chest. ‘I was spared,’ he whispered.
The prophet nodded slowly. ‘God spared Moses as a baby, though He could have slain him as punishment for his parents’ sins. Instead God allowed the devil to disfigure Moses, as a permanent reminder for all of us. Have you all forgotten so easily what the wrath of God looks like?’
Moses wanted to cover his face with his hands but he knew that would make things worse, so he held his arms stiffly by his sides.
‘Make no mistake,’ the prophet said. ‘God is serious. God is coming for you. As long as you harbour sin, you’re slipping into the hands of the devil – destroying the Ark we’ve worked so hard to build. Jonathan, what are the wages of sin?’
‘Death, prophet.’
‘Death. God is giving you time to mend your ways. A short time. After that, He is coming for you. Ezra, what’s hell like?’
Ezra faltered a little in his answer. ‘Horrible, prophet. A place of eternal torment. And fire.’
The prophet’s eyes burned with a fire of their own. He said, ‘Yes. A place of eternal torment and despair. Your skin is scalded off your flesh; your flesh is boiled off your bones. You’re put back together only so you can suffer further. You’re in agony – every – second. It doesn’t end. It doesn’t get better. Do you realize how long eternity lasts? Of course you don’t. Human minds can’t conceive of it. One day, you’ll know what eternity is, and if you’ve chosen an eternity of suffering you’ll scream and curse and beg for forgiveness. But let me tell you, no forgiveness will come. You had your chance. Your chance is now.’ His voice rose to a shout. ‘Your chance is now!’
Then he smiled. Moses’ breath came like a shudd
er.
The prophet said, ‘Who here doesn’t believe me?’
Nobody spoke.
Still, the smile. He said, ‘Come with me. There’s something I want to show you.’
Nobody stopped to put their waterproofs on. They followed the prophet outside and were soon drenched to the skin.
The rain was so heavy that Moses didn’t see it until they were already up close. The forest. He rubbed the water from his face and stared. Someone had cut the forest open. The tangled branches that guarded the entrance had been ripped away leaving a gaping, ugly hole like a wound, a tunnel amongst the trees. Moses turned to Judith. She was frowning, but didn’t speak. Moses saw the dead thing before his eyes again; blinked it away.
The prophet said, ‘Follow me.’
He stepped in amongst the mutilated trees and the others went after him. Moses could hardly bear it, seeing the adults walk with such ease into their forest. They didn’t even have to dip their heads to enter, let alone crawl.
As Moses had thought, the rain had begun to make its way inside the forest, even through the thick canopy of branches. There was a smell of damp earth. But still, the onslaught was lessened by the trees and the drops that made it through were light and half-hearted. It was a relief, being out of the driving rain, but the forest no longer felt like a refuge.
After a while, Moses realized where the prophet was leading them. It was taking longer than it should because, not knowing the forest well, the prophet hadn’t chosen the quickest route. But they were sloping gently downhill now, bending towards the left, and soon they would come out at the river. Moses wondered what the prophet wanted them to see. A horrible thought occurred to him, and he looked quickly for Esther, walking alone a little way ahead. The prophet talked a lot about punishment these days. What if he was planning to drown her in the river like the Egyptians? He told himself this was impossible, but nothing seemed impossible any more.
He and Judith had gradually dropped back behind the others, who were almost out of sight ahead. But soon Moses could see light trickling through the trees in front of them so he knew they were close to the edge of the forest. In seconds, the prophet and the grown-ups would be out in the light and rain. He tugged at Judith’s arm.
