by Sarah Blake
She fed the dog valerian root. She shaved the hair down until the skin was bare. She sliced along each side of the lump and peeled an almond-shaped piece of skin off. But underneath was not a worm. It was clear and springy, and as she pulled it out and sliced it off, she found more, and she pulled and sliced that part away, too. And as soon as it was gone, she noticed the dog had other lumps, the same type, harmless, all over its body.
She sewed up the wound with needle and thread, cleaned up the fur and blood as well as she could, and hoped no one would discover what she’d done. She felt ashamed because she knew her anxiety was already getting the better of her.
* * *
• • •
WHEN NEELA PUSHES AGAIN, the head begins to show, bowing out Neela’s vulva, a shape gained only by birth.
“I can see the head,” Naamah says. “Covered in hair already.”
“Go look, go look,” Neela says, knocking Ham on the arm.
He goes around to look. “I see it, Neela.”
Another contraction comes. “Big push now,” Naamah says.
With it, the head is out. Noah takes Neela from under her shoulders and lifts her and pulls her back in one smooth motion until she’s lying back in the hay. Naamah keeps her hand under the baby’s head, and it’s so steady, as if Neela’s body were orbiting a tiny red sun.
“Again,” Naamah says, “hard as you can.”
The shoulders come out and the rest of the body falls out fast, like it’s made of liquid. Naamah puts her mouth over the child’s nose and sucks out the fluid and turns her head to spit it out. She wipes the baby’s face until it’s clear, lays the chest of the baby on her leg, and hits the baby’s back twice. The chest fills with air, and when it empties again, the baby screams out.
Naamah cuts the cord with her bone.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” Neela asks.
“It’s a girl,” Ham says.
“I want to hold her.”
“Not yet, honey,” Naamah says, handing the baby off to Sadie. “Lift her up, Noah.”
“Oh no, Naamah, I can’t stand,” Neela says as Noah gets her to her feet.
“He’ll hold you the whole time.”
“I will,” he says.
“You have to push out the placenta now, okay?” Naamah says.
“Okay,” she says, but she’s looking at Sadie, who’s wrapping the baby in a dry cloth. The baby has already stopped crying.
“Look at me,” Naamah says. “This is important.”
Neela looks back at Naamah with some anger in her eyes, knees weak beneath her.
“Then you’ll get to hold her,” Naamah says.
Neela nods.
“I’m going to pull a little on the cord as you push, but you tell me if it hurts.”
“It all hurts, Naamah.”
“If it hurts differently.”
Neela nods again, and when the contraction comes she pushes it out. Noah lets her fall back toward him and gets her settled in the hay. Ham moves to sit behind her so she can rest against him. Sadie hands the baby to her and stays seated next to them. Naamah investigates the placenta and makes sure it’s whole. Then she lays it down on the deck. It falls flat, almost like a mushroom cap, but wet and heavy and loose.
“All there?” Adata asks.
“Yes.”
“Then it’s done.”
Naamah looks at her, but she’s still thinking fast, still feeling like she might have to jump to action, save someone, sacrifice something.
“You got her through it, and it’s done now,” Adata says.
Naamah relaxes. “Yes,” she says, and she looks over at the child’s face. Her skin is as brown as a star anise. “What will you name her?” Naamah asks.
“Danit,” says Neela.
“Beautiful,” Naamah says, and she nods at Ham.
He smiles back but finds it hard to look away from his baby girl. “Can I hold her, Neela?”
Neela lets him take her into his arms.
“Hello, Danit. Hello, little one.”
“Can we all hold her?” asks Sadie.
“I want her back with me,” says Neela.
“If she only gets used to your smell, Neela, she’ll never let you put her down,” Naamah says.
“Then I want to hold her again between each of you holding her.”
“We can do that,” Sadie says.
Ham kisses Danit on her forehead. The child receives hundreds of kisses before the day is through.
* * *
• • •
LATE THAT NIGHT, Naamah takes the placenta down to the tigers’ rooms. She takes a chicken with her, too, holds it by its feet.
The tiger that Naamah fed the lamb to never settled. Noah and Naamah have both heard the sounds of claws and snarling. They stopped allowing anyone else down near those rooms. They would rather do the extra work of cleaning and feeding themselves, rather than worry.
Now Naamah hopes that this meal settles the tiger once and for all.
As she approaches the row of tiger rooms, the tigers begin their chorus of rumbling. She opens the empty room, which gets covered and cleaned of blood over and over. She dumps the placenta in the room, releases the chicken, and then leaves again.
When she pulls on the rope that raises the small, square, heavy door between the rooms, she can hear the tiger’s body move from one room to the next. She lowers the door slowly so it doesn’t spook the tiger. Then she enters the other door to clean the tiger’s shit and replace the hay, so that the room might still smell of grasslands.
The chicken lets out a peal of clucking, and for a second Naamah mistakes it for a woman’s voice, laughing outrageously, as if at someone’s expense. The sound scares Naamah more than the tiger’s sudden silence.
When she’s finished cleaning the room, Naamah settles by the square door between the rooms and listens through it. The tiger extends a paw and then puts it back. Her shoulders are the highest point of her body, her head and haunches held low. Naamah can’t hear anything at all when the tiger stalks like this, but she can hear the chicken peck at the placenta.
And then the tiger pounces, ends up clear on the other side of the room, allows her back to bang into the wall, and Naamah lets out a tiny cry. She can’t help herself. If Naamah had been able to see the tiger, and had blinked right then, she would have thought the chicken disappeared.
NINETEEN
The whole family spends a week taking shifts, bringing the hungry child to Neela wherever she is on the boat, waiting for the child to finish nursing, then taking the child, burping her, holding her over a bucket to shit, rocking her back to sleep. Sometimes not in that order. Sometimes one of them ends up with the runny, yellow shit on their arms, spit-up on their shoulders. Sometimes one of them cycles the baby’s legs until a tiny burst of gas escapes her anus and she settles again.
After a week, Noah wants to send the dove out again. They gather on the deck. Neela lays the baby on the raised beds of grass Naamah has grown. Neela strokes Danit’s cheek and tells her how beautiful she is. Danit’s head turns toward her mother’s hand, her mouth rooting for it. She makes a face as the blades of grass poke her cheek.
“What is that?” Neela says, smiling. “Is that grass?” Then she hears Noah talking to the dove.
“Bring us something back this time,” he whispers.
Neela sits up straight and almost yells, “Bring us something back, dove!”
Naamah laughs, and they all start cheering on the dove. Noah releases it, and Danit cries at their loud voices; they’ve been so quiet around her for every day of her life before this. Now they quiet themselves again.
“Go on,” Neela says, scooping her up. “Don’t stop on our account. I want her to know what excitement sounds like. Don’t I, little girl?”
But no one knows what to
say. They can all tell the water is significantly lower now, but they still haven’t seen one tree. They have only their hope to send with the dove. And their desire to get off the boat.
* * *
• • •
NAAMAH WONDERS how Danit would turn out if they were never able to leave the boat. Before long they would have to let out all the dangerous animals, all the animals whose hungers they couldn’t satisfy, all the birds it seemed cruel to keep. Many would drown. Or some would kill each other and others would drown. Or some would kill each other and some would drown and then maybe one or two would starve on the bloody patch of ground beside the boat. And then Naamah would clean that up, too.
Danit would be like any other child. Naamah admits that to herself. She sees her running up and down the halls of the boat. She sees her hiding in the small rooms and pretending she is somewhere else that she cannot name or describe. She sees her in the connected rooms, playing with the square door, pretending to escape something else she cannot quite picture.
Naamah wonders what they would teach her about the world outside the boat. Together, would they think to spare her from what she would never know? Or would they work to build up the world as it was and as it could be? Maybe they would remake every empty room into a place she might have had on land. One a temple. One a market. One meant for an empress. She can see Noah constructing a bed with ornate posts that reach the ceiling.
It soothes Naamah to imagine the ways they might redirect their energies if they had no animals to care for. But would God be rid of them, too, if they let the animals die? She thinks eleven months has been a long time to tend to the animals, enough to earn their reward, especially if the reward is only to be left alone. But to Him, what is eleven months?
* * *
• • •
“HOW LITTLE SHE DOES, Naamah,” Neela says, looking at Danit.
Naamah laughs.
“When will she do more?”
“Not for a while.”
“She is darling, though.”
“She is,” Naamah says.
“I thought I’d be so excited to show her everything. Teach her words. Let her touch fur and wool. But none of those things would mean anything to her right now.”
“They will.”
“I have met babies before,” Neela says. “How did I not remember?”
“You said it yourself. What’s to remember? Except maybe exhaustion. And you were so much younger then.”
Neela asks, “What was Ham like, as a baby?”
“He was warm. Always. The other babies needed to be bundled, but not him. He slept easily, with his limbs sprawled, as if he were comfortable in the world from the moment it embraced him.”
“Danit’s not like that.”
“No. Most children need to be wrapped, to mimic where they have been, to transition. To give them time for their backs to grow large and flat, to support the whole of them.”
“But not Ham.”
Naamah laughs. “I guess not. But it didn’t feel strange because he seemed happy. And that seemed lucky to me.”
“I think he will be a wonderful father.”
“I’m sure of it,” Naamah says, though she knew saying otherwise would be admitting a failure on her part.
* * *
• • •
NAAMAH AND JAPHETH are looking out over the water. Everyone else is asleep. Everyone’s been so tired with the baby on top of their regular chores.
“Adata wants to start trying,” Japheth says.
“Does she?”
“She thinks we’ll be off the boat by then. That the timing will work out well.”
“And you?”
“I’m nervous,” he says. “And not about the boat.”
“What, then?”
He gives her a look. “About repopulating the earth.”
“It’s a lot of responsibility if you think of it that way,” she says.
“How do you think about it any other way?”
“Should I not have had you, knowing I’d be making you the patriarch of a nation?”
“But you didn’t know.” He looks upset.
“I know. You’re right.” She puts her arm around his waist and lays her head against his shoulder. “If there’s anything I wish for you, it’s that you have your family and all the joy you can possibly have in life. To not overthink it. Because no matter what our lives could have been, every version would have been filled with shit we’d have to deal with.”
And then the dove comes back. It flies right to Naamah, landing in front of her on the railing. And she sees only a leaf, floating in the air as if from God Himself.
“What is it?” Japheth asks.
“An olive leaf, I think.” She takes it from the dove.
“Do you grow those on the boat?”
She shakes her head.
“Mom,” he says, “what do we do?”
“Let’s wait for morning. I’ll wake your father when I go down, and if he thinks otherwise, I’ll come get you.”
“It still looks covered in water.”
“I know, but don’t—don’t be that way.”
“What way?”
“I don’t know. You’re forgetting how surprising the world can be.”
“This coming from the person who goes around for days as if you’ve given up.”
Naamah doesn’t respond at first.
“I’m sorry,” Japheth says.
“No. You didn’t hurt me. I know what I’ve been like. But you misunderstand. If you look at all this water and distrust the olive leaf, you’re forgetting how little you know. You’re thinking yourself more than you are, and yet using that to belittle yourself and your life and the world. When I can’t stand the boat anymore, it’s because of how little I know; it’s because of the smallness of my life against the size of the world.”
“You’re contradicting yourself.”
“I’m not trying to,” she sighs. “I use my understanding of the unknowable world to call myself to be unique and wondrous among its wonders. I don’t become arrogant about what my eyes can see and what I can understand. I don’t dismiss myself or my life either. I don’t know, Japheth. I don’t know. Look and see: you’re right—there’s no land to live upon. But also, look at the olive leaf.”
Japheth takes the leaf from her. “The thought of a tree—”
“A tree,” she says.
* * *
• • •
NAAMAH SHOWS NOAH THE LEAF. He says it’s good news, but as he’s falling back to sleep he also says it means there isn’t a place to stay. “There’s not a better home than the ark. Not yet.”
Naamah falls asleep holding the leaf.
* * *
• • •
AT BREAKFAST, everyone is buzzing. People start narrating life on land to the baby for the first time. “Stiff shrubs that one day burst into bloom. . . . Stalks of plants with tops like shredded fabrics, except lighter than air, as if they’d fly off if it weren’t for their green stalks. . . . Mud that comes up between your toes, and a river that washes them clean again.” Danit takes it all in, everything and nothing. Her breath is noisy. She snorts and gurgles and wheezes and holds her breath and starts again. She is conspicuous with living.
TWENTY
Deep below them, on the lowest deck, the tiger still has not settled, and Naamah is at a loss. Food has always worked. The animals were nothing if not predictable. Or they had been. She doesn’t know if she should tell anyone, not when they are all so happy and excited. But maybe that’s what has unsettled the tiger. Maybe the tiger can tell the promise of land is close.
* * *
• • •
NAAMAH GOES TO THE ROOM of paintings and searches for one of a landscape of the tiger’s own habitat, where her stripes would hide her well. N
aamah finds one that’s good enough and takes it down through the boat. She’s already let another chicken into the room for feeding. She’s let the tiger listen to it and wait. When she comes back, she opens the square door and hears the tiger pad through. Naamah can tell how silent she would be if she weren’t on planks of wood.
While the tiger eats, Naamah sets the painting up in the room of hay, directly across from the square door. Then she nails a board across the square opening so that the tiger will be able to see the landscape, but not pass through. She leaves and waits for the tiger to finish eating.
She sits against the wall and cleans her nails, dragging her left thumb under each finger on the right, her right thumb under each finger on the left, and then her middle fingers under each thumb, until the movement looks almost like she is making something, like she can spin a thread from her skin. She is so lost in the repetitive action that it takes her a moment to realize that the tiger is panting by her ear, on the other side of the wood, pressing up against the wall so she might be heard.
It could be to intimidate Naamah, and she does feel intimidated, but it could just be so that Naamah opens the door back to her other room. It could be that the tiger is trained, as much as a predator like her can be trained—a reluctant acceptance of a learned situation.
Naamah wonders, If she understands so much, does she understand the flood? Does she know she is being saved? Does she remember the other tigers and know they must have drowned? Does she know drowning? Does she know God?
Naamah stands and opens the square door. As soon as she does, the tiger goes to it. She fusses with the plank before she spots the painting. Naamah can almost feel the tiger seeing the painting, as everything goes quiet.
Suddenly the tiger runs across the floor and pounces at where Naamah is standing. Naamah hears her raised paws hit the wall near her head, and she is so startled she drops the door. It slams and the tiger roars. Not one of the low rumbles, but a terrible roar that shakes every animal on the boat into response. Naamah runs to the deck, leaving the painting and the tiger where it’s eaten, surrounded by the smell and stains of her kill.
