Their new home is close enough that, if they need to, they can empty their wagons and come back for more. But Naamah will never come back. She knows this as she sits in her wagon, holding the ropes, letting them hang, the slightest sagging arc down to the yoke that leads to the head of an ox.
Jael is on her shoulder, and now she is as mindful of him as he’s always been of her.
She remembers more dreams than the ones with Jael—so many dreams that she is having trouble telling which happened and which didn’t. In one, she is enjoying a field of neatly cut grass during a sunset, enjoying it so much that she lies down to sleep, and when she wakes she sees hundreds of small spiderwebs revealed by the dew, each droplet reflecting the grass back to itself, in an upside-down and curving world that could not exist. Even now she startles thinking of the life in the grass, but she can’t place where that field might have been, how old she was, anything.
But the memory of talking with God is clear, even if there’s hardly a reason to recall it. She finds herself going over every word in her head.
And as if she had called Him, the vulture returns with His kind voice: “Good morning.”
Around them, though the wagons continue, her family looks smeared, slowing down through time. “I guess it would be foolish to ask if they are okay,” she says.
He laughs, perched beside her.
She asks, “Won’t the animals be discomforted by your presence?”
“Do you think they will? I could stop them as well, but I thought you’d want to continue your good pace.”
Naamah finds it easier to talk to Him if she doesn’t look at the vulture. “Yes, I would like us to reach the river by nightfall.”
“Terrific. Let’s continue our chat.”
“I like your laugh,” she blurts, as if the thought forced itself through her lips.
“You do. And you like how it comes out of the vulture’s beak, that juxtaposition.”
“Yes.” And then she asks, “Do you cry?”
“If vultures cry, then yes.”
“Don’t you know if vultures cry?”
“I do. But I don’t always take the time to remember.” The vulture isn’t moving at all, besides his mouth, but Naamah has the sense that an adolescent boy has taken his place. “Where would all the mystery be?” He says, leaning back and swinging His feet out.
“Is mystery something that matters to you?” Naamah asks.
“Yes. Don’t you like mystery?”
“I’m not sure.” Naamah focuses on the land as it slips past, under the ox’s feet, but it unsettles her stomach. “And I didn’t mean, do you cry when you speak through the vulture? I meant, do you cry, as the Lord?”
“Ah, well, that’s another matter.” The young man of Him is sitting upright again, feet tucked under the bench. “No, I don’t.” After a beat, He adds, “Would you like to know if vultures can cry?”
“I thought you didn’t—”
“I tried not to, but I thought about it anyway.” The vulture flaps his wings. “There’s never been a vulture that has cried yet! Although they do have tear ducts, which could theoretically produce tears. One day one will get something stuck in its eye and it will cry profusely.”
“Like one day, that’s a possibility? Or like one day, for sure, you know it?”
“One day. I know it.”
“What is it like, to experience time like that?”
“Tricky. Trying to figure out if that vulture cried before now or after.”
Naamah laughs.
“What?”
“I didn’t think you’d find anything tricky.”
“Oh yes. Loads of stuff. Time, for one.”
“What’s another?”
“You’re another.”
“Me?”
“Mmm, you’re very tricky. You verge on the absurd.”
Naamah laughs a single laugh, like she was caught off guard.
“You want to know why,” He says. “That’s understandable. You’re unpredictable. I honestly could not guess if you were going to choose to stay with the angel or with your family. I saw both paths clearly.”
“You know about that, huh?”
“Naamah, the angel is a part of me.”
“You mean—”
“Yes.”
“I’ve had sex with you?” she says.
“No,” He says.
“No.”
“Do you want to have sex with me?”
“No!”
“It’s okay if you do.”
“I don’t!” She shuffles a little away from the vulture.
“You couldn’t even if you wanted to. Only with forms I could take on. And what would that be, anyway?”
“I’m not thinking about that, because I don’t want to have sex with you.”
“Okay, okay.” He laughs. “What do you want to talk about?”
Naamah pushes a breath out. “You know what.”
“The flood.”
“Yes,” she says.
“Bethel.”
She looks at Him, looks into His vulture’s eye. “Yes.”
“She could have come onto the ark, Naamah. She didn’t want to.”
“No, she couldn’t. Don’t do that. She thought I would be punished if she came on the boat, in case it denied your word in some way.”
“I went to her after that.”
“What?” Naamah says, her eyes filling with tears.
“I let her know she could go to you. But she was ready, Naamah.”
The tears roll down her cheeks and fall onto her thighs.
“I’m sorry. It was her decision.”
Naamah shakes her head and yells, “Did you talk to everyone before talking to me?”
“You know I didn’t.”
“So why? Why come to me now? Do I have a decision to make? Some task to take on?” She pushes tears off her face with her fingers, moving fast and sloppy.
“No.”
“No, I’m just the absurd woman.”
“Naamah—”
“Leave! Leave now!” she yells, and then more calmly, “Come back again if you need to. But leave now.”
He does.
NAAMAH HEARS DANIT CRYING. She looks over at Noah driving his wagon. He sees her flushed cheeks and he mouths, “Are you okay?”
She nods. She feels Jael on her shoulder. She looks around to each wagon, counting them. Adata is farthest ahead, and Naamah catches glimpses of her face. She wonders if Adata’s lover was given the choice to come on the boat, if she chose to die instead. She wonders if Adata would have fallen in love with the angel and if she would have stayed with her underwater. And would the angel have loved her? Was there nothing about Naamah at all that the angel loved? Would any living woman have been enough? Maybe Naamah met people only in moments when they were susceptible to a difficult woman.
WHEN THEY REACH THE RIVER, it’s late and dark. The light of the moon catches on the water and wet rocks. They look over it for a long time. They gather water. They talk about where they should settle, which side of the river, how far from the bank. Someone says the words to avoid flooding, and everyone feels it in their stomachs, the word flood sounding small, as if there were nothing remarkable about it.
A WEEK GOES BY. NAAMAH likes to stand at the river and look back on their tents. Four for their families, four for animals, and two more for storage. They have started building stables and fencing off fields, so the horses and oxen don’t always have to be tethered. Their new village is expanding the way water flows through dirt, reaching this way and that.
Today, Naamah starts the garden, closer to the river, where the ground is ready for it. Jael is with her, scratching at the dirt. She creates row after row, tearing through the surface of the earth until it loosens. She sees how the earth gathers itself, tightens its skin, when no one is there to break it.
Naamah feels as raw as the dirt. But she’s not sure what she’s waiting for, what seed she could take right now, what she could grow to the point of blossoming.
IN ONE ROW OF DIRT she is forming, she comes across the bones of a hand. She digs above the bones of the wrist and finds the two longer bones of the forearm. She goes back to the tent of horses and cuts off some of a horse’s mane and makes a brush with the hair and wood and twine. She collects more bone tools, more wood, and returns to the garden beds.
She digs up from the forearm and finds the upper arm, the shoulder; she uncovers the skull. Without looking at anything too closely, she continues, working down into the chest and the ribs. She doesn’t dig deep enough to reach the spine but moves down to where the pelvis protrudes. Then she exposes the left leg, then the right. Then back to the shoulder, to work down through the right arm to the smallest finger bones.
She clears it of more dirt with a wooden spoon and then brushes the bones clean. The body rests like a relief in stone. Only upon seeing it entirely uncovered does Naamah understand that it’s a child’s remains.
“Dear one,” Jael says.
Naamah lies down beside it, with her head near the skull, then sits up to see how far her legs continue beyond the thin, bony feet. She puts her hand on the child’s hand.
The dead of the flood are gone. Naamah doesn’t know how, but they are. This child died before the flood, which means there are other remains, which means that people lived here before. And of course they did. What a lovely river. What a bounty of life.
But Naamah had been fooled by the newness of the unflooded world. Now she realizes that her family, their new world, will live in communion with the old world, but not with the destruction that birthed one world from the other. As if that’s a blessing.
SHE LIES BACK DOWN in the dirt. The neck of the child is so small. Naamah had never thought of her neck as a vulnerable part of her body until she let a man kiss her there. She wonders if a woman would have made her feel that way, if a woman had been her first kiss.
In their old desert, there once was a woman who sliced her own neck. Naamah hadn’t known her, but the idea of any woman killing herself didn’t surprise her. She didn’t wonder if she could have helped her. She held on more closely to her intention to live a life she wanted to live.
But everything changed when God spoke to Noah. Her intention was overwhelmed. That didn’t feel bad at first.
Naamah runs her finger over the exposed vertebrae of the child’s neck. Even without the body, the skin, she recognizes the feeling from the necks of her boys when they were young.
She remembers hacking into an animal’s bones for food, gripping them tight, sucking out the marrow, her hands still salty with blood from handling the kill.
These bones—she taps on the largest, in the child’s leg—are hollow, have been hollow for a long time. Her fingernail holds the vibration of the bone, telling her which things in her life the bone is harder than, which softer. She closes her eyes.
NAAMAH WAKES WHEN SHE HEARS tapping, thinking it is Jael, but it is the vulture tapping on a bone.
“Get away!” she yells at him.
“You are burning, Naamah.”
“What?”
“Your skin is burning.”
She runs her hands over her face and it stings. “I fell asleep.”
He feels no need to respond to something so evident. He takes a few steps into the torn dirt of the garden.
“Doesn’t mean you should peck at this child’s bones,” she says.
“It’s no longer a child.”
She looks at his taloned feet in her garden, and even that feels like a trespass. “Where is Jael?”
“He went back to your little tents. Danit was crying.”
“Why are you here?” she asks.
“He is coming. I was going to wait, but I saw you were burning.”
She can’t conceal her surprise. “Were you concerned for me, vulture?”
But before he can respond, God is there.
“Good afternoon, Naamah,” He says warmly.
“Hello.”
He steps out of the garden and then turns back to face it. “The plants will be bountiful, and the birds will eat their seeds and carry them all over the world.”
“That’s great,” Naamah says, flatly.
“Yes, plant more than you’ll need. I will see to it that the birds come.”
“Okay.”
He stops and looks at Naamah. “You’re being short with me.”
“I am,” she says. She closes her eyes and a vaguely human shape is before her. It feels like a shadow. Someone standing too close.
“What are you doing?” He asks.
“It’s just easier to talk to you like this. You’re not God speaking through a vulture.”
“What am I?”
“You look like a lanky teenage boy, in my head.”
“Would you prefer I come to you like that?”
She tilts her head. “Could you?”
“Not here. Here, I’d have to speak through, well, the only people here. Come to you through Shem, let’s say.”
She doesn’t open her eyes, but she points her head as if she’s glaring at him and cuts her voice low. “Don’t you dare.”
He laughs. “I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t, okay?”
She relaxes again.
“I could come to you in a dream in any form you like.”
“I don’t think Sarai would let you.”
He nods His vulture’s head. “She is something.”
“She is real, then?”
“She is.”
“Does she know you?” Naamah asks.
“Not yet. But I think she will. She is becoming more and more godlike.”
“Do you fear her?”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced fear. How would you describe it?”
“Your heart races, or you let out a yell you can’t help, or you start sweating.”
“That’s all physical.”
“Oh, right.” He waits patiently while she thinks. “Well, I guess it often happens when you’re trapped in some way, so the feeling of fear is tied up with calculating escape. The thing you fear—is it something you can outrun? Can you fight it? If not, should you still fight it, get one good hit in and then run? If you’re forced to surrender, then can you decide not to show fear?”
“This is how you felt with the tiger?”
She nods. “Except the questions were easy to answer because the tiger was stronger. I just tried not to be scared.”
“But you did not understand that she was only being true to the animal she is. You did not forgive her. If you had accepted her, wouldn’t your fear have dropped away?”
“Did I owe her that?”
He doesn’t respond.
“Would you not have saved me?”
“No,” He says.
“No?”
“You are an old woman, Naamah. As much waits for you in death as in life. You have done everything here that was needed of you and more.”
“I did not do it for you.”
“I know that. But I’m grateful nonetheless.”
And then He is gone. The vulture returns, looks down at his feet in the hot, caked dirt, and moves back into the garden.
“Where is He?” she asks.
“He had to attend to another matter.”
“And you, Metatron?” She can’t hide her disdain for him. “Must you stay?”
He shits in her garden as he takes off into the sky, and she mixes it into the dirt.
NAAMAH RETURNS AS EVERYONE IS leading horses into the newly finished stables.
“How do they look, Mom?” Ham yells over to her.
“They look great!”
Noah is smiling. Jael is on his shoulder. He’s beginning to see the life they will have here.
Naamah catches up with Neela, who’s bringing up the end of the line, carrying Danit.
“Hello,” Naamah says.
Neela nods at her. Things haven’t been the same between them since the night Naamah took Danit to the water.
When the first horse is in the stall, Neela brings Danit’s hand to its side and says, “Horse.”
Danit is happy. She makes a gurgling sound high in her throat.
“Did you get burned out there today?” Neela asks. “You look red.”
“I fell asleep in the sun. Is it bad?”
“Not too bad.”
“It stings,” Naamah says.
“Do you want some milk to put on it?”
“You don’t mind?”
“No.” Neela hands Danit to Naamah. It’s the first time Naamah’s held her since that night.
Neela takes out her breast and with one hand squeezes milk into the other. Then Neela puts her breast back and looks at the milk. “Want me to do it?” she asks.
“Okay,” Naamah says.
Neela dips two fingers into her cupped left hand and runs them across Naamah’s forehead. She dips them again, touches lightly at the center of Naamah’s chin, then runs them along her jawline and over the tips of her ears. Then she rubs her hands together and takes Naamah’s face in her hands, placing her thumbs on her nose and dragging them across her cheeks. Naamah hasn’t been touched this way, this lightly, with such care, since her mother died.
“Thank you,” she says.
“Sure.”
Naamah holds Danit out toward Neela, but she doesn’t take her back.
“Would you mind if I go bathe?” Neela asks.
“Take your time,” Naamah says. But what she wants to do is drop down, kiss Neela’s hands, and thank her for these first signs of forgiveness.
NAAMAH TAKES DANIT BACK TO a tent to play. Jael follows. Naamah lies down, placing Danit with her knees in the hay and her head and arms on Naamah’s stomach. And then Danit does what all of her sons did: she pushes herself up, trying to raise her head. Jael is on the other side of Naamah’s stomach, bouncing his head for Danit to see.
“Hello,” he says.
And she smiles and her head plops back down. She smushes her nose into Naamah’s belly, left and right. She sputters and drools.
Then she starts again, her neck looking perfectly strong for a moment, Naamah cheering her on.