Noah, the tiller of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk, and he uncovered himself within his tent.
Genesis 9:20-22
I wake up in the sodden pool of my own waste, harsh and stinking in the heat of the desert. Old men have loose bladders, I think, trying to deceive myself. But I know it is the wine. I do not know what time or what day it is or where my family is — but I know it is the wine. My tongue is smeared and swollen with its sweetness. There are bottles scattered around the tent.
I sit up and look at myself. There is a dark stain on my clothing, which clings to my skin, moist with grease and sweat. A single drop slides down the bridge of my nose and falls like rain onto my thigh. It may have been a tear; I am an old man, and my flesh is often weak.
I reach for a bottle. One is still half full. I pluck out the cork and wrap my lips around the mouth like a baby, hungry and sucking. Red wine, a flood, washes over my gums and teeth and splashes down my throat. I drown in a furious ocean of red.
For I am a righteous man, and was spared.
Wine does not despise or discriminate; it is uniformly benevolent. Wine does not dictate moral mandates; it submerges morality and memory. Wine is steady; oblivious salvation lies in every bottle.
Could He be judged so kindly? God is a fickle architect, creating worlds and then snuffing them at every minor indignation. God demands subordination; wine emboldens. God turns deaf to every entreaty; wine hears and understands every plea. God murders; wine resurrects. Which is the greater deity?
I am the father of a new race. All that now exists and walks erect on two feet has issued from me. My seed has repopulated the land.
I had never built a ship before.
That mattered little, for there was no ambiguity in the voice I heard. I was given an exacting schedule and precise blueprints detailing materials, dimensions, and capacity. The length of each plank, the degrees of arc, the joinings, even the blend of pitch to coat the hull — all these instructions were laid out for me with detached precision.
I could have refused. I could have pronounced this judgment insane, the plan monstrous, the executioner despotic. I could have protested or resisted. I could have debated or cajoled, I could have begged, I could have thrown myself down and cried out for the sake of everything that lives.
I said nothing.
I climbed to the top of the mountain and began to gather the wood I was told I would need.
I am a farmer, not a builder of ships. I was a farmer, that is. Now I am a ghost who lives on for no reason. On and on and on.
In the time since the beginning of all things, since the days of the farmer who knew no toil and the woman who knew no shame, the world had become, I was told, corrupt and vile. Ugly and unnatural, it was ruled by intemperate desire. Its citizens had failed to fulfill their promise.
As I began to build I gazed around me. I watched my neighbors passing by and marveled at the easy grace of human forms. My wife’s muscled symmetry, her dark, rich skin, astonished me. I reveled in the open, innocent curiosities of my three sons. The world — it was flawed and faltering, tempestuous and tottering, imperfect. It bore scars, and that is what made it perfect.
And no crime, no sin of omission or commission, had completely annihilated its spirit, its hopes, its dreams that limped toward light. There was no irrefutable justification for a sentence of genocide. But that was the verdict.
When I began to build the ship, my friends and neighbors, ambling by, laughed. They were quite logically amused to see an old man building a large boat in the middle of a vast, sandy plain. I tried to joke, mumbling about what age does to a man’s reason, explaining that I was beginning a new hobby, that the tedium of farming will make a man do nearly anything for diversion. In my heart I hurled questions at the sky.
Is my family to be the only one that survives?
For it was said that the wicked swarmed, that the sinful festered, that the world was a snake coiled back into itself. And my family alone, for whatever reason, would find reprieve. The record now documents these events blandly. For myself, I could not fathom the numbers of the dead: a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, one hundred thousand, a million chests bloating and bursting with water. To spare so few, among so many? Surely there was some error. Surely the standard was too high. That was the question I whispered in my heart and shouted in my dreams: Are there not more?
When I was a boy we lived on the banks of the Jordan River. Every spring when the rains came, the river would surge up over its banks.
We raised sheep. They are not intelligent animals and are wont to wander off, confused and skittish.
One spring when the rain beat down and the waters raged, I took count of the flock and came up one short. I anxiously told my father, and we hurried out to search for it. Over the rise beyond our home we saw the lost sheep shivering on the bank of the engorged river.
I called out to it. The sheep turned and stepped backward, alarmed, perhaps, by my shout. It slipped in the mud and plunged helplessly into the river.
I leaped forward, but my father caught my arm and pulled me back. I could do nothing but watch.
The sheep paddled furiously against the savage current, its fleece soaked and heavy, its legs jerking futilely. Then it began spinning around and around and down.
I could see its eyes.
They were so wide I thought they might explode from their sockets, as though to close them would be to perish. They were begging me, a savior, for help. For that moment I was the God of All Sheep, viewing the death of one of my own, for no cause but mere accident.
And I heard its voice. It was not the common bleating of a sheep. This was another tongue, a song of strangling, of dying. It was a voice that burrowed under my skin and knotted my nerves. I knew what it said: Why?
The world began bucking and heaving beneath my feet, and just before the blackness swallowed me, the river swallowed the sheep.
That was centuries ago. My father is long since dead, and many sheep too. My sons tend the flocks now, for I am old and frail, of little use to sheep.
To construct such a massive vessel took many months. The laughter of my neighbors swelled into open derision for a time before fading into a wry and tolerant bemusement. Old men — and I was an old man even then — are granted the privilege of feeblemindedness, of folly. Since acting the clown helped me avoid their eyes, I willingly played along.
My wife and sons, mercifully, never attempted to dissuade me from my seemingly mad obsession. They never asked me about it either. Did they know? Did the One who spoke to me speak to them as well? Perhaps, like me, they felt a drop of rain.
Eventually my neighbor across the pasture was the only person who still stopped by and spoke to me. Every afternoon he would walk across the field and join me in my tent for some cool lemon tea. We did not say much; his visits were his way of telling me that I was not, in his eyes, a madman. He would survey my ship, by then looming large, and admire its craftsmanship without sarcasm.
Once, while inspecting the stern, he turned to me and asked, “Is there something important I do not know?”
I hid my face and offered him more tea.
When the hull was completed I was instructed to coat it with pitch so that it wouldn’t leak. The work was even harder than hewing and shaping the wood, for the pitch burned and its smell assaulted my nostrils. At the end of each day’s labor, my hands were black, smeared with a stain that would not wash off.
Winter came. The ship was nearly finished. My wife and I, and our sons and their wives, began laying in stores for the journey: food, salt, lard, cloth, and firewood.
By spring it was done.
I lingered over final tasks, postponing certain details, stalling. But finally there was nothing left to do but wait.
Heavy clouds began darkening the skies. Day by day it became more difficult to breathe, as though we were underwater.
In my dreams I pleaded one last time. I cried out to Him for mercy; I heard only the growls of distant thunder. I screamed at Him, hurling accusations against heaven; my words fell back upon me like stinging hail.
And so I began counting, one and two, one and two, one and two. They came to me in pairs, as though commanded by the clouds. They lumbered on heavy feet, the plank groaning; they glided in on the winds; they scampered, slithered, waddled, sprinted, skittered. They obediently hunkered down in the belly of the great boat.
The last ones walked erect: my wife, our sons, their wives. I was last. I pulled the door shut behind me and sealed it with a final coat of pitch from the inside. Everything else was sealed out.
For I, Noah, am a righteous man.
The finger of God ripped open the sky, and the rains came. They came as a thundering hammer, a pounding, as though the fists of men and women were beating against the outside of the hull. They came in great storming sheets, running like panicked crowds before the onslaught of a great wave. They came spurting and unstoppable, like a torn artery. They came sharp and shimmering, like tears. I huddled in the belly of my ship, shivering, unable to cry. And I heard them out there, their voices of another tongue, of strangling. I heard the curses, my name spit out, and I heard the songs of dying — singly, in pairs, in hundreds, in thousands, in millions; men, women, and children. And when the last voice sank to the bottom of the sea, I, the God of All Sheep, crawled into the storeroom and found the wine.
This story previously appeared in the Pinehurst Journal.
— Ed.
