Sound the depths
A Black Chapter from: The Body | Made Flesh
Every morning for seven months Ham descended into the lowest deck of the vessel to tend the animals, and every morning the descent was the same: through the middle deck where his brothers and their wives slept on pallets of flax and rushes, past the stores of grain and dried fruit and the jars of oil that lined the ribs of the hull in long rows, and down into the hold, where the air was a thing you wore.
The pitch coating every surface, inside and out, gave the darkness its own taste, a sweet petroleum bitterness that settled on the tongue and stayed. The lanolin of the sheep. The dung, constant, layered, composted into the ballast of straw and earth they had laid before loading the first animal. The ammoniac sharpness of urine pooling in the bilge. And underneath all of it, a smell that had no name, the smell of living things confined together in the belly of a sealed wooden box for so long that their individual scents had merged into a single atmosphere, heavy, warm, intimate as breath, and as inescapable.
Ham knew the sounds of the hold the way his father knew the sounds of God: by long attendance and by trust that what he heard was being spoken to him. The lowing of the oxen in the dark. The shuffle and stamp of hooves on wet straw. The shrieks of the birds that came in cycles, building to a frenzy and then subsiding into a silence that was its own kind of frenzy. The goats bleating for grain. The insects, everywhere, in the straw, in the fur, in the seams of the pitch, a low hum that ran beneath the animal noise the way a drone runs beneath a melody, continuous, foundational, the first sound and the last.
On this morning, the morning of the fourth day of fog, the hold was silent.
Ham stood at the bottom of the ladder with the oil lamp in his hand and listened. The flame threw a circle of yellow light that reached as far as the nearest animals, the two oxen in their stall, and beyond that circle the hold extended into a darkness that contained every species of creature that walked or crept upon the earth, each pair in its place, each according to its kind, and none of them making a sound.
The oxen had turned their skulls toward the starboard hull. Both of them. Their brown eyes caught the lamplight and threw it back, flat, wide, and they stood with their weight settled as though the floor beneath them had become a thing requiring attention. The doves in their wicker cages sat with their breast feathers compressed against their bodies and their eyes open and their heads motionless, and they trembled, all of them, at a pitch below the range of sight, a vibration Ham could feel when he placed his hand against the wicker. The she-goats had pressed themselves into the hull planking at the seams between the ribs where the kopher still bled in slow black tears, and their feed troughs were full, the grain untouched.
A goat that refuses grain has arrived at a conclusion.
Ham climbed back through the middle deck, where his mother lay sleeping on her pallet, her hair grey against the flax, her breath shallow and even, and he noticed, as he passed, that the rushes beneath her were the same rushes they had cut from the banks of the Euphrates two months before the rains, and the Euphrates was a memory the depth of the ocean now, and the banks where the rushes grew were silt, and the hands that had helped him cut them belonged to men whose names he could still recite in order.
He came up through the ṣōhar and onto the deck.
The fog was absolute. It covered the water and filled the air and erased the distance between them so completely that the surface of the sea and the roof of the sky were one substance, a white so uniform it defeated the eye’s attempt to focus. Through the single opening in the roof of the vessel, a square the width of a man’s writing desk, Ham had seen the same white for four days, and he had come to understand it as the face of the deep, the tehom, which had been bounded at creation and unbounded at the flood and which now pressed against the vessel from below and above and every side with the patience of something that had been here before the light.
Visibility ended at seven cubits. Beyond that seventh cubit the world was theory.
His father stood at the rail. Shem and Japheth flanked him, their robes dark with mist that had accumulated on every surface, their breath visible for a moment before the fog took it back. They had been standing there since before Ham went below. They may have been standing there all night. Noah had ceased to sleep consistently after the fortieth day, and his sons had learned to work around his vigils the way a river works around a stone, flowing past on either side without comment, without collision, resuming their course beyond.
Noah was studying the fog. He studied it the way he studied the wood grain before selecting a plank, the way he had studied the clouds for two years before the rains. With the absolute attention of a man who expects what he sees to answer him. This attention was the thing that made him righteous. It was the first quality God had noticed and the last quality his sons would forgive.
He told them to drop anchor. He had been speaking to things that gave no answer for seven months.
The word was ordinary. The act was, in the vocabulary of the sea, routine. Ships anchor. Men drop stones over the side and stones descend to the bottom and the bottom holds. Except the Ark was a vessel adrift on the waters of an unmaking, above a world drowned to the peaks of its highest mountains, in fog so total that depth itself was a guess, and the bottom, if there was a bottom, held the body of every man and woman and child and beast who had lived and died in the age before, and to send a stone down into that water was to reach, for the first time since the door was sealed, into the grave of the world and ask it to hold you.
His sons obeyed.
The anchor was limestone. Pale, dense, shaped roughly into a trapezoid by hands that understood stone as a material of construction. A slab as long as a man’s arm and as heavy as a man’s body, with a single hole bored through its crown, large enough to receive a doubled fist, smoothed by the rope that had already passed through it a hundred times in practice moorings along a coast that was now seafloor. One of six aboard. Lashed to the deck with flax cordage that had gone stiff and dark with salt and months. Ham and Japheth unlashed it together, working the knots their father had taught them in the yard of a house, beside a well, under an almond tree whose root structure was now deeper than any anchor could sound. They fed the line through the hole and secured it with the hitch that locks under load.
They lifted the stone over the rail.
The water below was the color of old pewter, opaque, without reflection. It accepted the anchor the way the fog accepted breath. The surface opened and the stone passed through and the surface closed, and what remained was the rope, paying out over the rail in a long hiss of wet flax against wet wood, the only sound on the deck, the only sound in the world.
Ham counted.
It was the last instrument left to him. In a world emptied of every landmark, every road, every fixed point by which a man locates himself in the field of the living, Ham counted. He counted by fathoms, by arm-lengths, the ancient measure, the width of a man’s embrace extended toward the thing he wishes to reach. The stone descended through water and the rope followed and Ham counted the fathoms the way the bereaved count days.
Five fathoms. Thirty feet. The depth of the market wells in Enoch where women lowered jars on braided cord and the water came up cold and tasting of chalk.
Ten fathoms. Sixty feet. The height of the cedar grove east of his grandfather’s house, measured once from root to crown by his uncle Oren, who smelled of tanning oil and who called the number up to a boy sitting in the branches with his feet bare and his hands sticky with resin.
Fifteen fathoms. Ninety feet. The depth at which daylight thins to a green the color of old bronze, and the world above becomes the rumor of a world, and the world below has yet to begin.
Twenty fathoms. The rope stopped.
The stone had found purchase. Something solid beneath the opacity, beneath the pewter surface, beneath the silence that had replaced geography. The rope drew taut between the rail and the deep, and the vessel swung slowly to its new center, and the timbers groaned along the full three-hundred-cubit length of the hull, a sound so low it registered in the sternum, and then the groaning ceased and the vessel held.
For the first time in seven months, the Ark was still.
Ham stood with the rope in his hands and the stillness in the hull beneath his feet and he could feel the fixity in his knees and his jaw and the column of his spine, as though his body, which had spent two hundred days adjusting to motion, had to learn motionlessness again from the ground up. The fog pressed closer. The animals below remained silent. The rope descended from the rail into the water at a steep angle and vanished two cubits below the surface, beyond which the eye could follow nothing, and whatever held the stone held it with a grip firm enough to arrest fifteen thousand tons of gopher wood and pitch and living freight.
Noah came to the rail and stood beside his son and looked down at the place where the rope entered the water. His face in the fog was the face Ham had known for thirty years, weathered, certain, built for silence the way the keel of this vessel was built for weight, and Ham, standing beside him in the first stillness, understood that his father had expected the anchor to catch. Had known it would catch. Had been waiting for this.
The fog held. The timbers ticked and settled. Somewhere in the hold a single bird shifted on its perch and the shift was audible because there was no other sound, because the world had contracted to the radius of this vessel and everything beyond it was fog or water or the memory of what the water had replaced. Shem went below to check the stores. Japheth sat against the rail and closed his eyes. Noah remained standing. Ham remained standing. The rope between them and the deep remained taut.
Minutes passed. They passed the way hours pass in a room where someone has just died, slowly, thickened, each minute aware of itself. The fog developed currents, thin grey rivers of denser white that moved across the deck without wind, stirred by some pressure beneath or above that the men could feel on their skin. Ham thought of the woman who had taught him the names of fourteen stars in a room above the tanners’ quarter in the city of Irad, her hands tracing the shapes on a stretched hide, Leo and the Scorpion and the seven daughters, and he thought of that room now, twenty fathoms below him, and the hide, and the hands, and the fourteen names still alive in his mouth while the woman who had placed them there lay twenty fathoms below.
He was watching the rope. He was watching the place where it crossed the rail, the wet flax pressed into the groove it had worn during the slow swing to center, and he was watching the place where it entered the water, the small disturbance of surface tension where the fibers pierced the grey, because watching was the thing Ham did.
The rope shifted.
A small movement. Lateral. A twitch, as though the stone twenty fathoms below had been nudged. Except the Ark was riding no current. The Ark had been riding no current for days. The fog had arrived with a calm so total that the surface of the water held no disturbance of any kind, and the vessel stood fixed upon it, and any movement in the rope came from below, from the place where the anchor gripped, from whatever the anchor gripped, from the deep itself.
Ham watched it and said nothing. His father watched it and said nothing.
The rope moved again.
The third movement of the rope was sustained.
A pull. Lateral. Steady. Drawing the bow of the vessel to starboard with a force that registered in the deck planking beneath Ham’s feet before it registered in his mind. The vessel began to turn. The timbers spoke, a low complaint that ran from stem to stern along the keel-line, and the water along the port side changed its voice, thickening, resisting, as the hull swung against it.
Noah said haul.
The three sons went to the line. They wrapped it around the rail post and braced their weight and pulled, and the rope gave nothing. It was taut beyond the capacity of three men to influence, rigid as a bar, humming at a frequency Ham could feel in the bones of his fingers. They hauled again. The rope bit into the wood of the rail and scored it and the deep kept its grip and the vessel kept turning, slowly, enormously, drawn by a force beneath the surface that cared nothing for the instrument it moved.
Something below had the anchor and something below was moving, and it was moving with a purpose that had nothing to do with current or tide because there was no current and there was no tide. There was only the deep and whatever lived in the deep that the flood had failed to kill because the flood was the deep.
The deep does not kill itself.
The vessel began to move forward. A slow gathering of momentum, the hull groaning as the force on the line translated through the bow rail and into the frame and along the three hundred cubits of gopher wood and pitch, and the water began to part along the leading edge, and Ham could hear it, the shush of displacement, the sound a vessel makes when it is under way except that no vessel under way had ever made this sound because no vessel had ever been towed by its own anchor through the grave of a drowned world in fog so total that the destination was invisible and the speed was a guess and the force was coming from twenty fathoms below where a stone had caught on something that would not let go and would not hold still.
Noah said cut it.
And Japheth took the blade. A bronze knife, wide, heavy, honed on a whetstone that morning by habit because habit was the only discipline left aboard. He set the edge against the rope where it crossed the rail. The fibers were compressed under a load that had turned flax into something closer to iron, each strand bearing the full weight of whatever held the stone and whatever the stone held, and the blade scored the outer layer and slid. Japheth pressed harder. The blade skidded across the surface of the rope the way a hand skids across a wet stone, finding no purchase, no entry, no gap between the fibers through which an edge could begin its work.
He sawed. The rope hummed. The hull accelerated.
And Ham braced his feet against the deck and watched his brother work the blade back and forth across a rope that refused the bronze, and below them in the hold the animals found their voices, all of them, at once, a sound that rose through the decks the way heat rises through a house, the oxen and the goats and the birds and the things that crept, all of them crying out in a register Ham had never heard in seven months of tending them, a sound older than fear, the sound of recognition.
And the vessel was moving at speed. And the fog streamed across the deck in long white ribbons. The water along the hull had changed from the lapping of rest to the sustained hiss of passage, and the pitch coating the exterior groaned as the planking flexed under stresses the builder had calculated for buoyancy, for weight, for floating, for riding out a deluge in place, for enduring, and had never calculated for this, for being dragged, for being hauled through the waters of a world whose death was supposed to have settled everything.
Shem came up from below with his face the color of the fog.
The blade was useless. Japheth’s hands were bleeding where the rope had peeled the skin from his palms during the sawing, and the cut he had managed was a shallow score across a quarter of the rope’s diameter, and the rope bore it without acknowledgment, without weakening, holding its load and its secret and its direction.
Noah stood at the bow. He had moved there during the cutting and he stood where the line descended from the rail into the water and he was looking forward into the white, into the direction the vessel was being drawn, and his face was the face of a man listening to something he has heard before and is hearing again and will hear for the rest of his life.
And the rope parted.
It parted at the rail, where the friction of the wood against the wet flax under sustained load had been working its own slow cut for the full duration of the drag. A patience that outlasted bronze. The sound was a single crack, loud as a timber breaking, and the freed end whipped across the deck and struck the mast housing and the vessel lurched forward under its own momentum, suddenly free, running on its own weight through water it had no means of ceasing to move through.
Ham fell. His hands found the deck and the deck was wet and vibrating and he looked up from the planking, forward, through the fog, in the direction of their travel.
The mountain came out of the white the way a body comes up from under the water, all at once, entire, streaming. Black stone, wet, enormous, filling the visible world from the waterline to the top of the fog and beyond, a mass so sudden and so absolute it had been there all along, hidden in the white, patient, waiting at the end of whatever leash the deep had used to drag them here.
Ararat.
The vessel struck the mountain at the waterline and the mountain did not move.
The sound began in the bow and traveled the length of the hull the way a word travels the length of a sentence, arriving at the stern a half-second after it began, and in that half-second Ham was airborne, his feet leaving the deck, his body thrown forward by the arrest of fifteen thousand tons of wood and pitch and living cargo against a surface that had been waiting in the fog since before the flood and before the vessel and before the man who built it. He landed on the deck planking with his shoulder and his teeth and the oil lamp shattered somewhere behind him and went dark and the darkness lasted only a moment because the ṣōhar was above and the white poured through it and then he was sliding, the wet deck angled beneath him, the vessel riding up onto the rock shelf, the flat bottom meeting stone with a friction that tore the kopher seal along the starboard bow and opened the fourth strake to the water.
The gopher wood screamed. The planking split along the grain and the split ran from the point of impact aft for six cubits before the framing stopped it, and through the split the sea entered the vessel, grey and cold and carrying with it the smell of the deep, a mineral darkness that cut through the petroleum sweetness of the pitch, through the animal stink that had been the atmosphere of the hold for seven months, through everything, the way a new grief cuts through the old ones and reminds the body that it has always had more room.
The vessel settled. It listed to starboard, five degrees, perhaps six, and the listing held, the hull pinned against the rock shelf at an angle that made the deck a slope and the slope a new fact of life aboard. The water coming through the opened strake filled the bilge and met the ballast and stopped rising at the level of the lowest stall, and the animals in that stall, two yearling heifers, stood in water to their hocks and lowed once and then were silent.
Everything was silent.
The fog pressed against the hull. The mountain, where it touched the vessel, was black basalt, wet, seamed with frost at the waterline, and it rose from the surface of the sea at an angle steep enough that the vessel lay against it the way a man lies against a wall when his legs have finished carrying him. Above the point of contact the rock vanished into the white. Below the waterline the rock descended into the grey. The vessel had grounded on a shelf or a shoulder, a ledge of mountain protruding from the mass, and beyond the ledge, on the seaward side, the water went down into the same opacity the anchor had sounded before the rope moved, before the drag, before the fog delivered them here.
Ham stood and his shoulder answered with a heat that would become a bruise by evening. He looked aft. Shem was on his hands and knees near the mast housing. Japheth lay against the port rail where the impact had thrown him, and he was moving, his hands finding the rail, pulling himself upright. Their mother had come up from the middle deck and she stood in the ṣōhar opening with her grey hair wild and her face the face of a woman who has been woken from sleep by the sound of the world ending and has heard that sound before.
Noah stood at the bow. He had braced himself against the rail before the impact, or the impact had placed him there, and he had not fallen. He stood with his hands on the wood and the mountain in front of him close enough to touch and he was looking at the rock the way he had looked at the fog, with the attention of a man who expects what he sees to answer him, and the rock, unlike the fog, had a surface, had a texture, had the evidence of age in its seams and its frost and its lichens, grey and green, the first color other than white and pewter and the brown of wet wood that Ham had seen in seven months.
Lichen. Growing on the rock. Which meant the rock had been above the waterline long enough for lichen to take hold, which meant the waters were receding, which meant the mountain had been emerging from the flood for weeks or months while the fog hid it.
Noah touched the rock. He placed his palm flat against the basalt and held it there, and Ham watched his father’s hand on the first solid ground any of them had touched since the door was sealed, and the hand was steady, and the steadiness was either faith or something Ham had no name for.
The hours after the grounding passed in the work of survival. Shem and Ham went below to assess the damage. The opened strake admitted water at a rate that could be managed with bailing, two men working in shifts with the clay vessels they had brought for grain storage, filling and hauling and emptying over the rail in a rhythm that became, within the first hour, as automatic as breathing. The water was cold and it was grey and it smelled of stone and of something else, something beneath the stone, an organic sweetness that Ham recognized from the months in the hold and then placed: the smell of decomposition, of matter breaking down in water, of the world that had drowned returning, particle by particle, to the medium that had killed it. He bailed and he breathed it and he said nothing.
The vessel was stable. The rock shelf held it. The list would not worsen unless the shelf gave way, and the shelf was basalt and basalt does not give way. The hull above the waterline was intact. The stores were dry. The animals were shaken and restless and several of the birds had injured themselves against their cages during the impact, beating their wings against the wicker until feathers littered the straw, but none were dead. The manifest of living things remained complete.
The fog began to change.
It did not lift. It thinned. The white lost its uniformity and developed textures, densities, corridors of clearer air through which the mountain revealed itself in sections, a shoulder of rock here, a crevice there, the dark line of a ridge appearing for a moment and then closing again as the fog shifted. The world returned in fragments. A ledge of stone twenty cubits above the waterline, bare, streaked with mineral deposits the color of rust. A patch of sky, briefly, pale blue, the first blue since the rains, glimpsed through a tear in the white that sealed itself before Ham could call his brothers to see it. The mountain emerging from the fog the way a face emerges from behind a veil, feature by feature, the whole still hidden, the parts sufficient to confirm that behind the white something enormous was becoming visible for the first time.
The water level had dropped since the grounding. Ham could see it on the rock. A line of wet stone, dark, and above it a line of dry stone, lighter, and the distance between them was the distance the waters had receded in the hours since the vessel struck. Six inches. Perhaps eight. The deep was withdrawing. The bounded chaos was being bounded again. The fountains of the deep were closing and the windows of heaven were shutting and the habitable space between the waters above and the waters below was reopening, and the evidence of this was a hand’s breadth of dry stone on the side of a mountain in the fog.
Noah saw it, and his face did not change, because his face had not changed since the day the first rains fell and the screaming began outside the sealed door and he stood with his hands at his sides and his eyes on the ceiling and waited for the screaming to stop.
By evening the fog had thinned enough to see the full breadth of the shelf on which the vessel rested, a natural terrace of rock fifty cubits wide and twice as long, angled slightly toward the sea, holding the Ark the way a cupped hand holds water. Beyond the shelf the mountain rose into cloud. Below the shelf the sea extended to the edge of visibility, grey, still, featureless, the surface unbroken by anything except the fog that still hung above it in long pale strata.
Noah went below.
Ham heard him in the hold. He heard his father’s footsteps on the ladder and then on the straw, and he heard the animals stir at his passing, and he heard him stop, and he knew where he had stopped because Ham knew the hold the way his father knew the voice of God, by long attendance, and what his father had stopped in front of was the cage that held the doves.
The wicker creaked. A small sound. The sound of a hand reaching into a cage and closing around a body no larger than a man’s fist, warm, feathered, trembling.
Noah came up from the hold with the dove in his hands.
He stood on the listing deck with the fog curling around his shoulders and the mountain at his back and the grey sea before him, and the dove sat in the cup of his palms, her breast feathers white against his brown fingers, her eye a black bead, unblinking, fixed on the distance that had swallowed everything she had been born to navigate, and Ham watched his father hold the bird the way he had watched him hold the pen, the way he had watched him hold the hammer, the way he had watched him hold everything, with the grip of a man who believes that what he holds has been given to him for a reason and the reason will be made clear at the moment of release.
The fog held. The mountain held. The dove trembled.
Noah opened his hands.
The dove sat in the cup of his palms for a moment after the fingers parted, the way a word sits in the mouth after the lips have opened, trembling, unresolved. Her feet gripped the skin of his thumbs. Her breast feathers rose and fell with a breathing so rapid it was almost continuous, a vibration more than a rhythm, and her black eye held the fog, without discrimination, without preference.
She pushed off.
The feet released and the wings opened and the first downstroke pushed a column of air against Noah’s upturned palms and the sound of it was the sound of a book being closed, a single percussive report, and then the second stroke lifted her above the rail and the third carried her into the fog and Ham watched her go, a white body moving through white air, visible for five wingbeats, four, three, her shape thinning with distance, the distinction between dove and fog narrowing until it was a question of faith whether what he saw at the edge of visibility was a bird or the memory of a bird or the fog itself, rearranging, offering back the shape of what it had just received.
She was gone.
The fog closed behind her the way the water had closed behind the anchor stone, without seam, without scar, without any evidence that something had passed through it. She had entered the white and the white had taken her and there was nothing remaining on the deck to prove she had been there at all except the warmth in Noah’s palms, which Ham could not see but knew, because he had held the doves himself, many times, in the hold, and he knew what their bodies left behind: a ghost of heat in the cup of the hand that fades over the course of a minute and then is gone and the hand is just a hand again.
They waited.
Noah at the rail with his hands at his sides. Ham beside him. Shem below, bailing. Japheth against the mast housing with his bandaged palms in his lap, the linen wrappings spotted brown where the rope had taken his skin during the cutting. Their mother in the ṣōhar opening, watching the fog from the only frame through which she had seen the sky for seven months. Five people on the deck of a grounded vessel on the shoulder of a mountain in a receding flood, watching the white for the return of a bird the size of a man’s fist that carried, in the hollow bones of its body, the entire question of whether the world outside the vessel was a world at all or only water.
Ham counted. He counted the way he had counted fathoms, by the body’s own instrument, except now the instrument was breath. He breathed and the breath went out and the breath came back and each cycle was a unit of waiting, the way each fathom had been a unit of depth, and the depth he was sounding now was time, and the bottom, if there was a bottom, was the moment the dove returned.
Twenty breaths. A minute, perhaps. The fog unchanged. The sea unchanged. The mountain holding the vessel on its stone shelf and the vessel holding its list and the list holding steady, five degrees to starboard, the new posture of their lives.
Sixty breaths. Three minutes. Ham looked at his father’s face and his father’s face was still, composed, attending to the distance with the same absolute attention he had brought to the fog before the anchor, to the wood grain before the planking, to the clouds before the rain. Whatever the fog returned to him, his face was ready to receive it. It had been ready for thirty years. It would be ready, Ham understood, if the fog returned nothing at all.
A hundred breaths. Five minutes. The animals below had gone quiet again. The birds in their cages, the goats, the oxen, all of them settled into the held silence that had preceded the anchor, the same silence, as though the vessel had arrived for the second time at a threshold and the living things aboard could feel it and were pressing themselves flat against whatever surface might hold them while the threshold was crossed.
Ham heard it before he saw it.
A sound from above. From the fog, from the direction the dove had gone but higher, much higher than a dove returns from a scouting flight over calm water, a sound descending at a speed the ear registered before the mind could name, the whistle of a small body falling through air at a velocity its own wings could never produce.
The dove struck the roof of the vessel.
The sound was wet and brief, a single syllable, the sound of a thing that was alive becoming a thing that was not, and then the body rolled down the pitch-coated slope of the roof and dropped to the deck at Ham’s feet.
She lay on her side. Her breast feathers were white and clean and undisturbed. Her wings were folded. Her eye was open, black, still carrying the fog it had last seen. Her feet were curled beneath her the way a sleeping bird curls its feet, and she looked, for a moment, as though she had simply landed badly, as though the fall were a mistake she would correct with a shake and a ruffle and a push of her feet against the deck.
Her neck was broken.
It was broken cleanly. A single fracture at the base of the skull that had rotated her head forty degrees from the axis of her body, so that she looked back over her own shoulder at the place she had come from, the fog, the white, the distance into which Noah had released her. No blood. No wound. No mark of talon or tooth or weather. The break was precise. It had been delivered by something that understood where the life in a dove resides and had ended it there, at that exact point, with an economy that was either mechanical or deliberate, and Ham, who knew the difference between a death by accident and a death by intention, knew which one this was.
No one spoke.
The dove lay on the deck between Ham and his father, her broken head turned toward the fog, her clean white feathers catching the grey light. The snapped anchor line hung over the bow rail, its frayed end dark with wet, swaying slightly. The mountain rose behind them. The sea spread before them, and somewhere in the fog, or beneath it, or woven into it, the thing that had caught the anchor and dragged the vessel and thrown the bird back dead was still there, and it was patient, and it was close.
Ham looked at his father.
Noah was looking at the dove. His face was the face Ham had known for thirty years, the face of a man who speaks to God and is answered, the face of a man who builds when told to build and loads when told to load and seals the door when told to seal it. And Ham watched that face change. The change was not large. It was not the collapse of faith or the arrival of fear. It was smaller than both of those and more dangerous. It was the face of a man who has seen something and is deciding, in the silence between seeing and speaking, what he will say he saw.
Noah bent down and picked up the dove. He held her in one hand, the broken head resting against his wrist, and he looked at her, and then he looked at his son.
Ham met his father’s eyes. He held them. He did not look away.
Noah turned and carried the dove below.
When he came back up, his hands were empty of the dove and he was carrying, instead, a square of parchment and a reed pen and a small jar of ink, and he sat down on the listing deck with his back against the mast housing and he uncapped the ink and he dipped the pen and he began to write.
Ham watched the pen move across the parchment. He watched the ink darken the surface in strokes that moved from right to left, steady, unhurried, the same broad strokes a man makes when he is certain of the words, when the words have been composed already in some interior room and the hand is merely delivering them to the page. Noah wrote and the fog thinned as he wrote and the dove lay below in the hold where he had carried her with her neck broken and her clean white feathers and her eye still open and her head turned back toward the fog that had killed her, and the pen moved, and what the pen wrote was this:
וַתָּבֹא אֵלָיו הַיּוֹנָה לְעֵת עֶרֶב וְהִנֵּה עֲלֵה־זַיִת טָרָף בְּפִיהָ וַיֵּדַע נֹחַ כִּי־קַלּוּ הַמַּיִם מֵעַל הָאָרֶץ
And the dove came to him in the evening, and lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf freshly plucked; so Noah knew that the waters had abated from the earth.
And so it was written.
There's so much philosophy in here. You italicized a-lot of it, and hid the best work in the depths, or I suppose, fog, of the work. This feels like it could take a career to unpack... Your sentences run, I think of Herman Melville, but are compressed; is he an influence of yours If you don't mind saying? I think you are finding your voice, and I can honestly say that I have not heard similar before. Awe inspiring work Barnes.