Her back is straight as steel. “I don’t need to read it to know it’s evil. It teaches our children to deny God!”
“No, Miriam, it does not.” Then before my temper gets out of control I add, “God moves in mysterious ways, and no mere human can know all those ways nor claim to understand the dimensions of God.”
“But God spoke to the prophets, and through them to me. I know God’s Word and His Truth.”
I don’t rise to the bait, and after a moment she adds: “My children will learn to listen to God, and I don’t want them taught evil.”
I don’t rise to that bait, either. All at once I’m weary of this, and I know it’s a mistake to argue with her. It only feeds her conviction. And her willingness to argue with me feeds my anxiety. That willingness is due in part to the fact that we’re alone, but it also suggests a burgeoning confidence in her. I hear a rush of rain on the roof. Just a squall; the light has gone gray.
“Miriam, I don’t want to be your enemy. We can’t let ourselves be enemies, not when our little community is so vulnerable to schism.”
For a long time she studies me as if I am something inanimate, or rather a phenomenon to be cautiously observed. And I look back at her, seeing her in the same way: a phenomenon like the smoldering embers in a lightning-struck tree that are the seeds of a conflagration.
Finally she shakes her head, smiles faintly. “No, Mary, you aren’t my enemy. You are the Lord’s enemy.”
I take a deep breath, let it out slowly.
Gird up your loins, old woman.
Yet what of that fleeting fear I read in her eyes when she looked at this book? Why would she feel anything but contempt for a book that describes the evolution of this planet as it occurred—not as it was written by the authors of the Pentateuch in an era when the world was still thought to be flat? Was she afraid of the truth in this book? Rather, the reality?
It finally comes home to me that Miriam fears this book as a body of arcane knowledge, magical knowledge: black magic. Here at Amarna, I am the possessor and fountainhead of that knowledge. A witch. And in the words of her god, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
In the same book of the Bible, her god prescribes ceremonies for animal sacrifices, decrees laws dealing with slavery, and advocates revenge in kind as a means of redressing wrongs.
I’ve been through all this before in another time, another generation. Generation unto generation…
The backdoor opens, and Esther, Grace, and Enid come in, wet and laughing with exhilaration from the rain. But Esther stops when she sees Miriam and me. “I’m sorry. Are we interrupting something?”
Miriam takes a pod out of the basket, slits it open. “No, Esther. I’m just getting these peas ready for midday meal.”
Grace sits down by Miriam. “Here—I’ll help you. Oh, the rain just came in buckets, so we had to leave the garden work for now.”
I rise, take the book to the shelves on the south wall, then go into the living room to look out at the rain. There are streaks of blue sky in the west, but above Amarna clouds hang like shadows. I hear the children come in the backdoor, then Jeremiah, all creating a congenial cacophony. This small, fearfully isolated community is still united.
The squall drifts on within half an hour, and indoor work is put aside for outdoor. At this time of year the garden comes first. And the garden begins in the greenhouse.
I’ve always thought the greenhouse was one of the most agreeable rooms in the house. I suppose it’s not precisely a room, although it’s surrounded on three sides by the house, and I can never think of it as outside. The angled glass panels of the roof let me look up into the sky, but they stop the rain. The west wall is nearly all glass, even its door, and I can see the ocean, but I can’t feel the sea wind. I walk on stone, but it must be swept with a broom like any inside floor. But half of this floor is earth, and that puts me outside again. So do the plants that grow in that earth: tomatoes, leaf lettuce, poppies, spinach, and, to distract whitefly from the others, nasturtiums. And for pleasure, sapphire blue lobelia.
The shelves along the walls are crowded with pots and trays filled with damp, dark earth in which green miracles are occurring. Year after year the miracles occur as they have for millions of years in different shapes and forms. The tart scent of the tomato plants, warmed by the sun, blends with Bernadette’s herbs: parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme—and how I wish I could remember all the words of that old song—chamomile, basil, borage, marjoram, peppermint, goldenseal, pennyroyal, hyssop, hepatica. And even a little cannabis.
This early in the year, the plants, except for the perennials, are miniatures of their once and future selves and charged with potential. But today many of the vegetable seedlings are leaving this sunny womb to survive—or not—in the true outside world in the garden. Bernadette is, aptly, midwife of this process.
Bernadette’s hair—short and curly, entirely white now—flies wildly around her head. She has become even smaller with age, but she’s still quick and impatient, still like an inquisitive squirrel with her sun-browned face, her gray, questing eyes, her small hands constantly busy. She is saying to Esther, “That flat there—yes, the cabbage. That goes. Then there’s more broccoli and these two cauliflowers.”
I’m at the worktable on the north wall stacking the slitted tarpaper squares that will go around the cabbage seedlings to discourage cutworms. The squares are much the worse for wear, and I’m not sure we have more tar paper in the storeroom. I look up at Stephen, who waits to carry one of the flats with its precious cargo. Esther places it in his hands, tells him, “Now, just watch where you put your feet on the way.”
“Esther, I never have dropped one.” He seldom calls her Mother, nor do Miriam’s children call her Mother.
I put a stack of tar-paper squares under my left arm and take up my cane. “I’ll walk up with you, Stephen.”
He smiles at me, leads the way, then pauses while I open the sliding glass door. We walk past the deck and the north wing of the house, then up the gentle slope to the garden. The grass is starred with dandelions and tiny, white English daisies. Stephen concentrates on keeping his load balanced. He doesn’t look up as he speaks. “Mary, I haven’t finished Treasure Island yet.”
He’s slated to report on that book in school. “There’s no hurry, Stephen. Besides, I’ve given you quite a lot to read lately.”
His mouth tightens. “Miriam says I can’t read at night. It wastes candles.”
I am jarred by sudden anger at that. There are always enough candles for reading. I try to keep the anger out of my voice. “Well, you’ll just have to finish it when you can. Do you like it?”
He glances up at me, grinning. “Yes. It’s really exciting.”
And what more can a teacher ask? Yet I wonder how much of the world of Jim Hawkins makes sense to Stephen, who would find the world that existed only thirty years before he was bom incomprehensible. But so would Jim Hawkins.
A cascade of laughter distracts me. Little Mary and Jonathan are running toward us on their way to the greenhouse. Jonathan shouts in passing, “Hurry up, Stephen. They’re waiting for more seedlings.”
Stephen retorts, “I’ll get there when I get there!”
When we reach the garden, they are indeed waiting; that is, Miriam, Grace, and Enid. Isaac has been detailed to hoe chopped kelp into the soil at the east end of the garden, and little Rachel is ostensibly helping him. She looks around at me and grins, and her small, fair face reminds me, as it always does, of Rebecca. But there’s no pain in that reminder, perhaps because Rachel is so replete with life and laughter and the unaware innocence of all young things.