Stephen rouses me from my memories. “Did Luke write the story of his journey?”
“Oh, yes. Jeremiah has it now. Maybe he’d let you read it. It was an arduous process, the writing of that story, but Luke took great pride in it. And Rachel inspired him to read books other than the Bible and to listen to ideas that were new to him. She told him a myth is the essence of an event. She told him to read between the lines and finally applied that principle to Genesis. She showed him glimpses of the universe.”
Glimpses. That’s all he’d open his eyes to see, but I thought he understood what little he saw, and I thought he understood the significance of the books and the importance of building a place to house and protect them.
“Mary, how long did the courting last?”
“About three months, actually. It was odd about that courtship. It was tacit. He couldn’t seem to work up his courage to actually say he wanted me to go back to the Ark with him.”
“Maybe he was afraid you wouldn’t go with him.”
My laugh at that has a bitter edge. “I wouldn’t have refused him. I had no choice. And I kept wondering why he didn’t understand that. Why he wouldn’t ask.” Then I shrug. “But I’d have done the asking if necessary. In fact, it made no difference whether I loved him or not. That only made it easier to accept what I had to do.”
But I did love him.
Rather, I was in love with him, and I doubt Stephen will ever understand that. My happiness hung on Luke’s smile. Yet at times I was angered almost past tolerance because he couldn’t fulfill all my expectations. I spun dizzily on a silken filament, and he was at the center of the web always.
I pull in a deep breath. “But perhaps I did, unconsciously, restrain him from the asking. That was because I wanted one final proof of his intentions.”
“What was that?”
“The vault, Stephen. I wanted the vault built.”
Stephen looks north toward the Knob. “Was that for Rachel?”
A perceptive question. “Partly, yes. But it was for me, too, not only because I believed fervently that the vault must be built, but because it seemed the ultimate test of his love.”
Stephen stretches his legs out, crosses his ankles. “I guess he must’ve passed the test.”
“Yes. Rachel and I helped, but the vault was really Luke’s project. Rachel drew the plans the last week of May, and we chose the site. The drainage is good on the Knob, and it’s highly visible. It gets the brunt of the winter storms, but that slope also gets sun all year long. The actual building began on the first day of June. Luke dug an excavation into the hillside, then he scavenged brick and stone from Shiloh. He used the stone for the walls and lined them and the floor with brick. Fortunately we’d stockpiled some sacks of mortar. He felled a cedar tree and split it into beams and planks for the roof and inside walls. He made the door of cedar and found brass hinges and a stainless steel chain and lock. He covered the roof with composition shingles three layers thick, added another layer of cedar shingles. Oh, it’s a work of art in its own way, Stephen. A labor of love. It took him most of the summer to construct this Taj Majal.”
At that, Stephen tilts his head quizzically. “This what, Mary?”
“The Taj Majal was a very famous building Before.” And I wonder if it’s still standing. Is it a vine-smothered ruin that may someday be disinterred as Angkor Wat and Chichén Itzá were and might be again?
Stephen is waiting patiently for me to get on with my story. But what can I tell him about the culmination of Luke’s courtship? He wouldn’t understand it, and it’s none of his business or anyone else’s. It belongs to me alone now, the memory, and it will die with me.
I tell him simply, “It was in June, on the summer solstice, when Luke finally asked me to be his wife. I accepted.”
Chapter 18
In its essence, the delight of sexual love, the genetic spasm, is a sensation of resurrection, of renewing our life in another, for only in others can we renew our life and so perpetuate ourselves.
Luke reached the end of the path ahead of her, looked back, grinning exuberantly. The sky floated a skim of cloud as subtle as the interior of a shell, the summer-tamed waves frothed beyond the velvet sand, and Mary laughed as she ran with him toward the breakers, chisels rattling in their buckets, sand flying around their feet until they reached the dark, wet sand vacated by the tide. They walked north toward the Knob, laying strings of foot tracks over the convoluted tracks of flowing water, and Mary told him about a similar day not so long ago when she had started for the Knob with her chisel and bucket and found a stranger on the beach. Luke nodded and took her hand in his.
At the base of the cliffs on the seaward side of the Knob, the ebbing tide had exposed rock terraces paved with tiny barnacles, a brittle mosaic that wheezed under their boots. In sea-scoured hollows, small, mysterious worlds shimmered beneath aquamarine water—worlds of roseate brocades, peridot swatches, yellow-gold spikes, where sinuous green silks glowed iridescent blue when the light struck at the right angle, and sea anemones opened into exotic blossoms of pale green and pink. The terraces were transected by fissures carved by the knife of the sea, and on their honed faces, mussels crowded, tufted mats of hissing, shining blue-black shells. Mary and Luke filled their buckets with seawater and set to work, carefully prying the mussels off the rock with their chisels.
Within half an hour the tide began to turn, rising into the fissures, draining away, but returning again in the long, constant rhythms of the sea. Mary worked methodically back from the encroaching water, taking only a few mussels from any one area, always leaving the largest to live and breed. The memory of the time when these rocks were barren of life gave her a profound respect for this profusion.
When at length, the tidal surges served warning that the sea was reclaiming its own in earnest, Mary and Luke walked up the slope of the beach until they found a satin-backed log to rest on. Mary put her bucket down next to Luke’s, assessing their harvest and calling it good, then sat beside him, while he delved into his shirt pocket and pulled out a cloth-wrapped package of venison jerky. He offered her a piece, but she shook her head. “I’m too thirsty for that. You didn’t happen to bring a canteen, did you?”
He motioned southward. “It’s down there—the creek.”
For a while they didn’t speak, and Mary cherished the tranquil silence as she watched the sea slowly flood the sand. Gulls wheeled restlessly, flying so high they were almost invisible. The weather would change soon.
Luke wrapped the remaining jerky and put it back in his pocket. “Rachel always has a different way of looking at things, doesn’t she?”
Mary felt the tranquillity shiver like the water in a tide pool ruffled by a wind. “Different from what?”
He shrugged. “Different from anything I’ve ever known.”
“Did you expect her to look at things the way you were taught?”
That surprised him, and Mary felt an acid rush of annoyance. So much surprised him.
“No,” he said hesitantly, “I guess I shouldn’t expect her to look at things the way I do, but I’ve never known any other way.”