When his father righted his head again and began to walk toward the shed, his steps had once more become purposeful. Ham was made even more curious by the way the shakiness and uncertainty had deserted him so quickly. What was he actually seeing when he looked at his father?
He came out of the shed again a few minutes later, dressed in his normal blue overalls. On his way to the house he caught sight of Ham and beckoned him but didn’t stop until he stood before Shem and Japheth, who had long since seen him, and stood waiting, each with a hammer dangling from his hand, and Japheth with two nails sticking out of his mouth.
The sawdust that lay in a pyramid under the horse they’d been using stood out sharply white against the otherwise muted, diffuse colors. The blade of the saw, discarded in the grass next to it, reflected the gray of the sky as water would have done, or a mirror, except where an incipient layer of rust had dulled its surface, and only the metal itself, brown and grainy, was visible.
“So you’re keeping at it,” said their father.
“Yes,” said Shem. “I think we’ll be finished sometime tomorrow. Then we just have to hope for fine weather so we can get it painted too.”
“That’s good,” said their father, and turned to Ham, who’d just come up.
“You’re here as well,” he said. “Then we’re assembled.”
Shem and Japheth exchanged a quick look. There was a trace of amusement in their eyes, and Ham had to look down to prevent himself smiling.
But Noah, an unusually sensitive man, who’d undoubtedly caught the atmosphere he’d created, took no notice of it.
“God has shown himself to me,” he said, and rested his eyes on each of them in turn. “In a few months a great flood will cover the entire earth. It will exterminate all living things. But he wants to enter a covenant with us. We are to build an ark, and when the flood comes, we shall get into it, and take with us a pair of all living creatures, so that they will be saved with us.”
The three brothers stared at their father in disbelief.
“So this rain is no ordinary rain,” he said, looking up at the sky. “It is the beginning of the end.”
Ham craned his head back and squinted up to see what his father saw. But the clouds looked like ordinary clouds. The rain like normal rain.
Everything was as normal, he thought. The house, the farmyard, the garden, the small patch of field, the wooded hillside, the mountains, the sky. His two brothers, with their rain-glistening faces and dark tufts of hair sticking out from under their hats.
Only his father wasn’t as normal. And wasn’t it tempting to think that it was only there, in his imagination, that the world would be destroyed?
“This ark,” said Shem, unable to conceal his skepticism. “What had you in mind regarding the look of the thing?”
His father gave a barely perceptible smile.
“I know you find it hard to believe me. But you don’t need to believe me, provided you do exactly as I say.”
“You want us to obey you unquestioningly,” said Shem.
“Yes,” said Noah. “I’m your father, and you do as I say. It’s as simple as that.”
“This ark,” said Shem. “What do you have in mind?”
Noah smiled again.
“It’s not what I have in mind, but what the Lord has in mind. And according to God’s word it must be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high. It must be furnished with many rooms, it must have a roof, and it must have a door at one side. And it must be tarred both inside and out.
“Three hundred cubits. .,” said Japheth. “Where could we build a ship of that length?”
“That’s the question,” said his father. “There are no treeless spaces big enough around here. My first thought was that we’d have to build it down in the fields in the valley. But in the first place, this would mean everybody could see what we were doing, and secondly the rising water level would soon make our work impossible. So we must go up,” he said, and pointed to the mountains. “We must head up there.”
And so it was. Early the next morning Noah and his sons left the valley. On their backs each had his bag of tools: hammers, nails, saws, axes, knives, planes, crowbars, levels, plumb lines, and across their shoulders they’d coiled as much rope as they could carry. They walked over the shoulder of the valley and down to the river, which they followed all the way up into the mountains, and didn’t stop until they’d got as far as the gorge, where, after balancing across the stone bridge one after the other, they ate the food they’d brought along, standing on the mountain on the other side. None of them spoke, whether because of exhaustion after the climb or the roar of the water, which in the funnel-shaped gorge was magnified to something almost impenetrable. Silent as cows they stood there and munched in the pouring rain. Then their father shouldered his bag and started into the forest without waiting for his sons, who had to jog quite a distance along the muddy animal track before they caught up with him.
He stopped at the forest’s edge in front of the meadow where Cain and Abel had killed Jared fifteen hundred years earlier, and turned to his sons.
“What do you think?” he asked.
The meadow extended to a little over a hundred yards and was therefore too short in relation to the ark’s planned length, but it was so good in other respects that these more than compensated for its lack of length, which they would be able to add to without extra effort by felling into the forest: they’d need timber anyway. The meadow was high up, and there was plenty of forest in the vicinity; it sloped gently down, which would make it easy to launch the ship when the time came; and perhaps most important of all, the steep mountainside to the southwest shut the meadow off from the gaze of the community in the valley. Even when the five-hundred-foot-long, eighty-foot-wide, and fifty-foot-high ark was ready, it would be hard for the people down there to see it.
“It looks good,” said Shem.
“The first thing to do is to lengthen the meadow into the forest,” said Noah.
“Shouldn’t we begin by putting a roof over our heads?” said Shem.
Noah nodded.
“You and Japheth can do that. Ham and I can begin to fell.”
In the next few months they worked on the ark from early morning until late at night. But despite the fact that it rained constantly during this time, and the valley beneath them was slowly covered in water, the brothers continued to doubt their father’s words. They agreed that God could have appeared to him, especially as people who knew him always said two things of Noah, which his sons had heard several times: that he was just, and that he walked with God at his side. Naturally they’d assumed the latter was meant figuratively, that he was especially lucky, especially endowed, or especially happy, but now up here on the mountain, beneath the somber clouds of catastrophe, they began to wonder if, after all, it wasn’t meant literally. Shem even thought he could remember an occasion in his childhood, on a hunting trip with his father in forests of the valley, when he’d several times seen a movement up on the hillside, a strangely rapid one, and when in the middle of the day they had built a fire, he’d suddenly seen something glide past in the trees only a few yards from them, shining metallically, but when he’d raised his hand and, pointing, had asked his father what that could be, he’d only looked at him doubtfully and said there was nothing there, he must have been seeing things.
But he’d never turned to look! Shem told them now, that was his link with God, but this was too thin to convince Ham and Japheth of course, and even Shem himself wasn’t really convinced, he’d been only seven or eight years old at the time, and could no longer tell if he’d really seen it, or just imagined that he had, either at the time or later. But it wasn’t unthinkable. Hadn’t Ham seen something among the trees just before his father had come over to them and told of his revelation?