Sinners and the Sea (32 page)

He does not want to be comforted. He keeps the sinners close to him with his sadness. There is nothing for him to do in the new world but mourn.

• • •

I
see him early one morning on the peak of the smallest mountain. He stands tall, waving his arms out to either side, making his tunic billow in the wind. He seems more alive than he has been since crying out to the sinners one last time before God drowned them.

I hurry up to him as fast as I can, which is not very fast. Long before I reach the peak, he has dropped his arms to his sides and his head to his chest.

Panting, I come to stand beside him. His eyes are closed. “What is it?” I ask.

“I thought I had found a village of sinners who had survived. I heard their shouts, screams, and copper swords clashing. Women were laughing in the flesh tents. I saw their dark mass below me. I shouted at them as I used to, so loudly that I used up all the air in my lungs.” He breathes as if catching the air before it can escape again. “Wife, do you know what I thought?”

“You are tired, good husband. You should rest.”

“I thought,
This time I can save them.
”

He opens his eyes and gazes to where he saw the sinners. The milky film in his eyes has stretched across the brown of both irises. “But the village was only a shadow cast by a cloud. The sun burned through it.”

“Do not be sad, husband—”

“Yet if I look hard enough, I still see them there.” His pupils shift slightly behind the white film.

I move to stand beside him. I squint until I see them too.

There is Javan, talking with her hired boys near one of her flesh tents. Outside other tents, whores are calling at passersby—cajoling, flattering, and insulting them. There is screaming, shouting, and laughter. Pain, elation, anticipation.

I take Noah’s hand as best I can with the stiffness that has spread from my hips and knees to my whole body. Together we stand on the mountain peak and watch the sinners.

• • •

O
ften he is quiet, and I know he is thinking of them.

• • •

“G
et!
” Ham yells, and hurtles a rock into the sky. The vultures have been circling above me for many days now.

“Careful, son. There are only two.”

“And only one of you.”

I feel like a vine so twisted that it is being cut by its own thorns. “Walk me to Herai,” I say. I am giving the next generation my blessing, and I have left Herai for last.

Herai is caring for the boys while Ona tends the cookfire. The birds’ shadows loop around ours as Ham brings me to the Mothers’ Tent. He lifts the door flap, and I walk in. Elam lies beside Herai on the blanket, pulling at one of her ears. The purple in his dark hair is shining in the sunlight coming through the tent window. If my fingers were still agile, I would tickle his belly, as I did my sons’.

“Daughter,” I say, “I have come to give you my blessing. And ask you a question.”

Her smile broadens. Little Javan is at her breast, but she offers me her arm anyway as I lower myself down beside her. “Mwahfah,” she says.

I brush the bottom of Javan’s tiny foot with my hand, which causes him to scrunch and unscrunch his toes. Herai marvels at this before returning her gaze to mine.

“There is something I have wondered for as long as I have known your mother.”

Both of Herai’s hands are holding her son. I press my palm as best I can to the back of one of them. “How did she get the X upon her forehead?”

Herai’s smile falls away. She sets Javan down, and for once he does not cry. He looks into his mother’s face, confused at being taken from her breast while he is still hungry. She does not pick him up again.

“Do not be troubled, daughter. I already know your mother
killed as many men as any mercenary. What could be worse?”

Herai’s hands remain at her sides.

“Unburden your shame. I will not be around so much longer, and then you will have lost your chance.”

“Mwee,” she says.

I had never considered this. If Herai had not been slow, Javan never would have been exiled, and Herai would not be here now. Just as I would not be here if not for my mark.

“What a blessing we were born as we were,” I say.

Herai looks puzzled. I am about to explain what I mean, but I fall asleep. I do this often now without meaning to. I dream of my father. He is not more than ten cubits away. I am a little girl again, and he holds his arms out to me.

Each time I dream, I get a couple of cubits closer.

When I wake, I am leaning against Herai. I think I have given her my blessing, but I cannot be sure. I straighten up, beckon her to place her head under my misshapen hand, and I bless her.

• • •

T
hat night I wake suddenly and see that Noah is not beside me on his sleeping blankets.

There is a full moon, but I do not need its light to show me where he is. I go to the apricot tree and lower myself beside him. Though he says nothing, I am certain he knows I am here.

We sit silently in the moonlight until I thank him.

“For what?” he asks.

“My life and those of our children and grandchildren. If it were not for you, God would have started over.”

He turns and squints at me for a few breaths. Then he reaches his hand out and touches my leg. He has never mastered the gentle touch, but it is nice to feel his skin against mine. “The mission the Lord sent me on is over and done, and now I do not know what to do with myself. You are one of the only comforts left to me. I will be sad when you are gone. I have been thinking of planting a vineyard so I can do something besides wait for the Lord to bring me from this world.”

I am surprised that he will miss me, though it is true we have grown close in the new world. All I say is, “You are sad already.”

“Not all the way. I have been thinking of a name for you.”

A name.
My heart beats harder. “Please, husband, do not hesitate. Tell me the name you would bestow upon me.”

He is lost in thought. “Perhaps you were blessed not to have one before now. You did not have to fashion yourself to fit your name, like those of us who have had them our whole lives.”

I did not think my blood was young enough to find its way to my cheeks, but suddenly my face is hot. “I did have names, they were just never my own. I was daughter, wife, then mother.”

“You were. You were all of those things, my good wife.”

I do not wish to taint the new world with old hurts. But I also do not wish to bite my tongue. “I needed something people could call me instead of ‘demon woman,’ ” I say more harshly than I mean to.

We are silent, letting the night sift through my words. When it has taken the sharpness from them, Noah says, “God gives some a great burden to overcome. Only a righteous woman could have
borne up under the weight of the mark that you have carried upon your brow for all the years of your life without complaint.”

“I did not think you knew how heavily it weighed upon me.”

“You have been tested, and the Lord has found you worthy.”

It does not seem possible to me that the Lord was testing me or that He found me worthy. But neither does most of what has happened in the last year. Perhaps the God of Adam has been with me even when I did not know it.

“Of what am I worthy, husband?”

“Being the matriarch of all mankind. And now you need a name worthy of you. One by which you can be remembered.”

I turn to look at his wrinkled face, which seems to be lined not only by age but by six hundred years’ worth of sadness. Does he know of the vultures’ shadows that loop around my feet when I walk in the sun? How they grow bigger, closer, so that I sometimes think I feel feathers against my cheeks?

His hand presses on my leg. “Tell me, what should we call you?”

The sun has begun to peek up over the mountaintops, and without taking his hand from my leg, Noah turns his head to drink in its light. And I know what my name should be. I have traveled all this way from my father’s tent, and from one world to the next, in search of a name, and I could not have found one any sooner than this instant.

“You can see only light and darkness. Dawn is both, as well as a new beginning.”

Noah considers for a breath, then snorts. “Yes. This is a new
dawn. Not for everyone”—the sinners are never far from his mind—“but for you, for our children, and for theirs.”

“So, then, what is my name?

“Shahar. It will come to mean dawn in the new world.”

“Is that the name you thought of for me?”

“I wanted to call you Shifra, which will come to mean beauty and brightness. Yet now I think that Shahar is your true God-given name.”

“God has spoken to you about it?”

“Well, no,” he admits. “It is actually I who think it a fitting name for you.”

“That is good enough for me.”

He is astonished when I kiss each of his hands and his forehead.

I laugh and rise, creaking, to my feet. Soon I will be reunited with my father. But first I want to hear my sons and daughters call me by my name. I hurry to bring them the good news.

I have a name.
I am Shahar.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
hank you to the following people who’ve helped me on this journey: all of my teachers at Talmud Torah Day School, especially Earl Schwartz; Rabbi Allen of Beth Jacob Congregation, who had his hands full preparing me for my Bat Mitzvah; Jerod Santek, Brian Malloy, and the rest of the Loft staff; family friends Rolla Breitman and Pete and Sue Stein; those personal friends whose encouragement has kept me going, Dawn Frederick, Diane Grace, Amber McKenzie, Margie Newman, Becky Novotny, Richard Nystrom, Tanya Pedersen-Barr, Karen Seashore, and Jessica Warren Rugani; my spiritual mentor, Lynn Nelvik-Levitt; the tireless members of my writing group, Sandy Steffenson and Richard Thompson; agent extraordinaire Carolyn Jenks, and all of the good people at the Jenks Agency who’ve worked on this project, especially assistant agent Jacob Seifert; my editor, Becky Nesbitt, along with the other lovely people at Howard Books; Scott Hamilton, without whom I couldn’t have done it; my mother; my brother, who knows how hard, and also how rewarding it can be to chase a dream; and my father.

© SCOTT HAMILTON

REBECCA KANNER
holds a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing from Washington University in St. Louis. Her writing has won an Associated Writing Programs Award and a Loft mentorship award. Her stories have been published in numerous journals, including
The Kenyon Review
and
The Cincinnati Review
. Her personal essay “Safety” is listed as a Notable Essay in
The Best American Essays
2011. She is a freelance writer and teaches writing at The Loft in Minneapolis.

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