God Locked Seedtime and Harvest in Place After the Flood

Noah put his foot on ground that had been the floor of the sea a year before, and it took his weight, and he did not trust it. Mud came up around his ankle and let go with a sound. Behind him the hull sat where it had grounded, black at the seams, the animals already spilling down toward the grass, and he stood looking at a clear sky the way a man looks at a roof that has fallen on him once.

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Rain had been the instrument. Every cloud that came over the hills from now on would have the shape of the beginning of it.

What They Called the Fountain

In the first age nobody had watched the sky at all. A fountain went up out of the ground and watered the whole face of the earth (Genesis 2:6), and the drink came from underneath, and a man could live out his years without once reading the weather to learn whether he would eat.

One fountain for the whole earth, though. Not possible, not for a world that size, not with mountains standing over plains and plains lying under mountains. Unless the word was doing what words do when a king musters. Call out the entire force of a king's cavalry, thousands of animals spread over miles of open country, and men will still say the king brought up the horse. One word, and every rider on the field underneath it. So with the fountain. Every vein of drinkable water threaded under the ground, all of them pushing upward at once, and the tongue folds the lot of them into a single name because they all come up the same way.

And it did not water the earth. It watered the face of the earth, which is a smaller thing and the only thing worth watering. The face is the part that can be good and fertile and hand something back. In a living body the springs go to the governing part first. In the world they go there too, and the rest of the rock can wait.

Noah was standing on the face of it now, and the face was mud.

The Smoke and the Answer

He built an altar out of stones the water had left in a heap and offered from the clean animals that had spent the dark months a few paces from his family. The smoke went up into the same air the rain had come out of, which was rather the point, since he had nothing else to send in that direction.

The answer came back aimed at the fear rather than at the offering. The ground would not be cursed again for the sake of man, though the bent of a man's heart would stay bent from his youth. So the promise was not a compliment about anybody improving. It was a decision made in spite of what the water had already proved.

That was worth something. It was not yet worth a furrow.

Seedtime Fastened to Harvest

Then came the rest of it. Seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night: while the earth remained, none of these would cease (Genesis 8:22).

The words locked the seasons in place after the flood the way the cubits had once fixed the ark. They arrived in pairs, and the pairing was the whole gift. Seedtime is a beginning and harvest is an end, and neither is any use alone. A beginning with nothing fastened to the far side of it is a man flinging grain into dirt for the pleasure of flinging. An end with no beginning behind it is a barn that fills itself, which is nothing at all. Put the two together and you have the only arrangement under which anyone is safe. The start leans forward toward its finish, the finish leans back toward its start, and a household can plan.

Cold would come. Heat would follow and undo it. Autumn burns, but only enough to take the fire out of summer as the year comes round.

Opposites Held in Tune

Nature is assembled the way a tune is assembled, out of notes that disagree. Flat against sharp, and the disagreement is the music. Cold against heat, wet against dry, each holding its own ground and none of them permitted to swallow the others. Let them keep that order and nothing on the earth is destroyed. Let them run together into confusion and everything perishes, which is what the flood had been.

Noah carried two more of those opposites inside him and needed nobody to explain them. Cold is what fear does, the trembling and the wanting to be indoors. Heat is what anger does, since a man in a rage burns like something set on a fire. Made things hold both, and always will, and the year outside a man swings the way the weather inside him swings.

Spring finishes the seed. Summer finishes the fruit on the trees, and trees give more than a body needs, which is the surplus that keeps a household in something beyond bread. What a man owns serves his body. His body serves his mind. And his mind serves God, and the chain does not run any further than that.

Day and night keep the count. One of them is clear wisdom. The other is the folly a man cannot see his own hands in.

The Furrow and the Cloud

He went out later and opened a furrow and set a vine into it, because a man handed a year has to test whether the year is real.

While his hand was still down in the dirt a cloud came over the hill behind him. His whole body knew that shape. His shoulders came up, his eyes went to the ark and measured the distance to the door, and the entire count ran through him in under two seconds. Forty days. The deep opened. The door shut from outside. Then the first drops hit the leaves around him and stopped being a flood, because they were only rain, and rain in this world was a thing that ended.

He stayed in the dirt and finished the row. The water went down through the soil and found the roots the way water once found them from below, and he slept that night on dry ground with one ear still open, listening for a storm that had been bound to a calendar.