God Fashioned the Child in Water Not on Stone
She was four days into the clean count when she saw blood. She looked again. The fifteen days she had been carrying were gone.
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Seven days from the first sign. Then seven more that had to come up clean, one after another with nothing in between. Then the eighth day, and after the eighth day the sun had to go all the way down, and after the sun went down there was the water.
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Fifteen days from one end to the other, and she carried the number in her head the way other people carry a debt. She knew which day it was when she woke. She knew it while she was grinding, while she was answering the door, while her husband slept on the other side of a room she was not allowed to cross.
She Carried Fifteen Days Like a Debt
The seven days felt longer than seven. The verse calls them many days. Israel in Egypt had many days. The famine in Elijah's time had many days, a month and a year and a month, and Scripture still said many days. She did not need a preacher to explain it. She was grinding grain on day four and the room she could not cross was ten feet away.
Nobody counts a hungry year the way they count a full one. Nobody counts these days the way they count market days. She woke, named the number, and put her feet on the floor.
Blood on the Eleventh Day
She was four days into the clean count when she saw blood.
She looked. She looked again. The number she had been carrying since the last new moon was gone. Not paused. Gone. Tonight is day one.
Rabbi Hiyya had taught the rule and it did not bend for anybody. Blood on the eighth day, keep that day and you are clean. Blood on the ninth, keep it. Blood on the tenth, keep it, and those three are the many days the verse meant. Blood on the eleventh, on the fourth day of her cleansing, and the whole seven of menstruation start over from nothing.
She went and told her husband.
"It started again," she said.
He nodded. He did not cross the room. Then she started again at one.
She Put Her Head Under After Sunset
One month the count held all the way through.
Seven days, then seven clean ones, and clean on the eighth, and when the sun was down she went out and down the steps and into the water and put her head under it, and came up, and she was lawful to her husband again.
The water was cold. She held her breath. She went under until her hair lifted off her neck, then she rose and stood dripping on the stone of the pool. She walked back up in the dark with her hair soaking and her shoulders steaming a little in the cold. Somebody had left a lamp burning at the top of the steps. She had counted fifteen days to get to that lamp, and she could have named every one of them by number.
She crossed the room that night. He was awake. Neither of them mentioned the eleventh day that had failed them last time.
No One Carves a Face on Water
What happened after that was the work no craftsman in the province could copy.
A man of flesh and blood cuts a face into a stone wall and steps back to look at it. Let him try to cut one into water. The chisel finds nothing. The wall is gone as soon as he touches it.
God fashioned the child in the middle of water, inside her, where nothing should hold its shape for a second. She put her palm on her belly in the dark and felt nothing yet, only the same body that had counted and failed and counted again. That is what Hannah meant at Shiloh when she handed her son over and sang that there is no rock like our God. The word for rock is the word for forming. The forming happens exactly where the stone would sink.
Count what a carver needs before he starts. A wall. Plaster. Lime. Pigment. A rule, a chisel, a mallet, a full day and light to work by. And when he dies the wall outlives him, which is the hard part of being a builder.
God starts with one drop of white and nothing else. Out of one drop comes a peacock with three hundred and sixty-six kinds of color standing in its feathers. Out of one drop comes a person, in a dark wet room with no lamp in it at all.
The Image Stood Up and Answered
A man finishes a face on a wall and stands in front of it and praises his own work, and the face says nothing back, because nothing was ever put inside it.
God finishes His image and the image gets up on its feet and praises Him.
And a carver's image will never make another image. This one will. The girl formed in water grows up and forms a child in water of her own, and the work goes on in the same medium, in the dark, at her cost, with the days counted out again on the far side of it.
The sun went down on the eighth day and the counting stopped. Months later, in the same room, something turned under her hand, and she held very still to find out whether it would do it again. A shape God had fashioned in water, not on stone, moving where no chisel could have followed.
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