God Fashioned the Child in Water Not on Stone

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She Kept the Count in Her Head

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.

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.

Seven days is seven days. The verse that governs her calls them many days, and it uses that same phrase for the years Israel spent in Egypt, and for the famine in Elijah's time, which was a month and a year and a month and is still called many days. Days that hurt are counted differently. Nobody counts a hungry year the way they count a full one.

The Eleventh Day

She was four days into the clean count when she saw blood.

It takes about five seconds. Long enough to look, and to look again, and to understand that the number she has been carrying since the last new moon is gone. Not paused. Gone. Tonight is day one.

The rule Rabbi Hiyya taught is exact and it does 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. But 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. Then she started again at one.

Water 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.

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.

Nobody Carves an Image 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.

God fashioned the child in the middle of water, inside her, where nothing should hold its shape for a second. 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 humiliating 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 That Stands Up and Answers

Here is the rest of the difference. 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.