Noah Drank in His House and Ham Found the Shame

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The First Vineyard After the Water

Noah pushed cuttings into ground that had been at the bottom of a sea. Nothing had grown in it for a year. Everyone who might have argued with him about where to put the rows was gone, so he set them where he liked and worked them alone.

The vines took. He pressed the grapes, poured the new wine into jars, and one evening he filled a cup inside his own four walls and drank it, and filled it again.

He drank of the wine and he was drunken. The man who had counted the animals in two by two, who had held a boat together over a drowned world for a year and come out the other side, went down on the floor of his tent with his clothes off him. No angel came. No voice came out of anywhere. The roof and the walls closed over him, which is what a house is built to do.

Stone and timber will cover a body. They cover nothing else. The other garment, the one a man puts on every morning and wears the way honest people wear their honesty, had come off with his tunic, and he had not decided to take it off. A righteous man goes down the way the drunk and the out-of-their-minds go down, meaning none of it, and afterward he has to be dressed again by hands.

Ham Went Outside and Told

Ham found him there on the floor of the tent. He did not put out a hand. He did not turn around. He looked at his father, and then he walked out through the door to where his two brothers were standing and told them what was lying inside.

The telling took a few seconds. It is the whole of what he did, and it was enough. Inside the tent a man was uncovered under his own roof and the walls were doing their work. Out in the open air the shame went where the walls could not follow it, and after that no cloth in the world could get in front of it.

The Cloak They Carried Backward

Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across both their shoulders, one end on each man. Then they walked into the tent backward.

Their faces stayed turned the other way the whole time. They could not see the floor, so they went by the sound of their own heels and by the pull of the cloth between them, and when they judged they had come far enough they let it down and kept walking backward until they were out in the daylight again.

Two grown men shuffling in reverse into a dim tent with a blanket stretched between them. It took a great deal longer than looking would have taken. That was the entire difference between them and their brother.

Noah Woke and Knew

He came up out of the wine under a garment he had not pulled over himself, and he knew what his youngest son had done to him. Nobody told him. The cloth on top of him said one thing and the quiet outside the tent said the rest.

Then he opened his mouth, and the first words spoken out of the first vineyard were not about Ham at all.

"Cursed be Canaan. A servant of servants shall he be to his brothers."

He blessed the God of Shem, and said Canaan would be Shem's servant. He said God would make room for Japheth, and that Japheth would live in the tents of Shem, and that Canaan would serve him too. Three times the sentence came down. Three times it landed one generation past the man who had earned it.

A Son's Name Set Down Too Early

The three of them had come off the boat together and been named together, Shem and Ham and Japheth. Only one of them had a child's name fastened to him at that moment, before the ground had dried, before the cuttings went in, before there was any wine in the world to be drunk. Ham, the father of Canaan.

Shem is given nobody there. Japheth is given nobody there. The middle son walks out of the boat already carrying a son who has done nothing yet, and years later, in a tent that smells of new wine, an old man sits up under a borrowed cloak and says that name out loud.

Noah lived three hundred and fifty years after the flood. Canaan's name went in front of him into every one of them.