Noah Planted the Cedars for the Ark and the Town Laughed

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The Man Who Planted Cedars in a Fat Year

The saplings went into the ground in a season when nobody needed anything. Fields in that generation were sown once and fed a household for forty years. Men lived long enough to hold the fifth and the sixth generation of their own descendants, and they had stopped counting harvests, because the harvests had stopped ending.

So when Noah walked out to open ground with an armful of cedar saplings, people came to watch.

"What are these cedars for?"

"The Holy One intends to bring a flood upon the earth," he said. "He has ordered me to build an ark so that I and my family might escape."

They laughed and went back to the heaps in their barns. He had a hundred and twenty years. That was the span heaven had set for the generation to turn around, and Noah, who had gone over his own sins first and put them right, meant to spend every year of it in the same field, saying the same sentence to the same faces.

What All Flesh Had Become

On the hour they were made, every living thing had been given one rule. Each shall cleave to its own and is forbidden to go to another. The command was older than any city. It sat in fur and feather and instinct.

By Noah's day the rule was a joke. Cattle went to the wild beasts and the wild beasts came back to the cattle. Beasts went to men. Men went to them. The world had lost every fence it was given, and the air over the towns was thick with it.

Heaven had a long history of overlooking things. Not that. When a whole generation is soaked in it, the seizure that follows takes the decent along with the rotten, and the decent had already grown thin on the ground.

Above the towns the giants walked, the mighty men whose names everyone knew. They stared at the sun and the moon and worked their magic through them. They had an answer ready for anyone who mentioned the God who made the two lights.

"Depart from us. We desire not knowledge of Thy ways. What is the Almighty, that we should serve Him? And what profit should we have, if we pray unto Him?"

He Tended Them Until They Were Tall

Noah watered the cedars. He pruned them and kept the goats off them and watched them thicken through decades in which nothing whatever happened to the weather.

People came back. Years had passed, and the trees now threw real shade.

"What are you doing?"

He told them again. A flood. An ark. Escape for a household. They mocked him again, and this time the mockery had the ease of a routine, because a man who has been wrong for forty years is a fixture rather than a threat.

Then he felled them. He cut the trunks he had raised and sawed them into lumber, and the yard filled with boards that smelled of resin and had no possible use, and the crowd came out for the third time.

"What are you doing?"

Same answer. Same laugh. They did not turn back.

The road under Noah was mud the whole way. A king walking his son through that kind of road keeps a hand on the boy so he does not go down in it, and something like that hand stayed on Noah for the whole hundred and twenty years, because a man who spends a lifetime being laughed at by everyone he knows does not usually stay upright on his own.

The Queue of Pairs

What he was called, in the end, was not builder. He was called righteous, and the reason given was feeding. He fed the creatures of the Holy One. That was the whole of it, and only one other man in the tradition earned the same word for the same reason, and that was Joseph, who fed Egypt when the grain ran out.

The animals that walked up the ramp were counted righteous too. Not for obedience. For their kind. Out in the fields every border had gone down, and these came two by two in their own pairs, cattle with cattle, birds with birds, the small things that move along the ground with their own, and they stood in the dark of the hold and let a man portion out their feed.

Then the deeps broke open underneath and the windows of heaven opened above, and the laughter outside stopped all at once.

The Sentence Read Over the Rest

The generation that had never seen a bad year got its terms.

Seedtime and harvest, from now on. You will sow every single year, and you will bury children you have raised. Cold and heat: fever and the wasting cough. Summer and winter: the sick stomach, the face gone grey. Day and night, which means no rest in either, and fire and snow waiting at the end of both.

The water rose out of the ground before it fell from the sky. It filled the valleys where the mixed herds had grazed. It stood in the barns where the forty-year heaps had been, and the heaps went soft and floated.

The ark lifted. Inside, a man moved along a row of stalls with grain in his hands, feeding animals that had never asked him for anything, on boards he had planted as saplings while a whole town stood at the fence and laughed.