Noah's Wife

by Lindsay Starck

  He leans forward, takes her hand in his and rubs her knuckles to calm her down. “I’m sorry it upsets you, of course I am,” he says. “You’re my daughter, and I love you. I know you don’t understand.”

  “I don’t,” she says. She extricates her hand, picks up her stethoscope and slips it around her neck. The weight of the metal drum drops toward her heart like an anchor. She stands up and goes to the kitchen to heat a can of soup on the stove. A little while later, her father joins her in the kitchen and they eat in silence.

  When she leaves the house she says good-bye to him and kisses his leathered cheek. Her lips are pale and dry. “See you later, Papa,” she says. “Be safe, okay? Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “I’ll be fine,” he says, somewhat vacantly. He smiles at her and pats her shoulder.

  She walks down the sidewalk to her car, slides into her seat, drives away from the house. When she has gone a block and is out of sight of the windows she pulls over to the curb, stops the engine, rests her head on the steering wheel, and cries.

  sixteen

  Leesl is not surprised that Noah’s second service is even less successful than the first.

  But then, Leesl is never surprised.

  Although she believes that Noah’s heart is in the right place, the problem is that his would-be congregants now have other things to occupy them. As she walks through the silver drizzle this morning, she sees Mrs. McGinn’s husband wrestling with large cages that he is loading into the back of his van; the sheriff is trying to persuade the habitually useless firemen to drive the elk into the town park; wild boars are roaming free, and Mrs. McGinn’s daughter is chasing after the sheep. The zookeeper has been working through the night to transport the animal feed and supplies from storage units near the zoo to vacant rooms in the long-abandoned town hall. The plan is to distribute supplies to the townspeople several times a week.

  When Leesl sees Mrs. McGinn poking a stick at a boa constrictor in the gutter, she pauses to ask if she can be of any assistance and then she says something—helpfully, she believes—about Noah’s second service at the church this morning.

  “Perhaps you would find a little peace up there,” Leesl quietly suggests. “It might do this town a world of good.”

  Mrs. McGinn steps away from the snake. “That one’s definitely dead,” she declares. Then she turns on Leesl. “As for the church, Leesl, I don’t want to hear another word about it. How can any of us be expected to worry over the next world when there is so much that needs doing in this one?”

  The weatherman, crossing the street at that moment, hears her and snorts. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,” he declares. “This place is a mess. If you people don’t evacuate within the next week, your town is doomed.”

  A penguin struts out from behind Mrs. McGinn, making a beeline for the weatherman. When it reaches him it stops and gazes up with eyes so polished that they seem unreal.

  “What does it want?” he says, disconcerted.

  “What do you think it wants?” Mrs. McGinn snaps. “Fish.” She whips out a can of tuna from the deep pockets of her raincoat, peels it open, and sets it on the pavement, where it promptly begins to fill with water. “Anyway,” she says, “I told you before, and I’ll tell you again. We’re fine here. What makes you think we can’t handle a little rain?”

  “A little rain?” repeats the weatherman.

  “That’s right,” she says.

  Leesl squints between the two of them, hating the conflict.

  “Listen,” insists the weatherman. “Do you know how long it took me to get up here? I’ve never seen roads so terrible: thick with sludge, and some places several inches full of water. You need food delivered here, you need mail, you need supplies for your shops, and God knows what you need for these damn animals. It’s only a matter of time until the river overflows and the rest of this place is underwater, too. How do you think you’ll manage in a week when the trucks can’t get through?”

  Mrs. McGinn glares at him. “You think we haven’t had bad winters in these hills before? You think we don’t have a plan? Sometimes the pass into town is blocked up for days. We’ve got canned goods and gallons of water crammed into storage units down the road. We’ve got more supplies than we know what to do with. We don’t get much mail even when the roads are clear. Anyhow, the rain’s letting up. It’ll all be over soon, so you might as well return to your car and go back where you came from instead of staying here and trying to stir people up into a panic when there isn’t anything to be concerned about.”

  “And these animals you’ve got stinking up your shops and houses?” he retorts. “That’s not something I should be concerned about?”

  “They’re our animals,” she barks. “We can do what we like with them. I don’t see that it’s any concern of yours. In fact, if I were you, I’d get out of this town as fast as I could. We need someone to house the snakes, and if you’re still here tomorrow, I’m planning to send them on to you.”

  Leesl murmurs a good-bye and leaves them while they are still fighting. She crosses the wooden planks that Mauro has been laying from curb to curb over the crosswalks. Although the rain has let up, the water is much higher in the streets now than it was before. It rushes quickly through the gutter, bearing loads of twigs and leaves along with it. There are broken branches strewn across the sidewalk from the storm two nights ago, and as Leesl climbs the hill she fears that the trees are leaning far too close to telephone poles. In the distance she can see that the river is running much faster than it was yesterday, its waves lapping like cat tongues at the crumbling banks. Well, what is there for her to do? She cannot move the tree branches; she cannot bail the water from the river to keep it contained between its banks, or force the rain back into the sky. For now, she simply continues on up to the church, her knees sharply bent into the wind.

  There are only a handful of people in the church. Leesl sees Noah’s wife waiting serene as carved stone in the first pew, her limbs crossed, her gaze fixed upon her prayer book. Scattered in rows near the back are six or eight haggard townspeople, most of whom get up and walk out when they realize Mrs. McGinn has not come to take attendance. The rest stay put until Leesl has finished the opening hymn, flinging bright, hard notes up toward the rafters. After several long, damp minutes have passed without any sign of Noah, those few remaining rise from their seats and trickle toward the door, one by one, until no one is left but Leesl and Noah’s wife.

  “Where is he?” asks Noah’s wife once the rest of them have gone. Her flutelike voice is fearful, and she rises in her pew.

  “I’m sorry,” says Leesl. “I don’t know.”

  Noah’s wife turns and hurries down the aisle. “Maybe he went home to check up on the animals,” she says. “It’s so unlike him. He’s never missed a service in his life before.”

  Rooted to her seat, Leesl turns her head and watches Noah’s wife disappear through the lobby. A moment later the front door eases shut and Leesl can see the outline of a figure receding through the lower stained-glass windows. She runs her fingers along the keys, plays a few more notes, and then inches off the bench. The zookeeper said that he would be bringing the cheetah to her sometime late this morning, and so she ought to return home to open up the garage.

  It is as she steps lightly around the back of the altar to the office, where she intends to leave her books until next week, that she hears the murmuring of a familiar voice. As she approaches she recognizes the verses: the story of Daniel in the lions’ den, saved from claws and fangs by the grace of God. She rounds the corner and finds Noah sitting on the floor, the Bible beside him and a small, leather-bound journal in his lap. Walled in by stacks of papers, he glances up when she enters and does his best to beam.

  “Lovely work today, Leesl!” he says with forcible optimism. Leesl winces. Earlier this week when she asked him what he thought of her selections, he sang a few lines in an off-key, desperate sort of bellow. He does the same thing now, butch
ering a phrase of “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” and she winces again without meaning to.

  “Please don’t do that,” she whispers. She hesitates, and then asks: “Are you all right? You didn’t come out for the service.”

  “I’m fine!” Noah replies. “Just got caught up reading!”

  “But there were people there,” Leesl informs him.

  “Not many,” retorts Noah.

  His tone is curt, so Leesl drops the subject. Instead she tilts her head and indicates the papers. “Let me take those. I’ll throw them away.”

  “Why?” asks Noah, peering up at her with renewed interest. “Are they private?”

  Leesl shakes her head. “They belonged to the old minister,” she says. “They’re Reverend Matthews’s things.”

  She must be the only person in town, she reflects, who knew anything at all about the old minister as a human being, the only person who kept coming up to the church after the failure of the services in which they bowed their heads and prayed for the rain to end. In the months before he died, he stopped writing sermons and puttering around the church. Mostly he sat at the stained-glass window with his notebook on his lap, telling Leesl that as long as he looked at the world through these colored panes, the sky would never be gray.

  “What are you writing?” she had asked.

  “Poetry,” the old minister said. He had a theory that poetry was a lot like prayer: a signal flare shot off into the darkness, a call without any hope of a response.

  She sits down cross-legged in front of Noah, the moisture in the cold stone floor seeping through her cotton skirt. “Here,” she says, beginning to gather the papers to put them away. “Let me help you with those.”

  Noah remains where he is, his fingers gripping the edges of the notebook. Leesl glances at the pages, sees something that looks like a sonnet.

  “What happened to him, Leesl?” Noah asks, plaintively. “Was it an accident or not?”

  Leesl stops riffling through the papers and considers him, her blue eyes calm behind her glasses. “Of course it was an accident,” she says. “What makes you think it would have been anything else?”

  “Well,” he replies, stretching out his legs with a groan. “I’ll tell you something. I didn’t always feel this way—but truthfully, Leesl, it is a very sad business being a minister. If I’ve come to see that, I wouldn’t be surprised if other ministers before me had come to see it, too.”

  Leesl rests her knobby elbows on her knees. “It can’t all be sad,” she says severely.

  Noah nods, looking past her. “There used to be a lot of things I loved about it,” he admits. He tells her that the work had always come easily to him; that even as a child he had a talent for public speaking and a gift for reassuring people. His friends and siblings were in the habit of seeking him out when they were anxious or unhappy because with a few carefully chosen sentences he could ease the weight of all their worry. Noah had assumed, upon entering the ministry, that this transformation would be the most significant aspect of his work. He had imagined a steady stream of congregants lining up to seek him out, one after one, day after day, bringing their troubles to him so that he might share in their burden and teach them to lift their eyes toward heaven. “Raise your voices!” he would tell them. “Sing songs of praise to the Lord!” He had become a minister because he wanted to lessen the sorrow of the world, and increase its joy.

  And during the first few years of his work, he says, he still thought that this would be possible; he still entered the nave with a hopeful step and a high heart. It was only later that he learned how little his vision of his work corresponded with the reality of it, only recently that he realized that nearly all prayer is lamentation: complaints, grumblings, grievances. Most of the congregants who filed into his church at ten o’clock on Sunday morning were not coming to offer thanks or praise. When their family members were sick or injured, when they lost jobs and were in debt, when they lost friends and were in mourning—this was when they came to pray. They prayed for help and for mercy and for healing, and when the Lord did not heed their prayers, they gave up hope and turned away again.

  Leesl remains perfectly still while Noah tells her that over the past few months, he has found himself stumbling. The tales of woe that he hears make him woeful, in turn, and although he prays with his flock, he fears that the act provides little comfort to either party. When the prayers are not answered—when the family member becomes sicker and dies, when the couple remains barren, when the sorrow is not lifted—Noah feels himself to be personally responsible. He wishes that he could offer the peace that these people are seeking, but instead he is beginning to lose his own sense of peace. If he has succeeded in lightening anyone’s burden, it is only because he has taken on that burden as his own. He has been going through the motions of the rituals with a growing sense of panic, the spirit draining out of him.

  “Does anyone else know about this?” asks Leesl, startled by the frankness of this confession.

  “No,” he says. “I told myself that doubt is only natural, that this, too, would pass.”

  “What about your wife?” Leesl asks. “What does she say?”

  Noah shakes his head. “It’s not her problem, it’s mine.” He pauses, clears his throat. “Anyway,” he says, “I waited for things to improve, but the doubt only grew worse. That’s when it seemed like a good idea to look for a change of scenery. I figured that if I could succeed here, in a place like this that’s been written off for years, if I could manage to turn things around—well, that ought to be enough of a miracle to turn my heart around, too. That ought to be reason enough to believe.”

  “So it’s a test,” murmurs Leesl. She has not been tested since her school days, but she remembers the experience as being petrifying.

  He pauses, his forehead creased in thought. “It is, Leesl, it is. But perhaps every man’s story is a sort of test: a series of obstacles, challenges to overcome. How else do we gain faith and wisdom? How else do we grow into the people that others believe us to be?” He shakes his head, sets the journal aside, rises to his feet, and extends a hand to help Leesl to hers. “The only problem is that these days I don’t quite feel as though I’m up to the challenge.”

  Leesl allows him to lift her to her feet, his hand wide and dry. She doesn’t know what to say to him. Before she leaves, Noah says: “I’m sorry for carrying on so, Leesl. I didn’t mean to burden you with my personal troubles.”

  She only nods. As she walks back home, picking her way between the raindrops, she gazes out over downtown and sees the light boxes glowing in her neighbors’ windows. She goes home to wait for the arrival of her cheetah, and while she waits she pours herself a glass of milk and tries to sweep Noah’s melancholy words from the corners of her mind.

  Leesl refuses to believe that her town is as taxing as it seems. If there were nothing here but the incessant rain, the vacant shops, the failed relationships, the abandoned homes, the fading zoo, the so-called broken dreams—if it were true that that was all there was, then no one would remain. The townspeople would have been gone long ago. Leesl is convinced that there must be something more here than that—something intangible, unseen.

  seventeen

  After three full days spent doing rounds with him, Noah’s wife informs the zookeeper that she cannot help him anymore.

  “This was supposed to be temporary,” she says, when he suggests that they stop in at the diner to dry off and grab a quick lunch. “I only agreed to help you for that first afternoon, while you were still getting the animals settled. They’re settled now. I should be spending more time at home—taking care of my own.”

  Although she tries to make her voice as stern as possible, the zookeeper’s hard gaze wears her down. She looks into her soup and feels the heat flooding her cheeks.

  “Is that so?” the zookeeper counters. “You think they’re settled?”

  She wants to say yes. But then someone slides through her peripheral vision, and s
he turns to see the sheriff taking a seat on the stool beside her. As the man reaches for a menu, Noah’s wife catches a glimpse of his hands: two fingers wrapped in bandages, and the rest of the skin crosshatched in tiny cuts.

  The sheriff notices her looking. “The red panda,” he says. “I’ve got worse ones on my calves from the raccoon.”

  Noah’s wife tries not to feel sorry for him. Didn’t she and the zookeeper show him how to put the portable pens together? Whose fault is it that he didn’t pay attention? She doesn’t like feeling responsible for people who are still strangers to her, and yet she cannot help but worry over the townspeople she has seen over the past few days with dark rings under their eyes, bandages on their limbs, claw marks on their arms. It has not been an easy adjustment for anyone, taking these animals under their wings. Earlier this morning even Mauro—bubbly, bumbling Mauro—swore at her and the zookeeper as they stepped through the entrance to the general store. He is tired of waiting for things here to change, he told them, deeply perturbed. He is sick of the rain, of the way that it teases him and toys with his emotions—letting up for a few days here and there so that he begins to think the worst is over, only to come ripping out of the sky with a vengeance some afternoon while he is walking back to his store from the diner. Worst of all are the bugs: the little black and gold beetles that have begun creeping in under the windowsill and scuttling up and down the walls at night. Mauro can hear them in the dark as he lies awake below his blankets, his lips clamped shut and his hands over his ears because he once read a story about insects that crawled into people’s orifices, laid their eggs, and died. The zookeeper assured him that the beetles have no intention of doing such a thing, that they are only coming inside in the first place because the ground is too saturated for them to survive.