by Layne Maheu
“I Am!” I crowed out the song of the new day, and the song of Our Mother of Many, and of Night Time and Squall and Plum Black, I called, “Plum Black,” working my wings, but with no will to fly anywhere, since I’d been denied my own kind, but I flew along the sagging hull of the ark to the smashed body of Hookbill my Savior from the Lost World.
Hearing me, one of the pups lifted its head up toward the papery dead wings of the Old Hookbill. There was complete one-eyed understanding in the face of the newborn blindness.
“It’s you!” I swooped down and threw my song out over the pup, who squirmed to return to the safety of the litter and its mother’s brimming flesh, warmed from within and without.
If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows.
—REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER, MID-1800S
5. Curse of the Wine
The pig saw Shem approach with the dull blade and squealed, straining against the rope. In anger against his father, Shem stood over the panicked animal and slit its throat in one swift rip. His elbow flew and the pig kept running, burrowing into the mud even after it lay down, squealing and gurgling and spilling hot blood down onto the root of the vine.
When Shem approached the chimpanzee, the ape raised his hands above his head in the most intelligent protest yet. He jumped and yelled and intimidated the beastman from approaching any further. Searching all around him, all the ape could find to throw was handfuls of mud and his own dung. Defeated, Shem walked back to the carcass of the lion, picked up the stick, and worked to splice the knife to its end all over again. That was when Noah walked near and handed Shem the shovel.
“Here. Busy yourself elsewhere. There’s a matter I must discuss.”
The son walked away, searching upward, where the calm, wide wings of the vultures circled without judgment. Beyond the rocks, he saw that the wild dogs had gathered.
“We must hurry,” he said, “before nightfall and all is turned to carrion.”
Then Ham spoke to his father, who still inspected the corpses. “Now that you have done this thing, and the offerings have bled on the vine, can’t we just nourish ourselves and some of the other creatures who crave flesh?”
“That’s a pig,” said Noah. “We can’t eat pig. And who would eat a chimp? So much like a hairy man.”
“What about the lamb?”
“Do not ruin our sacrifice when you’ve done no work and have no thirst to quench.”
Then Noah ran over to the charred rocks, where the Stranger was still perched, and took the goatskin bottle and lifted it to his face. His anger softened as he drank, and the Stranger sidestepped his way along the log, clutch by clutch, until the beastman had squeezed just about the last drop of potion from the bottle. The rich red color ran down his neck.
“Is it possible?” asked Noah, between deep breaths. “What must be done with the creatures?”
“Do as you wish,” said the Strange Bird, still clawing his way side to side, up and down the length of the log, one claw at a time, changing which way he faced, lurching forward to catch his balance. “These offerings were made to fertilize the field with your wishes, so that your vineyard might grow robust. For drinking the fermented fruit to excess, you will act as the pig. You will soil yourself as you drink yet more until finally you become like the ape. You will grope about in your own foolishness. Your wits will flee you. And you will blaspheme your Master, who keeps the garden.”
Noah stood openmouthed, in horror.
“It is as I feared,” he said, downcast, and remote. “Shem, free the ape.”
As Shem neared the beast, the ape strained against his rope, shrieking and scolding and ready to attack. Shem stepped back and turned to his father with a pleading look.
“All right,” said his father. “Just feed him, then. We’ll untie him when it’s time.”
Looking down, Noah buried his face in his hands. “Stranger, begone with you! Not only do you blaspheme God, you blaspheme me, and the dead. You mock the very nature of these animals destroyed on your own council.”
“That is not so,” said the Strange Bird, extending a wing and inspecting the ragged saw-tooth of his feathers, then folding it back into place. “That is the one thing I do not do. Take heed of my warnings.”
And with much hardship, for there was little left to his frame, the Wizened One spread his prickly wings and used them to float over to the lion, where he lit on the stock of one of the arrows, which rocked back and forth as the Strange Bird hung on.
“Farewell,” he said, looking down. “The sacrifice seems complete.” Then he swooped down on the mud and began hopping as slowly as he had when he had arrived, stoop-postured and pausing often, heading down the long mountain, one hop at a time. “Do what you will with the remains. I leave you as I found you, except with more knowledge than before. My good Noah, you and your family shall live long lives for your hardship. May you enjoy your many years here on earth.”
The gods smelt the fragrance,
Gathered like flies over the offering.
—Atrahasis, MESOPOTAMIAN FLOOD MYTH
6. The Dead
Free of the leash, the ape lumbered using his hands across the open loam of the trail until he was a safe distance from the ark. There, he sat back on his haunches and brought the dried tuber that the beastmen had given him up to his mouth and chewed sullenly. Like the vultures, I waited—I up on the ark and they in the vineyard. Instinctively I avoided them, scaly-faced, pink-headed, and too death-like to assume the identity of the creatures awaiting their skills. I left them alone to stare with their lost, moony eyes at the feast sinking slowly before their sight. The young beastmen were still digging holes for the feast, where not even the God Crow Itself, for Whom such offerings were usually made, would ever bother to look. So it was a feast meant for dirt—dirt and the creatures that live in dirt.
During my confinement on the ark, I had learned more about the strange theories of the beastman concerning their voyage to the hereafter, but only their own voyage, since no other kind of animal can go there. The blessed human Soul takes leave of the earth by means of flight, given to it by a sudden sprouting of gauzy wings. Though no other part of the body has feathers, the wings do, and these beautiful wings carry the deceased up through their dirt mound and into the earthy air and the ether beyond, unsoiled.
While the sons of Noah dug, they made their staccato grunts and yelps with their usual excitement. But I found it hard to understand their barking. Noah sat on his rock and drank his potion with great contentment and did not concern himself with the nearing of the vultures, or wild wolves, or hyenas that circled outside his poor hearing and sight.
“Keeyaw,” I complained, but without conviction.
The beastman simply lowered the headless goatskin bottle from his face. He let it roll from his lap, and the bloody potion spilled onto the rocks, until he clenched the opening shut with his fist and eyed me with a bleary, bursting look. I had the distinct impression he had something urgent to say. He had a desperate need on his face and in his grunts and searching gestures, as if he’d never laid eyes on a bird before, and was just then trying to figure out who or what I was. His attempt to break down the barriers between species completely rankled him.
He began to chirp at me, using his kind’s poor skill at mimicry. Out of curiosity, I flew down onto the mud and looked at him. He leaned toward me on one elbow and sang. He had no actual crow’s song in his head. He didn’t even sing like a crow, but like a songbird, only sillier. He was enjoying himself. But it was the vain enjoyment of the self-satisfied, for he wore the air of the holy shaman animal-lover he was, Noah, who not only saved the world but saved me, the little idiot bird who loved his singing so much just then. In Noah’s song, there were sounds I recalled from his sleepwalking days as he fed in the ark. “Come here, handsome fellow, pretty bird. Don’t be afraid. Hello.”
Then Noah sat up in a sudden lucid moment and called to someone behind me. I hoppe
d back, and would have hopped farther, if it hadn’t been my old benefactor the dog approaching with one of her pups in her teeth. She dropped the pup at the foot of the altar, and Noah petted her. Noah loved that old dog and pawed her with blind desperation, and when he spoke to me from his soused pile of rocks, I could understand him.
“Hey, bird. Why you? Huh?”
“You should know. You were the one who sent me into the flood in the first place. You did.”
But the beastman looked around with his bleary-eyed speculation. “How did we ever get here?” He motioned with a belligerent shrug to his sons, still trading off with that one shovel. “What is so special, or even noteworthy, about them that they should be singled out from the rest. Hmm? Was I standing at the right place, at the right time? Just look at this place.”
Noah tried to take in his ravaged seabed surroundings. His weary mane and beard spread out from his face like flattened kelp in the sand, and I cawed back with all the bile of the sea. But it was as before; he was beast-man, I was crow.
Scratching himself, Noah stood and pushed his garments aside and made a great splattering of water on the rock. The sound decreased to just a trickle, and sitting down again, he hung his head, and fell asleep.
I lit beside him and tucked in my wings.
I tugged at the stitching of the goatskin bottle. What was left of the bloody potion mixed with the ash on the rocks, and Noah made the low rumbling sound of his kind during sleep. He just lay there, sprawled out, only half-covered by the many layers of clothes. The bluish-white color of his grub-like skin was obscene. The scar he had received from the lion was still a ravaged slab of meat nearly revealing bone. Much of him was missing. It appeared as though the dogs and vultures had already dug at him and left behind mealy, furrowed rows.
I hopped up and perched on the folds of his robes.
I thought of all the perished crows trapped within the ribs of man. After all, it was a myth that the Old Bone had freed any of the Perished; the job was left undone. And though the great Mother of Many was not singing there, perhaps a part of her song was, trapped and fluttering within the gaunt ribs of that beast. Not only would I get my revenge, I would be an honored Misfortune whose song would last beyond the wind as long as songs were sung, if only I could pluck a hole within the cage of the beastman’s ribs and release not only all of the Perished but all the other birds and animals trapped within the field of human viscera. It would be a great outpouring of animal spirits in much the same way the ark perhaps was when the ramp door burst open from all the flapping of wings and poundings of hooves.
Then Noah’s son Ham cried out as if I’d already killed the old man and was wing-deep in tasty innards. Ham rushed near and shooed me away. After I flew back a few hops, he ran his soft claws over his beard, trying to make sense out of the exposed, already-peeled state of nakedness his father had achieved.
Ham knelt down and spoke to his father.
He turned his father’s face in his hands. Standing back up, he yelled, “Father!” But to no avail. “Father! The strange libations have claimed you!”
Noah snored away as before.
Ham picked up the headless, deflated goatskin bottle, wrung it dry, and walked with it across the fields. He stopped to talk with his brothers, who were just then rolling the lion down in the grave beneath the vines. The two brothers and Ham barked at each other. They growled, and Shem and Japeth dropped what they were doing and then barked at me and threw rocks my way, careful not to hit my perch, which happened to be their father. They ran up and waved their arms, trying to drive me away from my Holy purpose.
With great concern, they knelt over their father and splashed water from a bowl onto his troubled brow, all the while too ashamed to face the old man’s exposed, wounded flesh and diluted spirit. Noah blinked and shook the narcotic sleep from his tangled seaweed beard only to behold Ham, standing there above him. Noah grunted, which startled Ham, curious Ham, who beheld his father in a quiet, detached way, murmuring sounds of astonishment, but also wearing that same scowling disdain once his father fully awoke.
“Here. Give it here.” Noah wheezed through a parched throat, though he’d been dousing it all day. “The sweet wine.”
Ham inspected the goatskin bottle in his hands. He pulled and twisted it into a painful shape. “It’s empty.”
“What?” said Noah, rising. “Either give me that one. Or one just like it. But full!”
Ham only stared through the opening of the empty, bladder-like bottle.
“Don’t just stand there—gaping,” said Noah. “Will not you partake with the old man on the day of our thanks? We have journeyed so far—to Paradise! We made it.”
Ham cast his glance down the mountainside, and just then Nanniah appeared in her heavy, haughty robes and put her hand on her mate’s shoulder.
She said, “This muddy valley that once held so much, Father, forgive me. We should not give thanks for what happened.”
But Noah acted as if he hadn’t even heard her and kept talking to his son.
“Can’t you give thanks? For even a moment? For your very own life? Here. Drink.”
Neither moved.
“Nor will you help out your brothers and sisters?”
“The time to help my own is gone,” she said. “How can I possibly give thanks for this?”
“You ridicule me!” Noah’s voice grew so harsh and loud that even the cattle on the grain piles stopped their chewing and lifted their heads, but this time for only a moment.
“Father,” said Ham, “what have we done?”
“Begone! The both of you. If you won’t make offerings or help.”
And the two brothers, Shem and Japeth, had to restrain their father. While Shem held him down, young Japeth went into the ark and returned, dragging a heavy blanket across the sand. The two of them then covered the poorly healed scars of their father, and led the old man into the smoky caverns of a more secluded sleep, deep within the ark.
Later, in the fields, Shem and Japeth threw the last creature of the sacrifice down into its open pit, where the heavy sands of oblivion would fall.
“Out! Out of the way!”
I crowed at the lunacy.
“Let the crow do his work!”
I’d have loved to take a beast or two up flying.
And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
—GENESIS, 3:9
7. Exile
I knew enough about exile to know that Ham and Nanniah were being sent off under its curse—Nanniah seated on the back of an ass, and Ham watched over by a scowling father who stood on the decrepit gangplank that had once welcomed so many of the earth’s creatures, summoned by the God Crow and led here by those most merciful wings across the water. The four of them, Ham, Nanniah, unborn giant, and ass, started down the long mountain. At the time I knew nothing of the extent of Noah’s curse. I thought they were setting out to discover a better place, such as Ham’s island of musical instruments, a place he’d only dreamt of back inside of the ark.
It would not be until the Old Hookbill now a Dog Pup had matured into a faithful farm hound and could apply her skills of intermediation that I would learn the full extent of Noah’s curse and the many strange and odious explanations that it gave rise to. Stories of shame, ridicule, and castration, and other bizarre human acts, when it was the lion that mutilated Noah, and not Ham, nor his little boy, unborn at the time and still in the egg of Nanniah’s belly.
Occasionally, as she and Ham retreated, Nanniah looked back at the home denied her in the shipwreck’s appalling shadow.
When they were almost out of hearing, a horrible bleating, bawling sound came from the ark, as if from a monstrous lamb. It was the naked Giant Child, yanking against his rope, trying to untie it from the enormous log that held him fast. Giving up on the knot, he dragged the blackened tree trunk across the mud, and it was hard to believe that the world had been destroyed because of his kind. He stumbled down the slope
, crying out for his momma, his skin flushed red where the knots looped around his neck and arms. His mother turned around, and her mule halted in the soft mud of a gully. No one moved. No one except the wild Giant Child as the tree lumbered and bucked, until soon the boy stood before his mother, whimpering. Then she and Ham turned back to Noah, who stood in the doorway of his broken ark, and they awaited his decision. For it was part of the deal for the Giant Child’s safe passage across the waters that he would pay with lifelong servitude to the world’s benefactor, Noah.
On the ark, this same Noah rose.
He gestured, about ready to speak, but averted his face and made a fluttering motion with his hand, as if brushing the last few crumbs from a table.
Nanniah climbed down from her mule and wrapped her cloak around the giant’s wet, blubbering head, and she and Ham untied the ropes. Then they all resumed the slow journey down the mountainside, the Giant Child sniffling, and every once in a while letting out a long, quivering sob that gave him comfort.
“Come back!” I called.
But only the giant wild child turned around, filled with horror.
“Then be a slave to your giant slave—” said Noah, quietly, standing alone on the ark’s ramp. “Blessed be the grace of God on your brother Shem, whom your generations shall serve. And may He also increase Japeth, whom your kind shall also serve.”
And Noah withdrew back into the sagging, sunless quarters of his tree-heavy ark. Meanwhile, in Nanniah’s womb, the infant beastman grew, innocent within and cursed without, pacified by the sway of the ass’s shoulders and his mother’s quiet, defiant song.