Unbearable Loneliness
© Jeannie St. John Taylor
“The steps of a man are established by the LORD when he delights in his way.” Psalm 37:23
Shem finished burnishing a grape in a cluster carved midway up one of the thick posts supporting the bed in his living quarters. He stepped back to admire the sheen, permitting his eyes to move through the vines intertwined with leaves and fruit that decorated the aromatic cedar. It had taken him several years to find four perfectly matched straight tree trunks capable of producing the warm color he loved when rubbed with oil. Usually the sight of the elegant bed and room he’d been crafting for his future wife for more than fifty years filled him with satisfaction.
Not today.
Today the cozy space only accentuated his loneliness and longing. The rare hours scheduled for relaxation, usually a welcome change, stretched endlessly ahead of Shem today. Father insisted they take a few hours off occasionally, but this afternoon was stretching out longer than usual because Father wanted to allow Ham and his wife more time to get to know one another.
Shem tilted his head to study the carvings briefly and considered calling the job complete. Then he changed his mind and began buffing a leaf with his smooth river rock, taking special care to define the plant’s veins with the sharp end.
It had been days since the all-nighter he’d put in with his brothers hauling water and settling animals on the lower deck. Though mammals and reptiles still dribbled in two by two, the ark was far from full. Father seemed to think there’d be a rush of creatures as the Flood approached. Shem doubted that even the busyness required by feeding thousands of mouths would ease the ache in his heart.
Regardless of the fact that water falling from the sky seemed impossible – completely beyond logical comprehension -- he grew more convinced every day that something was happening. The earthquake intensity had increased to the point that Shem occasionally felt a slight shudder inside the ark. Volcanoes erupted almost daily in a distant circle around them. They saw plumes rising like smoke from a hundred kilns even though the mountains themselves could be viewed only from the vantage point of the trail head. After one of the eruptions a thin skim of gray powder settled around the ark. Mother’s chickens pecked away at the heavy ash, filling their gullets. Other than that one time, wind carried the ash away from them.
Shem sometimes wondered if their own mountain would explode with dust and lava. Father said the fountains of the deep would open during the Flood, and Shem had come to think that mountains opening to spew out the contents of the earth beneath must be included in that. Hopefully the family would float safely away before that happened.
He rarely allowed his thoughts to dwell on his uncle and the residents of the nearby City of a Thousand Gods who refused to believe in God, but he thought about them today. The plans God gave Father for the ark left room for literally thousands of people.
The ark was set up to house most of the animals on the lowest level. Many would live in areas filled with small cages, while others would stay out in the large main space. Horses, zebras and camels would stay behind stalls with half walls. The more unpleasant creatures would reside in the closed rooms to prevent them from squeezing out and roaming free.
Or slithering free.
Shem thought about Ham’s and Paseah’s panic over snakes and his mouth quirked into a smile. Ham had insisted on the closed-and-locked-room method for all serpents since then. Shem reached higher on the post to work on a stem, remembering Ham’s reaction when he and Japheth transferred the pythons to a room on the bottom deck. Ham insisted Shem first cut a deep mark in the door to identify the location of the reptiles, and then whitewash the boards so they would be easily identifiable even in low light. Ham did not plan to enter that room accidentally.
With the bottom floor reserved for animals, Shem and his brothers had spent the years filling most of the rooms on the two top decks with food for animals and people. Preserved and dried food rose to the ceilings or hung along rafters running through most of the two decks. Only a few storage compartments remained empty and Father said it was time to load them with supplies from the fields and trees near the house in the next couple of weeks. They would also bring on copious amounts of fresh fruits and vegetables like apples, pears, bananas, squash and pumpkins to store in cool dark areas.
The family quarters took up a relatively small space on the third deck, though it seemed spacious to Shem because it was larger than their current home. There was definitely enough space for additional people. The family might be cramped if a crowd of people suddenly chose to enter the ark with them, but everyone would be welcomed warmly. The family would be thrilled to scoot over to share lodging and food -- even if stores depleted and everyone lost a little weight. People could even sleep in the hallways if necessary. That would be preferable to drowning, wouldn’t it? They only needed to believe God’s words and come aboard.
Yet no one came because no one believed.
Worse, the one person who had come to stay had appeared miserable. Even tortured. Eudocea had quickly recovered from her physical injuries, but her emotional wounds were an entirely different thing.
Father had performed a marriage ceremony for Ham and Eudocea two days after her arrival, and Shem had expected life for Ham to change completely. Which it had, but not in the way either of the brothers had anticipated. Instead of enjoying a relationship with Ham, Eudocea chose to spend her time helping Mother and Ulla. Mysteriously, she already knew how to cook up the pheasant Ham shot with his bow, dry apples and run the spinning wheel proficiently. She exhibited skills most ladies born to her station in life never mastered because their slaves did everything.
Shem suspected she would rather muck stalls than get acquainted with her husband. Ham’s face revealed bitter disappointment. More than disappointment -- unrelenting sorrow. Shem shared Ham’s heartbreak because he loved his brother.
Mother eventually discovered Eudocea was a temple prostitute who had been mistreated for most of her life during pagan worship. Ham’s uncle bought her and gave her to his sons who used her up and grew tired of her. Paseah viewed her as a woman of no further use to him or anyone else.
Eudocea understood that completely. Devastatingly. And agreed with his evaluation of her. She’d come close to death-by-abuse several times and thought of herself as worthless. In addition, because men had hurt her, men terrified her. All men. Including Ham.
Day after day Shem’s respect for Ham grew as he watched his younger brother treat Eudocea gently, respectfully, forcing nothing. Not even requiring speech from her. Even though she averted her eyes in silence whenever he came near, Ham never ceased viewing Eudocea as a woman of rare beauty. A person of tremendous value.
Shem saw her differently. She proved that his own fears about accepting a wife from the surrounding culture were well founded. Ham had settled for one of those women and now he suffered. Was this really better than a lifetime alone? Shem thought not. Ham seemed lonelier now than before he met his wife.
Over the last day or two, however, Ham told Shem he felt optimism over the relationship. He’d made brief eye contact with Eudocea a few times and she’d actually smiled once. Ham expressed hope she would spend some time alone with him today. Shem suspected that was why Father had insisted they all take a day to rest.
Giggling from the family area floated through the closed door of Shem’s room. His head jerked up. Ham and Eudocea?
Shem put away his burnishing tool and fiddled with the jars of pottery on shelves lining the walls of his room closer to the door. He strained to hear while trying to put Ham out of his mind. Illogical, he knew. He checked the corks once again making certain each fit snugly in the top of its pot, thinking about pottery rather than problems. He traced sensitive fingers over one which was unadorned except for a satiny beige glaze oxidized with brown spots. So simple, yet so elegant. His favorite glaze.
He absently tested the wooden bar running horizontally across the front of the shelf holding his pots, checking it for the thousandth time. Maybe the ten thousandth time. The bar needed to hold each pot snugly in case of violent movement once the rains lifted the ark. Father predicted waves higher than most hills. Shem figured he’d be upchucking at that point.
The voices outside his room continued in a conversational murmur. Ham and Eudocea were talking. Unexpected hope burbled up in Shem and he rejoiced at his brother’s good fortune. But because a relationship between Ham and Eudocea made Shem’s future bleaker by comparison, uninvited feelings he didn’t understand popped up.
Was he jealous? He hoped not.
But always before he and Ham had each other. The voices rising and falling outside his door made him feel completely isolated, desperately alone. He was still a young man -- only ninety-eight. He could easily live for another eight hundred years. Father was poised to turn six hundred soon and could still work as rigorously as he did in his one-hundredth year. Grandfather Methuselah had lived nine hundred and seventy-nine years. Great grandfather Enoch walked the earth for only three hundred and sixty-five years, but he didn’t die. God took him up to heaven in a whirlwind. Longevity characterized Shem’s family and he assumed a long life would bless him, too.
Or curse him.
He sank onto the linen-covered bed he’d crafted for his wife and mourned his lost hope. This bed piled high with pillows which he’d expected to offer her pleasure left him with an ache. Locking his hands behind his head he stared up at the ceiling decorated with the flowing shapes of flowers and palm trees. Very few chisel marks remained visible. Shem’s habit of coming out to the ark to work after the evening meal for so many years had left abundant time for finishing details.
Everyone in the family joked about his tendency to go overboard with little extras. During mundane excursions to the tar pits to haul back copious amounts of the sticky material for water-proofing the ark, he’d found time to collect plants for dying the fabrics in his room. He experimented until he discovered that green rhododendron leaves produced a deep golden yellow, the woad plant with its delicate yellow flowers magically transformed pale cotton threads into dark indigo blue, and when handled correctly, St. John’s Wart yielded scarlet. It never failed to startle him when dye colors that didn’t resemble the source plant emerged as he boiled leaves and flowers.
Because of this attention to detail, everyone in the family teased Shem regularly. Mother often defended him by saying she’d noticed an artistic flair in him even as a child. Plus she was proud of the fact that he went to so much trouble making a romantic get-away for his future wife. Once, with a twinkle in her eye, she looked at Father and said she sometimes wished he was a bit more like his oldest son.
A knock at the door startled him out of his daydream. Ham poked his head in the door. “Hey!”
“You’re knocking?”
Redness spread up Ham’s neck.
“You blushed!” Shem accused. His tone was light, but heightened sadness flowed around his heart at the realization that Ham was changing. What would happen to the close friendship he had enjoyed with his brother?
“I did not blush!”
“Where is she?” Shem craned his neck to look past his brother. He couldn’t believe he was thinking of his relationship with Ham as close when his brother so often irritated him. “I thought I heard her with you.”
“She left to help Mother and Ulla.” Ham plopped down on the bed beside his brother and propped dirty feet in dirty sandals on the bed post.
Shem leveled him with a glare.
“Okay. Okay.” Sighing, Ham very deliberately lifted his feet from the post and lowered them over the side of the bed. “You’re worse than Mother, you know that?”
“Eudocea’s not gonna like it if you’re a slob.” Shem grinned to soften his words, but even he could detect an edge to his voice. Hopefully jealously wasn’t the cause of his stiff tone. He did not want to be jealous.
Lost in his own world, Ham didn’t seem to notice. “She’s finally started to warm up to me.”
Shem fought the temptation to make a joke about the goofy love-sick expression plastered on his brother’s face. “Good.”
Ham turned to look directly at his brother, brows lifted in a bewildered expression. “She was caught smack in the middle of one of the eruptions. She has no idea how she survived. They’d been walking for a few hours when . . . “
“They?”
“Yeah. She was with three others, the man Uncle sent to fetch her, along with two more slaves and . . . I don’t know . . . some camels. She was riding one of the camels. There was this loud blast and the next thing she knew everyone and everything with her was dead. Except for the camel she rode.”
“That doesn’t make sense.” Shem tried to puzzle through Ham’s statement.
Ham nodded. “She agrees with you. She can’t figure out if she fainted and was unconscious for awhile and the camel carried her or what. Praise God she’s safe now!”
That didn’t sound like Ham. “What happened to the camel?”
“Died later. Just . . . died.” Ham’s face was transformed with that silly look again. “Not a broken bone in her lovely body.”
Shem cleared his mind of the image. “A human being can’t survive something that would kill a camel.”
“She agrees.” Ham’s eyes darkened. “And you know her wounds should have killed her. She doesn’t know how she got them either. She told me that after the camel keeled over she walked for a day and a half with nothing visible but fallen trees and ash and ash-covered animal carcasses littering the landscape. She didn’t even have water.”
“How could she live without water? And breathing in all that ash?”
“How do you think?”
Understanding dawned on Shem. “You believe God miraculously spared her for you!”
“She thinks so, too.”
Despite himself, a thrill of hope shivered through Shem. If God could do that for Ham . . . He pulled himself up short mid-thought. No. He dare not think like that.
“I’m positive he spared her.” The conviction in Ham’s voice nearly convinced Shem. “The ark saved her. Near the end she saw the ark in the distance and kept her eyes fixed on it while she stumbled through the ash. You’ll never guess where the ash stopped.”
“No idea.” Shem suspected he might know.
“Right at the base of our mountain.”
Shem felt no twinge of surprise. “Like someone drew it with a stick, right?” He’d guessed correctly.
“Yeah.”
“What about the meadow?”
“Ash a hand deep.”
“Wow. The city?”
“She was so focused on the ark she didn’t even glance that direction.”
Shem stood and strolled over to adjust a wick in one of the pottery lamps in a niche on his wall. He still needed to bring in the last of the jars of olive oil for the lamps. He liked a lot of light and wanted plenty of fuel-oil. They’d need the light if they ran out of torches. “Think Uncle will come back?”
“If he’s smart he will.”
“How about a straight answer?” Shem caught Ham’s eyes and held them. Shem had a strong opinion on the matter and wanted to see if Ham agreed. “Do you think we’ll see our uncle again?”
Ham stared with unfocused eyes. “I think he’d already be here if he was coming. He probably died in an eruption or in one of the quakes.”
“I agree. Ironic, isn’t it?” Shem could tell by Ham’s face that his brother would have trouble forgiving his uncle for the way he’d treated Eudocea. “He walked away from the only thing that could save him because he wanted to hold onto something he couldn’t save.”
“His wealth?”
Shem nodded. “Pathetic, isn’t it? He disdains the important things in life.” He knew his brother would understand he included Eudocea in that statement.
An appreciative expression passed over Ham’s face, then his forehead creased into worry. He chewed his bottom lip for several beats. “No more pathetic than you sitting here doing nothing.”
Even though Ham seemed more concerned than critical, anger rose in Shem. He preferred Jokester Ham. “What do you mean doing nothing? What else could I do?”
“Go find a wife while there’s still time. She’s not going to walk onto the ark on her own.”
“There’s no one out there. You know that. They’re all . . . ” Regretting his words, Shem left the thought hanging.
Ham jumped to his feet and squared off with Shem, ready to fight. “My wife is the most amazing woman I’ve ever met. She’s beautiful. She’s kind. She’s beginning to talk to me even though it is taking her a while to work up the courage.”
“I’m sorry. I was out of line.”
“Paseah treated my lovely wife like a smear of manure on the bottom of his sandal.” Ham was too heated to even pause. “He thought he pulled a dirty trick on me, but the trick was on him. He lost someone of incredible worth. Sure she was guilty of evil behavior, but that’s past. When she began to understand the truth about her gods she begged the One True God to protect her.”
“How did she know about God?”
Tears shone in Ham’s eyes. “God came to her in a dream and told her he loved her.” Ham was calmer. “So she kept begging him to protect her even though for years after that she thought he hadn’t answered. But you know what she told me?”
Mute, Shem shook his head.
“She said when she saw the ark she had a feeling God was rescuing her and he had protected her all along. Even during times of horror, he shielded her spirit by keeping her from building up bitterness. Toward anyone. She doesn’t even hate Paseah!”
“Amazing.” Shem couldn’t deny the admiration developing in him for the woman and it must have played across his face.
“You finally understand.” Ham’s voice broke. “God has forgiven her and I forgave her when she asked, though there was nothing for me to forgive. God has made her pure and good and I love her.”
Shem hung his head. Could he accept someone who’d done the things Eudocea had, or would he always resent her?
Ham placed his hands on Shem’s shoulders, reversing roles as he urged his older brother toward a difficult decision. “You’re right, there’s no one out there who hasn’t been hurt and led astray by the culture. But Eudocea is a righteous woman because she’s forgiven and cleansed. You can find a righteous woman, too, if that’s what God wants.”
After a long silence, Shem walked to the opposite side of the room. “Thank you. Wise words.” The problem was that he didn’t know if he could or should be as forgiving as his brother.
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