Song of Slaves in the Desert Read Online Free Page B

the mountains sprung up out of the sea, and the cleft of water sprung into the light—
    Because it does come first—
    Yes, tell me the first part, first—
    The mountains arose, and the water poured down their slopes back into the cleft left behind by the rising land, and fire seized the surface of the sea, and the rains came and the fire turned to smoke and the smoke rose to cover the face of the sun. Where once large animals wandered the land when it was hilly and covered with trees, and cleaved to another great mass of land that no one had a name for because no one had yet been born to give things names—
    And after another great rain the sea remained burning, the smoke and steam rising higher and higher, and all the animals and trees went up in flame.
    Pillars of fire and burning bush…?
    Mountains melting and ice arising…and the seas in tumult…?
    Do we know, do we know when and where it all began except to say that the oldest rocks came out of Africa and somewhere on those shores some fishy creature probably pushed its snout for the first time up from the sea into the air? This in a long life of reading and speculation is what we have come to believe. But the preachers say otherwise. What do the imams and the rabbis say?

Chapter Four
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Boarding the Godbolt
    On this important morning, the first day of a new turn in my life that would change forever the direction I would take, I could feel the weight of that timepiece, wound and working, in my pocket—and the pistol—as I took a moment now to study my father’s face, and tried to imagine someone who looked nearly alike but weighed twice as much as he. I had some questions. But I gave up the thoughts as my Aunt Isabelle, looking, because swaddled in bed-clothes, twice her own normal size, came tottering down the steps from her room.
    “Dear boy,” she said, “dear, dear boy…”
    Her eyes were still dull from sleep, but nothing diminished the effervescent nature of her soul.
    “I shall miss you!”
    She glided up to me and touched a long extended finger to my collarbone.
    “Oh, how I shall miss you!”
    “He’s not going that far away,” my father said. “Imagine if he were going off on his tour how long he’d be gone.”
    “I wish I were,” I said.
    “Don’t be ungrateful,” Father said. “You accomplish this mission, and I’ll send you on your travels for two years rather than one.”
    “Truly, Father? Thank you, sir, thank you.”
    “That would make me sadder still,” said my Aunt Isabelle, turning away as if to mourn in solitude and reaching out a hand so that Marzy might offer her a cup of steaming coffee.
    “And make me happier,” I said, but immediately, upon seeing the hurt I made in her—she glanced at me over her shoulder and rolled her eyes—tried to jolly my remark away as a joke and a laugh. “Yes, sir,” I said to the parrot.
    “Yes, sir,” Jacobus said to me.
    Marzy, weeping quietly, signaled to us that our cab was waiting.
    And so Father and I went into the streets of early morning to the clatter of horses’ hooves and the cries of vendors and the shouts cast from one building to another as we crossed our narrow island on the way to the river.
    I still had many questions for him about the business I was taking up, and about the specific nature of my journey. But he sat back against the seat, his eyes closed in thought, or as I saw him sometimes in synagogue, deep in prayer, and so I did not feel as though I might interrupt him just then. For, truth to say, I felt a confusion of things. I was a bit afraid and also quite honored and somewhat annoyed and a trifle curious as to what would happen on this journey. In all my twenty-some years I was a perfect Manhattan lad and had never wandered further from this rocky island than to the Bronx farm to the north and the Jersey cliffs to the west, and to that Perth Amboy harbor to the southwest, where my mother and I had disembarked when I was a boy of