od said, "Gabe, I believe to my soul I smell barbecue!"
I didn't, but then I don't have God's nose.
"Let's go see," God said.
We touched down on a peak in Ararat close beside the ark, which would soon be hidden by the bushes and saplings growing up around it. It still looked as floodworthy as the day it was launched, though. I walked over and kicked the side of it. Solid as a rock.
"Why'd you do it this way?" I asked. "You could have just taken them away until the flood was over. In that big universe you created there must be plenty of places where you could have housed them temporarily. It would have been simpler, and they'd have been a lot more comfortable"
"That's just it. I didn't want them to be comfortable. They were not completely blameless, you know. I wanted it to cost them something."
"Well, the women spent a lot of time feeding the animals and the boys stayed busy shoveling manure, but Noah kept to his cabin complaining of seasickness the whole trip. Probably didn't draw a sober breath."
"And if you charged him with it, he'd claim it was the only way he could keep from heaving his guts out. He's a direct descendent of Adam, no doubt about that."
Below, the settlement lay along the fertile valley floor. Stretching out from either end were cleared fields, and up the slope of the hill marched a vineyard. Smoke arose from a cooking fire in front of the central shelter, and over in the shade of a clump of almond trees the men were seated around a low table. The women, two with infants on their hips, were shuttling between fire and table carrying bowls and platters of food. We went down.
Noah spied us at some distance and came out to greet us. "Hey, Lord, and you, too, sir."
"Gabriel," I said.
"Well, hey, Mr. Gabriel. Any friend of the Lord's is a friend of mine."
"What's the occasion, Noah?" God asked.
"Wine! First batch," Noah said. "First vineyard on earth and first wine made by man! My gift to my descendants and to the world!"
"But you got it all from the Children of the Watchers," I said.
"Just the cuttings and the recipe. They're all dead and gone now and good riddance if you ask me.
"And I expect you just swam around the whole time of the Flood one-handed because you were holding the recipe up out of the water with the other and you must have had the cuttings clenched in your teeth," God said.
"Now, Lord, you know I wouldn't want to take any credit away from you. Why, without you, we wouldn't be here. But you've got to admit, I was the one who thought about getting the cuttings and the recipe. But, hey, let's not argue about that. This is a celebration. We're just getting ready to taste the wine, and then we're going to eat. Come on, join us. You have the first drink, Lord. It's only right."
He led us to the table. "Boys, this is God and Mr. Gabriel come to bless us, and that's the Missus yonder and those are my daughter-in-laws. And this," he said, ruffling the hair of a three-year-old who had come to clutch at his leg, "is my grandson Elam. And now, without further ado, Lord, we offer the first fruits to you."
Noah took a cup and filled it from the wine jar at the head of the table and with a ceremonious bow presented it to God. God took it, sniffed, sipped, rolled the wine over his tongue for a bit, then downed the whole cup. Noah watching became so excited he began hopping from one foot to another. "Hee, hee, what did I tell you? Best you ever tasted, now, admit it!"
"Mighty good," God said.
"The best!" Noah insisted and filled cups for the rest of us, and I began to realize what I'm sure God had known all along, that the first fruits, far from being reserved for God, had been going into Noah all morning. But it was good wine, I will have to say that.
When we had drained our cups Noah refilled them again and said, "Shem, go fetch the burnt offering we made this morning and bring it to God."
"If it's all the same to you," God said, "I'll just have some of that barbecued mutton on the spit yonder."
So we had barbecued mutton and fresh things from the garden and washed it all down with more of the wine. As we were finishing up, a rain cloud spattered the lower end of the valley and the slope of the hill, but it didn't reach us.
At last, God shoved his chair back and said, "You know, I've come to the conclusion that I've been expecting too much of mankind. Boys will be boys, and most men will never be anything else but boys. So I'm going to make a promise. Never again will I curse the earth on account of man's wrong doing. As long as the world endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night will never cease to be. And never again will I bring a flood and destroy all living creatures. That is my promise and yonder will be the token of it."
We looked where he was pointing, and there arcing from the hilltop to the valley was a rainbow.
"From now on, when you see a rainbow, remember my promise to you and be at peace. Now, boys, and ladies, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. (I can see you've already started on that.) And my blessings be upon each of you."
As we lifted off for home, God, smiling down upon Noah's clan gathered below waving us goodbye, seemed to be in unusual good humor. Maybe it was the wine.
"That Noah is something else," I said.
"No, you've got it wrong, Gabe," God said, chuckling. "It's that gal that Ham married who's something else."
"Which one was she?"
"The tall, dark one."
"She was a beauty, all right."
"More than that. There's a Watcher in the woodpile there somewhere. Just wait a few generations and see."
"But I checked!"
"It'd be easy to miss, especially if it was some generations back."
"But what are we going to do about it?"
"Be more tolerant, like I promised. Now, don't worry about it, Gabe. It's going to be interesting to see how it turns out."
