6
At the end of June, when Ben reached the end of a dry, hard, hot week, and the first reprieve from the warmth pushed in on a sweet smelling breeze, he decided he wanted to see the ark for himself.
Barkers, food sellers and other opportunists had begun to set up their stalls near the ark, seeing the financial bonanza for what it was. The tent city had moved away from the boat to avoid the influx of lookee-loos. While the old man lived on the boat itself, staying near to the menagerie and the vessel, he kept his followers at a distance.
The men who tended the animals stood silent and steadfast by the cages when the crowds came, their faces like stone. Even if it weren't for the presence of the occasional law man or cavalry column, the strange stillness of the keepers seemed enough to warn trouble makers to be on their best behavior.
Despite the clear profit that could be made, none of Noah's people, nor Noah himself charged a fee. Visitors were allowed to enter the lower level of the ark via the ramp and look around the empty stalls, and the animals were a major draw, but the true fascination of the ark was simply that it was there, and no one seemed to know why.
When Ben arrived it was midday. The barkers and food sellers were doing swift business. Everything that a visitor could want to eat or drink was available at exorbitant prices. Many visitors planned ahead and brought picnic lunches with them. Along with the businessmen came the criminals. Ben spotted two youngters weaving in and out of the crowds, pegging marks, and bumping into women with purses or loose jewelry on their wrists.
He caught one of them by the nape and directed him to return the pocket watch he'd just stolen. The man took the watch back with an absent minded mumble of thanks, completely entranced by an emu that looked like it was molting in its cage.
While the keepers did a fair job of keeping the cages clean and the animals well fed and watered, it bothered Ben to see them locked away. Even a stall or a fenced in pasture would have been better than the boxes they were kept in.
Ben pushed through the crowds toward the receding shoreline of Lake Tahoe and stared up at the white bearded man standing at the bow of the ship. There was enough wind up there to blow through his robes and pick up strands of his ever lengthening hair. Ben had to admit that Noah made an impressive figure, from below.
Others around him pointed up at the man with laughter, awe, or curiosity, but Ben couldn't shake the feeling that some sort of evil was going to come of all this.
Ben looked at the strangers around him, then back up to the figure on the top deck and shouted, "Noah! I'm Ben Cartwright. I'd like to talk to you."
A few of the women and children standing near to him whispered about him, looking up expectantly to the old man on the ship. But the man didn't move or respond.
"Noah. I know about the flood." Ben tried, doing his best to ignore the snickers that followed. "I need to talk to you about the flood."
That got the old man's attention. He looked serenely down at Ben for a moment then walked away from the railing.
Ben ignored the laughter that followed and ran out onto drying mud, stepping onto the ramp that went into the bowels of the ship. He found the stairs that would lead up from the stables to the upper level and climbed up them, finding a second story of stables and another set of stairs. At the top of these stairs was a hatch that he assumed was normally locked. But Noah stood in the doorway, watching. When Ben got close enough, Noah stepped back from the hatch to let him pass, before closing it.
Ben stepped out onto the deck and stared at the world around him from a wholly different perspective. The breeze there was cooler, and he could see the trees on the shore dancing in the wind. Two women sat in the door of the shack that had been built on the main deck, fanning themselves in the shade. They didn't stand or speak, but watched Ben with the same curiosity he might have watched an ant.
Noah had walked back to the bow and he motioned for Ben to join him.
"You know about the flood?" The old man asked.
Ben looked down at the people below, watching the children wave happily up at him. "I…" He began. "I know that you believe there will be a flood."
"You do not believe?"
Ben watched the man for a moment, wondering how many of the people below would agree with him if they'd heard Noah's plans before. "I find it hard to believe that Nevada will flood. I do. It was even harder to believe when you had this boat out in the middle of the desert."
"That was a mistake." Noah said.
Ben's brow creased. "A mistake?"
"I misunderstood God's command."
"Oh." Ben said, nodding slowly. "Did you also misunderstand God's command to cut down my trees?"
"No. That I did right." Noah said and Ben thought the man might have been smiling behind the white mustache and beard.
"Noah..don't you think this has gone far enough?" The old man didn't respond, staring out at the crowds who had begun to yell for him to come down. "This sort of thing, it attracts the wrong kind of attention. You've been lucky so far, but it won't be long before roughnecks come out here. Those animals...some of them are dangerous. They aren't meant to be kept in captivity. With this drought I can't imagine how you're managing to keep them all fed, and watered. Those people...they must be half starved with no crops planted."
"The Lord provides." Noah said, his head tilting back serenely, his eyes closing.
Ben gritted his teeth, doing his best to be patient. "I'm sure He does, but you don't understand the trouble you're asking for with this boat."
"Ark." Noah said.
"Ark...boat, ship. Noah, this isn't the Bible. It isn't going to rain for forty days and forty nights, and Lake Tahoe isn't going to flood. God certainly isn't going to destroy the western United States. In case you forgot, He promised He wouldn't do that, ever again." Ben's voice had risen to a shout.
"No. He won't destroy it." Noah said, turning watery, hazel eyes toward him. "But it will rain. And it will flood."
"And in the meantime you'll let your followers, and your creation, be a subject of mockery and derision?" Ben asked, sweeping his hand out toward the masses below.
"Noah was mocked. Noah was called a fool. People came from all over to see his ark."
"Those people didn't have guns, Noah."
"God will protect us."
Ben leaned with both his hands on the railing, trying to find an angle that would get through to the old man.
"You said, that building the ark in the desert was a mistake?"
"I misunderstood."
"Yes!" Ben shouted, "And how did you know that you misunderstood?"
"I was stopped." Noah said.
"You were stopped." Ben said, nodding. "And if someone were to stop you now, would you know that it was again a mistake?"
"The ark is built." Noah reasoned.
"I know the ark is built, I'm standing on the ark. I'm asking, if someone were to stop you from...from loading those animals onto the ark, or from taking the ark out onto the water. Would it have been a mistake...a misunderstanding for you to have built the ark in the first place."
"If the animals want to be on the ark, they can." Noah said.
Ben paused for a moment then said, carefully, "Noah, those animals are locked in cages. They can't go anywhere."
"They aren't locked." Noah said. The old man turned toward the menagerie, sheltered in the shade of the trees and lifted his staff. The men standing around the cages responded to the motion by stepping away from the cages and walking toward the shore. As soon as their keepers left their side, the animals pushed the fronts of their cages out of the way. The hinged doors swung down and the animals began to move to the shore.
The sudden jail break had the crowd shouting, skipping away in panic. Some of the women and children laughed, and some screamed. Some of the men reached for their guns, confused. The animals moved around the people as if they were no more than bushes or trees, moving across the mud to the water where some drank. Others started up the ramp into the ark, chasing the visitors out of the stalls and onto the shore. When every animal was on board the boat, and the mothers had collected their children and husbands, and assured themselves that no one had been hurt, they began applauding.
Ben stared around him, his jaw set hard. He fumed down at the people on the ground enjoying themselves, all of them heading for their buggies, or horses, as if the animals going onto the ark was the final act of the show they had come to see.
"You've a very nice circus, Noah." Ben said. "Very unique. But I won't be a part of this..sham, this blasphemy. I hope, for your sake, that you decide to do the right thing before it's too late."
Ben turned to go, storming across the deck toward the stairs.
"Why do you think it blasphemy?" Noah asked.
Ben stopped, his shoulders hunching. He felt anger rising again and he realized that part of the reason for it was because he didn't know. He didn't have a reason for hating all of it. He only knew that he hated it. If Noah had stood on the deck of the ark raging at the crowds, and casting out the money changers as Jesus had in the temple, Ben would have felt better about it. He realized that he thought it evil because Noah let it happen and because of how Noah seemed to command his followers, and the animals. The blasphemy wasn't the ark, it was Noah himself.
"What if it doesn't rain?" Ben asked, turning on the man. "What if the longest drought in history descends on us, and men die, and cattle die, and your followers die and those animals die? What if the locals decide that the reason the drought has come is you, and you aren't really Noah, you're Jonah. What if they decide that killing you will bring the rain? Will you regret it then? Will you drop this silly persona then?"
Noah stood with his staff at his side, his robes rippling in the breeze, looking older than he had a few minutes ago. His eyes seemed wetter somehow, and it was as if Ben had opened an old wound and poured salt into it. As a man who had always believed in God, who had faith in His abilities, and who had read the Bible and believed its truths, Ben couldn't understand why he felt as he did.
If Noah's actions had been the altruistic deeds of a man with a child's faith, did Ben have the right to discourage that faith? Was this somehow a test of Ben's character, his own faith, his own beliefs? Was Noah really hearing God's commands, or was he mad? And was Ben certain that he could tell the difference between the two?
Ben found he had more questions, but he wanted to direct them towards the former slave, not the caricature before him. He wanted to have a down to earth conversation with the man that didn't involve vague responses and veiled mysticism.
Ben shook his head at himself and went back to the old man. "Noah...where did those animals come from? And don't tell me God provided them."
Noah looked up at him, his eyes dancing back and forth, wet with confusion and pain. Ben hadn't heard the young lady come up behind him, and jumped when her quiet voice said, "We don't know where they come from. They just come."
Ben looked from her to Noah, then back. "What about the food you eat? The feed for the animals."
"It just come." She said, her arms wrapped around herself as if she were freezing, despite the sun beating down on them.
"Why do you follow him?" Ben asked, his voice dropping to a whisper.
The girl shrugged. "He give us somethin' to do. We come west cause they don't want us back east. We may be free, but it ain't no different than it was before. And people don't want the black man out here neither. But Noah come out with the Mormons. He tol' us we was goin' to our own promise land. Wherever he go, we have peace. We find food. We is free. So if he say chop down a tree, we chop it down. If he say build a boat, we build a boat."
"And...and you believe God is behind this? God is commanding you to do all these things?"
The girl looked at Noah, her eyes doeful and sad. "Do it matter?" She asked him.
"I suppose not." Ben said. "What is your name?"
"Miracle." She said, meeting Ben's eyes for only a moment before she looked back to the ground.
"Thank you, Miracle. If anything should happen to any of you. If anyone should threaten you with harm, or you should run out of supplies, send one of the men to The Ponderosa."
Ben pointed east across the expanse of the lake. "Just over there. I'll do what I can to help you."
Miracle's eyes came back up and she looked distrustful for a moment before she said, "You think Noah different from you, but you the same kinda man." She said.
Ben didn't know how to respond to the comment so he didn't. He left the ark, climbing back down the stairs and down the ramp. He climbed on Buck and road slowly away from the crowd of the curious, feeling just as clueless as when he had come. The turmoil would sit in his belly for a time until the needs of the ranch and his family took over. Ben reminded himself that these weren't his children, or his employees, and they weren't even in his state anymore.
He returned to the Ponderosa, responded to each of the letters he had written some time ago, and dropped the matter from his agenda.