Picking Up The Pieces

Chapter 7

According to Marcel, it would take nearly an hour to reach Tours. The truck sped south on the A10 and I drew Neil’s Bible from my bag and spread it open on my lap. One by one, I turned the crisp, dry pages with my fingertips, beginning again at Genesis, as I had that morning, and searching for more tiny red dots. The first dot appeared at Genesis 6:5. I leaned over the page and read, “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” This passage referred to the era before the flood. Again there was a mark beside verse thirteen, which read:  “And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.”

A little further along, “And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth. In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.” Funny, I had never before noticed the part about the fountains of the deep. But it said here that underwater springs and wells gushed forth, too, causing the earth to flood abruptly. A cataclysmic earthquake might cause that to happen, I surmised.

A small red dot pointed out Genesis 8, verse 2 which read, “The fountains of the deep and windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained.” Why were the windows of heaven and the rains from heaven mentioned separately? Curious, I read on. After ten months, the ark ran aground on a mountaintop but there was not enough dry land for Noah and the family to leave the boat. It would take several more weeks before the ground was dry enough to disembark.

Marcel began to hum to himself. I glanced out the window at the passing vehicles, then went back to reading.

In chapter nine, there was a tiny red mark next to the ninth verse. “These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.” These small red marks must be there to tell me something about the stone blocks. But what? I studied the page again and in the reference column I found another notation. Matthew 24: 37.

Marcel turned on the radio. A voice shot from the speakers like machine gun fire, too fast to translate. He switched the channel, stopping at the sound of a bluesy female singer, then looked over at me and said, “Okay?” 

I nodded. In the passage in Matthew, Jesus was speaking to his disciples, telling them about things to come. He said that as in the days before the flood, so would things be at the time of the end of the world. There would be eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage just like up to the day that Noah went into the ark. In Noah’s day, the people had no clue that anything was going to change until suddenly the flood came like a tsunami and swept them all away.

Staring out the window at the passing landscape, I visualized how that must have happened. As we drove along, I saw a couple of women standing outside a tobacco shop in a village, a farmer ploughing a field, and a couple of schoolboys with backpacks, riding bicycles on a narrow road. Outside a local bar, big-bellied men drank beer at sidewalk tables. Life was probably not much different than this in Noah’s days. For everyone to be lost, the flood must have erupted as an instant deluge. Everyone would have been caught unawares. If the flood had been just a steady downpour, some of those people would have had time to bang together a boat, throw some provisions in it, and wait for the waters to rise. But waters had gushed from above and below. Unless they had already prepared, no one could possibly be saved. No wonder all but Noah and his family perished. I had no idea what this all had to do with the stones but there had to be some connection or why would Neil have sent me the Bible?