Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children
—William Makepeace Thackeray
The old man leaned back in his chair and watched the waves coming into the beach, their rhythm ever constant and ever changing. Out on the water a fishing raft was heading in for dock, sail down and nets up, with its crew pulling steadily on the oars as it slid down the ocean's curve. Another raft was already there, with half its catch already gutted and drying under the suntube. Farther down the coast more wharfs and rafts crowded the shoreline, reaching out from the village like fingers from a hand. It was a tranquil scene, as long as you didn't have to haul fish yourself. And thankfully I'm long past those days. He turned his gaze up the beach, to where his granddaughters were trying to build a house with pieces of driftwood. "Come on, girls," he called. "Your mother will be waiting."
They didn't come at once, of course, and so he called them again, and then a third time, and finally they scampered over, six and eight, and to his eye already heartbreakingly beautiful.
"Tell us a story first, deduchka," asked the younger girl. She had the wavy dark hair that all fisherfolk had, grown long enough to fall in windblown ringlets to below her shoulders.
"Yes," put in her sister. She was an older, lankier version of her sibling, self-consciously carrying the responsibility of her extra years. "Tell us a good one."
The old man smiled down at the children. The story request was a gambit for more time on the beach, away from home and bedtime. "Well, sit yourself down, devuchkas, and I'll see what I can remember." They giggled, because they thought they were getting away with something, and he smiled because he'd called them early in anticipation of exactly that request, and they had just enough time for a good tale. He waited while they made themselves comfortable on the sand, then started. "Once upon a time, a very long time ago now," he began, and he told the old story of Noah, and how he'd built the Ark and filled it with two of every kind of animal. He elaborated at length on Noah's adventures, how he'd filled the ocean with his tears for his lost wife and made the land solid with his own clotted blood after he fought the leopard. He told the story of how one of Noah's daughters became the mother of the fisherfolk, and how the other became the mother of the forepeople, who had their own ways and customs quite different from their own, and then he told the story of how Noah flew to the suntube on wings made of beeswax and falcon feathers to set it alight, so there would always be day inside Ark even though it was night outside. "And when he was done, he sent it off to voyage through the night to the wonderful world of Heaven, and here we are today," he finished.
"What's night?" asked the younger girl.
"Night is just darkness, devuchka. Darkness that's darker than the inside of your eyelids, and with nothing in it, not even air."
She looked at him askance. "How can something have nothing in it?"
The old man shrugged and turned his palms-up. "I don't know. I can only tell you what the story says."
"It's only just a story," said the older girl. "It isn't true, is it, deduchka?"
"Stories like that are always sort of true, and sort of not true."
"So are we going to Heaven then?" persisted the younger child.
"Well, only very slowly. We won't get there. Your children's children's children might."
"Don't be silly," said the older girl authoritatively. "We aren't really going anywhere." She swept her arms in circles to encompass her world. "If we were you could see us moving."
"Oh we're going somewhere, all right." The old man stood up and offered his hands to his granddaughters. "We're going inside for bedtime."
They protested only mildly, and he took them up the beach to the house, where their mother was waiting. She scooted them inside and closed the door so she could feed them and scrub them and send them to bed. The old man looked out the open window to the ocean, where the first fishing raft had made it back to the dock, with a good catch and their father, and all around them their world sailed silently on.