Build Me an Ark by Brenda Peterson

Build Me an Ark by Brenda Peterson

Author:Brenda Peterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-03-12T16:00:00+00:00


AND WHEN MY mother called to find me floating in my own bathtub I did not tell her that, for a wild beluga, living out her days in captivity would be like me living inside my own bathtub all my life. I never told my own mother about giving a grieving whale my hand and in return feeling both her sadness and my own. I didn’t tell my own mother that we also shared an inexplicable joy in our meeting. Nor did I say that I’d discovered that Mauyak had been first captured with two other belugas in Hudson Bay, in Manitoba, Canada—since Mother well knew that a branch of my father’s family was once part of the Hudson Bay Company. She certainly wouldn’t understand me claiming Mauyak as a distant mammal relative.

But back in 1992, when Mauyak had just lost her very first calf and I was trying to speak my mother’s Biblical language to engage her in this whale’s story, I wasn’t yet having nightmares of belugas dying in captivity. I was still freshly elated from my meeting with Mauyak and the whale’s tenderness at taking my hand, the whole world of me, in her great self.

“Mom,” I tried to explain, “Do you remember that Jonah and the whale story you used to read us all the time?”

“Oh, yes,” her voice was excited. She is always so happy when I remember my Bible stories. “It was always your favorite—that and Noah’s ark.”

“Well, that mother beluga I met after she lost her baby—she was like Jonah’s whale, the whale who took him to the place God wanted him to be all along.”

My mother was quiet suddenly, suspicious of where I might be taking her with my story. “What do you mean?” she asked, and there it was, all the distance of different beliefs between us—a whole continent, a lifetime.

I knew better than to push her into territories outside her chosen dogma, so I simply said, “Well, that whale was God’s will, wasn’t it?”

She hesitated, then tentatively agreed: “Yes.”

“All I’m saying is that in the Bible a whale took an unwilling prophet into her belly and kept him safe until he could be delivered up again on dry land. So that whale was like God’s way of working in the world, of teaching Jonah . . .”

“Jonah’s whale is just a symbol, honey,” Mother interrupted, and I could tell she wanted to get off the phone. This is rare; usually I am the one to disconnect. Again I could hear her shaking her head, those eyes bright with bewilderment. “Sometimes I think you believe that God is some kind of whale!”

“Well, Mom,” I said, “God does work in mysterious ways . . .”

“. . . His wonders to reveal,” she finished, delighted that I could remember a Bible verse. “Love you, honey. And God does, too.”

Within the next several weeks I received a number of religious tracts and articles from my mother, well underlined with pink highlighter. But I also



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.