Swallow the Ocean by Laura Flynn Page A

silently, one hand poised lightly at the bottom of the steering wheel, the other resting on his knee. We’d been in the car all day, on the road between Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. Behind the station wagon the Airstream pitched gently through the curves. My sisters and I were slumped three abreast in the backseat. The long hours in the car, the summer heat, the hum of the engine, the smooth roll of the tires on the highway, and my mother’s voice had a hypnotic effect. I leaned against the door of the car. Amy, forever stuck in the middle, leaned up against me. I could tell from the weight of her body that she was sleeping. My body was heavy too, but I was wide-awake, transfixed by the story.
    “Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his ass, and he took with him two of his men and his son Isaac,” my mother intoned.
    She’d decided to read us the Bible from start to finish, beginning the day we left San Francisco. As we traveled north through the deepening green of Oregon and Washington, then east through Idaho and Montana, the slim white ribbon that marked our place in the huge Bible inched its way through Genesis.
    We got as far east as Michigan that summer before my father tacked back west to get us home in time for school in the fall. My mother kept up with the Bible reading even after we got home, stopping two years later just short of Revelation.
    At church on Sundays in the hard pew next to my mother, I tried to cleave to the minister’s words. The only idea that had really sunk in was that Jesus loved me. The Old Testament was a shock. The language was strange, the morality hard, and this unforgiving God much tougher than anything I’d come up against until then. But the stories held me. From time to time as she read, my mother would pause to explain things to us: what a birthright was and how it could be stolen, what a covenant was and how it could be broken. Some things she could not explain.
    “Father, Isaac said, here are the fire and the wood, but where is the young beast for the sacrifice?”
    My mother paused for a moment, turned in her seat, and looked back at us. She saw that Amy was sleeping. “Well, that’s enough for today,” she said, drawing the silk marker down between the pages and closing the book carefully. My father glanced at her. He didn’t like the Bible that much. He didn’t go to church with us on Sundays anymore. What he liked were car games, racing to see who could find all the letters of the alphabet on road signs, or who could sight the most out-of-state license plates. My mother didn’t play. Even packed tight into the station wagon, it was getting so you couldn’t be with both of them at the same time.
    I sat back in my seat, my mind fumbling over the story. Poor Isaac . I shrugged Amy off my shoulder and turned towards the window to watch the open country. Amy, awakened abruptly, turned to me. Her face was crumpled up, eyes beseeching. All she wanted, all she ever wanted, was to lean up against someone to sleep.
    I shook my head at her. Pushing her off me with one hand, I silently redrew the line on the seat that marked my territory from hers.
    She turned to Sara, “Can I?”
    Sara, staring out her own window, shook her head without looking over.
    My mother turned around again. “Come up front, baby,” she said, holding out her arms. Amy went, headfirst, over the bench seat. I watched her go, too lazy even to reach out and slap her butt as it rose up over the seat.
    I retreated into my own territory, holed up against the window, trying to get my head around this story. That God would ask, that Abraham would agree. I turned to look back at the trailer. The two propane tanks at the front of the trailer bobbed upright just behind the hookup. The Airstream’s sleek rounded form was reassuring.
    On these mountain roads the station wagon couldn’t pull the trailer at much more than a crawl. With the Airstream attached to our wood-paneled Oldsmobile