I turn my head to watch Margie carry two chairs away. I don’t want to get into it.

“Well?” Sara asks.

“The Rock of A-ges,” I say at last, “is God. Cleft means bro-ken.”

“So. Let’s see. We’ve been singing, ‘God, broken for me, let me hide myself inside you?’ Does this make sense? Am I missing something here?”

The others laugh.

“May-be you need to read the Bi-ble a lit-tle.”

“You might be surprised, but I do. Parts of it, anyway. There are some great tales in it.”

Back for more chairs, Margie claps her hands. “Tell us a Bible story!” She unfolds a chair and sits in it.

“Shall I?”

Willie lowers himself onto the grass right beside me. All I can see of him are those boulder knees and the top of his head. “Let’s hear the story of Sara.” The top of his head, covered with wavy brown hair, doesn’t look bad at all.

“Okay.” Sara pauses to look into each face and draws her breath, a little warm-up routine. “I’ll tell you the story of a woman named Sara, like me. She married a man named Abraham. A very interesting man. He was rich, so all the relatives thought he was a great catch, and they lived in a beautiful house in a very old city—ancient even back then in ancient days. The city was called Ur. Ur was a very elegant and civilized place. The rich people there prayed to beautiful statues of bulls made out of gold and lapis lazuli.” She turns to Margie. “That’s a bright blue stone with flecks of gold.”

Margie’s eyes go big as her brain tries to make a picture of the gorgeous idol.

“Well, when Abraham was getting up in years, he went out to the country to see how his slaves were getting along with his livestock. When he came home, he told Sara he wouldn’t pray to the bull anymore, because a burning bush had told him that It was the one true god.”

“You mean the bush?” Margie asks.

“That’s right. The bush claimed to be the one true god. But the bush wouldn’t tell Abraham its name. When he asked, it said, ‘I am that I am.’ Well, Sara was okay about praying to Abraham’s bush if that’s what he wanted—it was all the same to her. But Abraham really went off the deep end. He couldn’t stop obsessing about the bush. So one day he made a decision: He and Sara would sell their house in the city of Ur and go out into the country. They would wander around with the cows and sheep to be closer to the bush.”

Wasn’t it Moses who saw the bush? I’m not sure; I let Sara talk.