Spies in Canaan
Contents (2)
SPIES IN CANAAN
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Travelling in a Strange Land
Gods and Angels
The Rye Man
Stone Kingdoms
The Poets’ Wives
The Light of Amsterdam
Oranges From Spain
Swallowing the Sun
The Big Snow
The Healing
The Truth Commissioner
A Run in the Park
For Alberta, who is the very best of us
CONTENTS
- GHOST SOLDIERS
- CROSSING OVER
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
GHOST SOLDIERS
My cup is full and running over. A book full and running over with stories. So many stories you could never remember every one and all of them are true because God has told the storytellers what words to use. A giant killed by a single slingshot, walls that come tumbling down, men who walk through fire and are not consumed. Where there is no death except for the deserving because in the early-morning light the stone is rolled away and they tell me that is why I never have to die if I believe with all my heart. And so I sit on the Sunday-school pew with swinging legs, try to believe as I sing,
Twelve spies went to spy in Canaan
Ten were bad, two were good
Some saw the giants big and tall
Some saw the grapes in clusters fall
Some saw that God was in it all
Ten were bad, two were good.
and I do the falling-grapes-and-clusters motion with my hands, flex the muscles I don’t have to represent the giants and hold up the right number of fingers for the good and bad spies. Then when it’s time, I give my collection coins that are to be split equally between the orphans and the lepers. And the silver-haired Miss Reynolds brings out the flannelgraph, sticks pictures on it about a boy who lives in a barrel, but I don’t like this story so much as some of the others because I like to think the pictures for myself. So I see the little boy who brings five barley loaves and two small fishes and how they feed the five thousand and sometimes when I open my brown paper lunch bag in school I know how hard it must be to do a miracle. But there are miracles everywhere in these stories – a child born in old age, a withered hand healed, a storm told to be still. So many miracles I can hardly remember them all.
But there is one miracle that as a child frightens me and sometimes creeps inside my dreams, and only years later I see that it’s not a miracle after all. After the plagues, after the pestilence, an angel with black beating wings, knife in hand, swooping in at midnight across the silent desert sands to kill the firstborn, killing Pharaoh’s child and even that of the captive in the dungeon. Killing the unbelievers. I am a firstborn and in my dreams I hear their screams rent the night. In later life it flares back again in all its raw intensity when I watch the pictures of Isis ravaging across desert sands. But as a child I believe that if my father has painted blood on the doorposts and lintels we will be safe, all those who have followed this command will be unharmed, and so I lie perfectly still, imagine the door to our world painted with blood and, amidst the silence that enfolds the sleeping house, strain to hear the angel’s wings passing in the darkness.