by Tosca Lee
“Perhaps it is going to storm. Bring your things inside.”
“It is not a storm cloud, Mother, but a dark shadow that comes quickly this way!”
Lila got up with an exasperated sigh but then halted upon the threshold. “Strange omens!”
“Don’t be foolish,” I snapped. The year that Hevel was slain, a ewe died. We found that its entrails were twisted, and Ashira, ever superstitious, had infected her siblings with her talk of portents.
But I stopped just behind my eldest daughter, my hand clutching her shoulder. “Mazor, call your brothers.”
The boy took off at a run in the direction of the fields, shouting, as Lila and I brought in the grapes drying in the sun. By the time we finished, Adam and Lahat were still afield. I ran—how I ran!—to find them. They were there, staring at the sky, prepared to defend the crops, though by what means I had no idea.
“What can it mean?” Now I could see them. In the thousands—no, hundreds of thousands—flying through the air.
“Run!” Adam said. “No, not to the house. It’s too far. To Kayin’s.”
I was stunned to hear him speak the name at all, though he never realized he did it. He pushed Lahat and me before him. As we got there, the sky came down, raining locusts.
When we emerged, it was to a different world. The trees were rendered skeletons, no more. Here and there one of them remained untouched even though its neighbor had been devoured seemingly whole.
The wolves—descendants of Reut’s brood—pounced on those stragglers that remained and chomped them down greedily.
The following spring we delved into our seed store, nearly depleted after the drought. But that was a lean year. All season we foraged for what we could, taking the flocks to far pastures where green herbs and grasses remained untouched, relying heavily on their milk—and then upon their meat.
That summer Besek and Lahat left together for several weeks on errand for their father. When they returned, they sat with him for a full afternoon. The next day Adam announced that we would prepare to move.
“The land to the south is rich, filled with the silt of floods. There the riverbanks are lower, and we will dig greater canals to water the fields from them.”
“This is like saying that we do not believe the One will feed us.” I did not like the idea of moving—how should Kayin ever know to find us if he should ever return this way?
Though I did not voice it, there was another reason for my reluctance: I did not want to go farther south than we already had from the gates of that valley. But when I said it in private, Adam sighed so heavily that I did not bring it up again.
“Still,” I said, when I had gotten him alone, “can it be right to wander farther and farther, to make for ourselves the water for our crops as though we would control the rain itself?”
In fear more than in faith, we laid the best lamb we had upon the altar. Perhaps the One could be reminded of our needs. If not reminded, perhaps he could be placated. For a moment, when Adam had finished bleeding and flaying the animal and laid it upon the stones, I felt a surge of panic. What if the fire did not come?
But the fire consumed it, in silence. So much silence.
Perhaps we should bring a lamb each year, Lila said.
Always we had moved by the signs that the fullness of time was upon us. But we had grown fearful and superstitious.
All the next year we harvested every shoot or seed as though we went to a place with no vegetation, as though we were the One planting the greenery of the earth anew. We sacrificed from the flock in thanks and petition.
Perhaps, Besek wondered aloud, if we gave enough and often, the One would be moved to bounty. A part of me protested this way of thinking, as though the One could be bribed with the very things of his own earth!
Another part of me—that part which knew fear—said nothing to disagree.
THAT AUTUMN WE PACKED our baskets full and prepared to make the trek south. Already Lahat and Adam had made two trips to stake out settlement and orchard and field. They were excited, anxious to go. But I was less ready; this was where my children were born. This was where my son was buried. But Lahat said that if Kayin should come, he would know the way to find us; we would leave one of our clay maps, burned hard, in the old house.
When it came time, Ashira refused to pack her belongings. She stood in the doorway of her house. “Take my daughter with you. But I will not leave the body of my brother. I will stay here.”
Panic rose in my chest. I could not lose any more of my children!
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Adam said.
I echoed her father, relieved in some small part of my mind to be in agreement with him on at least one thing. “How will you feed yourselves? How will you do for your family all of the things we have done together? What if something happens to one of you?”
Adam, his mouth set in a rigid line, went in to talk to her but came back out shaking his head an hour later.
“Ashira! Daughter! Please don’t do this thing.” I stood in her house and held her hands and cried tears upon them. “Who will bring forth the children? Who will turn the babes in the womb? What is there for you here but memories of a man who walks upon this earth no longer? Would Hevel have you live in a wasteland, in a memory? Did he ever dwell on the past at all?”
She sagged, and I could not hold her up. Now, after all of these years, her grief exploded over the banks of her reserve like a spring river in flood. She cried for a day without ceasing or eating. When it was done, we packed her things. The next morning, as the mists were still drifting through the old field, we laid our packs upon our backs and upon the onager.
We stopped once on the edge of the field to gaze at the place where Hevel lay. It was grown over and only a rock, broken open to reveal a wealth of crystal within it, had been laid to mark the place. Not that any of us could ever forget it. Ashira stood over the place and gazed at the earth for a long time, saying nothing. Then we began our journey south.
27
We cleared new fields in time to plant that spring. Besek took after his brother, taking the flocks to the far hills, seeming to thrive with the time to himself, though sometimes he took Asa or his eldest son with him. They were all three nearly as skilled with Hevel’s sling as Hevel himself had been and had long trained Reut’s descendants to go with them. Reut herself had died many years before, and I had always been glad that she had preceded Hevel to that place, wherever it was.
Within three years our gardens and fields—larger than before—flourished. Lila wove nets that the younger boys took to the river, and they brought back fish, which we ate regularly now, baked over fire and in soups.
When the adam and I spoke, it was always about the children or the gardens or the season or the improved wheat. Once, when I pointed out that I had not been consulted in the placement of the vineyard, he snapped, “You weren’t here, so Lahat and I had to make the decision alone.”
“You might have consulted me.”
“There wasn’t time.”
“Then you might at least prepare a new one where I want it. Besek and you might prepare a new one in a day if Lahat laid it out.”
He looked on me then with such forbearing—it was the same look that any of his children might have from him if they tested his patience too long. “Havah, I am not going to do that now.”
I went from irritation to seething anger. “I remember a time when you harkened to my suggestions and desires because you saw the reason in them.”
“Oh, indeed, as I harkened to your hand when you fed me whatever you would?”
Anger, hot and molten, shot up through my veins. “As though you did not share the same mind! Will you ever admit that you, too, wanted it, or will you claim always that you were too weak to hold your own with your woman?”
He struck me then. So fast—and so unexpected—that I stumbled back. I was not stunned. I had known that if I spoke my mind I would incur his wrath, held ever more in check. That thought a
lone sent my anger racing like adrenaline, hot in my veins, again. “You strike the image of God! Is that not what you said to your son when he came to take his leave of you?”
“I was made in the image of the One!” he roared, his face dark, cords standing out against his neck.
“As was I!”
“You were made in my image, for me!”
“Oh, for you? Now here is the truth of your conceit! I once thought it poetic that you called me flesh of your flesh, but now we know it was only vanity! And were my children, formed of my body and the mystery of the One, were they formed in your image as well? Flesh of your flesh? Is it all about you, husband? Was Kayin, your firstborn, of your image as much as Hevel, or was he mine?”
“I do not know whose son he was. Are you certain that he was fathered by me?”
I flew at him, beating at him with my fists. “Who else would it have been, except for the child fathered only by God? He was God’s then and not yours!”
“Was he not the serpent’s, that you communed so well and secretly with?”
I opened my mouth but found no words. How should he bring up that dream of the serpent, dreamed by me even as Kayin took root in my belly? How many times had I wondered in the recesses of my mind, unlit by logic, whether it might indeed be a child fostered by that thing the serpent had been and became?
“A serpent indeed, this child of yours.” His lips curled back as he straightened. “And how much he has shown it, that he should kill the brother of my image. How appropriate, Havah.”
I gazed at him as one dead, eyes fixed, unseeing. Did I know this man at all? I recognized the form of his shoulder, his strong fingers, his eyes. How well I knew them. I felt tears falling from my eyes and hated them and myself for shedding them, but I mourned—mourned for the man I had known, as seemingly dead to me as Hevel. Because surely this was not him.
I wiped my lip where my tooth had cut it when he struck me. “I would say that the only serpent I see is you, but surely the serpent—as I—would not disown our actions as the bidding of another, even before God. No, it takes more courage to own the full brunt of one’s doing rather than pass it off like a namby child on his sister. Oh yes, I see that you will strike me again. Well, do it! And will that also be the doing of another upon you? Whose deception and fault will it be this time?”
He shook with the effort not to strike me as I stood there, braced for it, goading him. I had provoked it, knowingly, willingly, in ways that would not please the One and did not please me, truth be told, except in the release of that moment.
So I had his attention. “Your hatred of Kayin has infected your heart.”
He flinched. Good! I would strike the soft vital points as often as I might if only to know that he lived, that there was indeed a man inside him who might hurt as I hurt and grieve as I grieved. My eyes had overflowed more times than could be counted.
“Get away from me.” His voice was very low. He made to leave, and when I went after him borne upon my anger—I think I could have railed at him all day—he spun on his heel and said, his face in mine, “Get away. Do not speak to me. Your wiles have cost us all too much already. It is one thing that I should lose my place in paradise. But it is another that I should lose a son and our children a brother—not one, but two, for I do not expect ever to lay eyes on Kayin again. Let me alone.”
I watched him stalk away. I called out after him, though it cost me my dignity to do it for the tremor in my voice, for the hurt breaking now on the surface, for the fact that I wanted nothing more than for him to take me in his arms.
“This is all my doing? As though I had such power over the world! Would that you had always been alone then. You might have been happier, to hear you tell it. Or better, would that I had been fashioned first!”
He did not look back.
ADAM AND I HAD gone without speaking on many occasions. We had lain down with our anger as though it were our most staunch bedmate and risen in our silence. But our silences and our anger had been nothing compared to this. Those had been days of cracks and fast breaks, like pottery that has not been properly fired.
This was a simple seething, a simmering that went on as our hurt cooked down to a thick and concentrated broth.
He did not come back to the house but stayed in the smaller one built for Besek and Zeeva, who seemed to prefer their privacy. My children watched me with silent glances and sidelong looks but did not speak of it as night after night he took his rest there.
I recruited Lahat and Asa to work my vineyard. What was Adam to do—stop me? To forbid it? I would laugh at him. I would do as I pleased.
At night I missed only his body to curl against, if not his presence. How much resentment had piled between us! Without him there, I slept the sleep of the dead and dreamed, even, a little bit. I saw Kayin, his face dark and tanned by the wind in ways it had not been by the sun, standing upon a knoll, looking out at a flock of sheep and goats and another animal with a great humped back. In the distance I saw a tent, pegged into the ground. I heard the sound of young voices and saw the bright weavings of colors on the entryway, waving in the sun, and from somewhere, the sound of Renana, calling for boys to use the midden and not the back of the tent. In my dream I smiled. How many times had I said the same?
The next day as I went to the river to wash my arms and feet and face, I thought of them and smiled. And then my heart was swallowed up with such an ache that I doubled over with a groan. How I missed him! Even Renana, my exasperating daughter, so fiercely lovely and sharp-tongued. How I longed to see and set my hands upon the faces of these children, these unnamed ones I had seen only once, in passing, in the land of dreams.
But I told myself it was enough that Kayin lived and prospered and that his family grew as his flocks. I prayed to the One to carry my blessing on the easterly wind: upon his head, and his eyes, and his feet, and upon his children.
As I was walking back to the yard, I saw a form on a far hillock. I knew by the long braid, twined with colored threads, and the way she wrapped her mantle over her shoulder, that it was Lila. She faced out, toward the north. Was she thinking of Kayin? Did she wait for him? Did she speak to the One? I stood and watched her for several moments, afraid she would turn and see me—Lila, who noticed everything. But she did not.
How I admired my shrewd daughter, who waited on no man but her youngest brothers and bestowed the favor of her skill where she willed it and when she would. My lovely daughter, so staunch in her unwavering escape of this weft for the one she wove upon her pegs, instilled with mystery known only to her.
“SUFA!” IT WAS ONLY morning, and I could not take any more of her clay flute. Because it had at first put me in mind of Renana and her drums, I had encouraged her. But unlike her sister, the girl had no talent for it, and I could not abide it.
“But Mother, listen.” She pouted her pretty pout, her fingers poised over the holes. How like none of my children she was, my stormy girl, who blazed at her brothers when they trod too near her and tempted them back to kiss her when she held sweet cakes in her hand. She made a syrupy-sweet compote of figs and dates for Zeeva’s bread when there was no honey to be found and shared it with whomever she would as one of her favors. Small wonder she had a special habit of pitting one brother against the other. Already her legs were shapely and strong as a woman’s.
“Enough. I am having a headache from it.”
“Perhaps you’re pregnant again,.” she said, putting the flute in her pocket.
“She’s not pregnant,” Lila said.
Just then Zeeva’s youngest came shouting into the settlement. I was accustomed to alarm on a regular basis—one crisis or another—but there were hysterics in the girl’s voice.
“Matnan! Matnan! He’s gone into the river, and it washed him away!”
We stared at her for an elongated instant and then sprinted to the river. I ran and ran, Sufa at my heels. Lila had gone for help to search downriver, and now I realized how little sense it made
for us all to go flying to the place where little Matnan had fallen in if he had washed very far already.
We ran downriver, shouting his name, the sound of my voice and Sufa’s hardly audible over the hammer of my heart. I could not lose another child, whether it be mine or the child of my child. I could not bear one more heartache. I was a vessel, filled full with sorrow, brimming over already.
For hours we searched, joining Lila and Zeeva farther downriver. Lahat and Adam and the children of Ashira waded out into the river calling and shouting for him. All day we searched, wandering farther and farther downriver, past idle eddies and fickle currents. It ran faster here than it had near our old settlement, and more than once Adam and Lahat lost their footing and were carried part of the way down. Each time, seeing that a grown man could barely keep his own in the current, Zeeva moaned and cried out, tearing at her hair and shouting anew.
As the day waned and Besek, in from the hills at last, came with his wolves at his heels, we were all of us worn and hungry and numb.
Finally, as twilight fell down like a veil over the day, a shout issued from the far bank where Besek had crossed some time ago. He cried out again, and I saw him get down in the reeds and slowly lift out a small, lifeless body.
Did I wail? Did I scream? I heard the keens and wild howls of Zeeva, even of Lila.
Besek had to travel upstream before he could find a place to cross, and we ran, searching desperately for a place slow and shallow enough to meet him. But even from here I could see the blue face and splayed limbs, the way they jittered, limp, as Besek shook him. I saw the expression on my son’s face, twisted, as he was finally, on shaking and exhausted legs, met by his father and brother.
We tried to breathe and slap and pinch and shake him to life. But life, once surrendered, cannot be regained. Somehow, during that time that was all one nightmarish mire to me, I stared at his small lifeless body and saw in him the same lifelessness I had seen in Hevel. I thought, So once the adam must have been and still the One breathed life into his lungs.
