And It Was Good

by Madeleine L'engle

  When my brother and I were very little we liked the giants and the odd winged creatures who weren’t men, being immortal. We, they told us, were mortal, but nobody yet knew what being mortal meant. The giants, like us, were mortal, but they lived in a different chronology, or so we were told, and their life span was longer than ours. What was a life span? We did not know. Some of the giants had only one eye in the middle of the forehead, and six fingers on each hand. They were gentle with small things, and would play games with my brother and me, tossing us back and forth like living balls, and we would squeal with excitement and pleasure. Of course our parents had forbidden us to play with the giants for fear they would harm us, if only by accident, but they never did. With large things they were not so gentle, and we saw them kill dragons and dinosaurs with one blow, though we did not at first know what it meant, to kill. The dragons and the dinosaurs would fall over and twitch and then stop moving and sometimes their blood would come out of them.

  The giants told us that this was mortality, but one of the winged men told us not to pay any attention because we, being human, were neither like the giants nor like the dragons and dinosaurs, nor like the beasts of the field.

  One particular winged creature took a special interest in us and taught us a great deal. He seemed to be the leader of the others, because they all deferred to him. First of all he showed us how wise it was not to tell everything to our parents; if they didn’t know we had been playing with the giants, for instance, they couldn’t scold us.

  This special winged one was tall, not as tall as the giants but taller than our father, with great dark wings which he could spread like a cloud so that they covered the sun. Once, as he was thus hiding the sunlight, he told us that we must be particularly careful not to tell our parents when we had seen him. “They do not understand me,” he said, sadly. “They blame me for what should have been a blessing. I was certainly bored in that Garden.”

  My brother could not keep his mouth closed. While we were eating our pottage that evening he let slip to our parents what the winged one had said.

  “That snake! That serpent!” my mother hissed furiously, putting her arms around both of us and pulling us close to her. “Trying to seduce innocent children. Stay away from him, that evil one! If you go near him again I’ll have your father beat the living daylights out of you.”

  I knocked my brother around a bit at bedtime, not to hurt him, you understand, just to teach him to keep his mouth closed next time.

  When I saw the winged man again I could see why my mother called him a serpent. His shape seemed to be changing until now there was something sinuous about it that was unlike our bodies, a rippling and a darkness that was no longer shining. “Why does my mother hate you?” I asked him.

  “Hate,” he mused, smiling. “It’s only the other side of love.”

  I tossed this aside. “Yes, but what does she blame you for? Were you in the Garden when they were there?”

  He nodded, stretching his wings and then folding them in much the same way that I stretched my arms above my head when I got up in the morning. “Oh, long before they were there. I can go back any time I want to,” he added, “though I don’t want to very often. Dull place. They don’t know when they’re well off, your parents.”

  “Why can you go back if they can’t? What about the cherubim with the flaming sword?”

  “Only man was thrown out of the Garden,” he said. “It’s different for me. I threw myself out, so it’s still open to me and my friends.” He indicated some of the other winged creatures. He grinned. “I’ve been thrown out of better places than that.”

  At this point my brother came leaping up behind us and scared me half out of my wits. He was like that, full of jokes and surprises and roarings of laughter. He laughed at all kinds of things that weren’t funny to me at all. Once when we were kneeling by a still pond to drink and saw our faces reflected in the water, he threw a pebble at our watching faces, and laughed and laughed as our expressions changed and rippled in the moving of the water. He used to sing, too, and whistle, enough to deafen you, and run and leap and prance.

  My father would shout, “Can’t you keep still for a minute?”

  My mother would answer him, “Let the child be happy if he can.”

  My mother used to sing, too, but it was a different kind of singing from my brother’s. It was a tuneless humming, and usually came when she was annoyed with my father, or with the Lord El, or with herself, and we learned early that it meant that she was telling us, “I don’t care. I’m all right. I don’t need you. Go away.”

  When the humming went on for too long I would leave the home fire and go. Sometimes my brother would come running after me. “She doesn’t mean it. She does need us. She really doesn’t want you to go.”

  “You’re too young to understand,” I told him out of the darkness into which her humming had pushed me.

  “Come on home. She’s cooking dinner. Father brought home a mammoth and she’s broiling mammoth steaks and they smell marvellous.”

  That was my brother for you: He accepted anything our parents said or did. Mammoths, like the dinosaurs and the dragons which the giants killed, were mortal.

  What was mortal? I did not understand, so I asked the great winged one.

  But he did not answer the question. Instead he said, “Your father was given all the animals of the earth and air and water to name, and so he has power over them and may do with them as he will.”

  Why is he telling me this instead of answering my question? I wondered. But I was interested. “My father named me. Does he have power over me?”

  “I’m glad you brought that up,” the winged one said. “It is significant that this realization should come to you at this point when you are going through a crisis of your identity.”

  My mind was on power. “Who named my father?”

  “The One who shut him out of the Garden.”

  “So the One has power over my father?” I thought about this for a moment. Then I asked, “Who named you? What is your name?”

  The winged one spread out his great leather pinions, darkening the sky so that a few confused drops of rain spattered on the ground at our feet. “I have no name. I am NoName.”

  Why did this frighten me? “Then if you have no name—”

  He folded his wings calmly and smiled at me. “Then I am Not. And no one has power over me.”

  “I don’t understand.” How could he Not Be? There he was, standing right in front of me, larger than life—oh, he was taller than my father by far.

  “Why don’t you go hunting with your father?” he asked, as though he were answering all my questions. “You’re old enough now. It would be a significant experience. You might learn a great deal.”

  “About what?”

  “Not-ness.” He laughed. His laugh was not like my brother’s laugh. It was more like my mother’s humming.

  I went back to the home fire. My mother was there, stirring something in a clay pot, and she was singing instead of humming. Her singing was as different from my brother’s singing as was her humming. My mother’s singing came usually when she was preparing something for us, a special meal, or a new skin coat for cold days. I remembered her singing most when my brother and I were very little and she would hold us in her arms and sing and then kiss us as she put us down on our beds of skin for the night. She sang when she was holding us together in the circle of her song: herself, my father, my brother, and me: not pushing us away. She sang when she had forgotten the Garden.

  “No,” my brother said. “She has not forgotten it. When she sings she is still there.”

  “What nonsense,” I said, “with that ferocious cherubim at the gates keeping us out, all she talks about is not being there.”

  Our father talked less than our mother about the Garden and the old days. Perhaps it was because he had less time. Food which had been theirs for the taking he now had to sweat for, struggling with thorns and thistles, drought a
nd rain. Unlike our mother he seldom complained. Perhaps he didn’t have time for complaints, either. Sometimes in the evenings he would play with my brother and me. Once when we were very small he woke us up and took us to see the night sky. Because we slept from sundown to sunup, we had never seen darkness before, and we were awed and frightened. The sky was hidden behind a black covering, which was filled with thousands of little holes through which the light shone.

  “No,” my father told us. “They are not holes, my sons, they are stars, and the Lord God knows them all by name as I know the animals, and as I know you.”

  “Does the Lord have power over the stars, then?” I asked. I was frightened. I thought perhaps the Lord God might decide to throw one of the stars at us if we angered him.

  “Who is the Lord God?” my brother asked.

  Here at least I could show him that I knew more than he did. “Idiot. The Lord God is the one who threw our mother and father out of the Garden and put the ugly cherubim there to keep everybody out.” Then I remembered winged NoName. “Almost everybody, that is.” Was it because he had no name that he could go past the flaming sword and into the Garden?

  “Is the Lord God bad, then?” my brother asked.

  “No,” our father said. “The Lord God is not bad. But he is not to be understood.”

  “But if he made you leave the Garden then why isn’t he bad?”

  Our father stood looking up at the night sky, and at the flaming lights called stars. “God made the night and the day; he made the sun and the moon and the stars. Look at the sky, my sons, and ask yourself if the one who made the stars can be bad.”

  —Why not? I thought. The stars frightened me.

  But my brother gave his pleased and happy laugh. “I see! The Lord God is Good. And he is not to be understood.”

  After that night my father included us when he made offerings to the Lord God.

  “Why do you make the offerings?” I asked.

  “In gratitude.”

  “For being thrown out of the Garden?”

  “For food and sleep. For rain and sun. For you, my beloved children.”

  “And what else?”

  “For forgiveness.”

  “But how can you forgive the Lord God when he threw you out of the Garden?”

  “No, no,” my father said. “I ask him to forgive me.”

  I went to winged NoName for explanation and instruction. He sat down on a rock and drew me to him, unfolding his wings just enough to protect me from the east wind which had risen, bringing with it a stinging of sand from the desert. “I’m glad you’ve come to me for further orientation,” he said. “Your father is, of course, old-fashioned in his dwelling on guilt. It’s morbid, and morbidity is unhealthy. In the first place, he didn’t do anything wrong—”

  “But what did he do?” I interrupted. “They’ve never told me.”

  “They ate an apple,” NoName said. “That’s all.”

  All I knew about apples was that my mother wouldn’t let us eat them, and my father got angry when we teased.

  “And then,” NoName continued, “they learned the difference between good and evil, and so they became a threat to the powers that be, and had to be got rid of.”

  The difference between good and evil? My mother had called the winged NoName the evil one. To me he was the question-answerer. Perhaps it is evil to answer too many questions?

  “You must understand,” NoName said, “that your father belongs to the older generation and his attitudes are no longer relevant. What you must do is establish a meaningful relationship with this world. I must go now, but come see me again soon. I enjoy our dialogs.”

  As we grew older, my brother and I, we had less time to run about and play. We had to help our parents. Our father took us hunting with him occasionally, but mostly he set my brother to keeping the sheep, and me to tilling the ground, because I was older and stronger. Superior. I still went to see NoName whenever I had the opportunity. My brother seldom went with me. Instead, he often used to talk to the horrible cherubim with the flaming sword. And he got into the habit of talking with the Lord.

  “But the Lord doesn’t answer your questions,” I said, “and NoName answers mine.”

  My brother laughed. “The Lord answers my questions. The sun rising in the morning is an answer. The stars at night are an answer.”

  I tried to talk to the Lord God, too, but I found it quite hopeless. First of all I tried to establish a dynamic relationship, like the one I had with NoName. I introduced myself, and then I asked, “What is your name?”

  At that moment a storm started to blow up and there was a tremendous crash of thunder, so loud that it silenced the birds. In this thundering silence the Lord God said, “I will be that I will be.”

  This didn’t make any sense, and I wasn’t sure I’d really heard him because of the strange silence, so I asked again, “Yes, but do you have a name?”

  “I am.”

  This was as confusing as NoName saying he was Not, and I certainly didn’t regard it as an answer. It also made me think of my identity crisis, so I asked him, “Who am I?”

  And the Lord God said, “Certainly I will be with thee.”

  I gave up and started to go. Old-fashioned language confused me. He called after me, “Where is your brother?”

  I shrugged. “I should know? He’s always hanging around you. You see more of him than I do.”

  The rain started then, so I left. I was glad of the rain. The ground was dry, and we needed it for the grain.

  The next time we made our offerings my brother brought his best lamb, and I brought some of the fruit of the ground that was a bit wilted. As usual, they started talking, the Lord God and my brother. I might not have been there.

  “Oh, Lord, my Lord,” my brother said, “my heart is ready, my heart is ready, blessed be your Name from the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same. Who is like unto the Lord God who humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven, and in the earth!” It was like singing, the way my brother spoke.

  “How can he bless your name,” I asked the Lord God, “if he doesn’t know what it is?” At least NoName had NoName, I thought, and didn’t play tricks like saying I will be that I will be.

  As usual the Lord God gave an answer which wasn’t an answer: “The earth is given daylight by the fire of the sun, but neither can you look directly at the brightness of the sun without dark coming to your eyes, nor can you understand it; nevertheless it is by the sun that you see.”

  I left them and went to seek NoName and some proper answers.

  NoName was waiting for me by a large rock, and he opened and lowered his leather wings in greeting.

  “This Name person,” I said, “pays more attention to my brother than to me.”

  “He’s just copying your parents,” NoName said. “Too much is demanded of the first child. And yet you are not appreciated nor understood. No wonder you are an underachiever. Just because your brother has a pretty face and a nice voice is no reason for discrimination. They should try to have a deeper involvement in your self-fulfillment, and help you to realize your potentialities. Now, if your brother were out of the way, of course, things would be different. As long as he’s under foot you are going to suffer trauma and distress.”

  I went to find my brother. He was holding a new born lamb in his arms and he paid more attention to the lamb than he did to me. So I took a stick and hit him with it the way the giants hit the dinosaurs and the dragons.

  Still holding the lamb, he fell, and red blood came from his head. I looked at him, and then I told him to get up. But he did not move.

  “Get up,” I repeated. “You are not a dinosaur or a dragon. NoName said we were different. Come on. Get up.”

  Still he did not move.

  I knelt down beside him. The lamb began bleating and I pulled it out of my brother’s arms and pushed it away. “Get up!” I shouted in his ear. He did not stir. Then I saw that there was no breath i
n his nostrils, no rise and fall of his chest. The only motion was the slow stream of blood from his temple. His eyes were open as though they were looking at me, but they were not. They were empty, as though there was no one behind them.

  Perhaps we were not, after all, so different from the dinosaurs and the dragons.

  NoName stood beside me. “So we witness the first human death.”

  I continued to kneel beside my brother, beating at his chest to make it rise and fall again. “Is this mortality?”

  “Yes,” NoName said, “also known as death. You are not to blame. Make this quite clear to your parents. It was not your fault. It was theirs. There is no such thing as corporate guilt. They are the ones who sinned, not you. Remember that. It will be very bad for your personality development if they make you feel guilty.”

  I was not, at that moment, interested in my personality development. “Can’t you make him get up?”

  “He is dead.” NoName snapped his fingers. “Finis.”

  I blew into my brother’s mouth to try to blow breath back into him. But all that happened was that I lost breath myself. I drew back, panting, and NoName was gone.

  I ran away from that place and from my brother. If I stayed away for a while and then returned, perhaps he would be singing to the sheep again.

  The Lord God said to me, “Where is your brother?”

  I answered, “If you don’t know, how should I? Am I my brother’s keeper?”

  I left his Presence and went back to the home fire and told my parents that something had happened to my brother. They both began to run, run, to the place where the sheep grazed. I ran after them. “Perhaps he’s all right now,” I panted. “I was told that we, being men, were different from the dragons and the dinosaurs. I didn’t know he would fall down and not be able to get up. It is not my fault.”