“Hush. The One has done as the One has willed. That is all.”
At that, Kayin shot his sister such a look of venom that she actually backed a step. I hurried to him and took his arm, trying not to look at the altar. “Come away. Let it be.”
He jerked away from me and, with a howl, lunged for the altar. He pushed the vegetables, stinking and smoldering, into the ashes of the lamb. But even then they did not catch fire though they lay, half toppled, in the very place where fire had consumed the lamb. When Adam pulled him gently away a second time, Kayin staggered, his eyes darting this way and that. He groaned, tearing at his hair, and stumbled off, not looking back.
“What does it mean?” Zeeva whispered, too loudly. Ashira began to usher away her children and gently laid her hand on Hevel’s arm. He seemed to have slipped away to another place, though his body stood rooted to the ground. When he lifted his head, I caught my breath at the expression on his face. It was beatific. My heart lurched.
How could this be? Oh, God! I sank to my knees.
For as much as my heart hurt for Kayin, my heart should have swelled for Hevel. But I could only think: This is not how it was supposed to be.
Hevel turned away, still in a daze. Renana started in the direction of Kayin, but Lila stopped her. “Do you think he needs a chit of a girl to comfort him?”
“I will go after Kayin,” Adam said. His heart, too, longs for the One, I thought with sadness. I am not the only one.
“No,” said Hevel slowly, seeming to rouse from reverie. “I will go.”
Adam reached for me, and I clasped his hand tightly. Kayin and Adam had been enough at odds already. Kayin would, I knew, never forgive his father for holding him back when he would have attempted to light the fire over his offering.
Hevel kissed Ashira on the forehead and went after his brother.
24
Just before dawn there came a rustle outside the house. I opened my eyes, instantly alert with the keen sense of a mother. I sat up, my heart quickening. Perhaps my sons were back. Oh, the questions I had for Hevel! And how I wanted—needed—to comfort Kayin.
When Kayin slipped through the door, I felt instantly relieved. I almost chuckled, so furtive was he, like a child with a secret. I opened my mouth, but upon seeing me he gestured frantically. Only then did I see his disheveled hair, the dirt on his face. Across the room Lila stirred. Kayin shrank back, out the doorway completely. I got up and dressed, even as Lila sat up, alarm in her eyes.
“It is fine. Rest a bit longer.” I put on my sandals.
Once I emerged outside, however, I could not find him until I went around the side of the house. There he was, bent over as though ill, his face twisted. He tugged at his hair, threw himself toward me, and then immediately shrank back.
“Come, my son.” I lay my arm around him. I had wronged him. How greatly I had wronged him! “Come away from here and we will talk.” How my heart ached for him. “Where is Hevel now?”
He gave a strange, rasping laugh. “Again, ‘Where is your brother?’ You used to send him after me! Should I now be the shepherd of the shepherd? Ah, God!”
The laugh became a cry and then a thick sob. He threw himself down to the ground and embraced my feet so that I nearly lost my balance.
“What is this? Stop it now.” I tried to pull him to his feet before he could cause a scene and wake the whole house. I could smell the wine upon him. Well, I could not fault him; of course he was undone. We had fostered expectation and the veneer of controlled perfection in him and here it was, cracked as any pot too long in the fire. I could only blame myself. How I must pour out my love to him now!
I pulled him away from the house; I desperately did not want him encountering his father. Not yet. “Come away now,” I said, drawing him with me. Had Hevel not put him to rights? I had assumed through the day and evening he would make all well between them—would make well many things, in fact.
“Forgive me,” he said, crying like a boy, going wherever I pulled him. His nose ran, leaving slippery tracks in his grimy face as it had when he was a child. He smelled foully of earth and wine and smoke—the smoldering smell of burnt grain and oil. There was something else, too. Grime caked his hands up to the forearm. It had smattered his face.
Abruptly, he pulled away and shouted, “Do not look on my face! I cannot look upon yours!”
“Kayin! What are you saying?”
“Mother, Mother—do not remove from me your love! Please do not take your love from me!”
A growing unease in my bowels. “I would never! It is not your doing that the One chose whom he—”
He was staring at me, and the look was filled with horror. His eyes seemed painfully white against the dark gore of his face.
“Kayin.” My hands had begun, inexplicably, to tremble. “Where is your brother?”
At that, he fell to the ground with wild wails, beating at his chest and face and shoulders. His voice was none I recognized—raw and like an animal’s. Cold seized my chest. I got down, grasped his shoulders.
“Kayin! Where is Hevel? Where is your brother?” But he only beat at himself, clawing at his face and hair. I shook him hard, with more strength than I knew myself to have, until the whites rolled up in his eyes. “Where is Hevel?”
All at once, he lay still.
“Come, Mother,” he said in a small voice, wiping at his face with the back of his forearm. I heard a sound behind us, and Kayin started as Lila came out of the house, her face stricken. I could see now the form of the adam moving inside, hurriedly dressing.
“Do not let her see me! Do not let her come!” His hoarse cry sounded as though he had shouted all through the night.
I pulled him up and hurried with him across the yard, dragging him with me, feeling ill. As though the motion had brought order to his brain, he faltered. “Please, say you will not stop loving me. Please, never remove your love. I cannot bear it. I cannot bear it. I can barely bear to live—”
Fear was a cord around my lungs. “Tell me! Tell me what happened!”
He would have fallen to the ground again, but I caught him and shook him once more.
“I have heard the voice of the One!”
I halted, confounded. “What?”
“I heard the voice of the One, Mother.”
“What did—what did he say to you?” Why did those words, so long hoped for, feel so horribly wrong?
“The same as you, Mother, just now.”
“What?”
“He said that sin crouches at the door.”
I thought of Kayin, crouching, himself, at the door only a short time earlier.
“What cryptic tale is this?” Nothing made sense: the son before me covered with grime; the One, addressing the man whose sacrifice he had no regard for after so many years . . . the whereabouts of Hevel.
Where was Kayin’s brother, favored of God?
We neared the far field. I hesitated, but Kayin walked stiffly on.
I had a sudden recollection of the young Hevel running to me.
Mother, come quick!
Impossibly, as though he knew the turn of my thoughts, Kayin said, “You never knew. You never knew that the jackal I slew that day on the hill nearly slew me first. It came at me in a rush and would have had me except that Hevel threw a stone at it and stunned it. I was such a coward, Mother! ‘Get it, Kayin!’ Hevel shouted at me. I went to it on legs near to falling. Only when it lifted its head and began to get back up did I kill it with my spear.”
“Why do you tell me this?”
“Hevel would have finished it, except that I told him to get away because I feared for him—I did, truly—but I also knew I could not go to you having let Hevel kill it. It fell to me. It always fell to me. I could not bear that he should come to you having saved me, and so I made him swear never to tell—”
His voice broke, and he fell to sobbing again, quietly, into the crook of his arm.
“Please do not hate me, Mother. Father’s hatre
d I can abide, for he hates already that I share your love though I would remove myself from your heart and from this very earth if I could!”
I stopped walking and pulled him round to face me. “Kayin, where is Hevel?” When he stared at me, wild eyed, I screamed, “Where is Hevel?! Where is Hevel? What have you done to him?”
He started to wail, and I hit him then, hard across the face. I was sobbing and did not know why.
He spoke at last, dully, as though I had not struck him at all, “He always loved to be apart. Perhaps all this while he was communing with the One.” He pulled away and walked as one in a daze.
As we came to the edge of the field, I could no longer help myself but ran ahead of him on weakened legs. “Hevel! Hevel!”
Kayin stopped and would go no farther.
“What? What?” I looked wildly about me. He raised a shaking hand and pointed to a nearby ditch. He had been in the process of moving stones there for a low wall. At first I saw nothing but the field beyond it through the scrim of the mists, but then . . .
I saw a dark form in the earth.
I seemed to run forever, my feet not my feet, having no feeling in them, heavy as logs. I did not hear the breath, ragged from my lungs. I heard none of my own cries as I dropped down upon the dark form splayed upon the earth. Grotesque shapes took flight all around me.
Hevel.
I gathered him in my arms. “Hevel, Hevel! My son! Wake!” He was a dirty mess, smelling of earth and blood. Blood—
In the morning light I saw blood everywhere. Like the lamb before the altar. He was slippery, the back of his head too soft. I slapped his grimy cheeks. “Hevel! Hevel!” I shook and shook him.
Kayin was beside me and tried to put his arms around me, but I shook him off as savagely as though he were a carrion bird.
My hands roamed my son’s body. I saw his injuries and recognized, too, the work of vultures: his lips, so beautiful always, had been stabbed at so they were ragged and crusted, registering a toothy grimace on one side.
Like the wolf, scowling beneath the outcrop. I screamed and screamed, shaking him.
He did not stir.
I did not understand this great error, this terrible misunderstanding. “What—what is this that has happened? What have you done?”
Kayin wailed, letting loose a cry to chill my blood. He fell over his brother’s body and moaned and then began to vomit. Red. He vomited up red. The stench was wine, but it was the color of blood.
The mists were lifting, burned off by the morning sun. How could the morning come at all? How could the sun show its face?
Now by the light I saw red everywhere: upon my arms, upon Hevel’s tunic, upon Kayin’s tunic and arms and thighs. Red like the earth the adam came from.
I fell over Hevel and pummeled Kayin with my fists. “You came from the same womb! You sucked the same breasts!”
Kayin moaned, not raising a hand to ward me off.
I gathered Hevel again in my arms, cradling him and rocking him as though I could bring life to those limbs a second time.
“He offered me a lamb for my own sacrifice. As a gift. And I told him to keep it! That I had the work of my own hands. Would that I had taken it!”
There came now other sounds, though I did not hear them until they were nearly upon us. And though my heart had dried to dust within me, I said, “Run. Run! Before Adam finds you here. Go, lest I lose you both!”
He stumbled to his feet, and for a moment I thought he would not go, that Adam would be upon him. But then with a furtive glance he staggered several steps and then broke into a wild run.
I clasped Hevel to me even as Adam came and fell down on his knees, crying out a sound as awful as the lifeless body in my arms.
25
I am told that even as they lifted me up and took me to the house, I would not let go of him. That I held my dead son against the one growing in my belly and cried to heaven, cursing the One that Is, demanding that he give my son back.
Lila gave Ashira a cache of red ochre, saying that it would take the place of the blood gone from Hevel’s body. Ashira said nothing, silent, her eyes swollen, but painted the ochre upon Hevel’s clean palms, saying that he would have back the blood on Kayin’s hands, saying also that she coated him with the red earth of his father from whence he came. At this my heart cried, He came from me! But I could not speak. We laid on him the fleece of the lamb he had given in the sacrifice and returned him to an earth not yet ready to accept him.
Adam spoke hardly at all. He did not ask after Kayin or why he had run off at his coming.
When I slept, I dreamed such dreams as no heart has the strength to endure—dreams of siblings raising arms against one another and of words hurled like stones and spears that kill and draw blood until the earth runs with it.
I remembered Dvash, crouched beneath the outcrop that would become her tomb. I am as unhinged as that wolf.
They say I woke and cried out Hevel’s name.
Even waking and knowing he was dead, I half expected to open my eyes and see him kneeling near my bed. Memories of him in life came back to me in acute, painful detail in his death: Hevel as a baby toddling into Lila’s pegs. As the child who dragged Kayin’s toy spear around whenever his brother wasn’t looking. As the man with the laugh lines crinkling around his eyes. As the one who stood before the altar, his face raised to heaven.
When I could bear it no more—the sleep, the visions, the face of Lila, drawn and pale, and of Ashira, who had come to the house with her children, leaving them with Zeeva so that she might go sit by the grave of her mate—I got up and went out to the field and sat down with my daughter.
It was five days now since Hevel stared, unseeing, at the sky.
Ashira lay her head in my lap, and I crooned to her as I had when she was a child, as unable to comfort her as I had been unable to comfort Hevel in his death or Kayin in surviving . . . unable to do anything but pour out grief for which there is no word.
I grieved for my dead son. I grieved for my living son, undone. I grieved, too, for the ruin of my hope, as void as the sweet face of my Hevel, his head smashed in like an overripe fruit.
That afternoon, when Ashira had gone, I lay down in the grass near the fresh earth. How simple the sky was in its blue. How impervious the clouds, understanding nothing of the sorrow beneath them. How oblivious the breeze, which caressed my cheek as it did on that day in the valley when I had first opened my eyes. The sounds of this world had been laden with mystery once. Now I lay by the grave of my son.
Sometime before sunset, Kayin came to me. He was grizzled and gaunt and carried a spear. His clothes were stained but seemed to have been washed, and he, himself, looked washed. His hair was unbound and pulled down over his forehead. He sat down near me, collected, silent. Eventually, he spoke.
“I must tell you, so you know, what the One said to me.”
My heart constricted, but I nodded.
He bowed his head. “When I left the altar, I wandered through the fields. I shouted at the heavens. I sobbed. When Hevel found me, I told him to come to the field. I wanted to show him the area I had consecrated to this work so that he might know my heartache, my bitter defeat in all of it. I wanted him to see.
“He came and we drank together, and he laid his arm across my shoulders and said, ‘Brother, I do not know the burden you carry, but now I am sickened that you might not have needed carry it, for the One has taken my sacrifice. And how you have suffered all of these years.’”
He drew a ragged breath. “I could not stand it! To hear it from his mouth, to hear and know it was true!”
I looked away and covered my face. I had worn a linen cloth over my head to keep it from the sun, and I drew it down over my eyes so that they might look on nothing. At least that much of the world I would block away.
“I could have borne it. I thought I was even relieved. But then Hevel said that he was going to leave, that he could take his flocks anywhere and graze them . . . that
he would leave so that he did not hurt me. . . . I could not bear the thought of him going away from me or for being the cause of his going from you. Most of all I could not bear the thought of him being followed by the One that I had pursued so ardently, if only to win the love of you and of Father.”
His voice caught. When he had collected himself, he continued. “I flew against him, railing, shouting at him that he would not deprive our parents of the thing they had waited for, that he must stay no matter the pressures of it. I was so angry I wanted to hurt him—his nose was bleeding, but he did not fight back. Hevel, who was always stronger. He did not fight! Why did he not fight? But he would not.”
He was weeping now, as was I.
“Surely he would be alive if he had, for he was the stronger of us. He was more true with his sling than I ever was with my spear. He would have taken that jackal that day bare-handed to protect me, I know—” He sobbed quietly.
I, who wanted to comfort and to shun him, to hold and to beat him, sat unmoving, unable to do either.
After a little while he drew a trembling breath. “I walked through the night—I don’t know where. Sometime before dawn I heard the very thing for which I know you have petitioned all these years. ‘Where is Hevel your brother?’ It was like a voice known to me from a dream that I have never dreamed before. I said, ‘I do not know.’ Part of it was insolence because in that moment I hated that voice and the One it belonged to. I had sought it all my life, and now it had all come to this! But the rest was simply that I did not know where Hevel had gone, only that he stared at the dark sky—”
He shook, covered his face with his hands. “Ah, have I sent him beyond the reach even of the One, that he asks me where is my brother? Do you know, Mother? Have I?”
“I don’t know,” I said woodenly because if I thought on it too much, I might go mad. Perhaps to soothe only myself, I said, “I do not think there is any reach beyond God.”
“But then, most terrible, he asked the very thing you asked: ‘What have you done? Your brother’s blood cries out from the soil.’ Ah! It is too great, too terrible! And now I am cursed! Cursed for the soil that took my brother’s blood! It will no longer yield to me its strength. And so I cannot stay. I have tried and cannot grow even a mustard seed! It lies in the soil as though dead, even on the third day.”