Eve (32 page)

One day when Cain was, I think, seven years of age, he was digging in the mud for snails and mussels and crabs. The water table had been exceptionally high that week because of recent rains and flooding, and it became apparent to Cain that he could create a mud bath simply by standing in the divot he’d made and squishing his toes in it. To a small boy, this was the most delightful thing to do with his day, and when he came home he was caked with the stuff, like a dried-up snakeskin rustling in the wind. Before I ordered him back to the river to wash off, his mouth dropped open, as if he’d made a huge error.

“Mama,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“We could make stones with it.”

“What?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

But he was already off and running. “I’ll show you …” His voice trailed off.

I watched him run and shook my head. That boy was forever into everything.

And that is what he did, for days and days. He toiled out there in the marshes, mixing mud and adding what he called fixers, things such as wheat and barley chaff and reeds and shells. He had Adam help him cut down small poplar and willow saplings and chop them into workable lengths. He laid these on the ground in a sort of boxy grid, and into these he poured his mud mixture and waited for it to dry in the sun. When the mixture had hardened, he lifted the grid and chipped away at the sun-hardened seams, to loosen the “stones” from one another. What remained were rough, lumpy rectangular “stones,” which he later called bricks.

“See?” Cain said, groaning under the weight of one of them, stacking it on top of others he had already piled up.

Adam stood and watched while Cain demonstrated his new idea. He crossed his arms and stroked his beard. “I think that just might work,” he said after a time. He reached out to tussle Cain’s hair. “How do you think of these things?”

Cain shrugged and continued the stacking.

“There are holes between them,” said Adam.

Cain smiled. He had already thought of this. He dipped a stick into a
clay jar full of bitumen, a black sticky substance that was ubiquitous in the marshes. Once he had secured a glob of it, he stuffed the holes with it. “It will dry,” said Cain. “No more wind.” He held out his hands in triumph and grinned from ear to ear.

Adam teased him by not smiling.

Cain’s grin slackened.

Then Adam burst out in a guffaw. He clapped Cain on the back and said, “Amazing. Simply amazing.” Then, in mock disappoinment, he said, “We’ll have to keep you, I guess.”

Cain went back to his work, and Adam interrupted him. “Don’t waste your time on that pile. Tomorrow we shall build ourselves a new house!”

And we did. We made walls and buildings of the stuff.

The difference was considerable. We had been building reed houses all along. As you might imagine, unless we had summer winds that would breeze through the house, we felt a bit scorched. And in the winter there was always the potential for a fire, with our small ovens constantly burning. Cain’s mud bricks, on the other hand, kept us cool in the summer and warm during the winter. Still, the spring floods remained a problem, even with Cain’s new invention. They washed everything away, reducing our house to a muddy river, but the floods had also washed away our reed houses, so it was just a matter of rebuilding, and rebuilding again.

We did not think to bake the bricks until much later. The bricks would have lasted much longer, even through the spring floods, had we known about this earlier.

But no matter. Cain kept us apprised of all his ideas, and in this way we were constantly making alterations to our living arrangements.

The cistern incident is a long-lasting bruise on my heart. It forever changed the way we dealt with the boys.

Surely one cannot plan for most catastrophes dealing with children, and we knew it was not possible, with Cain behaving like desert tumble-weed, but after the cistern disaster we separated the two, sending Cain to the fields with Adam and keeping Abel at home with me. Later, of course, Abel went to the fields on his own, with his flocks.

I have not spoken of it since, until this moment. Strange how events like these have wormed their way into me, yet I have been unable to find the voice for them.

It was early morning on a cloudless day, shortly after the tooth episode. Adam had long been gone to work the fields. I sent the boys out to water and feed the flocks, scrub down the stalls, and apply new barley stalks to the floors. Abel would milk the goats and bring the jars back to me, so I could churn it into butter.

I set reed baskets upon their backs and gave them each long, pointed sticks for flinging hardened piles of dung into their baskets. Dung was excellent burning material, lasting longer than brush or wood, and since I was continually preparing meals, I needed a constant fire.

Cain dawdled outside the courtyard walls. Abel set off resolutely to do as he was told.

“Help your brother,” I called.

Cain looked up and frowned. He brought his shoulders up to his ears, then dropped them to show his disgust—he was forever showing me his displeasure. But he ran then to catch up to Abel.

Another outburst forestalled.

Midmorning, about the time I expected them to return, for my fire was fading, I heard a sharp scream, then muffled protests. I supposed they were fighting, and I did not immediately think to check on them. A few moments later Cain came running, his knobby knees practically bumping his chin.

“Mama, Mama, come quick,” he said. “Abel’s fallen.”

I thought:
skinned knee, banged-up chin, at most a broken arm,
but as I was running, it became clear to me that I might find something worse.

Cain was leading me toward the cistern, a deep square pit lined with stones and rocks, a reservoir for precious rain and floodwater. Adam and I had built it after the first hot summer, after we realized that the heat was extremely difficult without readily available fresh water. It overflowed with the spring floods and lasted us through the fall. I had warned the boys time and time again to stay away from it. Originally, when we first built the cistern, I thought of lying to the boys, saying it contained crocodiles or some other sort of terrifying water creature, but I did not, and I regretted it already.

“Where is he?” I panted.

Cain pointed at the cistern and kept running.

Oh, Abel, no!

“Get your father,” I demanded, holding my belly, which ached with child.

Cain took off running in the direction of the fields.
Would there be enough time?

I reached the cistern and knelt on the rocky edge of it. “Abel, where are you?”

Sounds of sputters only. A thrashing sound from below. There, in the middle.

“Abel,” I screamed. “Use your arms and legs. Can you hear me?” I made him out in the gray shadows. He was exhausted, that I could see. His mouth opened and closed like that of a hungry baby bird, he was gasping so. “Abel. Look at me. Your father is coming. Can you swim to the side?” He seemed to hear me and turned to face the stony wall. But his efforts were in vain; he had no more energy left. He began to gulp and sink, gulp and sink. I could see his frightened eyes and open mouth, still and silent, disappearing into the dark depths, and I screamed again. I fumbled with my sash, stripped off my robe, and dove in.

Certainly Adam and I had learned the rudimentary skills of swimming in the Garden, in the deepest depths under the waterfall, but the real tests of our maneuverability came later, when Cain was a child and we were still following the Euphrates southward. He had no fear of the rushing water, and we became swift and agile rescuers.

I aimed in the general direction that Abel had disappeared, diving deep and opening my eyes. It was too dark to see anything—the sun’s light was not quite above us—so I thrust my hands out in front of me, blindly and in a frenzied fashion, reaching, reaching for
something
of Abel’s, a robe or sash or hand or head or heel, to clutch at and pull to the surface. Panic stole my breath; fright seared my lungs.

I kicked my legs and rose to the surface, vaguely mindful of the damage I might be doing to the child inside me, but my greatest desire was for the child I already had. I breathed in deep and dove once more.

There, I thought, to my left, but no, it was only a glimmering trail of bubbles behind me. “Abel,” my voice screeched into the murky abyss, realizing too late I had expended the little breath I had, and water filled my mouth. The gurgles of my voice swarmed about, taunting,
You weren’t watching him. You weren’t there to protect him.

I began then to calm my mind, to think methodically about the bit of watery space Abel and I inhabited. If I held fast to the slick mossy sides and worked my way around the cistern, reaching toward the center, I might be able to locate him. The problem was that unless I expelled air, I floated up, and if I expelled air, I had to repeatedly retrieve air from the top, which in turn wasted time.

Then. A tremendous
swoosh,
a shimmering roar in front of me.

Adam.

I pushed up, smashed through the surface, and took in large mouthfuls of air. The sky swirled; the sun tipped. I coughed up water and clung weakly to the cold crevices of the cistern.

A dove cooed with miraculous tranquillity.

I wiped my hair from my face and looked up, to find Cain.

Cain’s face hovered over the edge like a plover searching for prey.

Adam sputtered to the surface, his hair drenched and scattered, holding our limp son in his arms. Abel’s eyes were still rammed open, his little body already bloated.

“A rope, a rope,” I cried to Cain. I could hear him scuttling around up top, securing a rope we kept coiled on the ground for when Adam had to repair or clean the cistern.

Cain tossed it down, and Adam grasped the end and began to hoist himself and Abel up. I followed, as soon as they were topside.

“Oh,” said Cain as Adam laid out Abel upon the hot earth. Cain’s face was red and sweaty from running, and I could not know if he was feeling guilt or sorrow, or merely curiosity.

The shame would come later, for not saving my boy child myself, for not preventing what happened altogether. Right then my focus was only to make him live again. The terror of my own death had lessened over time because I had grown accustomed to the fact of death—the animals, the
plants, even the cyclic lives of the heavenly lamps—but the death terror of one of my own children had not lessened. It only grew stronger each time I laid a cold stiff baby in the unforgiving ground.

I fell on my knees beside Abel’s inert form.

Adam pounded on Abel’s ribby chest. “Come on, boy,” he breathed. “Come back to your mother and me. You are not done with this world.” And louder. “Back, boy, now!”

Then, with a rustling and a creaking, Abel turned his head and vomited, water and bread and figs.
Oh, glorious day, my boy lived!
I grabbed him up, oblivious to his heaving, and held him close.

“Careful,” whispered Adam. He stroked Abel’s head.

My fingers grazed the frail cup between Abel’s shoulder blades, and I felt the transparent flutter of his heart on my breasts, like hummingbirds wings. I crooned to him, willed him to breathe, to live, to love me with all his heart. I said to him, through the warmth of my skin,
Come back to me, my child, I will protect your solemn, beautiful body I will show you how to live. I will tell you of my previous life. I will show you what you cannot see.
The calm seeped into him. The tension rippled out.

Adam turned to Cain. “Why do you disobey?”

Cain shrugged. “We were just playing.”

“You did not push him?” said Adam.

“No,” said Cain. But his eyes betrayed him. They looked anywhere but at his father. Perhaps Cain was remembering another time, another place, when Adam and I had tossed him into the Euphrates to teach him to swim, and how he flailed and sank, flailed and sank, too many times to remember, until he had begun to stay afloat. Perhaps this was his revenge. I do not know.

Adam sent me a glance that asked what we should do with this outright lie, what punishment he should dole out to Cain. I shrugged and turned my head away, back to Abel. Alas, it was too perplexing a question. We both knew that love and respect was not something that could be mandated; it had to come from the heart. Cain would always be testing us— and his hapless, trusting brother. The harder we clamped down on Cain, the more testy he became, so to think of an appropriate punishment was fraught with difficulty.

I laid Abel back down, to put on my robe. He stared at me fiercely, intensely, his face round and ashen. He was a little pea, shucked of his shell, and he began to whimper. I was only too grateful when he held up his arms to me, to be lifted into the air. I thought of how close we had come to losing him.
If Cain hadn’t called. If Adam hadn’t come. If, if, if.

I was steeped in happiness and relief. Abel had chosen
me
; he loved
me.
I looked at him in wonder—the freckles scattered like caraway seeds across his face, the muddy brown eyes that betrayed his tender depth of feeling—and I knew that my littlest son held tremendous power in his delicate body. I had fed him the strength and heat and courage to say
yes
or
no,
and that was all he needed to either validate my life or destroy it.