Eve (48 page)

As my sons were bringing my husband back to the house and Aya made up her healing tea and poultice, I was struck by how the shadows looked that afternoon. No one looks at shadows. They look at the light and what it illuminates. But the shadows, they are the things that hold the edge of truth—the shadowed creases of age, the hidden bowers of memory, and the latent meadows of thought.

I had been shining my light on the obvious, while underneath, in the dark, lay the unadorned and undiscovered truth. All I had to do was stand still as though under a moonless sky and listen to the rustlings around me.

Adam was loved. By me and by his children. These were new feelings, fresh feelings, comforting feelings. I mention this only because it seemed strange after so much striving among family members.

I was jolted to attention by Adam’s cries and the clomping of the donkeys hooves. I rushed to greet them.

The donkey’s sides were soaked with blood.

With great difficulty, Abel and I transferred Adam to his reed mat. Aya had lit the oil lamps and set about clay bowls full of water and wool cloths free of burrs for washing the wounds.

Jacan hovered by the doorway.

We undressed Adam slowly, methodically, peeling the bloody cloth away from his body. Abel needed to cut some away with a knife, as parts of Adam’s robe had already encrusted themselves fast upon his skin. We removed his sandals, taking care over his toes.

Aya held up Adam’s head and poured a gentle stream of willow tea into his mouth. “Drink,” she whispered. When he gagged, she tried again.

Adam’s face was as pale as the moon. He muttered unintelligibly. Across his
middle, several deep gashes wept blood. Aya washed them clean, packed them with a poultice made of poppies, and wrapped long fresh reeds around and around, tucking the ends in to hold them fast.

She started on Adam’s leg, aligning his foot with his thigh and knee. “Hold him,” she said to me. “Abel—” she started, but Abel knew what to do.

I laid my body over my husbands, to hold him down, and Abel pushed against Adam’s foot, wrenching it and clicking it into place. I grimaced at the grinding of bone and thought of the searing pain that had gone through my body when the bear knocked me down.

Adam screamed and struggled against me. His forehead glistened. His eyelids were closed, squeezed together like sun-dried grapes.

Jacan ran to me from the doorway where he had been watching and cried out, “Why are you
hurting
him?” His tears spilled over, and he tried to pull me away from Adam. “Don’t
hurt
him!”

I reached out to him, and he leaned into me. “We’re making Father better,” I said.

Jacan looked up at me. He squeezed my legs through my robe. “Will Father die?” he said.

I did not answer.

I’m sure he took my silence as confirmation, and he went back to the doorway, seeking within himself whatever comfort his mother could not give him.

Abel reached for Aya’s splint, made of willow saplings cinched together with reeds. He set it under Adam’s leg and secured both ends with more reed, holding the break fast. Aya washed the skin and packed it with her pain-deadening poultice, then wrapped it tightly.

Now Adam groaned.

Aya wet a clean wool cloth in the tea and dabbed Adam’s lips with it. To me, she said, “Will you bring a little beer?”

I went then. Behind me, I left the love of my life and three children who loved him with all their hearts. I thought of Cain’s gods and goddesses, and I knew that the people I had left in that small dark room were more grand than Cain’s gods and goddesses would ever be. You would not know it by looking at them. You would have to wait a moment to let the darkness descend, then you would see, peering out of the shadows, the golden truth of their character, hidden all along by the blaze and glare of the sun.

There is a peculiar moment that occurs right after a disaster
It is a moment of not knowing and a moment of hope, all rolled into one.

At first, when I heard Jacan’s horn and heard him scream, “It’s Father, come quick, come quick,” I could not move. In my mind, I recounted all the stories about Father I carried inside me and thought, no, it couldn’t be, he could
not
be in trouble. But it had to be, because up to this point, Jacan’s horn-blowing had never been used as a warning.

This was
my
life,
our
life. Elohim would not have intended for our story to be told thus, with an ending like a weak trail of slug slime. So, for a brief desultory moment, I pressed my eyes shut, willing it to be gone, wishing it to be gone, whatever it was.

What finally made my paralyzed limbs move was knowing Father’s life depended on my treatments. I called to Goat and made a mad dash back to the house, my basket of dung thumping on my back.

Once back in the courtyard, I immediately began setting out things I might need: bowls of water and clean cloths. Since I did not know yet what had happened or how badly Father was injured, I had to prepare for the worst. In the end, I made my standard poultice from poppies and boiled a batch of willow bark tea, because they both worked to numb pain.

With my willow tea simmering over the fire, I looked up and saw Mother running through the courtyard entrance. She was dazed and shivering, even
though the afternoon was sweltering and the sweat was dripping into my eyes. I went to her and hugged her, and she accepted it meekly like a child. “The lion,” she said. “Your father.”

When my brothers came, with Father eased over the donkey’s bloodied back, I realized that he had suffered much already. If he contracted a fever, I would be by his side for several days, weeks maybe.

Abel and Jacan had been tracking the lion for months now. Indeed, Dara had told us that one of the city children had been eaten, horror of horrors! The workers had found a child’s arm bone, gnawed upon, only thirty paces from the city wall. How the small boy had come to be outside the city was anybody’s guess. His dog was missing too, but no trace of it had been found.

Jacan had heard Dara’s story and got it into his little mind that he and Abel would protect her and all the city children. The morning before Father’s incident, Jacan had boasted that he and Abel had seen the lion lurking behind rocks, trying to ferret out one of their goats, who had hoof rot.

Jacan hid behind his bravery like Turtle had hidden behind his shell. “Look, Aya,” he had cried before breakfast, pretending to whirl a slingshot round and round his head. “Like this…” Faster and faster his arm went. He pretended to release the leather sling and said, “It flies through the air and hits the lion”—he smote his own forehead and fell to the ground— “right here, and he will
die
.”

“Then,” I said, “we shall go find the lion and drag him back here … to
eat
him.” I grabbed him up. “We shall put him in my pot and
cook
him.”

Jacan frowned and shrugged his shoulders. “I was only jesting. I’m not really the lion.”

“But you will be good to eat, perhaps with a little bread and beer,” I said.

He rubbed his eyes and nose. “I’m Jacan,” he said.

For once, Father’s presence would not comfort us. For once, we would not have Father’s booming voice at the beginning of a meal, thanking Elohim for His provision. For once, we would not have Father’s cheery admonitions to find the animals in the clouds. We would have to remember and do it ourselves.

Of that dark night, I remember little of Mother and Father, other than Mother sitting up with Father, softly chanting their song from the Garden. She kept his brow wet and cool. She caressed his face with her fingers, leaning forward to inhale his scent. She murmured the verses of the song into his ear, but he did not respond.

I do remember Abel—his strong and able hands correcting Father’s break, his soft and gentle manner with Mother, and his attentiveness to my instructions. His face was weathered and his sloped nose peeling, yet a strange calm lay between the wrinkles, and when he looked at me, I thought maybe he saw me, the real Aya, the one behind the crippled foot and the average beauty.

Oh, I am silly, I know it, but whereas Naava wanted kisses and couplings from my brothers, I wanted respect and admiration. I wanted Abel to see me, really
see
me, despite the fact that I knew I would forever be his second choice, after Naava.

My heart bayed to the wiry curls of hair on Adam’s chest. Only a
few tufts of them were visible over Aya’s bindings, but I set my head down anyway and smiled when they tickled my forehead. I listened to his labored breathing, the
thump thump
of his heart, the squelches of his inner workings, and I was filled with such a longing to hold him again, his sweaty ordinary sun-baked body riddled with freckles and sun spots.

“I love you,” I whispered. I lifted my head and paused, unsure of what to say next. I was certain he could not hear me, for he was fighting a fever. I wanted to say what had been in my heart, how worried I’d been. I wanted to say all this when I knew he couldn’t respond with his characteristic brashness. I wanted my words to stand firm and strong, so that he might know how frightened I’d been at seeing him splayed open like one of Aya’s fish fillets.

Our love needed only a little breath, a little encouragement now and then, to make the embers turn to flame. So many other obligations demanded our undivided attention—our children and our crops and our flocks—that we quite forgot to tend our love for each other.

“For all the times I talked of the Garden and going back, I am sorry,” I said. “I kept alive the hope that we would return someday, return with our children, to live with Elohim there. I know, I know you would tell me that Elohim meant what He said and I should not try to change it, but I was
sure that Elohim would repent of His action and gather us back to Him, like lost sheep being found by their shepherd.” I touched the crescent feathers of Adam’s eyelashes. I ran my finger along the narrow slouch of his nose. I was aware that I was searching for something I would not find-that giddy first-love feeling that simply
was,
like rain is wet or fire is hot.