Eve (58 page)

“Shhh,” said Naava, running her hands through her mother’s hair, teasing out the sweaty knots. “I’m here.”

Oh, sad, sad sun, sliding up out of the blackness. Can you see me?
I am here, up in one of Cain’s date palms. I can see everything—the mountains to the way north, the white city, like a well-polished shell, the turnip-shaped boats floating downriver, the steppe where Abel and Jacan pasture their flocks, and the wide, wide sea to the south.

I can see the smoke from Abel’s sacrifice. It smells of ashes and singed fur.

Cain had been punished. That, anyone could see. I was glad of it that Elohim had agreed with me.

At the foot of my tree, Goat brays.

“Shhh,” I say. “I’ll be down soon.”

Beneath me, the yellow river teems with cranes and herons and egrets. They call to their mates. The sound of their wings flapping and lifting upon the steamy air lodges in my ears, and I wish to be one of them. I wish to soar upon the wind and fly to the mountains, to find Elohim.

For now I know that He exists. Now I know that He listens. After all, He sent fire down from the sky.
Did He not?

I squint in the morning grayness and see Cain heading to the stables. I see Abel and Jacan milking the goats. I see Father limping off to the fields, to check the soil for replanting. Mother is still sleeping. She bore my baby brother last night in a delirious rant, and when he emerged like one of
Abel’s stubborn ewes, all blubbering and blue and cold, she refused to feed him. She fell asleep not long after, and though I tried to coax her to bare a breast for the baby, she shifted and turned her body from me. I got Jacan to help me extract a bit of milk from a willing goat, and this we used to tempt the baby’s palate. My brother—Mother has not named him yet-latched on to my finger and sucked as though everything he needed was contained within it.

I do not know what is wrong with Mother. If anything, she received a response to her life’s prayer last night, but this seems not to matter to her.

Soon, I know, I shall have to help with the morning repast, but I want to linger here awhile longer, feel the breeze on my face, and smell the occasional whiff of Abel’s dying fire. The fire that spoke of Elohim.

So Cain had noticed my affections for Abel. I did not think to be so obvious. I shall have to correct that.

And Mother. She muttered over and over, “Why would Elohim do that? Honor Abel and not Cain? They both worked so hard. Why, Aya, why?”

Finally I said, “Cain performs a duty he only half-believes in, Mother. He isn’t entirely sure Inanna the Queen of Heaven isn’t a real deity. It’s his heart that’s different than Abel’s.”

It did not appease her. She repeated the question over and over again in the next few hours, as Cain continued to rage on into the night, and when I lay down, next to Dara, I could still hear her pleading voice.
Why?

I thought back to Mother’s stories of the Garden. In my head, I recounted the details that Mother had thought to include in each telling— her love for Elohim, the deceit of Lucifer, and her and Father’s subsequent decision to eat of the fruit.
What was missing? Why was Elohim’s punishment so severe for so minor an infraction?
And now Elohim had disregarded Cain’s sacrifice.

I had already considered, for a fleeting moment, that maybe Cain’s offerings were ignored because of
my
contributions. Perhaps Elohim did not appreciate broken people either. But then I remembered that I had helped Abel with his offerings. This relieved me, as you can imagine.

Oh, what a strange deity, this Elohim.

As I told Mother, I had decided that Elohim somehow regarded the
intent
and
attitude
of the heart, not the deed itself, as the significant thing. Maybe.

Cain’s anger last night was but one grain of sand compared to the whirlwind of his anger today. He overheard Naava speaking to Father about her leaving for the city to be with the prince. Only through threats was Father able to keep him away from her, even though she had fallen asleep next to Mother.

I see Cain sidle out from behind the stable and join Abel and Jacan on their way back to the house. They lean into their headbands, into the weight of their milk jars. Cain gestures wildly as he talks. Abel looks at Cain only once. Jacan kicks at plants and pebbles as they walk along.

They reach the courtyard, and that’s when Cain sees Naava standing in the doorway of her weaving room, and he leaps toward her, fists raised to strike. She is carrying my baby brother on her hip, nestled in a length of wool wrapped about her shoulder. She cries out, and Abel grabs him from behind. Abel has him down on the ground in a flash, and Cain holds up his hands in mock surrender. Abel releases him, wary, and beckons him to come with him, away from Naava.

Abel waits until Cain gets up and leaves the courtyard, then he follows.

There is something not right about Cain’s posturing. Even I can see that from here. He is too excited, too animated. He jabs at the air with his hands, gesturing urgently, stumbling several times because he pays no heed to where he’s walking. Abel says something, and Cain stops and turns to him, jabbing him in the chest. Abel swipes his hand away and keeps walking. Cain follows, his face red and his arms pumping.

He and Abel approach the river and the grove of date palms, moving directly toward where I am sitting, high up in Cain’s tree.

I adjust my position, making sure I am hidden behind plenty of palm fronds. Cain continues to gesticulate. Abel listens but does not respond. Soon they are standing beneath me, a way off but not so far that I cannot
hear them. They can go no farther west, unless they want to swim the breadth of the river.

“Brother, I am warning you. Do not do this thing. We shall not escape like we did yesterday. They will kill us this time,” Abel says.

Cain paces. “He cannot lay claim to my sister. She is
mine.
She will be
my
wife.”

“So it
is
true, then, about you and Naava,” Abel says quietly.

“Of course it’s true. Why else—” But he didn’t finish his statement; he was too agitated. “My head,” he says. “I think I’m going crazy. I hear a … voice.”

“A voice?” Abel repeats.

“That is what I am trying to tell you,” says Cain vehemently.

Abel turns to face Cain. His stance is wide, a defensive posture. “I am innocent. I did not cut them down,” he says.

“You are not listening,” screams Cain. “Elohim has spoken to me in the night.”

Abel’s eyebrows raise. “I am not surprised,” says Abel. “He speaks to me all the time.”

Cain’s lips curl like the sun-baked reeds that are strewn along the shoreline. He sneers, “I know, you say this always. Are you trying to provoke me?”

“No, brother,” says Abel. “I only wish you could believe in Elohim as I do.”

Cain scratches his ear. Puzzlement washes over his face. “He asked why I was angry, why my countenance had fallen. If I did well, I would be glad. If I did not do well, sin would crouch at my door. In fact, its desire would be for me, and I would have to conquer it.” He rubs his forehead. “What do you make of that?”

Abel is silent a moment. Then he says slowly, “I think Elohim wants your heart.”

“My heart?” says Cain. “My
heart?
Did my offerings not show Him my heart?” He bends down to pick up a ripened coconut, washed down from upriver, and juggles it back and forth in his hands. A ray of light passes across his cheeks, and he smiles suddenly. “Do you remember when you bashed out my teeth?”

Abel nods. “You asked me to.”

“Yes,” says Cain. Then his smile disappears, and he is brooding once more, picking at the coconut fibers with his fingers.

“I am sorry about the dates,” says Abel. “I know how important they were to you.”

Cain’s face rears up like the hood of a snake, like the face of Lucifer himself. It hovers and sways back and forth. His fingers stretch wide around the coconut, poised and ready.

I see Cain’s face, the determination, the coldness, and my mouth opens to scream, to warn Abel of Cain’s intentions, but when I do, nothing comes out, not even a squeak. My innards clamp up, and for a moment I cannot move. I cannot breathe.

Abel seems not to notice that Cain’s purpose is to hurt him. He turns to go. Then, oddly enough, he thinks of something and turns back to Cain, saying, “I shall help you with the dates next—” But Cain is upon him, and even before Abel can cry out, Cain is striking him on the head with the coconut, over and over again.

Abel has had no time to reach for the dagger tied to his leg, and now his robe is awry, the sharp blade exposed in the morning light. He had not expected to be cut down like a tree in the middle of life. He had not expected to be plucked of his fruits before he was ripe. The blows continue to rain down until Abel, with his crushed head and his astonished eyes and opened mouth, slumps to the ground, unmoving. His face is immobilized, fixed fast like the traces of life in the fossils he had collected for me.

“Abel,” I cry out finally, my scream finding its way out of my mouth.

Cain stops, stares at his hands, at the coconut. He looks around and does not see me. Then he looks up, slowly, to the top of the date palm.

“You,” he says weakly. Again he looks at his hands and at Abel at his feet. He drops the coconut.

He looks back at me, his face unreadable. “It was you,” he says.

“What have you done?” I cry out. I begin to shinny down the tree. “Help him,” I scream.
“Do
something.”

Cain seems confused. He grabs his head in his hands and drops to his knees. He does nothing.

I call Goat, and she comes bounding. It is I who must run as fast as a rabbit now. It is I who must save Abel.

It is as I am running that I hear a tremendous growl and snuffling off to my right side, and I glimpse a blur of yellow, a blur of fur, chasing me, breathing on me, and I want to scream, I want to cry out, but my throat is dry and will not cooperate. The earth trembles underneath the lion’s giant paws, and I throw back my head and think that now would be a good time for Elohim to show His power. Answer my prayer.
Please, Elohim, make me as swift as the wind.

I think it is Jacan’s lion, the lion who killed the little boy from the city, the one who felled Father, the one who will kill me now, a crippled girl who is not his match. I think these are my last steps, my last breath …

But the lions breath is gone—it has vanished—and I look behind, thinking that I am in the space between the lion breathing and the lion pouncing, and I cannot believe my eyes. The lion has Goat pinned beneath his great paw.

She cries out for me.

The lion blinks nonchalantly, then bends down and tears Goat’s head from her body.

I run like the wind. I imagine flying, my wings outstretched. I find that I am sobbing and choking on my tears. It is like this that I run to Abel’s stable and collapse among his ewes. I cannot think. I do not want to think what it is that I have done.