Havah (17 page)

When we found the flock, my eye automatically sought out the tall form of my eldest.

He was in the late stages of a lovely boyhood, growing into the lean and long-limbed beauty of a man. He reminded me so much of the adam of the valley, full lipped and lean of thigh, that I found myself stumbling and calling him by his father’s name often. Somehow I thought this displeased Adam—and even Kayin, too—though neither of them said so.

As we got closer, I could see the sheep clustered together, acting strangely. But their number was right and all seemed in order. So where was Kayin? When I repeated the question, impatient now, Hevel pulled me around a large tamarisk. There I found him, my young hunter, squatting on the ground near an animal, blood on his hands. I cried out at sight of it, but Hevel shook my arm, saying, “It is a jackal, Mother, and Kayin has killed it with his spear! See? The blood is not his.” There was adoration and hero worship in his voice. And in fact, Kayin was already in the process of skinning the animal. When he smiled up at me, it was macabre; he had gotten some of the gore on his face. I drew back. Seeing this, the smile vanished.

“Mother,” he said.

“Wipe the blood from your face!” When I was satisfied that he was unharmed, that, in fact, none of the blood was his, I examined the carcass at his feet.

It was a not large creature but a young adolescent.

“Well done, my son,” I said, sitting down between them. Hevel was too excited to be drawn into my arms, so obviously the vicarious hunter. With great vigor he recounted the story so that Kayin could hardly tell it himself: The jackal had been stalking the flock now for days. But Kayin killed a hare just that morning, purposefully laying out the carcass so that it would draw the predator. He had kept hidden a little ways away until the jackal appeared. When it did, he ran out after it, throwing his spear and wounding it.

“He finished it with a rock,” Hevel said, pointing to the place on the animal’s skull. “Like this!” He got up, pulled a stone from a pouch at his waist, and threw it at a shrub twenty paces away, almost hitting it. “Almost like that. Like this!” He threw another, striking the top of it.

Studying the limp form of the jackal, I felt none of the vestigial sorrow I once did on these occasions. There had been a time that I knew the markings of each individual animal, that I could recite each of their quirky preferences—for scratching themselves on the lowest branch of the hawthorn or being the best at catch and seek, which we loved to play in the valley.

Now our games were played out by our children, with much more dire consequences.

Hevel made me watch as he emptied his entire pouch of stones at the hapless shrub, and I had the faintest vision of something similar once, as I had run the length of the valley with the breath of the One that Is in my hair.

Watch me run!

Had I been this exuberant? Had the One been as doting and patronizing—or as proud—as I was today?

Hevel ran off to retrieve his stash of stones, and Kayin said, “This pelt is yours, Mother.” Though I needed nothing in the world, my heart swelled. My son had slain a predator in protection of his flock. One day he would slay the serpent as well.

That night I cooked a feast complete with sweet honey cakes. Reut feasted, too, on the kidneys of Kayin’s kill, which she devoured without decorum.

As we sat down to our meal, Adam inspected the pelt and handed it wordlessly back; I knew his thoughts had taken a turn similar to mine upon the hill earlier that day. But Kayin did not know that.

“It is a fine pelt,” I said, trying to prompt him. But Adam was lost to his own thoughts.

Only I saw Kayin’s countenance fall as surely as a mud brick crumbling in the sun. I said, hiding my annoyance at Adam, “Only ten summers old and you have killed the jackal, my love!” Hevel, oblivious, reveled in the moment as though it were his own, eating every crumb that Kayin left untouched, squabbling with Lila for the last.

Later, as the hearth embers mellowed to ash-crusted coals, Kayin lay with his head in my lap, carving a small figure of a wolf out of bone. Adam had gone out with Hevel to repair a portion of the pen. The twins, recently nursed, were asleep on Lila’s mat. I stroked back a wisp from Kayin’s dark face where he lay, his cheek upon my knee.

Hevel, as much as I loved him, was not moved to indulge me these kinds of moments, preferring to stay on the hill with the animals or, when he could be coaxed indoors, to keep to his pallet, working on tanning a bit of hide to absolute softness until he fell asleep with it in his hands, his mouth open. Sometimes Hevel stayed in the pen with the animals, which I could never understand, though Kayin, I knew, snuck out to join him sometimes after he thought we were asleep. At this moment, though, I knew he stayed for my sake, and I loved him the more for it.

My young hunter. My warrior seed.

Adam returned, stooping through the door. When he saw Kayin with his head against my knee, he frowned. “You are too grown a boy to lie in your mother’s lap.”

Kayin got up. As the air touched the place his head had lain, a hot flash of resentment toward his father struck me.

“Yes,” I said, handing him the bit of thong he had loosed from his hair, “You have killed a jackal now and are nearly a man.” I looked at Adam. “But no child of mine shall ever be too grown to lay his head in my lap.”

I was angry. Angry that he had not praised his son’s kill, angry that he should criticize or contrive to keep him ever from being as near to me as possible. I knew Kayin felt my anger and felt it keenly, as one feels a draft of cold from beneath the door flap.

Adam must have noticed it too. His eyebrows drew together, but he said nothing. But by then it was too late; I would not look him in the eye the rest of the evening.

A few days later I made a point to take a midday meal to Kayin and his brother. When I could speak to Kayin alone, I said, “Your father sees that you are not a child anymore, and he is right. But you will always have a place in my arms. No man may deny or come between a mother and her child.” I knew that among the animals there were females that staved off their mates once they bore young. We had even found evidence of males killing a mother’s young to keep her from suckling them so she might go into season. I had been horrified and angered by these new discoveries, and though I knew there was no true comparison, Adam’s response the night of the jackal reminded me of it. We had become enough like the animals already—were we to join them in this contention as well?

“I know, Mother,” he said, leaning into me, his young arm going around my waist. I smoothed his hair, grateful for his good heart, hoping his softness might last just a year longer.

Hevel crested the hill at a run, his hair wild and untamed. Newly inspired by his brother, he carried a spear—no longer a small one, but a larger one closer to Kayin’s length. He also carried a length of leather hanging from his waist. When he saw me, he said, “Come, Mother, and see what I’ve done!”

He took us to a small cairn of rocks surrounded by a smaller pile of pebbles. Selecting a few of them and backing several paces away, he pulled out the braided leather from his waist and laid a stone in the strap.

“He has been at this since the day he realized he could not best me in throwing,” Kayin said, in an undertone.

Hevel missed the top of the cairn with every attempt, but there was no doubt that he had come upon something; he had slung rocks in every direction—once just missing our heads—with better force than he could throw one.

“Take care, Son, that you do not practice when others are about, lest you do more harm than good.”

“Yes, Mother.” Hevel hardly looked at me as he scurried to gather his stones. He had a renewed mission for shepherding, though I think it had more to do with killing predators—or any animal that came close enough to serve as a target—than protecting the flock.

He ran back again, hands full of stones. “That lion will have no chance, soon enough!”

When I said, “What lion?” he froze and then deliberately shrugged. He was a terrible liar.

“We’ve seen a lion in the foothills,” Kayin said. “It does not come near, especially when there is a fire, and it does not like Reut.”

I was uneasy. The boys had ventured farther and farther from the house, staying out sometimes overnight. How had I become comfortable with this? My boys, only yesterday at the breast, out here with no more than two spears and a few ill-aimed rocks! Though I had lauded Kayin for his kill, I admitted to myself that I regarded it a lucky stroke, more than anything a sign to me of his destiny, if not his skill as a hunter.

I felt his great brown eyes upon me—so like a girl’s, rimmed with lashes that made Lila tease him and call him “pretty”—as he said, “It’s nothing, Mother. Only an old loner.”

“Still,” I said, shaken, “you will bring the animals in by the setting sun, especially tonight and tomorrow with the dark moon upon us. I’ll have no more of these evenings in the dark.”

Hevel chuffed, and I knew his adventure had been spoiled, but Kayin nodded and said they would obey.

ADAM DID NOT AGREE with me. “You’re cosseting them. How are they to learn this way?” he said. “Kayin has proven his arm. No danger will come to them if they stay out, especially together.”

“Will you put them so casually in danger?” I flared. But what I wanted to say and did not because someone was always within hearing distance was:
Will you chance the life of our hope?

He knew my meaning and did not challenge me again, but I cursed him in my mind for his thoughtlessness, for his selfishness and shortsightedness. While I was at it, I cursed also the line of his mouth, drawn down in disapproval, the feet that walked away from me when I would speak to him, and his back turned toward me as we lay down that night.

19

In the course of one year, Kayin grew a hand’s span, his legs lengthening so that no matter how much I fed him I couldn’t seem to keep him from growing lankier by the day. Hevel had just entered the stage of smooth-faced boyhood where the fat still clung to his arms and cheeks. In a way I wished that Kayin might return to those days even as I welcomed the man he was becoming.

One night, as flat cakes cooked on the stones around the hearth, I recounted, as I had nearly every year at this time, the night of his birth.

“The mist comes in,” I said, “and I must go to the midden. So I take up the spear and go out of the house.”

“This is why you carry your spear everywhere,” Lila said knowingly to Kayin. She was holding Zeeva, feeding her bits of honey from her fingertip, as though it were a nipple. Zeeva sat in wonder, her mouth open in shock at the sweet, her pink tongue sticking out between the circle of her lips.

“I never thought of that,” I said, wondering again, as I had many times, how much a child might know of life through the experiences of the mother who carried him. I wondered how different it must be to come from a woman and grow into being—rather than being fashioned on the spot.

“The mist comes in,” Kayin prompted.

“The mist comes in,” I said, “and my back is aching. I know it must be very soon. But the mist is so thick that I can hardly see. So I walk with the spear before me, so I don’t stumble.”

“Like this!” Hevel said, jumping up, leaning on his spear like an old man, though he had never seen an old man in his life—nor had any of us, for that matter. He hobbled along, holding his back. Kayin laughed, and even Lila, normally so austere, did too.

“A sound comes from the mist. ‘Adam?’ I say. ‘Adam?’”

“It’s the One!” Lila said. The twin in her lap grinned, understanding nothing but the exuberance in her voice. Ashira, sitting beside them, babbled excitedly.

I nodded. “It is the One indeed.”

“What is it like to see the One?” Kayin looked from his father to me.

I fell silent.

The truth is I hoped the One would have revealed himself to the boy by now—would have caught him on the hill or in the field, on a day when he might at first think that the light on his face came from the sun. Or on a cloudy day, so that he would have to know such light came from no other source. Sometimes, when Kayin returned to the house, I searched his face, wondering if today had been the day that he would come in, beatific, to tell me that he had lived the greatest moment of his life—or that his life had truly begun. I waited to hear him say he knew now for what purpose he had been born. Perhaps on that day I would feel the presence of the One vicariously from the light still shining on his face. Perhaps he would say that he vanquished a shining creature and that he saw, afterward, a vision of a valley and knew the way to go there and knew, too, that the way would be open to us.

But nothing of the sort had happened.

So I clung to the hope that the One might yet whisper by day or in secret by night to this son of mine who kept his own counsel—already his brown eyes held a sorrow and compassion that was too deep, I knew, for any boy his age. Until then I was resolved to continue in faith that it would come to pass and that we must only wait—and survive—until then.

Hearing this question from him now, though, I was disappointed. I looked down, waiting for the adam to answer him. When he did not, I said, not looking at Adam, “Ask your father. He was in the presence of the One before I came to be.”

“Father?”

Adam, naked to the waist and crouched near the hearth, did not look up. When I thought he would not answer, he said at last, “It is like being in the presence of one you know better than anyone, who also knows you better than anyone. So that you need not speak. So that you need say nothing because you are cut from the same hide, and two came where once there was only one.”

I was moved and not a little appalled—he had not spoken of the One at all. He looked across the hearth at me then with such sadness and longing and—yes, hunger—that tears gathered on my lashes.

“How can one feel like that and not even talk?” Hevel blurted, shattering the moment.

“There is no need,” I said, gathering myself. “It is like being in the sun—a sun that warms greater than the sun. Like bathing in the sweetest stream—”