air of holiness that Cain could happily do without.—Do you think you can deceive me?
Exasperated, Cain turns at right angles away from God. The river confronts him now and he has no choice but to cross it, stepping along a series of half-submerged stones slick with algae. In fact he’d never planned on trying to deceive anyone, God least of all. But recent events had shifted faster than his ability to keep up. And so, having at last done what he’d long dreamed of, Cain is left wondering: Now what?
God waits for him on the far bank in the form of a large flat boulder. Lichen patterns it in particolored stains.—Your crime will not go unpunished.
Cain, knowing he is beaten, stops and says nothing. Stands ankle-deep in cold river water and waits.
—Confess what you have done, God commands quietly. The voice is reasonable, soothing even.—Do not compound your sin by denying it.
—I have done nothing! spits Cain.
Why is he lying? He cannot say. Some primeval impulse to cover up, to dissemble: the child’s urge to escape the wrath of the parent. Cain knows it is useless but there’s too much noise in his head to think clearly. Rage tumbles through his mind like a plague of frogs. He both tries not to think, and can’t help thinking, about his brother’s easy smile, his eyes green like this cypress grove at dawn, the creeping grin as he turned toward him.
They had stood at the edge of the ravine this very morning. Cain’s blood sang in his veins. His rage was the melody. He had resolved to murder his brother and felt oddly detached from the proceedings. Insofar as motivation went, there wasn’t much more to it than that. There was no single thing that had cemented his resolve—only a thousand tiny things built up over the years, accruing higher and higher into a great termites’ nest of revulsion.
In the time it took to draw a breath, Cain recalled ten reasons to kill his brother:
| 1. | The way he smiled vacuously at anything he didn’t understand. | |
| 2. | His certainty that all conflict could be resolved if people just tried a little harder. | |
| 3. | Preferential treatment from Eve and Adam. | |
| 4. | Preferential treatment from God. | |
| 5. | You should and You shouldn’t. | |
| 6. | A breathtaking inability to see another’s point of view. | |
| 7. | The unbearable way he treated the younger children. | |
| 8. | Smugness in all things. | |
| 9. | His effortless ability to mouth platitudes that, unconvincing though they were, still left Cain feeling a misfit. | |
| 10. | Obliviousness to all of the above. |
None of these reasons was especially valid, Cain knew. Or perhaps they all were. Perhaps it came down to this: his brother annoyed him, so he would die. Annoyed him, enraged, infuriated, humiliated him. And made him feel he deserved it. These were good enough reasons, weren’t they? They had seemed so that morning, when both men had stood atop the cliff overlooking the ravine. Abel leaning out, peering down at some imaginary curiosity that Cain had pointed to. Against the small of Cain’s back pressed his hand and in it was the stone. The stone was large but knobbed, affording an easy grip as if formed especially for this purpose.
Formed by whom?
Cain had pointed to the bottom of the ravine, some sixty cubits below.—Look! What do you suppose that is?
His brother squinted down.—What?
—There. Do you not see it?
—I see nothing, brother.
And then Abel leaned further into the abyss, stretching his slight, brown-haired frame, before deciding his elder brother was having a joke on him. And as Cain hefted the stone, arcing his arm with all the power of his shoulder and back to hurl into the impact, Abel turned to face Cain with a little half-smile and some word left forever unformed on his lips.
Cain felt as if someone else were propelling him, guiding his hand, the trajectory of the rock, the bleak anger in his center. As if some other force were in control of things: destiny perhaps. For long disorienting moments Cain hovered outside his body, calmly looking down from above at two young men tussling at the edge of a cliff. Then one of them became a murderer and the other one died.
And then Cain was back inside his body, flushed and jittery, breathing hard, and wondering what his brother had been about to say.
•
Did the stone kill him, or was it the impact at the bottom of the ravine that snapped his neck? Cain doesn’t know. He will never know.
His brother made no sound as he toppled through the emptiness. There were some birds in the distance, big white ones in a line, egrets perhaps. The sky was cloudless. Far off meandered the silver-white glitter of a river. Beyond that, the hills.
Cain watched as his brother fell and fell. It seemed to last for days. And then he stopped falling and lay lifeless in the dirt.
•
Now Cain sweats in the afternoon stillness. It is warm but not that warm. He is walking fast, trying perhaps to outpace God.
God will not be outpaced. In the form of the wind He rushes alongside Cain, tousling his hair and nipping at the hem of his tunic. God whispers in Cain’s ear, Your brother’s blood cries to Me from the very earth
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