Havah (15 page)

An appropriate expression for one coming from the bosom of God.

I named him. Adam had named every living creature, but this one was mine. The adam took him in his arms, called him by name, and greeted his son.

I had fretted about my dream of the serpent. But now, as I held my child and stroked the crown of a head already covered with curls a lighter shade than mine, as I held the fingers complete with their tiny nails, I knew that the serpent had infringed not at all, that I had gotten this child with the help of the One, having partnered with God in the making of him.

Kayin, my begotten.

Such hopes, such expectations, we laid across his tiny shoulders.

Too many.

16

The fawn, in the hour of its birth, stands up to walk. But Kayin could not lift his own head, let alone stand upon his legs. The very act of squalling sent a tremor through his entire body. So he came, mewling as a kitten, with his eyes open but just as helpless.

Had we ruined him in our mortal state? Had we caused malaise upon what would have otherwise been a stronger child? But no, he seemed normal after a fashion, and I soon accepted that this must be the way of children.

That night I dreamed that I laid Kayin in a basket of rushes. In my dream, I thought,
I have been given such a gift. Let us give a token in return.
But as soon as I thought it, I saw again that terrible day that Adah and her mate lay bereft of skin, twitching upon the grass.

But this time I saw something else: blood. I saw the blood of those animals running into the ground, into the earth from which the adam had been taken.

The next morning as we took our breakfast, I said, “I have had a dream.”

At this Adam chuckled. “When do you not dream, Isha?”

“I have had a dream,” I repeated. When had my dreams not carried portents or meaning of some kind?

“And this dream?”

“I dreamed—I dreamed that—” I wondered at the thing about to come from my lips.

“Yes?” he said, calling Reut to him.

“That we should kill an animal,” I said all at once. “That we let blood spill as blood was spilled from Adah and her mate for us.”

He straightened very slowly.

“Two animals were sacrificed so that we might have their skins to cover us as we wear them now. I think we should give back to the One . . . the blood of an animal.”

“You’re raving,” he said.

“Am I?” I asked, half wondering if I was. “My dreams have proven always so false then?”

“This one cannot be true. The One would not wish for the death of an animal.”

“Are you so sure?”

“Even if I agreed, are animals so abundant to us now that we can afford to kill one? Would you kill Gada? The new lamb? The milk ewe? The goat with the hair you like to weave?”

“You could find another, as you found these,” I said. Kayin had begun to fuss. I opened the front of my garment and put him to suck.

“Just to kill it, to give it to the One as you say, as though the One has want of it?”

Suddenly I felt foolish indeed. It had been a strange dream, and I found I no longer had the certainty or the logic to defend it.

“Or so it seemed,” I said lamely.

He went out from the house without a word.

All that day and into the evening, I did not see or speak to him. I wondered if indeed I had seen strangely or false, if perhaps the serpent had never loosed his hold on me but continued to fill my mind with strange logic.

That night Adam acted as though all was forgotten. I waited to dream but saw nothing as I slept.

The next day as I laid Kayin in his basket and prepared to grind grass seeds from their glumes, Adam came into the house. With an odd look on his face, he took up a length of new rope and went back out.

“What is it, husband?” I ran out after him, alarmed at seeing him like this.

“There is a lamb caught in a thicket near the river.”

“And this is amazing?” Sheep were stupid animals, more stupid than the remaining intelligence of any animal, it seemed. They would fall into a hole and never have the sense to get out even if there were a way. “Well, I should like to have a few more animals for their hair, though a milk goat might be better—”

“No,” he said, pulling the rope through his hands. “It is only the lamb. And it is as handsome a creature as I have ever seen.”

He went away like one in a trance and came back a little while later with the animal. When I came out from the house, I stopped short. It was indeed a lovely creature—fleecy and white and without flaw.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “we give it to the One.”

I felt a sudden prickle of alarm. “But as you said, it might have been only my dream. Surely so fine a creature we ought to keep.”

But he shook his head and began to lead the lamb away, saying, “No. It is for the One. I, too, dreamed of it. Last night.”

The next day, as the lamb stood placidly munching on a tuft of herbs, we built a platform out of stone and cut saplings, piling them high so the One might at least have a look at the grisly work we had done before any scavengers could come drag it away.

There was little preamble. Adam drew the animal near as I stood, Kayin in one arm, a wooden bowl in the other. He tied the animal’s legs and laid it atop the altar. It never kicked or bleated even once, and I had to wonder if we were on the cusp of some grave error. But before I could say anything, Adam raised his obsidian knife and slit the throat of the lamb so that I could do nothing but hurry to catch the blood in the bowl. I was so close that crimson droplets speckled Kayin and me both, and I swallowed hard at the sticky metallic scent. Kayin waved his little arms, and blood spattered one of his hands. I staggered at the sight of the dark crimson of that blood on those tiny fingers and would have dropped the bowl had Adam not taken it from me.

We had agreed that we should remove the skin. It had been so removed for us on that awful day and given to us, so we would keep it now. Adam began the work of separating the skin from the carcass.

I turned away.

When he was finished, he left the bowl of blood alongside the carcass on the altar and came away. He wiped his hands on the grass several times, and still they were bloody. We stood there like that, Adam with his dirty hands and gory knife and me, holding a smattered Kayin, uncertain what to do. We had no ceremony—what should we know of that? We once communed directly with God himself! So I simply thought,

It is done.

But I wondered what exactly had been gained by this.

As we prepared to return to the house, a hot blast burst upon the altar, bringing us back around in shock. The animal burned. I could see and now smell it, engulfed in orange and blue flames.

We stood there for a long time, amazed. How much like the fire on those trees struck by lightning it was! Even Kayin stared, transfixed.

The fire consumed the animal quickly, burning lower and then lower until it seemed to crouch down to the stones amid the crackling bones and embers. Then it burned out as subtly as a small flame dying without tinder.

When we inspected the altar, I gasped; the blood had burned out of the bowl without harming the bowl itself. Upon the rest of the stones were only the charred remains of bones, as though they had burned days ago. In fact, no heat came off the remains at all, though I had felt the blaze from where I stood. The stones themselves, however, still told the tale; they were hot to the touch.

“We have done well,” Adam declared, and I silently concurred—and hoped that we need never do it again.

OUR GARDEN PROSPERED. WE worked diligently through the day, tilling, harvesting, sowing, drying, and storing. The trees and vines we planted were still young, so we spent days ranging through the nearby hills, gathering fruit and grapes in such abundance that now our problem became one of storage.

During this time we realized the one new skin from the sacrifice would not be enough. We had need for more items supplied by animals: bladders and stomachs for water containers, skins not only for wearing but with which I might cook grains over a fire. So one day Adam took his spear and went to hunt the deer and the hare. He brought back sinew and bone and fat, and brains to tan the hide, which I refused to touch.

Kayin lay between us as we slept at night. I kept him near and suckled him whenever he began to whimper. By day I worked in the shade so that he would not be scorched by the sun. Adam offered to wear him in a sling around his shoulder, but I was jealous for the child.

As the months passed, Kayin began to cut his first teeth and, as curious as ever, insisted on putting anything he could find into his mouth: sticks, his father’s tools, clods of dirt, insects.

A curious thing occurred during this time: my bleeding did not return. At first I did not recognize it, but after several months, I mentioned it to Adam.

“Perhaps it will not until you have weaned the child,” he said. I was content with this idea. It hardly seemed possible that I should need the cycles anyway—the seed had been born. When Adam and I did come together, we did so for our own pleasure, however we could have it and however easily. The days of our sleepless nights, of our hours awake spent striving, seemed a thing of the past.

But during the ninth month after Kayin’s birth, my milk dried and though he tried to suckle, I could no longer satisfy him. One day, as Kayin tried to nurse, I pulled him away. “Enough!” I said, very loudly. He stared at me in astonishment, his fat cheeks framing the circle of his mouth. His lips were an elegant bow even at that age. Shocked at my outburst—he hadn’t even been biting—I put him back, guilt pouring tears down my cheek. But I had no more milk for him and began to feed him gruel. During those days the vomit came back to me again. The most bland meals sent me out of the house to retch.

That was how I knew I was with child again.

17

That spring, when the flowers were on the almond tree, I went into labor. It was two weeks early by my count, but already I had begun to seep pink fluid. Through the day I worked in the vineyard, stopping only to take a little food.
By nightfall I will hold my new son.

But night came without him. I lay down, expecting to wake to painful contractions but was woken only by Adam’s snoring.

Remembering the night of Kayin’s birth, I went to the back of the house, but my bowels had not churned, and they did not release. When I came to lie down again, I saw Kayin gazing at me from his place between us with his somber, too-knowing eyes.

“Sleep, my love,” I said, smoothing back his curling hair, leaning awkwardly to kiss him.

“Baby?”

“Soon, my son.”

But he studied me with such a look of concern that I tilted my head. “What is it, Kayin? Why can’t you sleep?”

“See the baby,” he said, on his side, gazing at me. How I loved him like that, his little naked shoulders so soft against the woven mat, his hair like a dark halo.

“Perhaps in the morning.” I paused and then said, “You know you will need to help care for your brother. And you must love him because he is younger than you.” I had recently begun to worry for Kayin, so much the center of our attention until now. We had spared nothing for him, giving him the best of everything we had. And though he had my best love—surely it could not be possible for me to love any other as much as he—there would be another now to need me. At least Kayin had spared me the two of them nursing at once, for which I was grateful.

“Love him,” he said sleepily. I kissed his brow and lay back, sighing heavily.

The next morning Adam instructed Kayin in the use of his spear. The boy tried to placate him, but Adam walked back and repositioned it in his little hand again—and then again, impatiently. I knew he feared for him if he should ever need to defend himself. Finally I called out, “Peace, Adam! He looks fearsome to me.” The moment I said it, Adam turned a baleful look on me. Yanking his larger spear up from the earth where he had stuck it, he stalked away.

Kayin just stood there, his small spear in hand, waiting to see if his father would return, holding it steady over his head until at last I went to him and lowered his arm.

His chubby face seemed too solemn, too seeing. Too very adult. He stood there for a long time, spear in hand. It would be some time—many years, in fact—before I realized that he had meant to protect me in his father’s absence.

Late that afternoon my back cramped and my bowels began to gurgle, and I knew that the hard back-labor with which I had borne Kayin was imminent.

I went out to relieve myself, commanding Kayin to stay in the house and away from the fire. I was near the midden when my first great pain came and I doubled over. This child had been active all the last part of my pregnancy—did he mean to kick his way out as well?

Upon the ground a slow, sinuous creature slid between my heels as though through the gate of a mountain pass. At first I thought I had started to lose consciousness and that the glowworms at the edge of my sight had turned dark and snaked their way through the middle of my vision. But that was not the case; I was very conscious when I recognized the chrysalis.

It wound its way out from beneath my shadow toward the sun and the field beyond. I watched it, willing my attention away from the tight contraction only now releasing me, and as I did, a ray of light caught its scales: gilded, so sleek they seemed to be one great smooth surface rather than a collection of individual plates. The world around me seemed to fall away. His scales were so brilliant now that I could see now my own form reflected in them. They refracted queer light—not the sun—so bright that I raised my arm before my eyes, my shadow thrown behind me where it had been beneath me only a moment ago. It was as though the creature emitted a light of its own, casting every shadow in reverse. But there, what was that in my hand before me as I shielded my eyes? Something mangled and glistening. . . .

The core of a fruit.

I screamed and threw it away from me. The serpent darted out, lightning quick. It coiled around it, unhinged its jaw, and began to devour the object whole. From somewhere now came the words of that creature:
How was he to know that you loved him unless you had a choice?