After Abel and Other Stories Read Free Page A

body alive to its tiniest sensations. I wanted Adam again and again. After we fled the Garden, wrapped in the skins God had covered us with, we found out what cold was and clung to one another. But the warmth between our bodies made Adam’s clothes bulge and his breath quicken. His weight on me, the rocking of his body into mine, made me crave more. Dark came so early in those days. Nights I spent cataloging every part of him, naming and touching—shoulder, elbow, nipple,stomach, shaft, scrotum. Each a discovery, a new source of delight.
    I think now that God must have known how little His words meant to me when He first said them. He must have waited to show me how wrong I had been. He had promised labor, that I would work to bring life into the world. How else to explain the screaming pain of Abel’s birth? The pushing and pushing down through my bowels and him not coming, stuck as if in a vessel stoppered with rags. My womb was a cave hiding the clay of his new body from the winds, and it did not want to give him up. Perhaps my body knew, even then, that losing him would be the greater pain.
    No, this will not make it into the final account. The men who will come to tell this story will never know that teaching this new baby how to be a man is the important part. They will think the tests ended where punishment began.
    I will protect Seth. And he’ll be my last. I won’t do it again, give over everything in me to make him, only to see him crumbled like a leaf off the tree, the ground mulching to reclaim him.
    God didn’t tell the whole truth. But I’ve grown used to that. My desire has changed. It’s not for Adam, who continues to reap and plant, reap and plant, whose body grows leaner, his skin slacker, each year. When he turns to me now, I turn away. Everything I have is saved forSeth, the last of my womb, who has to grow tall, who has to learn better how to survive this world. I have so much to teach him. He needs to know how to speak to God and the world in the languages they understand.
    Adam also got it wrong. He focused on the penalties, the pronouncements, on our banishment. But he confused the consequences for the cause. Here’s what happened: God said one thing. The snake said another. Which is how I learned that someone had to be lying. That was the knowledge. That was my first step out of the Garden, and no one chasing me with a flaming sword. It wasn’t the bite into the fruit or sharing it with Adam. I knew that one of them had told the truth, the other hadn’t, and the only way I’d know which was to take the fruit into my hand, into my mouth.
    Here is the real lesson. Only God got to say which was good, which bad. Not because of truth. No. He got to decide because we—I—had tasted what it meant to see a future of our own making. That’s what He couldn’t allow. So He showed us the cost of choosing the wrong truth. Showed us the door and then shut His mouth tight.
    Believe me, they’re going to get it wrong when they tell my story. They’ll miss what it meant to raise my boys. They’ll write them off with a sentence. They won’t show the mistakes I made, who had no mother to teach me how to love. No father to brush the hair frommy face, the dirt from my scrapes. God was our only model, and we took all the wrong lessons: Adam to walk silently through his life, and me, with my decrees and a quick slap across the face when they were defied.
    It took this—one dead, the other disappeared—to see what I could not have known all along. Cain was too much like me, too quick to anger, too quick to hide. I have finally learned. I will do better this time. I won’t raise my hand. There is no lesson so urgent it has to end with Seth’s cheek bruised and streaked with tears. I never want to see a son of mine cower in fear or hide from my anger. That’s my promise, even though no one will ever know it.
    None of that will