They tried to have their own family straight away, of course, Mama and Dad. But birthing three all at once the first time had messed her body up. Abel and Cain grew up okay but my sister Awan was always sick and always clingy, wanting to be with Mama every single second, not just when she was a toddler but long after most kids can’t wait to get away from their parents. At least, that’s the way Mama tells it. All this was way before Azura and I were born. Mama kept getting pregnant but all the babies died – eight, nine, ten times. I was the first one to make it. There are sixteen years between me and the older ones. Then there was one more after Azura but it perished. It nearly killed Mama too. They cut the dead baby out of her and she bled for seven weeks.
They named me Seth, which they tell me means “appointed”. “You’re my special prize”, Mama always said; “God knows losing Abel nearly killed me, so I got you instead”. The older I got, the more that idea made me uncomfortable. At first it made me feel important, like the way kids who’ve been adopted always know they really were wanted by someone even if they were an accident between two teenagers in a field to begin with. But then it hit me: if Abel hadn’t died, she probably wouldn’t have wanted me at all. And that was weird. I’d had a window onto a world where I’d never have existed – the world that Mama would rather have happened, because she loved Abel so much and would never have given him up willingly.
But it was even more than that. I wasn’t just a replacement for Abel, I was a better version of him, because I the son she should have had with my dad way back then. That’s what it was in my dad’s eyes. He was married before, but he never had kids with her, so you’d think there’d be less baggage that he brought to his marriage with Mama after Lilith ran away. But because Mama had been married before too, it was there like a great black angry hole, the fact that Mama’s older children, the triplets, were by Samael and not Dad. If Dad had had children by Lilith as well, at least he and Mama would have been quits. But he didn’t. We all had Mama’s brown-blonde hair, not Lilith’s red. And the fact everyone thought Samael was some kind of a god made it all worse. I get that – no man wants to have to compare himself to the other guys a woman’s had.
So Dad could never quite treat my brothers like they were his own, though he did better with Awan, I guess because she only looked like Mama and not Samael, and because she was so fragile. So that made the two of them, Abel and Cain, extra-close. Awan used to tell me all about it when I was little:
“They were so big and tall, Sethy, just like you’ll be, and they were so strong that they could carry me with one finger each under my arms. And they always went fishing together, and they used to see who could chop the wood the fastest. And when we were kids, they were such babies: they used to sleep all curled up together, and one of them always cried when the other one had to get his nails cut. I don’t think they knew where one ended and the other began.”
So that made it all the worse when Abel started to do better, when they weren’t so indivisible any more. Awan showed me the farm log years ago, before I understood what it meant that Cain’s figures always showed a deficit and Abel’s didn’t. They had the same start but something happened, something imperceptible, to send them different ways. They had exactly the same upbringing, they were exactly the same age, they were given exactly the same things.
But Abel did well and Cain didn’t. And Abel was never smug about it, never pleased when Cain’s land got parched or a crop didn’t do so well. It was the lack of a why that did for Cain. There was no reason why Abel’s animals were charmed, why they never got footrot or blackfly. He was a good farmer, but so was Cain. Cain got all the bad luck.
“God hates me”, slurred Cain one night when he was drunk, “just like Dad hates me.” Awan told me that once, again when I was too young really to be told things like that – too young to be told about the whole sorry, intricate mess. I pieced it all together – Dad had made it clear to Cain that it couldn’t possibly be just bad luck that meant his crops kept failing and losing money, that there was never enough labour to keep up with what needed to be done. I can just imagine Dad spitting at Cain, “You must drink all the money, you little shit! Abel gets the same as you and he manages okay. No wonder you can’t pay anyone enough to work with you and have to look at that miserable face. Well, the one comfort is you’re nothing to do with me, you son of a whore.” And knowing who brought Cain up – that’s the irony, there was so much of Adam in him – it makes perfect sense to me that Cain would think, “He thinks it’s true, so it might as well be. I’ll never be able to make him believe I’m not drinking the profits, so what the hell, I will.”
*
I wasn’t there, I was never there, I wasn’t even born; but one night after I’d drunk myself to sleep (because I was truly Cain’s brother in that respect), I saw it in a dream. Later I was to wake up certain that if I didn’t get some liquid in my body in the next few seconds I would certainly die. Chugging a cup of tepid water, I would feel something at the base of my skull ticking as my brain rehydrated and the tiredness wicked from my eyes.
But for now I had a sweaty, vulnerable window on my own prehistory, on the things that had to happen to make me exist at all but which were also always already the seeds of my destruction.
The sky was red and angry and there was a hum in the air which everyone hoped wasn’t locusts. It hadn’t rained for two months but Adam, my father, said he could smell it coming in from the horizon. I saw him in my vision, hanging shelves in the dim, steamy kitchen, looking younger than I ever remember him even from my own earliest days. They weren’t Mama and Dad, yet, then; they were just Eve and Adam, two strangers, who by the time I met them were no longer really themselves any more. I haven’t been able to think of them as Mama and Dad since.
“What time’ll you be back for food today?” asked Awan, clearing off the breakfast dishes. She’d never bloomed, she was always skinny and sallow and grubby-looking, but here at the age of fifteen she was as pretty as she’d ever got.
“Late, probably. Depends on the lambing”, yawned Abel cheerfully, also – of course – fifteen, pushing dirty blonde hair out of his eyes. I’d never seen him in real life, because he died before I was born, but I recognized him from Awan’s sketch that had always been in the hallway: sleek yet wiry, tanned, with a babyish air about him although he’d been a man for three years by now. “Dad and Cain are coming up to help out. Yes?”
“Yeah”, Cain concurred briefly from within a bowl of watery meal, “as soon as I check over the Long Side to make sure it’s not locusts coming in up there.”
“Well, I could have six or eight lambs coming today, so I could really use you”, his brother smiled.
“Well, if it’s locusts they’ll eat the meat right off the ewes’ bones and then we’ll all be screwed”. Cain frowned. Nobody could keep nature at bay forever and the plague was already two years overdue. Abel didn’t reply, but I saw him twist his mouth in a secret, wry grimace to Eve, Adam and Awan, a face that said Cookie’s in one of his touchy moods. Best leave well alone.
Awan handed Adam and each of the boys a packet of cheese and bread and dried meat, two apples, and canteens of beer. The morning haze was burning off and the three dogs were running in circles outside, yapping and snapping at one another’s heels much as the triplets had once done in between Awan’s bouts of fever.
As Abel whistled for his dogs the dream-me swooped up involuntarily to the top of the biggest tree, standing lone and crazed since its roots sucked all the water out of the ground for a good way round it. Abel, Adam and the dogs set off one way and Cain the other, and I could see Eve and Awan swirling sheets in huge soapy buckets outside the house. I could also see a darkness thickening on the horizon, which I was pretty sure were locusts after all. Cain was right; they’d leave nothing in their wake. I screwed up my mind to try to remember if I’d ever been told about locusts coming around this time. I couldn’t, but I guessed maybe that particular tragedy had got lost among the rest of the family catastrophe from the period.
Adam had to be away overnight to check the traps over by the Red Rock, and he set off in the middle of the morning after helping Abel haul out the second lamb. He didn’t often go away and it always made Eve nervous. Through my childhood I’d always supposed that was a result of what had happened, but now I could see she’d been just the same all these years ago. It was weird for her to be so anxious, incongruous with the rest of her character.
Have you ever had a dream where you find yourself rooted to the spot? Where you try to scream for help but no sound comes out? Or one where you wake up and it’s like someone’s pinning you down, and you’re completely paralyzed? This was like that. I could see as far as the horizon, and from my treetop my vision could sort of zoom in on any point – but I couldn’t actually move, so anything that took place out of my line of sight remained unknown to me.
The humming was getting louder and more intense, but I knew now that it wasn’t locusts. I could feel it rather than hear it; it was like the buzz just before you touch something metal and a spark flies out.
Very tinily, very far away, and in a smeary slow-motion made watery by the heat, I saw Cain trudging over from the Long Side to the enclosure where Abel was with the labouring ewes. When Abel saw him he jumped up and started to go to meet him. They disappeared into the shade of the scrubby copse and I couldn’t see them any more.
I strained and strained but the distance was just too far. Half a mile, twenty years, all the ruling spirits of time and space: whichever way you looked at it, I couldn’t reach them, these mysterious brothers of mine. The humming crescendoed and the air I breathed was dry and sore; then abruptly, eerily, it was gone. It was as if all the heat in the world had gurgled down a plughole. In the sudden quiet, small sounds carried. I heard a ewe bleating in pain, but Abel didn’t go to help her. A shimmering breeze carried the smell of blood and salt and wet lambs over the fields. The sheep cried and cried but no-one came, and a long while later, she was silent.
*
It was well past dark when Cain lumbered into the front yard, but somehow my omniscient dream-state meant I could still see everything that was happening even in the shadows. He and Abel would normally have been back hours before, and so would Adam have been if he hadn’t gone away. Eve had been out to look up the path every ten minutes, and I could smell something acrid from where Awan’s cooking-pot had boiled dry.
“Where’s your brother?” frowned Eve, running out of the house, when she glimpsed him at last.
There was silence.
“Where is your brother?”
“How should I know? We don’t come as a package deal, you know,” muttered Cain, habitually grumpy.
(“But you did”, I thought from my treetop, “you always did.”)
“You’ve done something to him”, she yelled. “Awan! He’s done something to Abel!”
Why jump to that conclusion? I thought. Had they been fighting before, or does Eve just assume that Cain’s to blame for everything that goes wrong?
Adam, of course, wasn’t there, but Awan rushed out and looked anxiously up at Cain. She swung off his hand. “Have you, Cookie?”, she said urgently from under furrowed brows.
Cain looked much older than he was, his puffy face a distortion of his womb-mate’s. He shook her off. “Like I was saying to Mama, just because he’s not here doesn’t mean I automatically know where he is, any more than you do.” But there was something cracking in his voice, and I could see in Awan’s fifteen-year-old face that she was certain he was lying. (It was the same face she was to give me six or seven years later when, as a mud-streaked preschooler, I swore blind that I definitely hadn’t borrowed her mascara for drawing war wounds – even as the smudgy kohl ran down my legs and stained my shorts.)
Nobody spoke until Cain did again. He sounded more desperate now, and he and I simultaneously started to realize some sort of game was up – that he was about to be condemned for something. “Seriously, you’re being mental, both of you”, he insisted, looking from Eve to Awan and back. “I haven’t fucking seen him.”
“When did you see him last?” demanded Eve.
“I dunno. When you did, probably. Hours ago. Breakfast time. We do actually both work all day, you know. We don’t sit around together playing noughts and crosses.”
“If you’re lying to me”, said Eve, “if you know where he is and you’re not telling me, you can kiss the farm goodbye. It would be just like you to think it was funny if he’d put his foot in a hole and had to lie out all night in the dew.” Her voice rose and she became hysterical, spiralling into apparent non-sequiturs that I knew weren’t, that I could tell were born of years and years of navigating these waters. I tuned back in as she climaxed, “Maybe you’d just be better off somewhere else, somewhere away from here.”
“Oh, that would be so terrible”, said Cain sarcastically. “Things are just going so well here. I don’t know how I could possibly bear to walk away. It’s so much fun breaking my back on land that never manages to grow anything, and never seeing anyone, and watching everyone telling Abel how great he is. And you and Dad are so fantastically supportive.”
“Well, you’re bound to mess up wherever you go, so I suppose it won’t make any difference. It’s like you’re cursed or something. Honestly, the harvests have been worse for the last three years than they ever were before you took over. If it wasn’t for Abel –”
She couldn’t finish what she’d said, because Cain pushed her roughly aside in disgust and she fell into the dust, hitting her temple on the crumbling fence-post.
Awan ran after Cain into the house. “Cookie, Cookie…” I couldn’t hear any more, just the crashing silence of Eve’s tears making hot rivers in the dirt as she wondered why this one son of hers could give her so much anxiety when the other was a fountain of bubbling joy.
*
I felt the wet of her tears, but it transmuted into the wet of my own, real blood. I woke up having clawed my chest so hard it was raw with tiny dirty wounds. I groped my way to the tap and flooded my body inside and out, and by the time I could piece together a coherent thought my head was pounding so hard that the vision seemed like a sweet contrast. The rest I only know from what Awan told me later, and the little bits and pieces that Eve’s let slip. She doesn’t like to talk about it much. When they woke up in the morning Cain was gone, and they never saw him again. A few years later there were rumours that he’d been spotted over in the east, but they never knew whether it had really been him or not.
Adam found Abel’s body when he came back on Tuesday evening, in the shallow ditch behind the copse. The flies had made a mess of his face, gorging on the sticky black blood. Adam had lost both his sons, but as he always used to tell Cain, they weren’t really his sons at all. I was eventually born a bit under a year later; I guess Eve had just been carrying me when it happened, so in a way I was there after all. The irony was that I look so much like Cain did, so Awan tells me – so all the things in Cain that Adam despised, all the things he thought were bits of Samael, were really bits of Eve that were in me too. Abel was no more his son than Cain was – but Abel had something in him that let him not resent Adam for resenting him. Cain wasn’t so fortunate.
*
It was Cain and Abel who were lost, but even I never quite found myself. It was arduous as a kid, not being able to get away from all that pain and expectation, everything I knew Eve and Adam and Awan must be able to see every time they looked into my face. All I could do was take out my anger on Azura, the only one around even weaker than I was, having been born four and a half years later. She was so small and light, and she wore her bruises like orange blossoms. Awan dabbed them with ointment and looked at me sadly, but she never said anything to stop it. As time went on I took out other kinds of frustration on Azura too. That’s what happens when you live in the middle of nowhere with no-one else for miles around. Sure, I’d have preferred to do it with someone who wanted it, but you take what you can in this life.
And today my son came, my blessing and my condemnation. Awan gasped when she saw him first; once all the blood was washed off there was still a stain that wouldn’t go away, right across his face. I know weird things do happen when men father issue by their sisters – especially when the sisters are still almost babies themselves – so this child, this Enosh, has got off lightly. Eve gurgled a strange prayer that stuck in her throat. Adam fell to his knees. Awan invoked the name of every spirit she knew and Azura stared at me with resentful black eyes. The baby opened its sticky lungs and grizzled for honey, and my heart fell even further as the first of the locusts thumped menacingly against the window.
Susannah Cornwall
