Havah (12 page)

I heard the echo of the One:
Cursed is the ground because of you.

“Then let us cultivate what we need, wherever we will.” We had done it in the garden, and our knowledge was vast. I had already begun to select the best of the wild grass seeds for just such a purpose. They were tough and, like everything else, less delicious than they had been in our valley, but when I ground them between two hearthstones, I produced a gruel I could mix with water and cook on stones closest to the fire. I had begun to lay a store of other seeds as well. Soon I would plant a garden. There I would recreate a vision of the hills and orchards and even the terraces of that place at the foot of the mount. Perhaps there I would lay among the grapes and dream of the One that Is and what had been and what must surely be once again.

“Farther south the river will have spread her silt, and the rain will not run away from the uneven ground or settle in pools as it does here.”

Though I was impatient to return north, I told myself this, too; I could bide until the day our son led us back.

Adam began his search the very next day. Though I went with him at first, after a while I became impatient to be productive. We both needed coverings for our feet if we were to keep this up, and I could only think to make them out of the hides we wore, which meant we needed more textiles to supplement our wardrobe. Adam had less patience for this kind of work and was less neat of finger than I. He insisted that his feet did not pain him, no matter that they were tough and dirty and even cracked in some places. And so I left the business of surveying this new land to him, knowing he would have toil aplenty once he had found it.

He was gone entire mornings and then full days at a time. He took with him a basket, and when he returned, there were new vegetables and green shoots, small berries and grasses heavy with grains, interesting stones, and bits of eggshell. We found uses for nearly everything. He brought with him the bones of a fish once and the hollow wing bone of a bird. He plucked as much flesh from it as he could, but still it offended me until he dried it and, by boring tiny holes along one side, made it into a tiny flute.

He brought back pieces of horn, which he carved into cups. He made also a three-pronged comb to tame the tangles in my hair. I cherished that gift nearly as much as I missed the carved pendant he had given me in the valley and promised I would never let it go from me.

He brought diseased or malformed leaves and stems and anything strange or unknown to us. He even brought dry dung, which we broke apart to learn the diets of the animals. Sometimes we burned it in the fire. It put off a foul smoke; where even the scat of animals had been filled with the pure waste of leaf and stem, it now contained the foul rot of flesh.

At times I was appalled. Here was the adam, who named the animals, reduced to scavenging bits of horn and bone like a hyena eating the remains of a carcass, or the jackal sniffing at the droppings of another. His boundless energy for pleasure seemed gone, the worries of this new life settled between his eyes and at the corners of his mouth. I cherished his fortitude and vulnerability even as I secretly and occasionally disdained it compared to the man he had been. One day I said, “Do you see the clouds, pulled thin as a bit of Gada’s fleece? They were the same the day I first opened my eyes upon the world.”

“That was a lifetime ago.” He looked away.

The sadness in his voice stung me deeply. For the first time in days, I wondered what might have happened had I never been created that day or, worse, if I had eaten alone from the tree. I wasn’t sure it was even possible; we had shared one accord between us. But lying awake on my mat at night, I could not help but terrify myself with the thought of it. Would the One have cast me out alone to die the death without even the promise of the seed?

“Perhaps you wish you had never been burdened with me,” I said with inexplicable bitterness. I got up to go to the river, but he pulled me roughly into his arms and breathed deeply of my neck.

“Sometimes,” he said, hoarse, “I swear I smell the flowers of the olive from our valley in you.” He buried his face against my breasts, and we forgot our work for the day.

13

One morning Adam prepared to leave on another of his explorations. This time he took a length of rope.

“What will you do with that?” I asked.

“It’s for the goats.”

“Goats?”

“The goats on the long hills that I saw yesterday.”

Annoyance prickled the inside of my chest. “What goats?”

“That I saw on the hill yesterday.”

“You say it as though I should know what you are talking about. How should I know that you saw goats on a hill?”

Finally, he said, “I don’t know.”

In that moment I thought he looked as dumb as an ass.

“Then how should I know?” I said, pressing the matter. I wasn’t sure at whom my wrath was aimed: him for not knowing, myself—again, as always, for my part in all that had caused his not knowing—or the One. This last thought surprised me, and I shrank back from it and fell silent.

That night he did not come back. The sun waned in the sky and spilled its colors along the horizon. It was an extravagant display, the first sunset I had truly appreciated since our flight. I wondered if Adam saw it too.

When the sun had gone and the insects had begun their evening drone, I sat by the fire, morose, regretting my terseness of earlier. When he came tonight, I would welcome him back with every pleasure I could summon with rough fingers and dry lips.

But long after the moon had ascended in the sky, he had not returned. I ate my meal, closed the thorny gate, and lay down alone.

Was he not to return? Would morn come and see me by myself? I lay awake waiting for the sound of his foot upon the path. It never came.

It rained through the night and into the morning. When the clouds cleared and the sun returned, it did so without Adam. That evening, as I fed the fire bits of wood, and the stars I once fancied my crown appeared beyond the lip of the cave, I was miserable with anxiety. Lying upon my mat, I strained for any sound of him, but there was only the howl of a distant wolf, long and lone in the night.

Was he angered by my irritation with him? Could he be so angry as to leave me? Where would he go? What would I do alone with this child? Could the word of the One be fulfilled if we were separate in this world? Surely not! I became despondent and then angry. How selfish of him for not thinking of this!

Had he come to some harm? But what could harm the adam—what would dare? Though the animals had turned feral, one upon another, Adam had been regent over all. Surely all the earth would intervene before it would allow harm to come to the image of the One.

But the earth was indifferent toward the one who had ruled it. The fire no longer blazed when the adam wished it to blaze. The wind came whether we wanted it or not. The skies had rained the displeasure of the One upon us like a torrent of tears.

Now here was fear!

I fretted through the night. If he did not come by morning, I would go look for him.

Sometime after dawn spilled her paltry light, I woke to Gada’s bleating. Steps sounded on the rocky path outside the cave. The briar hedge was pulled away, and Adam appeared at the entrance. I scrambled up, admonishments and tears at the ready, but I hesitated at the curious sight of him. A strange, brown shape lay over his shoulders and the basket upon his back. He pulled it away, and I saw that it was a stiffening goat hide.

“An animal—a lion, I think—got to it before I did,” he said, dully. “I salvaged what I could of the hide and some of the fat, though it wasn’t much.”

I shuddered, but I understood the practicality; though we scraped and pulled any pelt we came across to make it pliable, we had yet to match the suppleness of those tanned by the finger of the One himself.

“I am glad you are home,” I said, suddenly emotional.

“No tears, Isha. I know just the thing to cure that—come see the yearlings.”

He made another trip, and then another after that, returning each time with animals: once with a goat and her suckling kid, and the other with a squealing wolf pup.

He brought back as well the skins of two rams. “I found them in a ravine,” he said. “Their horns were locked together. One had broken its back, and the other had two broken legs.”

Broken its legs? We had seen rams face off in the rut, but none had ever suffered from it except from lack of propagation.

“Would they not . . . mend?” I said. He shook his head. I wondered if the animals had died the death from their injuries or been helped by Adam’s knife.

I did not ask.

The pup, fuzzy as a bear cub, I kept in a large willow basket, which she chewed mostly to shreds. I fed her little bits of gruel mixed with milk from the goat. She was nearly a month old, I thought, because her eyes were open, and she imitated my howls with squeaky yowls of her own. I named her Reut.

Soon Adam announced he was going again. “I will be gone for several days.”

My stomach tightened. He had gone so often, surely he had seen all that there was to see in every direction.

“Then I will go with you.”

“No,” he said, too quickly.

“Why not?”

“There is no place for you to sleep except in the open.”

I laughed, the sound brittle as flint. “I slept in the open before we came here, or did you forget?”

“I am making for us a cave.”

“Nonsense. Even you cannot make a cave. Only the One may do that.”

He smiled, and I saw the inkling of a secret in his eyes. It was the first time I had ever seen that. In that instant he was so handsome! More handsome than he had seemed to me in days. How capricious I was!

“Isha,” he said, cupping my face in his hands. “Listen to me. There is everywhere evidence of animals stalking and killing others.” We did not yet have a word for predator.

“You must stay here where you are safe. There is no other Isha. I have no other wife.”

I found his last statement insanely funny. He smiled and covered my lips with his own.

That night I went to sleep, dispatched with pleasure to leaden the limbs. But I dreamed of blood. Blood, like Adah’s spilled in the garden. Blood on fallow deer. Blood on the gazelle. Blood on the white fleece of a lamb. But it was not the blood of the lamb. In my dream the lamb frolicked away.

It was the blood of Adam, ravaged beyond all recognition.

“Isha!” The adam shook me. I had cried out in my sleep.

I dug my nails into the dark skin of his shoulders. “Do not go tomorrow!”

“Isha. Havah . . .” He held me away from him. “Your vision was sent by the serpent. Put it away from you. You are wise to his guiles.”

But I was haunted through the night and lay in a sweat upon our pallet, my hand resting on my belly, over the child inside.
No harm can come. I bear the seed spoken of by the One.
The words became a mantra in my mind. But Adam had done his part in creating this child. If he should be killed by a predator as though he were a lamb, the child was already in me—what more did destiny need of him?

The next morning I clung to him again. “Stay yet another day.”

But he grew impatient. “See now? I will take this knife that I have made. I am strong, Isha, or did you not notice last night?” I smiled the best that I could, and he took his pack and his knives with him and left.

He left with me his spear, which was to keep me somehow safe against a world changed more every day into something unrecognizable to us. When I protested that he needed it more than I, he claimed that most animals ran upon sight of him and that he need only raise his voice for them to flee. Rather than comfort me, it only enforced my fear that harm might come to him and that none could come to me. But he insisted, saying I had the animals, coveted by predators, and so must keep it near me.

I wove and cooked hard cakes and chased Reut away from the store baskets, and then the pallet mats, and then the store baskets again. In the afternoon I ranged the hills with Gada and the goats.

Two days later I became impatient with the endless grazing of my little flock and decided to leave them while I took Reut and went searching for haws. I wanted to dry some of them for seeds for my future garden.

By late afternoon we ranged out of sight of the hill where I had left the goats and Gada to piddle about. That was when we came upon it.

I smelled it before I saw it: flesh. Somewhere an animal lay dead and open to the air. I turned away. The very notion of a body that lived no more offended me.

But as I did, Reut broke into a run. I gathered her up—I had seen her investigate lamb dung in the field, which is how much sense she had. But even as I carried the wriggling pup back the way we had come, the idea of the carcass nagged at me. A carcass might mean a pelt. We had become by now far too aware of our needs and had begun to horde anything we might need; an item in hand was one we need not go in search of. It meant time given to tools or food preparation or weaving. Or an hour of rest, if nothing else.

What would Adam think if I presented a fresh pelt to him upon his return? He had left me with the animals and a babe in my belly and a spear to protect us all. Fine. I could provide as well as he.

I dropped Reut to the ground and followed her in search of the carcass.

We found it lying beneath a clot of vultures. We did our best to chase them off, and then I cried my dismay: It was one of the gazelles. It had already been made a meal of—the eyes were gone, as were the mouth and tongue. Something had chewed through the skull to feast on soft brain. Even the hooves had been carried away with the legs. Of the hide there was only a piece barely large enough to cover a child’s feet.

I knelt down with my basket and got out my knife. Reut crouched near me, crunching contentedly on a rib. My stomach churned, and the smell threatened to choke me. The hide was a paltry bit of nothing, though I did salvage the horns. Watching Reut so preoccupied, I decided to take away a rib and the one remaining shoulder blade. If nothing else, Reut could amuse herself with them in lieu of our stores and bedding if I could only stand to have them nearby.