Cain and Seth Discuss Abel

Posted on May 4, 2003 in Book of Days Myths & Mysticism Prose Arcana

Note: This is nineteenth in a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Why not?….

Two men lay down next to a still, green cocktail olive stretch of stream. Blotched sycamores, tall white alders, and a California buckeye that was losing its leaves for summer shaded them. A robin calling. Sparrows chattering about current affairs, repetitively like keys under the fingers of an Internet addict. And two old men — still with most of the muscle on their bones, still with beating hearts and softly sucking lungs, reasonable hearing, but a view of the world like one of Monet’s later paintings, when he painted splashes where others made out the veins and blossoms of water lilies. Never did they stray far from a phone or a road where an ambulance could pull up because they knew that they were old and didn’t get to jumping over logs like they used to.

The circle closed on a long silence of their throats. The one that I call Cain spoke and asked the question of all the years: “Why don’t we kill one another?”

The other who I call Seth said “What do you mean?”

“I was looking at Abel the other day,” said the first septugenarian. “And I realized that after all these years, I still hate him.”

“Hate him?”

“Yes. Whenever he squints at me just so –” Cain sat up, squeezed his eyes nearly shut so Seth could see the expression — “I want to grab a heavy branch off one of those oak trees on the hill and bring it down on his head. Or take my gun and shoot the bastard.”

“But you don’t.”

“No,” said Cain. “I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because justice is written on giant stones,” replied Cain.”

“Giant stones?”

“Blue stones. Like the ones at Stonehenge. If you fail, they come down on you, crush you.”

“That’s a bit imaginative, Cain,” said Seth. “Silly even. Stones fall every day. The Old Man of the Mountain fell just last week. If any man was under it when it fell, no one will say that it happened because the Old Man knew was an evildoer was near. It didn’t wait through all those centuries just for that moment — that unique moment when one man who would be punished in no other way — would come walking by. Justice doesn’t come out of nature like that.”

“You’re right. It doesn’t come out of nature. It comes out of men,” said Cain after a long silence. “Through men.”

“How do you figure?”

“When you do something wrong, men come with guns, ropes, or stone. Black stones. Cannonball size. Like the ones I found out in that wash in the Mojave many years ago. When I was lost and searching for the road out of Death Valley. Men pick up stones like that and throw them at evildoers. They break bones and they take pleasure from it because it’s a dispensation.”

“A dispensation?”

“Yes, from God. In that moment, the Law becomes null and void. It says “Thou shalt kill. Thou shalt kill this man.'”

A leaf fell off the buckeye, floated and twirled, and clicked lightly on the water.

“Abel would never kill,” said Seth. “Not even if you told him that God commanded it.”

“Abel’s a fool. He’s in denial. He doesn’t want to admit that he’s like all other men.”

“And what are all other men like,” asked Seth. “Like you?”

“That’s a silly question, Seth. Of course they’re like me because I’m like them.” He leaned on his arm and drove his elbow into the soft, grassbound earth. “It’s been proven to me time and again by the years.”

“How did Abel prove it to you? How did he show that he’s just like you?”

“By his denial. By the way he squinted at me when I told him it was so.” Cain looked out over the creek at a squirrel coming to the water to drink. “We’d read of a war, see, or an execution. I’d tell him about it, who killed who, what body parts had been splattered and what have you. And he’d squint at me. Like he was repressing something. Give me the look, like the ground was sucking the life out of him. That’s how I knew. His face gave it away. Like you’re is now.”

Seth lodged his head against a soft piece of ground and pointed his chin perpendicularly. Through an aquamarine hole in the trees, he spotted a turkey vulture soaring.

“I don’t think Abel would agree that that’s why he blanched, Cain.”

“You know him as well as I do, I see,” said Cain. “You know he would say that. Which makes him a liar.”

“What does that mean?”

“It may mean that I get a dispensation. God says “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” And God says that the penalty is death. “Thou shalt kill Abel.” The blue stones shall quake and men shall heave lead slugs, arrows, and cannonballs at him. I shall join them.”

“But doesn’t it say ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor?'”

“That it does. And that is what he does. He says that I am more evil than he is. It’s such a patent, obvious lie.”

The wind blew through the grove. Cain rose and slapped his back until he was happy that enough of the dust and the grass was off it that he could make an appearance. He stretched his legs and reached as if he could grab the vulture from the sky by the legs, pull it down, twist its neck and keep it to roast later.

“Where are you going?” asked Seth.

“Home,” said Cain.

“To do what? Get your gun? Kill Abel?”

Cain’s ice blue eyes stared at Seth for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I will have to pray about it.” He pivoted and, like the antler-less mule deer, spurted out of sight.

Seth remained in the grass, unmoving, watching as the turkey vulture hovered in and out of view. Why didn’t men kill, he asked in the peace of his solitary soul. I can only, you can only — he addressed himself in both ways — speak for myself, for yourself. He, Seth, didn’t kill, because of the way he felt when he thought about the wreck he’d make of Abel’s face if he hit it with a bough or a river stone. The muscles and the skin pushed out of the way. The bone, the wet full globes of the eyes, and the pinkish-blue bits of brain showing past their flesh covering. Blood all over the place, salty drops of it on his face and on his tongue. Seth knew he couldn’t kill a man up close. He’d have to stand at least twenty yards away, where he couldn’t see Abel’s eyes — not those honey eyes — up close. The smells, the tastes, and the observed twitches of the dying flesh unnerved Seth — even as mere thoughts. This was why he did not kill.

He lay in the grass and listened. A car door slammed and an engine swished the gasoline around in its carburator mouth and gargled. His will heaved his shoulders up and forward. His arms pushed and his legs lifted the bulk of his sagging body. As the car drove away, Seth bounded like a forty year old out of the woods and through the close stretch of chaparral that separated him from the parking lot. Cain wasn’t like him. Or like most people. He had to be stopped.

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Wearing that ring…..