Fallen. David Maine

those famous, violent hands had been forgotten.

      But never—Cain knew this—for long.

      —You’ve given much thought to this project.

      Cain nodded: it was true. But as if his day’s quota of truth had been exhausted, a lie then skated off his tongue.—For some time now, I’ve thought of little else.

      •

      Nearly thirty years later, Henoch slaps his knees, rises with a grunt.—I must go. If we truly are to die tonight, there’s much to finish beforehand.

      His son’s odd humor again. Cain forces a thin smile and bestows his standard farewell.—Be productive.

      Henoch stands in the doorway hesitantly. There’s an air of concern on his face and Cain wonders if he looks especially awful today. He certainly feels especially awful.

      Henoch asks, Is there anything you need?

      For a moment Cain considers the answers that spring to mind: There is much I need, but you can’t get it for me. Or more simply, I need your mother. But he is not prone to such maudlin and says only, You are busy, go and don’t mind me.

      A moment longer Henoch lingers. Then he is out the door. Cain hears him exhale loudly, as if sighing in relief, but knows too that he is an old man and his ears may be playing tricks on him.

      37 thirty years previous

      Finally one afternoon, indiscernible from countless other afternoons since his exile began, Cain stops and looks about him. He breathes deep, eyeballs the cove and beach, surveys the grassland with a critical eye. Squints at the forest as if calculating something. The wife and child wait.

      —This is far enough, he announces at length.—We’ll stop here.

      Zoru glances about her but seems too dazed to take in much of her surroundings. In a voice as gray and washed out as her eyes she asks, For how long?

      —For good.

      Even this pronouncement fails to stir her. Zoru stops and turns to wait for Henoch, who shambles along two dozen paces behind them. The boy is overcoming a fever and rash, and has lost his customary energy and spirit. Zoru fusses over him, placing her hands on his cheeks while he grumpily protests being treated like a child.

      Cain unloads the bags draped across the donkey’s back. They have with them a small tent, a few rough tools of stone and wood and a narrow copper blade for skinning game, some kitchen utensils and blankets. This plus a few lengths of net and twine make up their possessions in this life. The donkey was old when they got it and has traveled hundreds of leagues with them. It is good for perhaps another few months.

      They had brought some chickens but they died. They had brought goats that ran off one night when Henoch failed to properly tether them. Cain shuts his eyes at the memory and calms his hands. It was years ago but the episode still rankles.

      A voice in his ear whispers, It is long past. Don’t dwell on it.

      The family has made camp countless times before, and each knows what is expected. Cain explores the beach, which as he had hoped slopes gently into water so clear as to be nearly colorless. An abundance of fish flutters through it like sedate butterflies, finger-length and brightly colored; a few are large enough to eat. Cain twirls in the sand, his footprints describing little arcs behind him as he casts the net. He hauls the catch ashore and lets the fry wriggle back into the waves, keeping only a pair of silvery-gray grouper longer than his feet. These he tosses onto the sand to spasm and die while he unfurls the net again. Before long he has more than enough for tonight’s supper and tomorrow’s breakfast as well.

      He enjoys the work so much he goes on with it, releasing the net and hauling it in, setting the creatures free. His movements are practiced and smooth yet minutely different each time. It might be, Cain reflects, the thing that he has learned how to do best in his entire life.

      Zoru has built a fire by the time he returns, while Henoch scavenges more firewood. Henoch had pleaded fatigue and sickness, but Zoru told him to get on with it anyway. Cain approves: fever or no, everybody does his part. But Henoch has passed from the childhood stage of unfettered adoration for his father, and has moved to a difficult point of feeling that every demand on his person is a deeply rooted injustice.

      Cain grimaces at the remembered familiarity of that.

      He squats and drops the fish at Zoru’s feet. She switches without pause from feeding the fire to gutting the animals. She is a dark-skinned woman designed with little excess flesh, but a great deal of energy. Masses of black hair fling themselves from her head in all directions.

      —I think we could prosper here, Cain says.

      —It’s a good sign that we caught these fish so easily.

      He smiles at that—we caught?—but nods.—Plenty of fertile land. And the spring of course.

      The spring bubbles up from the ground a few hundred cubits to the east, and runs in a tinkling brook to the sea.

      Zoru uses a forearm to wipe a strand of hair from her eye.—I’m glad we’re stopping, she says in a low voice.—The boy’s tired. And so am I.

      —I know.

      —We can’t keep on forever.

      —I know.

      It is a conversation they have held many times over the years. Given the circumstances, it seems now to have run its course, like the spring emptying onto the beach.

      Henoch returns, dragging a small lightning-struck sapling. It is too green to burn well: it will smoke and sputter and provide little heat. Cain sighs through his nose. Doubtless the boy grew tired of looking for something appropriate, and simply dragged back the first fallen tree that came to hand. He’s old enough to know good wood from bad.

      Or is he? Perhaps not. Perhaps Cain has not taught him, or not in a way that the child can understand.

      Cain wonders, not for the first time, whether a child is born with the man already inside him waiting to emerge; or if there is only a blankness, a void inside ready to be filled with whatever might be placed there. It is a question that has nagged for much of his life, and he has never yet found a satisfying answer.

      Henoch wrestles the resilient gray branches off the sapling and feeds them to the fire. His father watches and his mother burns the fish in a flat copper pan. As expected, the new wood is smoky. Parents and child engage in an elaborate dance to avoid choking, by bobbing and weaving their heads whenever the wispy gray fingers clutch at them.

      Cain wonders what his father had made of him at this age. The idea is startling, that he and his father might have such things in common as the pleasures and annoyances of parenthood. Seldom has he let himself consider the world through his father’s eyes.

      What had he been like, at age fourteen? Surly and sullen, no question. Silent much of the time. A child much given to brooding and calculation and tallying up the day’s unfairnesses. Admittedly, there had been unfairnesses to tally. And whose fault, ultimately, was that?

      The picture comes back to his mind then: his father standing over him, quaking in fury, his brown face even darker than usual. Black eyes glittering like comets. White threads coursing through the kinky mass of his beard. Never have I beheld such an abomination. . . .

      Cain on the ground, mortified, the image of his mother’s naked backside still fresh in his mind.

      His blood still sang at the memory. And at his brother’s voice, later that night, in his ear.—You’ve nobody to blame but yourself, you know.

      The words settled around his heart like an infection.

      That might have been the turning point, Cain thinks now. As he has thought many times over the years. That might have been the moment when he decided, at age fourteen, that one day he was going to have to kill his brother. Not for humiliating him, no. His father