It was from them I had to hide Abel.
But I could not lay him in the earth.
The raven’s eye grew more livid. Scratch, it said, scratch if you value your immunity. Scratch if you value your good name. But how was I to tell a raven that I could no more claw the earth with my fingers than I could receive spittle from his throat?
Scratch, scratch, said the raven.
I cannot, replied the man.
Then my friends and I will do it for you, coward, scoffed the bird.
We sat in unblinking silence, we two brothers, and watched the ravens excavate. Their envious natures made them competitive. Jealous of the sharpness of one another’s beaks, they attacked the ground as though it were their enemy, perforating the soil with a ferocity that must have made the writhing worms beneath fear Armageddon had begun. We sat as still as owls, smelling dung and loam, listening to the breaking of beetles’ backs, the splintering of shields and shells, the juicy skewering of slugs. Until at last there was a shallow trench the size — the length and depth, the shape — of Abel.
Lay him down, said the raven.
I shook my head.
Lay him in, said the raven.
I shook my head.
Lay him on his back, so that he can look up towards the sky, said the raven, and we will cover him, my friends and I.
Only if you promise he will always see the sky, I said. Only if you promise you will never turn him over.
Trust us, said the raven. Lay him down, lay him in, lay him on his back, and we will hide him.
And so I did. And so they did. But the moment there was no more of him above ground — not one straggling hair remaining, no cruelly broken bone, no gentle outline showing through impressionable soil — I remembered I had failed to show a brother’s love, had not put my ear to his breathing in the one hour above all others when it mattered that my hearing should be infallible. Where had been the use of all those years of vigil if I were to prove careless now?
The ravens read my mind. Nothing is ever lost on the envious. For envy is the engine of intelligence. They hopped around the perimeter of the grave they’d made and dared me to unmake it. Scratch here, they said, and we will requite you, claw for claw.
I outstared and outwaited them. Disgusted by their own company, they grew impatient for the night that would not come, began to fear that elsewhere there were other birds doing better out of the interminable suspension of darkness than they were, and one by one — all except my bird — hobbled off, broken-footed and crooked-spirited, to sink their sight, if not their claws, into whatever thing they’d missed.
But when I raked the earth for Abel, he too was no longer there, and the soil was not warm from where he’d been.
Was this how we died? Did the ground below the ground open wide its mouth to receive our bones and swallow down our blood? Were we not available to be visited? Had I seen the very last of Abel?
The bird squinted at me, still astonished by how little I knew.
I called to God: Where is Abel my brother?
All at once the darkness which had been held in an unbearable abeyance, like thunder that would not break, fell around me. All shapes vanished. All solidity dissolved. There was no separating me from the blackness. It was as if space itself had been swallowed, just like my mother’s other child, in a single gulp. Only the raven’s eye gave out light.
I cried: What have You done? Where is my brother?
And God answered through the bird, saying: ‘Wouldst thou dare call unto Me! What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood have I listened to, and thy brother’s generations which thou hast denied. For their sake have I done what I will never again do, and opened the earth’s stomach to receive him. But thee will I not receive.’
Am I, of all people, not to be told what You have done with him? I demanded of the Lord. Am not I my brother’s keeper?
The livid eye narrowed and flashed, like a blade piercing the blanket of the night. The beak snapped shut, as though upon a fly, and then creaked open — a rusted gate emitting rusted sounds.
‘Thou couldst not keep what thou wert given, Cain. Instead thou didst what thou now must name. Speak it: What thou hast done!’
How far back, I wondered, how far back into the history of doing would He allow me to go. Against just such a question as He had put to me, delivered in just such a voice at just such an hour, I had long prepared my answer: Lord, I have done what You fashioned me to do. But I did not have the courage for it now, face to face with the dishevelled raven, blacker than the night wherein I stood and quaked, alone. Instead, I said: Lord of the World, for Whom the whereabouts of the finest grain of sand is certain knowledge, Who cannot be surprised by any thought, of whatever monstrous growth or vile complexion, that flowers in the mind of man — why do You ask to hear what You already know? You knew my deed before I did. Is it out of cruelty that You would make me name it?
‘There is less cruelty, Cain, in owning to the crime than in committing it.’
There was no cruelty, I protested, in its committal.
‘Thou wilt not dare to say there was kindness?’
Would I dare?
Towards him I did not feel anything that was cruel, I said. If there was cruelty in my heart, my brother was not the reason it was there.
‘Thou wilt not dare to say he merely came, by ill-chance, between thee and thine unhappiness?’
Would I dare?
Lord, my unhappiness was great, I said, and had many teeth. But I loved my brother and always wished him whatever the opposite is of harm.
‘Thou wilt not dare to say thou art a thing of love?’
Would I dare? I was a thing of love. The word itself had been my undoing from the moment I coined it. Love — it was giddying just pronouncing it. It did not even try to conceal its delusiveness. You tasted its hollowness before you tasted its fruit. That was its nature. That was its purpose. To put an illusion of substance around a sensation of emptiness. But did I dare to say this? No, I dared nothing. The argument with the Lord which I’d rehearsed a hundred multiplied by a hundred times did not proceed as I’d imagined it. He did not find my reasoning as incontrovertible in actuality as He had during practice. He took less time to weigh the gravity of what I said. Left no room, in His replies, for counter-retorts or controversy. And had the advantage of commanding a time and place that were His choosing, not mine.
As for the bird, here too He had the beating of me. Whenever I spoke, the raven fell into an attitude of derision: hopped from one leg to another, clawed its throat, or collapsed, as though its wings were broken, a misshapen thing with no life left in it, like my brother.
I dared nothing.
I am sorry, Lord, I said. I repent me, Lord, I said. I am nothing, Lord, I said.
A little of the tautness went out of the night. Infinitesimally, the hands that stretched the blackness loosened. There was contrition in the air, and God breathed it.
I postponed a bitter thought, for the hours of vacancy which were to come. It was: He is making me do with words what I refused to do with cereal. I have gained nothing, then, by my stubborness. Unless the loss of everything can be accounted a gain.