Leaves

by: m. gantee

The LORD did not look with favor upon Cain.  Cain greatly resented this and was crestfallen.  So the LORD said to Cain, “Why are you so resentful and crestfallen?  If you do well, you can hold up your head; but if not, sin is a demon lurking at the door: his urge is toward you, yet you can be his master.”

Why?  Why am I crestfallen?  You do not favor me and yet you ask: why are you crestfallen?

Cain then said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out in the field.”

Brother with brother.  The end of a long day. 

See how the sun burns across the drooping heads of grain, brother.  See the sky and the field: both gold, both pregnant with possibility. 

Brother with brother.  Like a lamb to slaughter.

“I do not hate you.”  Resentment was not Abel’s sin.  It belonged to his brother, his keeper, his murderer.  “I do not hate…”  And it was done.

I see now my neighbor’s truck, moving the more necessary items to his new house, his wife scurrying children in through the door.  The virgin snow, a blank page: becoming written and scribbled with footprints, with dolly tracks – all the busyness of their lives.  The house surely still smells strangely of its former bodies; it will take time for it to grow accustomed to his comings and goings, his wife’s cooking, his children’s middle-school aroma (forgotten socks, unwashed bodies, spilled Hi-C and forgotten Dum-dums).

I go out to meet him and I know that it is him.

It is five degrees and windy and I am only cold as I shake his hand.  I give him my name and, although he is not interrogating me, I tell him where I live, tell him that I live there with my wife and four children.  And, as I tell him these things, I try not to stare at the mark upon his forehead.  And before he tells me, I know already that his name is Jonathan Ross.

I nod and I speak at him, “If your heat cuts out in the middle of February or your water pump quits on you, Jonathan, I will help you.  Your wife and your children yearn for stability, Jonathan.”  I think a moment and then add, “And you, too, Jonathan, yearn for peace.  But outside of an emergency, we will keep to ourselves.  You will tend to your business and I to my own.”  He is not my brother.  I am not his keeper.

And without shaking his hand, I walk away.  It is not normal to walk away without a good-bye in middle America.  It is not normal to tell my neighbor that, outside of an emergency, he should keep to himself while I keep to myself.

It is not normal.  I am a man amongst a field of men, our heads sweaty at the close of every day, our hands dirty with the work of growth and, too, of burying our dead.  We rest and then we work again.  We are, each of us, like a stalk of wheat reaching for the light, nodding beneath the fruits of our labor, rustling in the breeze against the bodies of our neighbors, leaning against the other, singing the wind’s sighs with the other.  It is cold here and yet, we survive: each with the other.  But not him.  Not Jonathan Ross.

I tell my wife of the news as we pull the covers up that night.  She nods and speaks words of substance, of kindness.  I miss the words but I am happy to hear her voice: warm voice coming from warm body and I make a gentle joke about our two bodies, so close in bed.  She winks.  Later, I open the novel I’ve been reading – it’s an old one by Steinbeck. 

Before I’ve made it through a page, I drift off toward the land of Nod.

And then the LORD said to Cain, “If anyone kills Cain, Cain shall be avenged sevenfold.”  So the LORD put a mark on Cain, lest anyone should kill him at sight.

And so Cain was made to wander, restless, apart from the LORD, and settled somewhere east of Eden.