Surviving the Flood by Stephen Minot

Author:Stephen Minot
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504010986
Publisher: The Permanent Press

XIX

BROTHERS

Cain. How many times had I studied his story? The priests had us discuss it, recite it, weigh its lessons, analyze the motives (sibling rivalry? rage against divine favoritism?), act it out (taking turns as aggressor, victim, divine voice), render its scenes in paint. Sometimes Cain’s story seemed as important as Adam’s.

For all our teachers’ efforts, though, we were working only with shadows of the real story, flickerings of words arranged to give us some notion of events and feelings locked within us. The words did not touch us deeply. “It would be terrible,” we said, “to be crossed by a brother”; yet we felt no terror. “How awful to feel betrayed by the Great Yahweh”; this with no sense of awe. How could we imagine it?

It was all word play and I was good at it. I won praise in spite of a tendency for irreverence which was as natural to me as the laughter of songbirds. I read the text closely—closer than many of my more orthodox classmates. I noted that Yahweh said sin might be lurking at Cain’s door even before a sinful thought had entered his heart: Could Cain really be considered a free agent? I pointed out that the man was a fruit grower: Was raising apples an echo of the original theft, setting the Yahweh against him from the start? And Cain’s flight—how similar to that of his parents’ when they were his age, both couples heading east under a cloud: Was fratricide just a darker, more acrid fruit? Was murder or the dream of it just another stage of growing up, becoming adult?

All those questions were games to enliven the tedium of class. What I didn’t suspect until later was that beneath the story we read and analyzed and satirized after class was a real story. Beneath the word Cain, which was used so carelessly when we “raised Cain,” lay a knowledge, not words on scrolls but episodes deep within us seen only in the flicker of dreams.

I knew as I blocked the air from my brother’s throat that I had been this way before without knowing it. And when in the long succession of years since then I have reread Cain’s story, I return once more with fresh alarm.

All this in retrospect. At the time there was no reflection, only struggle. A tempest roaring in my ears, a red glare blinding my eyes, this was far from noble combat—brutish grunting, gasping, farting with effort. Out to maim; out to kill.

No recollection but fragments—a clutter of pictures, a rubble of memory. Bulging eyes look up at me, astonished. My own? His? Mine reflected in his? Shouting. How can he shout?—his face turning to plum, mouth a mere bruise. No breath to speak. No air for a whisper. Yet a gale of shouting. I am lifted and fall again, lifted and fall. My brother’s neck rises in my clenched hands, snapping the head up and smashing it back against the grain-strewn floor. I recall doing this with a gourd.

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