Chapter Five: The Wages of Sin
Abel left early that morning, as he always did, with a staff in his hand and a song half-formed on his lips. Cain watched him go from the doorway, his jaw tight, his eyes like flint.
"Will you not eat first?" I asked Cain.
"The ground won't wait for my hunger," he said, though he did not move.
Only when Abel's figure had grown small against the hills did Cain step out into the light. All day an unease walked beside me. The sky was clear, but my spirit felt storm heavy. I ground grain until my arms ached, shaped the dough, tended the fire, all the while listening for their voices to rise on the wind as they often did—arguing, laughing, calling the sheep. That day, there was nothing. As the sun lowered, painting the red earth in long shadows, Adam came in from his work.
"Where are the boys?" he asked, wiping sweat from his brow.
"With the flock and the fields," I answered, but the words felt brittle.
"They should have come by now."
We waited as the sky darkened to bruised purple. A lone sheep wandered close to the house, bleating in that lost, panicked way they have when separated from the flock. My heart stumbled.
"Adam," I said, "go and see."
He reached for his staff. "Cain will bring Abel home," he said, as though saying it could make it so.
"No," I said, too quickly. "I will go with you."
We walked into the deepening twilight, the red earth cooling beneath our feet, the wind holding its breath. The closer we drew to the fields, the more wrong the silence felt. No insects hummed. No birds called. Even the air seemed to recoil.
Then we saw him. Abel lay on the ground as if he had fallen asleep mid-step, face turned slightly toward the sky, one arm curled under him, the other outstretched. For a heartbeat I thought he had only stumbled. I thought I would call his name, and he would rise and laugh at my fear.
But the earth around his head was dark and wet, and the smell of blood met us before our knees touched the soil.
"Abel," I whispered.
My voice broke on the second syllable. I touched his cheek. It was already cooling. Adam sank to the ground beside me with a sound I had never heard from him before—a torn, animal noise that belonged to a creature in a trap. His hands hovered above our son, shaking, as if afraid that touching would make it real.
"Abel," he said, louder, rougher, as though he could call his breath back into him. "Abel, my son. Get up. Get up."
The only answer was the slow, seeping whisper of blood into dust.
"Cain," I breathed. The name came like a revelation and a curse.
"Where is Cain?" Adam lifted his head, eyes wide, as if seeing what I had already understood.
The wound on Abel was not the work of beast or accident. It was the mark of deliberate force, of hands that knew their brother's softness and used it against him.
"Cain!" Adam's voice tore through the fields. "Cain, where are you?"
Only the hills replied, echoing his cry back in fragments.
I gathered Abel's head into my lap as I had when he was a child, when night terrors shook him awake. His hair was stiff with drying blood. I rocked where I sat, though rocking could soothe nothing now.
This was not the redemption, I thought, the words burning bitter in me. This was the multiplication of the curse.
When Adam went searching for Cain, I stayed with the body. The sky grew black. One by one, stars appeared, indifferent witnesses. The dust drank my son and did not protest. I pressed my fingers into the soil stained with his life and felt again the weight of that first disobedience.
"I was meant to be Ezer," I whispered to the night, to the God who seemed far, to the spirit world that once felt so near. "Help like You are help. But I could not save the garden. I could not save this child. I brought life into the world, and death has claimed it from my own hands."
A memory rose unbidden: Abel as a boy, sitting with me on this same red earth, asking about the garden of God. His eyes had been full of wonder then, not yet shadowed by his brother's envy, not yet closed in this awful stillness.
"Your ways are not our ways," I murmured, repeating the words I had once told him. "But, Lord, how can Your ways require a mother to bury the son she bore?"