segmented and broken as coals, and then they disappeared and all that was left was the water and darkness and then the light of stars forming against the dark outlines of treetops.
The ancient world. Sounds of water and a breeze, that mountain lit only by stars. A small band of us sleeping on the ground in these trees, waiting for morning when we could hunt. Nothing changed in all that time, in all the world.
I walked into the trees to my bedroll, laid out my sleeping bag and tucked inside, and I wish now I could have slept under hides. I wish now I could have gone all the way back, because if we can go far enough back, we cannot be held accountable.
6
A LL THE AIR GONE OUT OF THE WORLD, AND MY RIBS PINNED down, being crushed. An enormous weight, and I woke to my grandfather sitting on me. One hand on my face, pushing my head back against the ground, his other hand high in the air, holding his knife, ready to slash my throat like the throat of any sacrificial animal.
My legs moving on their own, kicking at the ground, and my left arm, free, punching into his side, but the rest of me was pinned.
He was staring down at me, that wide expanse of face featureless and the color of bone in starlight. No recognition, only a blank look into the hollowness of the world, and that knife held high, ready.
I could have cried out, could have asked my father for help, but that would have required time and sequence, one act following another, and my grandfather above me with that knife was outside of time. That moment an eternity and also an instant, and it held every other moment between the two of us.
Waterwheels here at the creek, his thick fingers holding an impossibly tiny nail in place against a thin slat of wood, tapping with a hammer, tapping lightly, careful not to split. Placing that slat between uprights in the stream, and the wheel coming to life immediately, a pulse to its revolutions, a pause between each of the two flings from water, and that pulse a reflection of our own blood.
Those hands on the pier at the edge of the lake holding a catfish in moonlight. Slick dark dream created from water, from water and mud and whatever quickens in each living thing, mouth wide and gasping, rimmed by tendrils, an ugliness and beauty that would not be believed. Hands that never hesitated, that ripped that hook from deep inside the fish even if every organ inside was attached, even if the entire stomach had to be pulled out through that mouth. The tail churning side to side through air that had no thickness, nothing to push against, and the flesh in folds, loose-skinned, invented too quickly.
The lake with its own stagnant breath always close, rotting of dead carp and birds caught in the tules, rotting of algae on the rocks, baked each day in the sun and then exhaling at night. The air thick with water and rot and these mudcats rising out of that, and my grandfather made of that also. A presence that had never begun but had always been.
I waited for that knife to come down. Nothing I could do against it, my throat exposed and the rest of me helpless. My grandfather as large and unfeeling as mountains.
I canât help but think now of Abraham and Isaac, of course, and I wonder whether every story in the Bible comes from Cain. A riddle, all of it, testing a man and finding him worthy because heâs willing to kill? Cain as our goodness, our faith, our murderousness as our salvation? No guidance is possible from the Bible. Only confusion.
And what does it mean that this was my grandfather, not my father? How do we read our lives when the story has veered off from what we know? A grandfather reaches further back, is more a father than the father himself. For him, the sacrifice is greater, the erasure reaching further into the future, but he also feels nothing, and so is there any sacrifice at all?
My grandfather did not come from god. Iâm sure of that. He came from something older, unthinking, unfeeling. He came from
The ancient world. Sounds of water and a breeze, that mountain lit only by stars. A small band of us sleeping on the ground in these trees, waiting for morning when we could hunt. Nothing changed in all that time, in all the world.
I walked into the trees to my bedroll, laid out my sleeping bag and tucked inside, and I wish now I could have slept under hides. I wish now I could have gone all the way back, because if we can go far enough back, we cannot be held accountable.
6
A LL THE AIR GONE OUT OF THE WORLD, AND MY RIBS PINNED down, being crushed. An enormous weight, and I woke to my grandfather sitting on me. One hand on my face, pushing my head back against the ground, his other hand high in the air, holding his knife, ready to slash my throat like the throat of any sacrificial animal.
My legs moving on their own, kicking at the ground, and my left arm, free, punching into his side, but the rest of me was pinned.
He was staring down at me, that wide expanse of face featureless and the color of bone in starlight. No recognition, only a blank look into the hollowness of the world, and that knife held high, ready.
I could have cried out, could have asked my father for help, but that would have required time and sequence, one act following another, and my grandfather above me with that knife was outside of time. That moment an eternity and also an instant, and it held every other moment between the two of us.
Waterwheels here at the creek, his thick fingers holding an impossibly tiny nail in place against a thin slat of wood, tapping with a hammer, tapping lightly, careful not to split. Placing that slat between uprights in the stream, and the wheel coming to life immediately, a pulse to its revolutions, a pause between each of the two flings from water, and that pulse a reflection of our own blood.
Those hands on the pier at the edge of the lake holding a catfish in moonlight. Slick dark dream created from water, from water and mud and whatever quickens in each living thing, mouth wide and gasping, rimmed by tendrils, an ugliness and beauty that would not be believed. Hands that never hesitated, that ripped that hook from deep inside the fish even if every organ inside was attached, even if the entire stomach had to be pulled out through that mouth. The tail churning side to side through air that had no thickness, nothing to push against, and the flesh in folds, loose-skinned, invented too quickly.
The lake with its own stagnant breath always close, rotting of dead carp and birds caught in the tules, rotting of algae on the rocks, baked each day in the sun and then exhaling at night. The air thick with water and rot and these mudcats rising out of that, and my grandfather made of that also. A presence that had never begun but had always been.
I waited for that knife to come down. Nothing I could do against it, my throat exposed and the rest of me helpless. My grandfather as large and unfeeling as mountains.
I canât help but think now of Abraham and Isaac, of course, and I wonder whether every story in the Bible comes from Cain. A riddle, all of it, testing a man and finding him worthy because heâs willing to kill? Cain as our goodness, our faith, our murderousness as our salvation? No guidance is possible from the Bible. Only confusion.
And what does it mean that this was my grandfather, not my father? How do we read our lives when the story has veered off from what we know? A grandfather reaches further back, is more a father than the father himself. For him, the sacrifice is greater, the erasure reaching further into the future, but he also feels nothing, and so is there any sacrifice at all?
My grandfather did not come from god. Iâm sure of that. He came from something older, unthinking, unfeeling. He came from
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