“He’s lying down there,” he says.
Cain looks in the direction he’s pointing. Perhaps twenty yards away a body is lying half in the stream. It’s on its back with one arm and one leg in the water. Fortunately the head is clear, Cain thinks. But when they get to the bank and see that it is indeed Jared who’s lying there, he realizes that’s not exactly relevant. The stomach and all one side of the body up to the shoulder are covered in blood. The face has been ripped open from the temple to the chin, where the jawbone and some teeth are exposed, brilliant white against the red of the flesh.
As Cain kneels down beside the body, a swarm of small insects takes to the air. At first he attempts to pull the ripped shirt free to see how serious it is, but the blood has begun to clot, the material is stuck fast, so instead he runs his fingers down the edge of the wound. To his dismay they meet no resistance but slip straight into the side of the body.
He removes his fingers and lays the flat of his hand against the body’s brow.
“He’s dead,” he says without turning. “His forehead is ice-cold.”
He stands up slowly. The two brothers have known Jared all their lives. Both lower their heads and stand completely quiet for a moment. Cain sees that a tear is running down Abel’s cheek. In the midst of the shock over Jared’s death, he feels his brother’s tears pleasing him. He’ll put a hand on his shoulder, he thinks, if any moment is right for such a gesture, it must be this one, and he half raises his hand, but then pulls back as a crow caws somewhere nearby and seems to shatter the moment. It’s as if they return to the world again.
Abel raises his head, brushes away his tears with a hand.
“We should pull him out of the water at least, shouldn’t we?” he says.
“I’ll do it,” says Cain. He goes into the stream, takes hold of the arms and pulls him up into a sitting position, clasps his hands around the chest, stands up, and gently pulls him out. He leans backward so that the corpse’s head won’t fall forward but will be supported on his breast, which is soon soaked in blood.
Safely out, he takes a rest and looks around for a suitable place to lay him. The grass by the stream seems unworthy, as if he were just some dead fish or other they’d slung away, he thinks, and settles for the three oak trees that form a small grove a little way into the meadow behind them.
“Was he groaning?” says Abel. “What kind of noise was that?”
“If you’re trying to be funny, you’re not succeeding,” says Cain.
“It wasn’t a joke. I heard something.”
“One side of his body’s open,” says Cain. “And his forehead is stone cold. He’s as dead as he can possibly be.”
Step-by-step he drags the corpse along. It’s not that heavy, but it’s difficult to handle all the same. The loose arms swing from side to side and knock against his thighs, while the legs, trailing with their heels on the ground, are pliable and yielding, and their lack of resistance almost causes him to lose his grip several times, and he is forced to heave the corpse up a bit to get a better hold. The intention of letting the head lie back on his breast is abandoned after a few yards, it falls forward unrelentingly and nods in time with his steps.
“It was just air you heard,” he says, looking back at Abel, who’s following a few steps behind. “There’s still air in his lungs, and in his intestines.”
Abel nods without speaking. Cain glances down at the face of the corpse again, it’s so close that he can see the fibers in the flesh and the smooth sinews that run through it. He forces his eyes away and out across the forest, only to look down at it again a moment later.
Then they reach the trees. Cain places the body carefully down on the ground, where it seems to be swathed in the soft light of the setting sun, whose fullness smoothes the contours of the injured face and gives it an almost peaceful expression.
He wipes his hands on the grass to get the blood off them, but they’re still sticky, and he decides to wash them clean in the stream.
Abel has knelt down by the side of the corpse. He’s running his hand over the gory side, poking his fingers tentatively into the wound.
“That was some killer blow!” he says.
“Treat him with respect, please,” says Cain, and starts walking away. The disc of the sun has now almost completely sunk beneath the wooded hills in the west. The valley below him lies in shadow, and almost all the valley sides as well. Like a sea, the darkness rises up the sides of the mountains. Soon it will cover them too, Cain thinks, and wonders what they should do. They won’t be able to bring a corpse down to the valley before nightfall. So they’ll have to spend the night at the hut and carry the corpse up there with them. That, too, might be difficult to do in time. The thought of carrying the dead body through the forest in the dark is repulsive, but if they must, they must.
He rinses his hands clean in the cold water, dries them on his trousers, and returns to Abel, who’s still hunched over the body. His back is turned, and Cain can’t see what he’s doing until he comes up to him.
He has thrust his entire hand into the corpse’s side and is moving it gently back and forth as if he’s searching for something in there.
“What are you doing!” says Cain.
“Keep calm,” says Abel. He stares concentratedly into the air as if listening for something. His movement stops for a few seconds, and then his hand slowly comes out. Out from between his bloody fingers slips the smooth surface of an intestine.
“He can’t feel anything,” Abel says, looking up at Cain as his hand pulls the intestine farther and farther out. “No more than earth does, or water.”
Cain bends down, grasps his brother’s wrist, and squeezes so tightly that he’s forced to let go.
Abel stares furiously up at him.
“We show the dead respect,” Cain says as calmly as he can. “Whether he feels anything or not has nothing to do with it. Tomorrow he’ll be buried. Do you think his guts should be hanging out of his stomach then?”
“Who d’you think you are?” says Abel. Without taking his eyes off him, he rises and stands so close that Cain can see how his pupils narrow when his head leaves the shadow of the tree and sunlight strikes his eyes.
“Is this to do with us, or him?” says Cain, nodding toward the dead, pleased to have an excuse to escape his brother’s gaze.
With its mouth open, the dead face lies there. Its blood is red and glistening against the pale green grass, its eyes completely empty.
“There’s something I don’t understand about you,” says Abel. “We’ve been forbidden, you said just a little while ago. Now you’ve said it again. But who’s doing the forbidding?”
Cain meets his brother’s glance once more. In the same instant he realizes something awful. The eyes were closed when they arrived.
Now they’re open. “Abel,” he says. “Weren’t his eyes closed just now?”
Abel looks at him with a mixture of scorn and surprise.
“Yes,” he says.
When the import of his brother’s question strikes home, Abel turns quickly and looks down at the dead body, kneels by it, and places his hand on its neck.
He holds it there for several seconds. Then he gets up, retreats a few steps, and says without looking at his brother:
“He’s alive.”
“But he’s ice-cold! And those injuries. .”
“His heart’s beating anyway.”
Cain clasps his hands impotently and stares up at the sky above him. No, no, no, he thinks. It can’t be true. Could this broken body be alive? With its stomach open. With its intestines spread over the grass?
Then he says: “I don’t believe you.”
“Feel for yourself,” says Abel.