Devoured

A broad-shouldered man stood in the middle of his field, only a speck against the setting sun. He crossed his tired arms, pressed tightly against his bare chest. Laying beside him was a kind of shovel: wood-handled with a head of stone, caked with fresh earth and coagulated blood.

“Where’s your brother?” A voice asked.

The man looked out the corner of his eye as he turned around. There was nothing behind him but field.

“Where’s your brother?” the voice came again.

He uncrossed his arms and eyed the landscape. Still there was no one.

“Where is your brother?” the voice repeated.

He re-crossed his arms, set his jaw, and stared hard into a mote of gnats hovering in front of the ruddy sky. He knew who it was.

“Where is Abel?” the voice demanded.

Without blinking, the man looked up to the heavens and asked, “Why do you ask me? Am I my brother’s keeper?”

My brother Yale was born when I was four years old. For all records, his name is David Yale Wall: David after our father and Yale for our mother’s maiden name. But we’ve always just called him Yale. I can’t imagine calling him anything else—except for a few brotherly pet names that tend to revolve around the rear end of the human anatomy: butt-munch, butt-head, butt-nugget, etc..

For the first two or three years, Yale was like every new child: a wide-eyed, speechless mass of flesh and curiosity that more resembled a cheerful and semi-vacant golden retriever than an independent human. And although I was only knee-high and still entirely dependant on our parents’ provision as well, I felt my new brother’s weight fall instantly on me.

There is a photograph that used to hang in the staircase of my parents’ old house. It’s long since been packed into a box and thrown into a storage unit somewhere in Southern California, waiting to be one day re-hung, but I still remember its old home opposite the chipped white banister at the top of the staircase. The photo is from a time when both of us were still short and pudgy-faced, and neither of us yet chose our own clothing. There the two of us sit side by side, obviously posing: Yale in a bright pink t-shirt, me in baby blue, and both of us in scrappy jeans and cheap plastic sunglasses in neon colors that consume our whole faces. Shoulders tilted toward him and my head arched over his, I wrap my arm around him sideways and smile. He’s covered from all angles, and we both give a squinty-eyed, gap-toothed grin.

I remember reading the story of Cain and Abel as a child. In light of many rocky years with Yale after that picture was taken, I concluded that Cain, the evil son, must have been the younger, and Abel, the righteous son, was the older. It was only at twenty-three that I found myself misinformed: Cain was the firstborn, not Abel. That put a glitch in my understanding of the passage.

A younger brother committing fratricide is one thing—evil, maybe, but not surprising—but the elder, ignoring his duty, his privilege, and taking the life of his protected brother? Standing there, crusted in blood and dirt, could Cain have managed to forget? Forgot the thrill that had fallen over him when Abel was born, the new realities that had run, yelling through his mind at the thought of having a friend, a responsibility, a brother. Who would demonstrate for Abel how to best get his way with Adam and Eve? Who would show him the best trails through the rugged, rocky crags down by the river and how not to be swept into the currents? Who would teach him which family livestock were fun to tease and taunt and which to stay clear of? Could he really put that all aside? It was a holy mantle of duty and honor that I only imagine settled weightily on his shoulders like a gleaming piece of new armor the moment he first held Abel in his twiggy, boyish arms. He was meant to be his brother’s keeper.

I’ve thought often of the day that each of my family members will die, not the least of whom being Yale. It’s a hard thing to imagine, one of the few that brings me to tears regardless of where I am—which can steal a little male dignity when I’m wiping my eyes on the bus with the old lady across the aisle watching me sympathetically.

From birth, when my parents had to leave me with my great-grand-parents to race away for an emergency cesarean, Yale’s life has been frought with dangers—most of the more recent ones being of his own making. Coming down with life-threatening infant illnesses, getting hit by cars, performing stupid-but-exciting downhill feats on skateboards rolling at mach speeds—death and lesser grave injuries have rarely been too far-off. For the most part, I’ve tried to be his voice of protective reason—albeit, the one he constantly shrugs off—but a year or so back, I had found an adventure I couldn’t keep to myself.

He was nineteen, and I was twenty-four, and it had been years since he had last clubbed me with a baseball bat—something I’m grateful for. There were four of us in the car that day; we pulled off the road, rolled down a shoddy gravel path, and parked the car beside some dripping bushes somewhere out in the evergreen forests of southwestern Washington. Yale climbed out of the seat behind me and stood still for a second in the moist air as the others got themselves situated. He tucked his fists deep into the front pockets of his black track jacket, and stared at the bridge ahead of him: he was focused on being neither frightened nor overly excited.

As we crossed the line from gravel path to steel bridge, we saw someone jump. The bungee trailed off the side of the bridge behind her as she disappeared into the emerald ravine, and all three of the men with me, including Yale, gaped and froze. I stopped too, at roughly the same place I had the first time that I had come here. It had dawned on me that first time that I might very soon be standing before God, trying to adequately answer why I had thought it a good idea to hurl myself off a bridge in the middle of the woods. This time, however, a different question came at me from the throne of the Almighty: who brought Yale to that bridge and why? I closed my eyes and winced.

The odds of dying on a bungee are dramatically less than the odds of dying in a car on the way to the bungee, and I knew this. From statistical data and from experience—having jumped on a previous trip and again on this one by the time it was Yale’s turn—I knew he was going to be reeled back up to the platform panting and babbling about the innumerable things that your heightened senses experience during a four-second freefall: the sense of liberation, of heaving yourself upon God’s physical laws, of relinquishing all authority to something stronger than you for survival. I knew he would climb back up onto the bridge, remove the harness and walk away shaking but alive, unable to wipe that idiot grin off his face. He would replay the moments of weightlessness backwards and forwards for the rest of the day, and I would listen with the same idiot grin. Still, as he put on the harness in the rain, I could feel my body rock to the thumps of my heart, my hands primed to grab him away from edge and throw him back in the car. I pictured the rest of my life in light of a bungee failure: trying to explain Yale’s death to our parents and then one day having to tell my future wife and kids why they’d never met Uncle Yale. Something in me kept repeating what have you done?

Considering the number of times that, as a teenager, I might have reveled in the thought of throwing that little pain-in-the-ass (another of our brotherly pet names) off a bridge, I stood there horrified at myself for taking my brother out for a fun afternoon of adventure. And that’s what makes Cain’s story so unimaginable. I’d hardly be able to live with the guilt of being in proximity to Yale’s death and not being able to stop it, let alone being the cause. I’ve tried to imagine what it would be to see Yale, bloodied and beaten, dead, and then to look at my blood-spattered hands and recall every blow. It’s something that, as his keeper, I just couldn’t do.

He had said it; yes Cain had said it: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” He’d stood before the God who’d shunned him, and he said it, remembering with each syllable how God had had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain, God had had no regard.

The Lord pressed the silence, “What have you done?”

He kept his arms crossed but let his shoulders fall as he shifted his weight and picked at a patch of dried blood on his forearm.

“The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the dirt.”

He was going to roll into another diatribe, Cain knew it. But none of that mattered: Abel was dead. The Almighty may have chosen his favorite, but Cain had overridden him. He would not be overshadowed. Not by his brother; not now; not ever.

When he was two, Yale came down with a violent case of colic—another item in the list of medical entanglements that have nearly claimed him over the years. Our mother tried desperately to calm his cries: cradling, rocking, cooing, but nothing worked, ever. The only person who could soothe him to the point of rest was our father. And though it wore on him to be up every night, walking the house with his son in his arms, and rise every morning, after perhaps a nap, to make the next dollar that would put food in our mouths, there was something about Yale’s need for him that he couldn’t turn away from. I’ve heard it in the slow, graveled quality of his voice the few times he’s recounted those nights to me. I don’t remember the times that he recalls so clearly, but I do remember standing in our family room years after that, listening to the rattly hum of an orbital sander in my father’s hand out in the back yard.

Every so often he got the itch to buy a piece of junk furniture that we all laughed at and take it out back to restore it. This time, it was a dining table. An ugly, pea green table with a layer of paint nearly as thick as the wood itself and a support structure underneath that consisted of one gigantic, lateral X that obstructed every foot position a person could try. But our father had a vision for it, and every chance he got, he was out in the Los Angeles sun and smog, sanding, measuring, cutting, finishing.

As the sander powered down and its hum trailed off on this particular day, I looked out the rear floor-to-ceiling, slatted windows of our family room to see what he was doing. He stood up from his work, put the sander down, and brushed off his t-shirt with his hands. It was the white t-shirt today. He only used two shirts for yard work and handiwork—both of which had been used for so many years that the cotton had actually become translucent. One was dark blue and covered in holes and had a huge white outline of a stamp and big white lettering that read “MAIL.” The other was a simple, white t-shirt. Today he was in the white one, and as he pulled the white 3M mask from his face, he looked to his left, beside the table, and said something.

In a t-shirt as ragged and as large as my father’s, Yale came into view. My father squatted to the height of the table—which was also about Yale’s height—and looked over the surface he had just finished sanding, feeling it with his hand and pointing things out to Yale. When Yale understood, he was sent to get another tool.

They worked together at that table for months, father and son, while I spent my days playing Legos and watching cartoons in the house, periodically peeking out at them through the window to see what I was missing. According to my father, that’s the way I’ve been since day one. He’s told me more than once, “When you came out, you didn’t make a noise. We used to just put you in your playpen with some toys, and you’d sit there for hours, happy as a clam playing by yourself without a sound. You didn’t need any of us.” He tends to pause there, his gaze drifting, like he’s lost something. But then his commentary picks up, and, for all the annoyance he intends to convey, his voice lightens and dances a little as he says, “Yale’s different, he’s never shut up. When he had colic, he’d cry and cry and I was the only one who could quiet him. He needed us; he needed people.” What my father has never said but has always been saying is that Yale needed him and I didn’t, and that was the difference.

When they finished the table and brought it back into the house, it was beautiful. Resurfaced, restructured, refinished, and my father had even purchased a custom-made top to finish off its metamorphosis. Every time that it was eyed by a guest or discussed by a friend, my father’s words were “Yup, Yale and I made that; that’s our table.” And it was their table; I watched them make it, I listened to them talk about it, and standing in the shadows, hearing “that’s our table” again, I wished it had been mine.

By the time Yale reached high school, those kinds of father-and-son sights were rare. Our father was less a person in Yale’s eyes and more a piñata to be whacked for candy and then ignored. When it came to Christmas presents, Birthday presents, and any privilege he could milk, Yale wanted him; but come any responsibility, wisdom, or discipline offered to him, and our father was the last person Yale wanted anything to do with, or at least so our father saw it. After years of whackings, he had had enough. His heart grew cold and his lips more often spoke bitterness over his younger son than they did adoration. After we’d both moved out, my parents sought to find and purchase their first home, and many of their things were thrown into storage for an indefinite amount of time. One of those things was the dining table. From a distance, I watched it all happen, watched their relationship get put in storage. And I think, in some secret place, it made me smile.

Only days earlier, Cain had been having another conversation with God, a very different one. He stood in this same field, his field, where he grew the wheat and barley for his burnt offering, the offering that had been rejected.

Without sound, he thrust his stone-headed shovel hard into the dark earth. A few inches below the surface it stopped dead, sending a shock up the shaft, through his fingers and arms, right into his teeth. Cain ripped the shovel from the dirt and hurled it into the air in one swift movement, and before it hit the ground, he had both his hands in the dirt, wrenching out a stone the size of a man’s chest that he lifted over his head and heaved in the same direction. He stood like an A-frame, staring at it. The waves of blood were visible, rolling through the veins that bulged from the backs of his clenched fists.

“Why are you so angry?” came the voice.

He stood unmoved, bare toes in the dirt.

“Why is your face so fallen?” God asked again.

Cain tilted his head and looked sideways at the sky. After a few moments, the Lord continued. “If you do things right, won’t I accept you?”

The voice only reminded him of the rejection. That chiding quality, the intended tone of concern, was ultimately still telling him that he was wrong. He was wrong and Abel was right. Abel was wanted.

Then his line of thought bent. It was Abel, his brother. All along, it was his brother; he was the reason—

“Be careful, son,” God interrupted. “Sin is crouching at your doorstep and it’s ready to devour you. You must master it.”

Cain’s eyes grew wide, focused on nothing, and the left corner of his lip began to rise and curl into a grin. He had opened the door.

I know that door. I’ve opened it as well, though I may not have known it.

Though everyone ever looking in at my family—even Yale himself—has assumed that I am the favored Wall son; inside, I’ve known better. For all my father’s care and desire for me, there is something more natural to his connection with Yale. Both my parents have attested to it, confirming what I recognized all along.

I can remember too many conversations with my parents, at home and over the phone after I had moved to Seattle, that somehow found their way to the topic of Yale. If he was our father’s more natural companion, I have been the natural ear of counsel, being privy to all the things that Yale has done to wreck the relationship. “All he ever wants is money, that’s all he calls for;” “whatever I give him is never enough, he’s never happy;” “he better get his act together if he ever expects to be a husband;” “he isn’t even responsible enough to sell that car of his—it’s still taking up space in your grandmother’s driveway, and she keeps coming to me about it even though I’ve told her that I have nothing to do with it.” I’ve heard it all, and I’ve commiserated with him too many times, complaining about my younger brother’s irresponsibility while still trying to sound like I understand Yale as well and am pulling for him—which of course, I am, mostly. But in some deep recess, I fear that if their relationship were restored, mine would be lost.

To the core, I am Yale’s older brother, his keeper, and—God help him—I always will be, so the degree of Cain’s evil action sets my mouth agape. But admitting the number of times I’ve talked about Yale with our father behind his back, ripping him down over the years, taking advantage of the wall built up between them because it opened a space for me—I can’t say that, at least in some small part, I don’t understand the envy that Cain gave himself to.

Cain had been hunted. The sin crouched upon his doorstep, haunched down and flicking its tail to and fro, was no impatient predator. It had been there for some time, probably years, moving slowly from bush to bush through the foliage outside the house, closer to the door with every methodic step: yellow eyes glowing behind the leaves, calculating. Maybe he had caught sight of it in the yard before it reached the door but thought nothing of it. Once or twice, he may have fed it, tossing out an uneaten scrap of meat or a dish of milk.

We can’t tell what all went into Cain’s descent into the beast’s jaws. The story doesn’t tell us how many times he had watched Abel’s gifts received and his own turned away, how close the brothers had been and for how long, what Abel’s attitude toward his older brother was, how Adam and Eve had treated their two sons in light of their own fall into the belly of sin. It certainly doesn’t mention the number of nights Cain lay awake in a cold sweat, haunted by his increasing dreams of murder.

Few of us will ever know the full of extent of Cain’s experience: being eaten alive, swallowed whole by a full-grown, murderous envy. But I, for one, know it in its infancy. It may be only a fraction of the size, but the consuming animal instinct of envy’s cub is no less. Its jaws viced onto my ankle, the sleek black kitten gnaws slowly only because that’s all it can do. I haven’t allowed it to grow, but some days I do allow it to go on nibbling.

Cain allowed himself to be fully devoured by envy, and it cost him Abel. Instead of keeping his brother, he kept himself. Every day, in small doses, those are my choices.