Adam & Eve (30 page)

Sitting on a benchlike slab of rock near the wide mouth of the overhang, I set about stitching up clothes I had envisioned—a full skirt with its drawstring waistband, and a more proper blouse, it, too, with a drawstring neck and full sleeves gathered just above the elbow into soft puffs. The days grew warmer as I sewed, and really the bandeau was a more suitable top, but I wanted to be making something congruent with our changing circumstances.

I think I knew even then that we must prepare to leave our Eden. With the sacrifice of the little lamb and the presence of the feral boy, violence had entered our haven. It was time to go, with or without the sacred codex. At least I had Thom’s flash drive. The boundary between our peaceful paradise and the violent world had turned out to be imaginary. I knew these things, and yet the thought occurred to me that I might teach the boy to talk, to communicate, to express himself, and in that ability—if we only understood each other better—a measure of safety for all might be redeemed.

Often as I glanced out from the overhang at the surrounding forest, I
imagined where Adam might be—under what tree, stooping to gather pecans or walnuts, fishing with a line. In my mind I made pictures of paradise to take with me when we left. Sometimes I merely stared at the beautiful world, unenhanced by any artifice save the vague boundaries implied by the periphery of my vision; I memorized the vast, wild landscape all the way to the straight-line horizon of ocean stretching across the gap between hills. I rarely imagined that the two men were together, but sometimes because of the heat I imagined the three of us, naked, refreshing ourselves by splashing in the stream. At odd, startling moments, sharp as a sudden thorn, involuntary memory presented the splayed lamb and its bloody, vacant chest. I thought of Rembrandt’s painting of a splayed ox, and I thought of Adam’s desire to draw and paint. I hoped he would find other subjects for art.

One night around the dinner campfire, Adam told us he had met the feral boy in the woods. “He watches us,” Adam said. “He noticed Riley’s knife and how I use it to peel sugarcane. He came to me and put his hand on the knife. He wanted me to give it to him.”

“I hope you didn’t,” Riley remarked as he glanced to see if the knife still hung from Adam’s sash.

“No. But I showed him how to chip away at a likely piece of stone. How to flake the chert with another rock.”

“He’ll make a stone knife,” Riley said.

“I expect so.”

Before they left the overhang the next day, Adam tried to give the knife back to Riley, but he refused. “It’s better off in your hands,” Riley said as though Adam were his revered older brother. With a quick grin, Riley added, “I’m going to rob a beehive today. I’ll take one of your pottery jars, if you don’t mind, to collect honey.”

Neither of the men urged me to come down with them.

I was surprised when sunset had pinked the sky, and neither Riley nor Adam had returned. I didn’t mind because I had only the hemming of the skirt left to finish to complete my outfit. I had decided on a balloon hem for the skirt,
to echo the puffs of the sleeves. A regular hem with its definite edge would be too stark. It made me smile to think I would somewhat resemble a pumpkin—probably the vegetable look was not haute couture this year in Paris. Nor the color orange. It seems strange now, looking back, that an interest in the aesthetics of clothing began in the wilderness for me, a woman who had always been rather indifferent to fashion.

It had been a sweltering day, even in the shade of the overhang. I could almost taste the sweetness of the honey Riley intended to bring home, and I lined up halves of pecans and walnuts on a stone for later honey-dipping. Little pieces of candy, they’d be. I set the stone closer to the fire to warm and returned to my sewing, enjoying the slick feel of the needle in my fingers. If only we had chocolate to add to nutmeats and honey—

Suddenly I realized I couldn’t see well. I brought the fabric up closer to my eyes and then glanced into the distance. Only the last blush of sunset hung in the sky. A wave of worry washed over me, and I set aside my sewing. I built up the fire to be a welcoming beacon and moved the heavy stone with its array of nutmeats closer to the fire. On one of the shallow clay bowls Adam had fashioned, I arranged a pyramid of various fruits.

Finally, after I put on my new outfit, there was nothing else to do. I sat still and studied the darkening landscape before me—how the loss of light shaded the vastness and melded the varieties of trees and spaces. Eventually I began to eat the warmed nuts and selected a yellow-green pear to bite into; I let myself idly wish for a good Stilton cheese as a complement. I thought of Thom, how on the airplane flying to Amsterdam we had been surprised when the flight attendant served Stilton and pears in a basket and a small carafe of sauvignon blanc. I saw Thom’s face again, his springy graying curls, his thick glasses. His restless leg syndrome had set in, and he had been shifting uncomfortably in his seat until the little picnic basket of cheese, fruit, and wine was presented. Such a large man, and, I realized, he had just been beginning to put on weight.

How difficult would it be to make cheese?

Probably Adam had some idea about how to do it. Odd, how he never suggested projects for other people, though he had an endless supply of ideas
for himself. I enjoyed thinking of the perfection of Adam’s body and of Riley’s freckled grin. The more he stayed in the sun, the more freckled Riley became. And boyish, too. This so-called Eden was a place where we could revert to something we hadn’t finished being.

In high school, with Janet Stimson, I had sewn a lot, though Janet was the better seamstress. I remembered a plaid jumper I’d made with six gores—in rich fall browns and golds, a touch of red stripe—with suspenders. I had sewn the whole thing together on my grandmother’s ancient treadle sewing machine before I showed it to Janet, who then pointed out, or rather asked, why I hadn’t matched the plaids. My homemade jumper was all higgledy-piggledy. Still the colors were nice, and I sometimes wore it. Autumn leaves, I had thought; fall is a jumble of color, not lined up in neat stacks and rows.

There was Adam.

In one hand, he carried a pair of neatly folded men’s trousers, and he was wearing a shirt, unbuttoned like a jacket with the tail hanging loosely over his short orange sarong. It was Riley’s shirt, and when Adam came nearer, I read the label above the pocket: “F. Riley.” As Adam came to me he held out his arms, his face a mask of misery. Automatically, I rose and walked into his arms. With one hand he held my cheek against his bare chest. The pad of folded trousers pressed like a flat cushion against my back, against the burn scar.

“Lucy,” he said. I heard him swallow. “Lucy, I had to bury Riley today.”

“My God,” I said. I swayed and would have fallen but Adam supported me, led me to sit down. “What do you mean?” I was engulfed with horror. It couldn’t be true. This moment wasn’t real. I had never imagined this.

“The boy killed him,” Adam said.

“Why! Why would he?”

Adam shrugged and shook his head. “The boy must have dropped down, out of an acacia tree. He must have waited till Riley hobbled along under the tree, and then dropped down like a panther onto his shoulders.”

“But Riley was strong. The boy was just a boy.”

“His weight would have taken Riley down—his weak ankle—and … And I think he cut Riley’s throat before they hit the ground.”

“I want to see Riley.”

“I buried him. That wasn’t all the boy did. He … he defaced him.” Adam began to weep. “And … and he cut out—”

“Stop,” I cried out. “Stop.”

My God! I thought of the Aztec sacrifices.

Adam took his arm away from me, covered his eyes with both hands, and sobbed into the folded trousers. As he gasped and wept, he said he shouldn’t have let Riley go alone. He said he shouldn’t have shown the boy how to make a knife. He asked what did it mean to save Riley, if he hadn’t been able to save him, finally. Incoherently, he said these things many times, that Riley was like his younger brother Fred. That Fred had saved him once … that Riley was innocent. That the war, the war, the war, the war—and here he began to slide into incoherence. Finally he stood up and said that we must leave.

“The cliff?”

“The whole garden. Everything here. We have to leave.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “We’ll go in the morning.” I thought about the French horn case, but I said nothing.

Nothing—certainly no message hidden in a bottle—was worth staying here. The peace was broken. It was violence, murder—
igtiyal
—not knowledge, that blighted Eden. The Bible story was rotten at the core, truly wrong on that score. Knowledge, creativity, were two keys to salvation; killing was the hermaphroditic mother and father of all sins. I pictured the slender savage boy dropping down, a chipped stone blade in his teeth, onto freckle-faced Riley’s shoulders and back—Cain slaying his brother Abel.

“I’ll give it to you now,” Adam said, but I couldn’t think what he might mean. Riley’s heart?

Adam turned to the pile of stones. He picked up one and hurled it as hard as he could into the trees below. We heard it strike among the leaves and fall. Because Riley is murdered, I thought, he wants to stone the world. It was dark, and he was exhausted, but one after another, Adam hard-hurled rocks. They thunked and bounced and crashed with distinctive impacts into leaves and grass, against boulders and tree trunks. With a degree of awe, I watched Adam’s fluid power in the cocking and release of his body as he hurled stones from his arsenal till the pile was diminished, and I saw what they had concealed.
He heaved a sigh and turned toward me. There was the hard black case of what might have housed a French horn.

Panting, he sighed again.

“You hid it,” I said slowly. I made my voice explanatory, not accusing. “Because you didn’t want me to leave.”

With averted eyes, Adam slightly nodded.

“I understand.”

When he raised his eyes, I saw shame, sorrow, repentance, trust—and hope. That sweet sincere mingling of trust and hope—where had I seen it before? In the tawny eyes of Pierre Saad, when, seated in the whitewashed room, he had lifted his eyes from the Bible, read the opening verses of Genesis, looked at me, and asked for my help.

And so, now, because Adam repented of his theft, I was to have another chance to deliver the sacred texts. I was to have another chance to salvage failure. I would be able to bring back something valuable to Pierre Saad, should Adam and I find a path back to the world.

“Come sit by the fire,” I said, in a voice that seemed unreal. “You’ve had nothing to eat. I ate up all the nuts, but we have fruit, many kinds of fruit you can eat.”

Like a child, he did as he was told. I handed him the earthy clay bowl he had made filled with the medley of fruit—apples, pears, bananas, oranges, quince, pomegranate. We were both very tired.

“Why is there no blood on Riley’s shirt?” I suddenly asked. “What about the trousers?”

“Riley had taken off his clothes before the attack. The trousers were folded, just as they are now.” Adam’s sentences moved by fits and starts. “He had hung the shirt on a thornbush. He was wearing only his underwear.”

For a long time the words hung in the rock room.

“Why?” I finally asked.

“Maybe he wanted to wash his clothes.”

Was I thinking or speaking? Lull, lull, lullaby. It was a place for lulling that I wanted to create. For myself. For Adam. How to relieve his anguish? Could peace be fashioned like a bowl from river mud?

Put your head in my lap, Adam. Cry. Sob. Curse. Try to rest. You’ll be all right. We’ll be all right. Riley’s gone. We’ll leave here. We’ll leave here in the morning.

Before he slept, Adam asked me if I did not want to open the French horn case. I explained it was not only locked but sealed, the better to protect its contents. I thought of the ancient words cradled within. Words describing how it all began, Pierre Saad had said, how people came into being on Earth.

That night I dreamed I was walking among the redwoods when the wild boy dropped down on my shoulder. His hair was flaming, and he blazed like a cherubim, his mouth full of dagger teeth. I woke up and stifled my scream with my own hand.

Before our flight from Eden the next day, we put on clothing. I dressed in my new skirt and blouse, and Adam wore Riley’s shirt and pants. All day we walked: past the ruined garden, beyond the magnolias and redwoods, and over the grassy plains into the rough wilderness. Riley’s pants were a little short on Adam and left his white ankles exposed.

Before we passed the boundaries, we encountered the feral boy once more. He leaped from above, as he had done to Riley, as in my prophetic dream. All his weight and force hit my chest, and I fell backward and down. His member was erect, he gripped a chipped stone blade in his hand, and he was wild with passion. He straddled me and tried to enter me in the single desperate moment he had before Adam pulled him away. He succeeded only in tearing open the seam where the sleeve joined the bodice of my new orange blouse.

Adam took the stone knife from the boy and tossed it aside; he placed the boy on his feet and shoved him roughly away from us. Adam did not try to hurt the boy; he just shoved him, each time farther and farther away. I sat on the ground, legs spread, tears streaking my cheeks, my face set in appalled and furious defiance. I bared my teeth, ready to bite.

The boy would not be shoved away. He snapped his jaws and pointed at me and at himself. With contorted face, he strained to speak but only made strangled noises, none of which were necessary to express what was evident: that he believed I should belong to him.

Because the boy fought to come back after each rough shove, Adam began to strike his shoulders and arms with his fists. Each time Adam hit the boy a more forceful blow—sometimes a slap across the face, sometimes a kick on the backside, finally a hard blow to the side of his belly.

The boy retreated a little, but he found his stone knife and returned. The gray knife resembled a dirty icicle. With complete coolness, Adam easily leaped away from the boy’s frantic assaults and made no attempt to wield his own steel knife. Tears of frustration dashed from the boy’s eyes, and when he could not land any slash or stab, he began to spit at Adam. To stop him, Adam caught the boy’s wrist, wrenched the knife from his hand, and threw the knife on the ground behind himself. Then Adam slapped first one cheek, then the other, very hard. The boy cried out, and tears gushed from his eyes. Suddenly, he turned and ran.