He Who Cannot Die Read online

  Of course, she never lived to see the bible. Neither did Dad. I’ve always been thankful for that. Not that Dad would have ever done anything but throw his hands in the air and tell his drinking buddies that the damned thing wasn’t even about him, and he certainly never ate a stinking piece of devil fruit.

  Dad was as simple and stupid and primitive as they came. Don’t get me wrong. The man you know as Adam had such a good heart compared to other men of the time. Like I said, he was just simple. And stupid. He did what Mom told him to do, brought her what she told him to bring her, hunted what she told him to hunt, and farmed what she told him to farm. That was his life, and many other men ridiculed him for his passive nature when it came to women. He was not a man of emotion, pride, or pettiness. He took care of his family, and I’m sure he worked until his dying day to do so. I learned how to work without complaint from Dad. I first learned just how silly such things as tempers and rage really were by watching him as well. Other men, and it seemed nearly all other men, were testosterone-filled jerks. Dad was organically peaceful and kind. Simple and stupid, but with a character to appreciate.

  Abel. He was one of those testosterone-filled jerks, and with what I can only assume was a more developed brain than most, he took it to another level completely. Other men would demand, and argue, and fight. Abel was ridiculously intelligent for the time, often thinking ahead six steps further than those around him. He was a sociopath, perhaps even psychotic. He was a charming bully. He loved to put unnecessary doubt and fear into those who surrounded him, and he was so charismatic while he did it. Somehow people adored him in the very moments he was ripping varying dynamics of their lives to shreds.

  Seth was so young that he never could see beyond Abel’s charisma, and so he hated me when I killed Abel. Seth was a boy as simple and gentle-hearted as his father, though also more intelligent. All of our minds had to have been passed down to us from Mom.

  I remember I would spend the day teaching Seth how to set fish traps in the river or properly work a field while Abel lazed around watching us labor, laughing and making crude jokes that appealed to Seth’s immaturity. We were lucky if Abel got in two weeks’ worth of work over the span of a year. I suppose he just knew the rest of us would do it with or without him, so he rarely bothered and rarely cared.

  Abel did whatever he could, as often as he could, to drive wedges between Seth and me. Seth was a smart kid, though. He knew what kind of man I was and dusted off most of Abel’s bullshit as silliness and absurdity until the end. Sometimes, though, thick Abel-driven wedges had to be fixed.

  It’s been so long that I don’t remember many specific examples of those wedges. Some have stayed with me as if they just occurred. One night Abel slipped into Seth’s bed, and told him he had just heard the news that three wolves were hunting the village, coming into homes, and gobbling up children while they slept. “Cain told me it’s not his duty to protect you, but don’t worry. I won’t let those wolves anywhere near you, even if I must die.” Abel just did shit like that, constantly.

  But shit like that isn’t death-worthy. It’s just annoying as hell. It was the way Abel constantly hurt everyone, took what he wanted when it didn’t belong to him, and somehow made people dislike or even hate themselves and others, all for his own deranged pleasure.

  One time he told Hamuth, the hoariest elder in our village, that he had found his son.

  Hamuth had been mourning the disappearance of his son Chipa’s for nearly a year, ever since Chipa never returned from a trip to the North to scout the movement of the elk herd.

  People disappeared back then. We all knew that the wilderness had taken him; Hamuth had even come to accept it. Then, for some reason, Abel convinced Hamuth that he had seen Chipa in the village beyond the mountains, that his son had promised he was coming back very soon, and that he would return with great abundance and a harem of women to share with his father when he did.

  Abel made himself a personal savior to Hamuth, a messenger of hope. He would recount fake and fantastic stories of his ongoing encounters with Chipa, always with the promise that Hamuth’s son was returning home to him in days or weeks.

  Hamuth became more depressed as time passed and his son never returned as repeatedly promised. Abel laughed to me and thrived in the power he had over a grieving father. It was only after a depressed and dying Hamuth could not be found one morning that I learned what Abel had done via his own narcissistic confession. “That half-brain packed up and went searching for his son!” Abel declared, as our family picked the meat from venison legs later that night. “And he did it when winter will soon be upon us.” Abel kept laughing as he mulled it over. Hamuth never returned to the village.

  Before Hamuth, there was Osie, the village underdog who came home one sundown with more than two dozen rabbits slung and hanging from branches across his shoulders. Word in the village was that it was a new record, and if anyone needed a win in life, it was Osie.

  Abel immediately became best friends with the young man, stole the rabbits that very night while Osie slept, decapitated them, and buried their heads in neat little rows in Osie’s field with just the ears protruding from the earth like wilted carrot tops. The next morning, Abel showed up to eagerly help Osie skin and harvest his rabbits, then angrily swore to the gods that he would find the person who did this and punish him for it. Abel went throughout the village, and like a true hero he interrogated every possible subject. I don’t even know what he did with the bodies of those hare; he likely just threw them into the woods and let them decay. He didn’t care about the rabbits. He didn’t care how much that meat and fur could help Osie or anyone else. He loved pressing anger and anxiety into others, and he loved being applauded by them while he did it.

  I only was privy to all this because Abel enjoyed boasting of his awfulness to me for some reason. I captured and took a couple rabbits to Osie the next day, but I knew better than to out Abel for his crime. The repercussion with Abel would never be worth it.

  All this was the man Abel was, constantly and without end. I accepted him as my brother but hated him as a human. I hated how much everyone seemed to admire him, when he had so deeply hurt all of them in one way or another. Killing him was never on my to-do list, though, until after I met and loved Racheele.

  Abel saw something he wanted in her. That desire festered inside of him. He eventually went too far with his greed. And for that, he had to die. For the good of the world, and the good of the woman I loved, and the good of our family, he had to go.

  CHAPTER 3

  Racheele sat atop her heels against the far wall of our hut, eavesdropping intently while Abel and I argued over her sexual fate. The flicker of fire gamboled about her face, amplifying the heavy shadows of her rutted and worried brows. Racheele loathed Abel. She had always hated the man. She was too strong to say it aloud, but I knew she deeply feared my brother. In that moment, that same fear I had seen many times was thick on her face again, as if it might forever pin her to the night that encompassed her.

  “Why do you deny me this, yet again? I have seen your body tremor when you know her, Cain. Share her with me, brother. I am your brother, after all, and she is only a stupid common woman.” Abel spoke to me, but his eyes remained fixed on Racheele with ravenousness and lust. He paused for a moment while he watched her, then lowered his voice along with his shoulders. “She is only a woman. I must know what dark and wonderful magic she brings you whenever your cock gets hard.”

  Had I not already tussled with him so many times to protect my Racheele from his unabashed appetite, his request would not have angered me so much. So was the way of the world, in a time when there were no relationships as we know them now. Women were used for the pleasure of men. They were shared. They were passed around between brothers, fathers, friends, and even passing travelers. Never, before Racheele, had a man so stubbornly protected any woman as I did.

  I loved Racheele, and she loved me. We didn’t actually know what romantic love w
as. We had never seen it or heard of it. We only knew that when we knew each other, we clutched onto one another in such a way that the past, present, and future all somehow merged into one. The thought of being with any other held no appeal to us. To be together after time apart was exciting to us. The vision of growing old together was pleasant, and we talked of it often. I know now that that was love. I know now what love is. Then I just loved her, and that was enough.

  I’d like to think that Dad loved Mom, but he needed her. That’s all. She needed him. And so, they took care of each other. When Mom passed, Dad didn’t cry or mourn. He simply went and found another woman. When that woman was gone, he found another. Only children cried in those days when death took someone, and even for children the grieving process was short-lived. Love and strong attachment were foreign concepts.

  Racheele was probably around the age of 17 when I first happened upon her as she gathered mushrooms in the woods. I was probably around 20. We didn’t really have methods of measuring time or age. One only knew roughly how many winters he had seen come and go.

  Racheele was a nomadic orphan, out and about that particular morning working for her own subsistence. Filthy, and dressed only in a tattered animal skin wrapped tightly around her waist, I noticed her in the distance as I walked through the Forest of Bog checking my traps. The weather was gloomy, and the forest’s spring peepers were croaking in greater numbers than usual. I was happy to discover that the black maples had finally begun excreting their sweet oozy discharge. I had collected enough that everyone in the family would get a rare taste, once I returned home.

  It seemed that something more than curiosity first drew me to Racheele. I approached to find her kneeling on the earth, her ratty matted and dry hair dangling in hardened chunks. Her roughed-up hands labored to pull at the damp and stubborn undergrowth. Her already sizable scratched and scarred breasts, caked in layers of dirt and mud, hung freely below her. A large, still-healing wound spanned the back of one thigh; I would later learn she fell from a tall tree while climbing for fruit. The fifth finger on one hand was half-missing. Slashing parallel scars on her neck, which looked to have come from the claws of some wild beast, shined pink in the sun. She was so beautiful; perhaps the most beautiful woman I had encountered at that point.

  She didn’t seem to hear or see me at first. I attempted to keep my approach silent, and hid behind the stripped trunk of a dead hemlock, watching her toil. She moved methodically back and forth, working the ground, occasionally pulling something up and setting it in a neat pile beside her. Her bare breasts swung back and forth below her, opposite whatever direction her body swayed. The crackle of the undergrowth snapped and cracked as she worked. A look of determination accompanied the pleasant melodic hum of whatever happy tune she carried within her. It was then that I first felt the tinglings of love.

  I have fallen in love many different times while on this Earth, and I believe that only a few truths surrounding love are actually universal and undeniable. It seems to me that love chooses the heart, not the other way around. This is one of those truths I cannot deny. We humans cannot control whom we fall in love with, as hard as we might try. The heart will want whom the heart wants, no matter how wrong the timing, how inconvenient or unrequited it is, or how difficult that love will probably be. After Racheele later suffered a tortuous demise as the ultimate cost of the love that was born in the forest that day, I swore I would never love another again. But such sincere oaths really can’t be kept. Not for me. Love has always had a way of choosing my heart, eventually, and torturing me anew.

  “I hear you over there,” Racheele eventually called out that day in the forest. She did not bother to turn around or to stop what she was doing. “You can watch me like a silly tree squirrel, or you can be a man, and come enjoy the day with me by my side.”

  I stepped out from behind the tree and cleared my unexpectedly nervous throat. “I did not want to stop watching. You are like no woman I have seen in these lands before.”

  She turned her head and looked at me over her shoulder, grinning. A tooth was missing. Another was chipped to nothing. Her smile was penetrating, and the way it curved higher on one side than the other enchanted me at once. “Come on, then, watcher,” she said. “Join me, or I will believe you have dangerous reasons for standing there like an idiot.” I joined her and spent several hours helping build a heap of delicious fungi, while we teased each other and learned of the lives that had brought us both to that secluded spot in the woods.

  Strangely, we didn’t fuck that day. Or the next. Or even the next. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the budding of a new love that kept us from fucking. Something deep within me kept my carnal urges at bay, and instead pushed me to do the silly things new lovers do. I made her laugh. I made her smile. I brought her little gifts. I softly caressed her face, and gently pushed the hair out of her eyes, as we for some reason kept pressing our lips against the lips of the other. I think we both somehow just knew, as we did all this, that the longer we went without fucking, the better fucking would eventually be.

  I brought her back to the village after a few days in the woods together. To everyone else, she was just another wandering woman, whom I had found and brought home with me the way women were brought home all the time. But Racheele and I already loved each other when we returned to my parent’s home, and I honestly believe we were the first man and woman who ever loved each other. Because of that, the first time our fully naked bodies met, we didn’t fuck. We made love. And we only became closer when we finally did.

  Then, that evening years later, as Abel insisted once more that I let him experience copulation with my first love, I had had enough.

  “You will never touch Racheele,” I snapped, as I took a threatening step toward him. “She is not to share, and if you ever seek this again, I swear an oath that I will…”

  Abel launched at me and struck me. I actually remember the sound of the rock making impact with my skull. I hadn’t even seen it clutched in my brother’s hand while we argued. Racheele! my thoughts screamed, as I slumped to the ground. An electric haze thickened and filled my vision.

  The last thing I remember seeing were Abel’s bare feet stepping over my collapsed body toward my terrified Racheele. The last thing I remember feeling was soul-clamping desperation and helplessness inside of my paralyzed body. The last thing I remember hearing was Racheele’s panicked cry, when she anxiously called out to me.

  And then… The blackness set in.

  CHAPTER 4

  This is the part of my story in which I killed my brother.

  My thoughts surrounding Abel’s murder have always been a seesaw of punishing emotion. I know that I have had to assuage my conscience with rationalizations for why I did what I did. I believed I was a good man before it happened, and that need to recognize goodness within myself didn’t abandon me after Abel’s death. I also know that I can’t feel integrity in whatever goodness I see, if I don’t fully own up to what I did. I believed I was a man of integrity before that day, and integrity’s definition didn’t change after he died, either. These are the conflicting forces that have always battled to shape and to own me.

  My entire curse, and all its ongoing complexity, is anchored in time to that specific event. Whether killing Abel was justifiable or not, the fact remains that I murdered my own flesh and blood. I pushed the spear into him that stopped his heart. It was my hands that did it. He was a terrible fucking person who only hurt people, but he was still my brother. There is no real closure for something like that. There are no victors in the mental battles surrounding it. My ongoing emotional and mental health long ago depended on thinking back to it as infrequently as possible, and on discussing it even less. I wish I could avoid sharing the details here, but I understand they must be shared.

  The Old Testament told some outlandish accounting of Abel, the first innocent; the original good guy; the first religious martyr. History has a way of inventing complete hogwash like t
hat in order to direct the emotional destination of its final details.

  Since the bible gave such a terse version of our story, here is a proportionately concise version of the actual truth behind it all. My brother knocked me unconscious with a rock, then forced himself sexually onto my lover while my unconscious body lay crumpled upon the Earth beside them. After it was over, I killed the sonofabitch.

  Obviously, it wasn’t anywhere near that simple, nor did his death take place immediately afterward.

  After being assaulted, I was unconscious for the next hour, by my best guess. When I came to, a battered Racheele was rubbing cold dripping sheep’s wool across my brow, humming whatever sad tune she suddenly carried within her. My head was resting atop her now bruised legs. The headache from the blow was debilitating. Discombobulated, I reached up and touched a finger against the point of assault. A searing pain shot through my skull and down into my neck, as the large lump which had formed began painfully throbbing.

  As the more complete reality of what happened materialized, I struggled to lift myself, but Racheele was strong and kept me supine. “I am fine,” she told me. A fresh abrasion under her right eye told a much different story. “Cain, I am fine,” she whispered again as she rocked against me. The dried tear trails through the caked dirt on her face said otherwise. “I am fine,” she repeated once more. The strained crack in her voice was fresh evidence of something else altogether. Finally, after I stopped fighting her and let her calming hands begin to sooth me, she bent over and kissed the bridge of my nose. “He is gone, Cain. I think your brother may not be coming back.”