Murder Ballad in the Land of Nod
And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod.
—Genesis 4:16
In a story with many firsts, the first man and the first woman committed the first sin and had two sons—one who offered fruit to God, one who offered blood in a garden. Somewhere east of Eden was a land waiting to receive the first murderer. The Hebrew root of the word Nod is the verb “to wander.” Cain left the still-warm body of his brother to enter a landscape made for a lifetime of lostness. But somewhere in Nod, he found a wife. He found her love, her comfort, the way she would kiss his eyelids to wake him in the morning. They had a son named Enoch and built a city in his name. Meanwhile, his brother’s body translated cell to soil to wild grass. All his sons were green, and they wandered until they covered the world.
*
The day my friend’s murder trial is scheduled to begin, it doesn’t. There is no news about dates or justice or whether there will be one trial or three for the men who took part in his kidnapping and murder. The men have been waiting, not wandering. The defense lawyer pleads he is busy, overbooked. The judge says: This is an old case. I know it’s difficult to line up the sun and the moon and the stars.
Everywhere the newspapers repeat, repeat. The blond news reporter separates her hands when she says walking home and connects them again when she says fateful night. Fate. Where does one go to meet it? . . . body was found off the interstate, she says, and the camera shows traffic, police officers, a field of saw grass. They show three men’s faces—the one who stayed in the car, the two that went into the field with my friend and returned without him. Three walked into the night. Two came back. Such awful math. So terribly simple.
*
The day my friend’s murder trial is scheduled to begin, there is news from the doctor that my blood could attack my unborn son. Usually this problem of blood is fine for first-borns, but I’d lied on my medical forms and said this was my first pregnancy. It was the first one I wanted. I wasn’t sure if the child that left my body years ago could affect what might happen with this one. I mention that my medical chart may not be entirely accurate. I ask what I should do and am told: It will probably be fine.
I should probably tell the doctor the whole truth. I should probably pray. But what could I possibly say to a God who asked his son to die but let a murderer wander out of a garden, as if exile were punishment enough, as if mercy were that easy. What is lost joins eternity. That’s how the immortal maintains itself. I find this written in an old notebook. It’s my handwriting, but the words seem to belong to someone who has only loved the living.
I spend most of the day in the nursery that’s already finished. I read my son the book On the Night You Were Born. I recite the poem “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” about three little fishermen rocked in a wooden shoe, casting their nets in the stars they mistook for herring. My son doesn’t kick or turn or thump to the ABAB rhyme scheme, and I hope he’s joined the trinity of sailors in sleep.
*
Sometimes I think about how much Cain’s wife knew and when she knew it. When did he tell her about his idyllic home? When did he tell her about his short life—sixteen verses between birth and murder? Did he tell her more than we know? We know field. She knew stone, or by his own hand, or a garrote made of wild grasses. We know he offered fruit; his brother offered a lamb. Did Cain say: I gave God the thing itself and not the symbol. Did he mean to say: God wanted a blood sacrifice. That’s exactly what he got.
*
My friend was kidnapped in one county, killed in another, and the murderers were captured miles away from either. He was taken in a county named for a lion and killed in a county named for a saint—St. John of Patmos, who lived in exile, banished for prophecy. I wonder if it’s easier to have visions on an island—the livable environment surveyed and mapped, surrounded by the seemingly limitless ocean. John promised: He thalassa ouk esti etí. In the fulfillment of the messianic apocalypse, there will no longer be a sea. Once I was told that to escape from a desert island, you should build a new boat out of the shipwreck—but what if, instead of an island, you are trapped in a truck with three men? What should you build then?
*
One of the murderers drew a sketch to help police find the body, hoping for a plea deal. He confessed the murder to another inmate, but the facts were wrong. Either he’d revised the truth of the events during his three years in prison, or he couldn’t remember them anymore. He confessed to kidnapping my friend in the wrong location, murdering him in the wrong county with the wrong weapon, and claimed to have acted alone before driving to a city named “Big Water” in a dead language. There he met a woman named Cheerie, but they had no sons and built no cities, and his wandering was over in a few weeks, when the police broke down his motel door and found him with a missing man’s credit cards in his wallet and a bloody knife wrapped in receipts.
*
I wonder if Cain ever revised his sins as he lay in his wife’s arms telling her the story of how his wandering began. Perhaps he told her he found his brother worshiping God in the wrong way or claimed that he caught him growing poppies among the figs or that he raised a mob of outraged lions to attack an intruder. Perhaps he remembered every blow he struck. Perhaps he remembered only his own fear and the blood on his hands, and needed to invent the rest, to imagine himself a hero only doing what he must to survive. Maybe in one version, he atones, and God forgives him. In the story he tells on another day, he is cursed. I wonder if his wife wrapped her leg around his and felt something new to this world, a loosening of her heart akin to empathy, an amazement at her husband and his brother and all men who’ve been made to suffer.
*
Where are you going, and what do you wish? the old moon asked Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. When the moon discovers the foolish fishermen are in the stars looking for herring, he laughs and sings, and rather than pointing them to an earthly sea, he makes their mistake come true. All the burning stars they pulled into their wooden boat were herring, and their boat became a trundle bed, and the three sailors became two closed eyes and the dreaming head. And those fish and that moon became a dream they couldn’t quite recall upon waking, but they knew they had wandered far, that something wonderful and terrible had happened, and yet they’d returned with the stain of starlight on their palms.
*
From the age of thirteen, I had dreams about two men pursuing me. One was a man who loved me so much he wanted to invent a thousand cages in my honor. The other was a man who loved me so much he wanted to kill me—how else could I be his? They followed me for two decades on trains, across deserts, through forests, into the secret passages of old houses, and the one who wanted me dead always reached me first. When I became pregnant, I stopped dreaming about them. Now, I dream of leading a crusade of children over mountains, trying to find a safe place to open the Ark of the Covenant. I never tell them what we’re carrying, and they follow me for the secret I keep from them. If they knew the truth, who knows what they would do, what they might become, how long they might pursue me to make me theirs alone.
*
Though the trial is delayed, the prosecution says it will seek the death penalty. When I look it up, I discover that the death penalty for the state is usually lethal injection, unless a convicted person chooses electrocution. So far, no one on death row has done so, but I am fascinated by the idea of this choice. I wonder if they offered my friend two ways to die, if they offered him a chance to pray or a cigarette or another cliché, if—worst of all—they offered him hope and told him to run into the wilderness.
*
Though no one knows for sure, some theologians believe it was Lamech, Cain’s great-great-grandson, who murdered him. It’s so appealing, this tidy closure. Vengeance comes, though decades later, from a family member. Yet it still leaves years and years of marriage and children, the building of cities, drinking beer, telling stories, eating figs on the bank of a river, slaughtering lamb after lamb for the God that absolved him.
How could a mother know such a thing? How could Eve predict one son would kill another? How could Cain’s wife know that the grandson of her son would kill her husband? They loved, they begat, they hoped for atonement. They prayed each day for natural deaths.
*
I read in the newspaper that pregnant women are genetic chimeras—they absorb part of their children’s genomes. On autopsies of women who’ve had sons, the majority of them have Y-chromosomes in their brains and breast tissue. Thank God, I say to my husband, knowing our son will always be with me. My husband points out that because my blood believes our son’s body is an invading organism, my cells will probably reject any fetal cells he leaves behind. The shots I receive hide the traces of my son from my immune system so my body won’t learn he’s not a part of me. My son is to lightning as I am to noon. I wait for him to be strong enough to arrive. I wait full of terror and godless breath.
*
My husband says I must stop anticipating terrible things. But terrible things happen all the time. Maybe if I just imagine the worst one more time, it will be the scenario that saves my life or someone else’s. Maybe all this practice for some terrible inevitable will pay off. Two men will walk with me into a field, and we will all walk out.
When I imagine my friend’s death, I try not to think of the hours he spent in the truck, afraid, watching the mile markers, thankful, perhaps, for each minute, each humid breath. I try not to think about what he might’ve said to the men who, perhaps, hadn’t yet decided if they would kill him or not. Or maybe they always knew how it would end, and so did my friend, but he told them things about himself anyway, to make himself real. I try not to think about what he must have thought of, whom he might have wished to call, all the ways he might have thought he could talk himself out of it.
When I imagine his death, he walks through the field and doesn’t feel the men like twin shadows at his back. He recognizes a constellation. He feels the earth give a little with each step. He thinks the word help, and something does.
