Читать книгу The Blessing - Gregory Orr - Страница 18

8

Cain Continuing

Frightening as my dream of Cain was, it offered me hope by offering me the shelter of a story. And stories are where human meanings begin. If I were Cain, I knew who I was and where I was situated in the universe. I was the one who had slain his brother. I was the one God was angry at. But he would not kill me. The story didn’t go in that direction. Instead, he would drive me alone into the wilderness. And wasn’t that how I felt? Isolated, alone. Shunned by people. Townspeople and my fellow students were, like my parents, afraid to speak to me. They probably felt sorry for me, but I didn’t know that. I thought they were afraid of me, because they saw my brother’s blood on my hands, sensed the uncanniness of Cain—that he was picked out by God to commit a terrible crime. I felt abandoned by my parents, but no one harmed me. Even the trooper had not arrested me. It was as if I wore the mark of Cain. It was a worse punishment for Cain to live than it would have been for him to die: “a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.”

“And Cain said unto the Lord, ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear.’” But God would not let Cain die and he would not let anyone punish me. He knew that my own self-hatred was a far more terrible punishment.

Like Cain, I would be allowed to live and to live in a world of meaning, though it was a meaning that filled me with despair. The story of Cain satisfied my childish needs by placing me at the center of a story. I was a child and believed that the world, if it made sense at all, made sense with me as the central character.

I didn’t know that other people were making up other stories to explain Peter’s death. In my child’s egoism, I couldn’t realize my parents had lives and fates of their own, distinct from mine. It never occurred to me that they might believe that their own actions had brought them to this place.