You are his fear, and little wonder. After measuring his life in inches, I am not surprised to find him timid.
You are his fear, little wonder, but you are my dread, and dread as I have never known. You lay claim to my heart even as the knife laid claim to his neck. The loss of oneself, and the loss of all one loves; I cannot be sure which is the greater cut.
When he came to me, so late in time, I thought life would run its course with him. He would have a garden and cattle and a wife and children that I would never see and need not see to marvel at their days. I would sit on my porch and imagine them, and I would see the course of his life, and I would rest in my chair. This laughter had made life worth living, his life made the sun worth smiling about once more. For the sun would one day warm his hands on a brisk winter morning. And it would quicken his grain with long lingering rays and draw each stalk tenderly to itself. It would greet his sons, born red and clutching at one another. And it would make his skin darker and his hair fairer as though marked by blessing as your own. He was yours, and yet he would be more fully yours.
The sun of which I dreamed and the sun that passed overhead on that day were kin like stream and ice which share essence but no more. Yes, that was the sun, but not as I had imagined, not as I had ever seen or dreamed. That day came and lingered as a dream, and the light seemed darker for the sun's immutability. It did not quake, it was not cold. It shone in warmth, calling all men liars and my heart false.
You are his fear, and my dread, and the sun did not notice as we drew closer to its path. The sun had long eclipsed us, and we stepped into our shadows as they lengthened, darkness ever farther than our steps. This obedience, which is life, unto death, failed my comprehension, and fails it still. I believe I took the knife to my understanding long before I took it from my belt, long before we had even reached the mountain. We climbed higher until the air should have cut my nostrils and pricked my lungs, but I do not think that I was breathing. Nothing so human was necessary so close to heaven.
The gods were less surprised than I when you told me what I must do. It was their custom, one I had hoped you did not share. Your claim was no less righteous of course, no less just. Yet it seemed unlike your kindness with me. You take only what you have given on loan, only what you have given for a little while. We all know and acknowledge this. It is yours, I am yours, he is yours. You have every right to do so. But must you do so? You, the maker of promises, the keeper of your word.
Life must again come from nothing, as it does with you- life either from the dead or from the good as dead. You will not be proved false, I believe this. And you tend to write life with a finger dipped in blood. A motif in your stories.
I had already killed my reason, my understanding, my feeling as I climbed, and when I stacked the wood I did not wrap my hands because I could not feel the splinters. And when I prepared the lantern I held the coal between my fingers and could not feel its burn. But when I wrapped the rope around his ankles and wrapped the rope around his wrists it felt like sharp-frayed cable on my hands. And when I held the knife it felt cold and heavy like polished bone against my palm. It felt poorly shaped, an absurd caricature. I remember thinking that I must have never held a knife before that moment. And I felt like I was already alone and he was already dead, and like I was already dead, and like I was holding one of his bones on some nocturnal pilgrimage to the end of the world.
The landscape was that of my country, alien as the moon, and as silent. The sun was low, near the scrub horizon, and its strength failed as it fell. Bound and set upon the wood, he shut his eyes tightly as though to keep something out; still water escaped them. The muscles in his jaw were sharply etched with his straining, and his lips were moving in silent rogation. His body shook, and I should have wanted to comfort him but could not for the numbness within me. That cold which began at your words had by now crept through my every artery and filled my body with ice.
I stood over him as a man over a child, and I thought he looked unlike my son. And I spoke to myself as I looked at him, this is not your son, and I willed that it be so. But it was not so, and I knew it was my son on the woodpile. And my thoughts ran to Sarah at the table as she realized we had gone, and to the boy in the field asking but where, father, is the sacrifice? And to Rebecca giving birth to twins at war, and the violence of man and the violence of God. And I felt my heart harden and break into pieces, the cavity gaping as a mourner's howl. And I looked again at my son. And I cried out that this all might pass, but you did not answer. And I cried out, if there is another way! but there was no sound. And I sobbed, oh take me Father, but you would not. And as I raised the knife I called out once more, thy will be done. My voice failed as I cried.
Your voice shattered the silence like the breaking of glass with a stone. At your voice the heavens shook, and sun's last light fractured into a thousand garnet streaks that burst from the horizon behind and reached over the mountain on which I stood. The light was scored so deeply it was as though meteorites had carved fiery scars across the sky.
At your voice the earth shook and the rocks split and matter crackled as though electrified. The north exhaled in a mighty gust of wind that felled me like a great tree and swept the mountains clean of their ancient dust. Your voice peeled back the landscape like a scab until it shone like raw skin, and immediately I saw my homeland and was utterly lost, an alien in what I once knew.
At your voice my eardrum burst, and blood issued from my right ear. Your word swept silence away and deafened me to the world, swept dread from my heart as refuse but taught my heart true fear, glory mixed with the most violent of hopes, new dread as I have never known. I would not hear for weeks, and I could not hold the knife for my trembling, and it fell into the soil.
And you spoke again and you said to me, get up and untie the boy. I did so with weak hands, and when I had finished I stepped back and watched as he sat up and stepped away and fell into the bushes vomiting. He had not stopped shaking since we reached the mountain, and watching him as a stranger I too began to vomit.
When I ceased, I collapsed, and closed my eyes and fell into an empty sleep, for how long I do not know. And when I opened my eyes there was the boy curled in the dust, and there was a goat caught in the bushes beside the woodpile with his eyes towards me. And he looked at me without blinking as though to speak, but I could hear nothing. He did not run when I untangled him and brought him to the pile, and when I bent to the knife he shook but did not cry out until the knife pierced him through and his legs buckled and he fell forward and to the side. I set his body upon the pile and lit it from the coal and stared in silence at the flames as they ran up the wood to him as though in some long-awaited greeting. The fire covered him, and lifted him heavenward, towards the stars that had begun to blink out of the night to see what had come to pass on that low mountain. My tears fell thick, as to wash even his blood away if they could. I began to walk, and the boy rose and followed me at a distance. The stars stared on in wonder all night as we descended, and only turned away as we walked into the morning.
The sun rose over the house as we fell into the kitchen where his mother had not moved for three days. The servants stood back from the door and whispered as we entered, and when our shadows passed into her vision his mother looked up and cried out so loudly that I felt her voice pass through me. She fell on the boy like a heavy robe and he fell to the floor, and she washed his feet with her weeping.
I found the blood on my ear and rubbed it off between my thumb and forefinger, and took off my sandals. I washed off the blood of the goat from my body, bathed, and changed my clothes. I tried to drink water but could not. And when I returned to the kitchen the boy remained on the floor, curled up like the child he was then, still shaking. And his mother held him there and rocked as though in a trance, halfway between sleep and death. I stood in the doorway and looked down at them, and when I saw his form held between her arms, I did not see my son. Instead, it was as though I was looking into a deep canyon, a canyon striped with red, and cut by the very finger of God.
