Saul Wernick - Cain’s Touch

A ROADSIDE ACCIDENT. A YOUNG GIRL FLUNG THROUGH THE WINDSHIELD OF A CAR. BLOOD STILL POURED FROM HER CRUSHED SKULL.

"Help her, Michael," the old woman said. 'If you can do what you've been telling me, then I want proof. Bring that girl back to life."

Make it look good, he told himself as he approached the corpse. You know that old bitch is watching you. The laying on of handsthat always got them. Try the laying on of hands. You've got nothing to lose.... Make it look good. Without knowing why, he closed his eyes.

And then it began....

LIGHT. PURE LIGHT. WHITE LIGHT. INTENSE. SO BRIGHT IT HURT. THE FEELING. LIKE A FAINT ELECTRICAL CURRENT IN HIS HANDS... SPREADING UP HIS ARMS ... TO HIS CHEST... HIS HEAD... LIFE!

He felt a trembling in the still, dead body.

And then he heard a scream....

CAINS TOUCH

SAUL WERNICK

Copyright 1978 by Saul Wernick

A DELL BOOK

This is a work of fiction. None of the characters in it exist in real life nor is any part of it based on anyone I have ever met or known. Names and episodes, incidents and dialogue are completely products of my imagination. Any resemblance, real or imaginary, to any actual person or any event is completely coincidental.

SAUL WERNICK

CONTENTS

July 1951. Harbortown, Massachusetts.

The old man had dark brown hands, weather roughened and mottled by age, that tied new knots in the ripped seine so fast that the boy couldn't see how he did it, only that the knots appeared, and that in a few minutes a whole section of the mesh was mended, with new twine showing where the old had been torn.

The boy liked to sit beside the old man and watch him. Sometimes the old man talked to him. The boy liked that, because the old man never talked down to him or treated him like a child. But the boy would never start the talking himself. He always waited for the old man. Some days the old man wouldn't say a word and paid no attention to the boy.

The old man liked to sit on the end of the wharf in the heat of the sunlight, warming his old bones. Small waves splashed against the pilings supporting the broad, timbered dock. The wharf was next to the one that most of the fishing vessels tied up to, and there were always two or three broad-beamed draggers or trawlers tied up to the wharf the old man liked to sit on.

The inner harbor was a deep, narrow inlet, the water dirty from the offal thrown overboard and from the sludge pumped from the bilges of the fishing fleet. Overhead hundreds of seagulls wheeled and soared, beating their way up from the water, caw-cawing at each other. The air smelled more of gutted fish than of salt water, especially when there was an on-shore breeze.

Today the old man hadn't spoken at all, and the boy was content just to rest and watch him and say nothing. When he finally spoke, the boy was startled.

"Out there," said the old man, in his hoarse voice, jerking his head sideways toward the ocean beyond the breakwater, "that's where it began."

"What began?" the boy asked.

"Life."

His rheumy eyes were fastened on the netting piled in his lap; he sat with one leg bent under him and the other extended, his feet bare so that he could stretch the net with his toes while he worked on it. His fingers were stiff and ached all the time. So did his knees, but he'd mended nets since he had first begun fishing, and now that he was too old to go on the boats, he was still able to mend nets ashore.

He said, "First there was heaven and earth and there was darkness on the face of the deep. That's what it says."

"In the Bible," said the boy.

"That's right. It's all there. An' it's still goin' on. It'll go on long's the earth's here. Come from the fish is where we come from. All of us."

"I read in the Bible," said the boy eagerly. "Not much of it I skipped the begats , but I read the first part a couple of times."

"Why'd you do that?" asked the old man.

The boy squirmed uncomfortably. The old man continued mending the nets while the boy squatted near him, watching him for a while, then turning his face away to stare down at the weathered planking of the wharf, then looking up to examine the grayish brown of the chipped and splintered pilings, and, finally, he watched one particular gull beat its way off the water and pull itself into the sky and lose itself in the soaring, circling mass of gray-and-white gulls' wings. He wondered what it would be like to be able to fly like the gull.

"You gonna answer me?" asked the old man.

"I killed my brother," said the boy, looking down at the old man's thick hands. He saw how swollen the knuckles were and how the twine unreeled from the shuttle which was almost hidden in his cupped right hand, how the knots seemed to spin themselves into existence, and how the mesh was built up in the net, one side at a time until the four knots lay evenly, one in each comer, and then the shuttle went on to the next square.

The heat lay heavily upon them. The boy wore only shorts, but the old man wore a heavy shirt and old, frayed corduroy trousers. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up just past his wrists. The boy wondered how he could stand the heat.

"You really did?" asked the old man.

"That's what my mother told me. She got mad at me one day, an' started screamin' at me an' yelled that I killed my brother."

"How old was you when it happened?"

"Three," said the boy. He said, "He was my twin," as if that explained everything.

The old man sniffed, then wiped his nose on the sleeve of his shirt

The blaze of the sun seemed to get brighter and the heat heavier and the sounds of the harbor seemed to die away.

"When she got over bein' mad at me, she tried to take back what she said. Then she said it wasn't my fault it happened." The boy spoke carefully; he wanted to make the old man understand what had happened and that he wasn't to blame. "She said it was supposed to be our birthday. Three years old. An' she come into the bedroom. We was sleepin ' in the same bed. I was just lyin' there with my eyes open lookin' at her while she come into the room an' over to the bed. He was lyin' at the other end of the bed with his eyes closed. She said she didn't know he was dead until she picked him up to wake him, an' I was watchin ' her all the time an' she said she just knew I had done it."

His throat was very dry. He stopped talking. He still couldn't bring himself to look directly at the old man.

The old man said dubiously, 'It's kinda hard to believe a three-year-old kid got enough strength to kill another three-year-old."

The boy nodded seriously. "That's what she said later on. She said she was sorry she yelled at me an' didn't ever mean to tell me how she felt. She wouldn't have, except she got mad."

"What do you think? You think you did it?'

"Oh," said the boy, knowing this was the hardest part to say. He'd never been able to tell any of this to anyone else. "I think it happened. I think I killed him."

The old man was silent. He'd expected the boy to deny it, and was prepared to reassure him.

"That's why I read that part about Cain and Abel a couple of times," said the boy, in explanation.

"Three years old an' you had strength enough to kill him? That what you believe?"

"I didn't need no strength," said the boy. "I put my hands on him."

"You put your hands on him?'

"Uh-huh. An' everything got dark. I don't know for how long, but when the dark went away, he was dead an' he was lyin' at the other end of the bed."

"An' you remember all that? You remember from the time you was three years old?"

"Sure," said the boy.

"Then how come your mother had to tell you about it?'

"Oh, I remembered," said the boy. "I just didn't know anyone else knew about it."