All Living : A Seedvision Saga (9781621473923) (14 page)

Kole rolled over and rubbed his shoulder. He sat up, stretched, and yawned. The sun was already getting high in the sky, and he had a moment to wonder where he was. He arose and saw the beautiful garden of Eden. He smiled. Then with a start he remembered the Lord and turned around. The Creator was sitting with his back to a tree eating a piece of fruit. He said, “You must be hungry.”

“Yes, I am,” said Kole, “unusually hungry.”

“Well, my friend, that’s what will happen when you sleep for a hundred years,” said the Lord with a smile.

“A hundred years,” Kole gasped.

“Now, Kole, relax,” said the Lord, holding out his hand, calming the storm of speculations in Kole’s head. “That is what will happen to a human body after eating seeds from the tree of life. The physical body is merely temporary and necessarily delicate.”

“I only understand about half of what you say to me,” grimaced Kole.

“Half? You’re doing well.”

“Maybe not quite half then”

The Creator laughed. “Come have some every day fruit.” Kole accepted the piece of fruit from the Lord’s hand and bit into it. Nothing had ever tasted so good. The juice ran down into his beard, and for the first time he noticed how long his beard was. “I guess we’ll have to take care of this,” said Kole, gathering his beard into one fist.

“We can if you’d like, Kole, but I think it looks rather good.”

“How did I eat if I was asleep?”

“Kole,” said the Lord, raising his eyebrows, “I took care of that too.”

After a few more fruits in thoughtful silence, followed by a wash in the water, Kole felt better but torn in two directions. He approached the Lord. “I should be getting home. My family will have worried…and my sheep.”

“Much has changed, Kole,” said the Lord.

“I guess it probably has,” Kole replied.

“Do you know what you’re to do, Kole?”

“I understand I am to go where the Father will want me, to be a tool in His hand.”

“Yes, Kole.”

“I remember that I am to tell no one the fullness of what has happened here until I am someday permitted.”

“Yes, Kole.”

“And I will witness certain things.”

“Yes.”

“And carry His holy spirit.”

“To carry a portion of His holy spirit,” corrected the Shepherd.

“Yes,” answered Kole. “Lord, I am anxious.”

“Nothing is gained from that, my friend. Think on what you have learned here, and give no place to doubt or anger, for I must give you a warning before you go. Do not be angry with your brother for what he has done, for anger will lead you to hate, and hate will consume you. Do not kill your brother Cain, for a mark has been placed upon him, and vengeance will be taken sevenfold on the one who kills Cain.”

“Does that not make him fearless before men?” asked Kole.

“It is the test that he needs,” replied the Creator.

“And my sheep, Lord?”

“Their descendants roam the meadow just outside the gate of Eden. They will follow you.”

“I never said good-bye to them.”

“Others will come along, Kole. I have watched over your sheep for you. Now you will watch my sheep for me.” Kole blinked back the tears that rimmed his eyelids. Tears for the loss of his small herd, tears for the responsibility that the Creator was entrusting him with.

The two men rose and embraced. “You must leave the garden now, Kole. The gates are closing, but I will see you again. Hold fast to your honesty and your courage, and pray often to our Father who hears and blesses.”

“There are so many things that I still want to ask you. Will I have children? Will they have children? When is the time of the end? How long from now is it? What happens, and why is it the end? The end of what? Then what after that? Nothing?” Kole gasped, breathless.

The Creator smiled. “You will know love, Kole, but you will know loss. Your days will be long upon the earth, and you, of all people, will desire the end to come, for you will understand family and what the Father has in mind.”

“Thank you.”

The Creator held out His hand to Kole. Resting upon his palm was a small, wooden bird that Kole himself had carved. A hole had been bored through the center of it and a strip of leather had been threaded through it.

“I thought you might like to have this back as well before you go,” He said.

Kole started to tentatively reach for it, but his hand stopped halfway. “Has it really been a hundred years? Will they even remember me?”

“It is time you went back to your family, Kole,” He said, taking the small bird and hanging it around Kole’s neck. “There are many things to be done, and much has changed. Always remember, Kole, you are loved.”

Kole pondered this, watching an ant on the grass and feeling as if he should be nothing more than an ant to the Father. But he was loved by God. Loved! When he looked up to speak again, the Gardner was gone.

Kole looked down on the valley that separated his brothers’ sacrificial hills. It was hard to believe it had been a hundred years. No longer were they cleared and cultivated. No sheep roamed the grassy slopes, no crops ripened by the riverside. Both his brothers were gone. But there was more than memories in this place. Kole stood beside a stone marker, Cain’s altar. It was still standing in its symmetrical, flat-topped, triangular shape after all these years, the grass and ivy around it grown nearly half way up.

From here Kole could look across the valley and see the rock that one day, long ago, he had leaned against while he witnessed the saddest day of his young life. Kole glanced to his right and saw the hill too upon which Abel had offered his acceptable sacrifice to the Lord. No homecoming would suffice unless he visited that place, a place that held one of his last few memories of his brother.

He started down the hill and stopped when he got to the shallow brook running lengthwise through the valley. He had forgotten there was another place that held memories for him. He looked down at the ground that had been Abel’s final resting place in life.
This is where he fell,
he thought.
I miss you brother.

He crossed the water and hurried up the hill toward somewhat happier memories. The ground leveled out near the top, and Kole slowed and looked around. He did not see his brother’s altar. It had been more diminutive in stature and had not survived the years. Then, with his new gift of vision from the Creator, he noticed the aura of rock amongst the aura of grasses and bending down, pulled the waist-high grass apart. There he found what was left of Abel’s cairn. It had fallen over at some point in the past and had obviously been used by chipmunks as a nesting place for generations. Dry nut shells lay cracked on the ground all around it, and nesting material had been stuffed in all the cracks between the stones.

Kole spotted a rather odd stone half buried in the ground and bent down further to examine it. Nearly as long as his arm, from shoulder to fingertips, it was the same in height and girth. A black, flat piece of fieldstone nearly square shaped; although how much more of it remained underground was a mystery. Kole was intrigued by the rock. Before him was possibly one of the last things his brother had touched before death. A smile played at Kole’s lips as an idea crossed his thoughts.

Abel must have thought this rock was peculiar, shaped and colored so. I shall return for it someday and set it up as a monument to my brother, so that all who see it will pause and remember. Remember Abel, when they see the stone of Abel, a brother as unique as this rock.

He stood in quiet reflection for a moment before heading back down the hill. He walked the familiar path back to his parents’ camp along the stream, unable to shake a feeling of fear for what he might find. Behind him, scattered across the landscape, were several hundred sheep, ewes and rams as well as lambs.

Kole had been startled to see the size of his flock. After he had stepped out from under the shade of the trees of Eden, he had been pleasantly surprised to see nearly 700 wooly heads stop munching the meadow grasses, turn in his direction, and bleat a greeting.

He wondered then how he would ever shepherd them all. Seventeen had been easy, but this herd seemed unmanageable. Yet they had not slowed him down. As he had started to jog across the meadow toward the cave exit the nearest animals to him turned and followed, though at a much slower pace. As he passed more animals, they too had followed.

Kole had set a hard pace home, stopping only for water. He traveled late into that first night and rose early the next day. His thoughts propelled him; thoughts of the garden and what had been revealed to him there about his future; thoughts of his family that he had unintentionally left behind for a hundred years.

What would they think of him? What kind of greeting awaited him through these trees and down by the riverside? Kole’s pace slowed a bit, unnoticeable but for the heaviness that had taken over his legs. For all his former eagerness he was now reluctant to face their looks of shock or to hear the news of events that had slowly unfolded over the course of a hundred years of his slumber. It was while in the midst of these thoughts that he had reached the hills where Cain and Abel had so long ago offered their first sacrifices to God. His home was now very near.

The path from his brother’s former site of calamity, the valley of death as Kole thought of it, seemed to meander slowly through the woods as if it too were hesitant about the impending homecoming. The forest was still, the air calm. If a breeze had blown it might have brought Kole some sense of relief, some cleansing air of reassurance. But all was silent about him, as if the trail were passing through a realm of insecurity; as if bird and beast both were unsure of announcing his arrival. Then the stillness was rent by the scream of a child.

Kole had been so absorbed in his own thoughts that he had not seen the small girl picking flowers on the path just ahead. His sudden appearance had startled her, and he quickly stopped and held his hands palm out to her. “No, its okay, young one. I am sorry to have startled you,” Kole said, even as a man materialized out of the woods to her side.

“Greetings, stranger” said the man. “I am Jared, tenth born to the mother and father. You must be of the line of Cain, although you are unfamiliar to me, and you approach from the wrong direction. I apologize for my daughter’s lack of manners. It is just that so few travel from the city, and we have had no guests for many moons.”

“Greetings to you as well, Jared, although I would call you brother rather than stranger. I am looking for Mother and Father, and it may be fortuitous that you are here just as I have arrived, to guide me to them.”

“You call me brother?” asked Jared. “How is it that you call me thus? For I know all my brothers and do not know you, sir.”

“My hope is that you will know me, if not by acquaintance, than at least by name. For if you are truly, as you say, the tenth born to Adam, then I am your brother Kole, just returned from the garden and eager for familiar faces.”

The look on Jared’s face, and the young girl’s as well, was a profound dumbfoundedness, as if a dream had just come to life before their eyes. “Kole,” he finally managed to stammer. “Kole, the first son, garden-born, quest-bound? Can it really be true? I have heard stories of you all my life. Indeed, I tell them to my own children—stories of your childhood and youth and stories of your disappearance. Our children are taught to behave lest you come and carry them away with you to the garden, never to be seen again. Although I must confess, Father frowns on that story. But there are many other tales of you. Father speaks fondly of you climbing trees and racing deer, throwing berries at him and carving wood in the shapes of our sisters. We have all laughed many times when mother tells of you pissing on the fire during your fourth winter. Pardon my language.”

“Why would I pardon your language, my brother,” laughed Kole. “It is true what she says. But does she also tell you that she had just put the family’s dinner on the fire, and we all had to go fishless that night. Dad was not always the fisherman he is now, and those particular river trout were unfortunately seasoned that evening.” He smiled, and Jared snorted a chuckle.