He Deceiveth All the Sacrificers

The crow came on a Tuesday.

Elias Varner saw it first because Elias saw everything first, being the elder by two years and possessed of a watchfulness that their mother said was his father's only gift to him before their father went to the river one March morning and did not come back. The crow sat on the fence post at the edge of the north field and it was larger than a crow had any right to be, larger than the dog, larger than the memory of a thing that should have been small, and it sat there with the stillness of a thing that was waiting rather than resting and it watched the house.

Caleb did not see it until supper.

Caleb was fifteen and built like the work had already gotten into him, broad through the shoulders, his mother's dark eyes in a face that was going to be handsome and knew it, and he came in from the south field where he had been breaking ground for the winter rye and he washed his hands in the basin and he looked out the window above it and he saw the crow and he said, that bird's been there all day.

It has, said Elias, seventeen, spare and angular, already becoming the man he would be, which was a careful man, a watching man.

Their mother was at the fire. Her name was Margaret and she was thirty-four years old and looked older and she did not look up from the pot. She had the quality of women who have decided that what they cannot change does not require their attention, a quality she had developed over three years of managing the farm alone, of doing what she had to do when the crops failed and the winter came and the boys needed feeding.

The boys knew what she did.

They did not speak of it.

The crow was still on the post when they went to bed.

It was in the house by morning.

Elias woke to the sound of it, a single flat syllable in the dark before dawn, not a bird's sound, something that wore a bird's sound as a coat wears a man, the shape of the sound correct but the substance wrong. He lay in the bed he shared with Caleb and he stared at the ceiling and he listened.

The sound came from below. From the keeping room.

He got up.

The crow was on the table.

It was larger inside than it had seemed outside, which was wrong, and it sat in the center of the table among the supper things that had not been cleared and it looked at Elias with eyes that were not a crow's eyes, that were the eyes of something that had observed the full inventory of what men were and had formed opinions. The lamp was not lit but the room was not dark, which was also wrong, a sourceless gray light emanating from nothing in particular.

Elias stood in the doorway.

The crow looked at him.

Then it was not a crow.

The change was not a transformation so much as a correction, the way you correct a word you have written wrong, going back to the place and drawing a line through it and writing what was intended. One moment the crow. The next a man seated at the table, tall even seated, dressed in the fashion of a gentleman of some standing but the fabric of the clothing wrong, too dark, absorbing the gray light rather than reflecting it, and the face wrong too, too symmetrical, too still, the face of a thing that had constructed a face by studying faces and gotten most of it right.

The voice was hoarse. Hoarse the way a man's voice is hoarse when it has not been used in a very long time, when it belongs to a throat that was not made for speaking.

Sit down, Elias, it said.

Elias Varner was seventeen years old and afraid and he sat down because sitting down was what his body did when it was afraid and there was no help for it.

The thing at the table folded its hands.

Its name, it said, was Malphas. It was a President of considerable standing. It had forty legions under its command and it had been to this farm before, many times, had watched this farm with interest for reasons it was not prepared to share. It spoke of itself in the measured cadence of a man reading from a ledger, matter-of-fact, without heat, as if the facts were simply facts and required no embellishment.

It had a proposition.

Elias said nothing.

The proposition was this. The farm was failing. Elias knew this. The north field's yield had been poor for three years, the soil gone tired, and the winter rye would not be enough and they both knew it would not be enough. Their mother was doing what she was doing and it was not enough either and it would become less enough as she became less what men paid for, which happened to women, which was simply the arithmetic of it. In three years or perhaps four the farm would be gone and the family would be scattered or dead.

Malphas could fix this.

He could fix the soil and the yield and the barn roof that was going and the fence line that was failing and he could fix the other thing too, the thing that brought men down the lane after dark, he could fix that so it would not be necessary anymore. He could fix all of it.

In exchange he wanted a small thing.

He wanted one of the brothers to kill the other.

Elias heard the words and the words made a sound in him like a stone dropped into a very deep well, the sound going down and down and not arriving anywhere.

He said: which one.

Malphas said: that is for you to determine.

Caleb was in the doorway.

Elias did not know how long he had been there. Caleb had his father's height and his mother's eyes and a face that was going to be handsome and he stood in the doorway of the keeping room in his nightshirt and he looked at the thing at the table with an expression that Elias could not read, that was not the expression Elias expected, which would have been fear, but was something else, something that looked more like recognition.

He sat down too.

Malphas looked at them both.

It repeated the proposition for Caleb without being asked.

Caleb listened the way Caleb listened to everything, with the whole of his attention, which was a quality he had that Elias did not always give him credit for, the quality of absolute presence, of being entirely in the moment of a thing. When Malphas finished, Caleb was quiet for a moment.

Then he said: and if we refuse.

Malphas considered this. Its face did the thing faces do when they are considering, but the timing was wrong, slightly too long, as if it had to calculate the correct interval rather than simply feeling it.

Then the farm fails, it said. Then everything fails in the manner that failing things fail. It paused. I am offering you a solution to an arithmetic problem. The arithmetic does not change because you dislike the variables.

What do we get, Caleb said. The one that does it.

Everything, Malphas said.

And the one that doesn't.

Nothing. He said it the way you state a number. Nothing is what the dead get.

Caleb looked at Elias across the table.

Elias looked back.

Between them on the table were the supper things: the pot, the bowls not yet cleared, a heel of bread gone hard, the horn-handled knife their mother used for everything. The gray sourceless light lay over all of it and made it look like the inventory of a life seen from a great distance, small and specific and mortal.

You'll leave now, Elias said to Malphas.

Malphas looked at him.

You will think on it, it said. It was not a question.

I said you'll leave.

Malphas stood. It was very tall standing. The ceiling of the keeping room was low and it stood inside that low ceiling without touching it, which should not have been possible, and it looked down at the two brothers with those wrong eyes and its face did the thing again, the calculation of the correct interval.

I receive sacrifices willingly, it said. The voice was very hoarse now, as if the speaking had used up whatever it had. I deceive all the sacrificers.

Then it was the crow again.

Then it was gone.

The lamp was dark. The room was just the room, the gray of actual predawn coming through the single window, the supper things on the table, the horn-handled knife.

The brothers sat in the silence.

They did not speak of it that day.

They worked the south field side by side, breaking ground for the rye, and they did not speak and the silence between them was a new kind of silence, a silence that had a shape now, that had weight and dimension and the specific temperature of the thing that had been put inside it. Elias watched Caleb work and Caleb worked without looking up and both of them knew that the other was doing the same calculation, had been doing it since before dawn, would keep doing it.

The calculation being: which one.

Elias was the elder. The farm came to him by right and by law and by the shape of things in 1842 in Ohio where a farm went to the eldest son and the second son went into the world and made what he could. This was not cruelty. It was simply the shape of things. Caleb would go eventually regardless. He had a life ahead of him that was not this farm, that was not this tired soil and this failing fence and the men who came down the lane after dark.

Elias had thought, until the previous night, that he minded this.

He understood now that he had not minded it enough.

Caleb was strong. Stronger than Elias physically, broader, the work gone into him in a different way. But Elias was watchful. Elias had their father's watchfulness if not his staying power and watchfulness was not nothing.

These were the thoughts of a boy who was seventeen years old calculating whether and how he might kill his brother.

He stopped his spade.

He looked at Caleb.

Caleb looked up.

And Elias saw it. Saw it in the set of Caleb's jaw and the way his hands were loose on the spade handle and the steadiness of his eyes, which were their mother's eyes and which were looking at Elias with a clarity that did not blink and did not look away.

Caleb was doing the same calculation.

Had been doing it since before the sun came up.

Was doing it right now.

They stood in the broken soil of the south field and looked at each other and the autumn was around them, the smell of the turned earth and the cold coming in from the north and somewhere beyond the tree line the sound of the creek moving over the stones and going on the way water goes on regardless, and neither of them moved and neither of them spoke and the moment between them was the longest moment of either of their lives.

It was Caleb who broke it.

He drove the spade into the earth and he looked away and he said, his voice entirely level, we're not going to do this.

Elias said nothing.

I said we're not, Caleb said. You hear me, Eli.

Elias looked at the back of his brother's head. At the breadth of his shoulders. At the specific and mortal reality of him, this boy he had slept beside since birth, whose breathing he knew, whose face in sleep he had studied the way you study a thing so familiar it becomes invisible.

No, he said. We're not.

But the calculation did not leave.

That was the thing about Malphas, the thing the old texts had tried to warn about in the language of warning that no one reads until it is too late. He receives sacrifices willingly, but he deceiveth all the sacrificers. The deception was not in the deal. The deal was never the point. The deception was in the asking, in the placing of the calculation inside two brothers on a failing farm and knowing, as he must have known, what calculations do once they take up residence.

They do not leave.

They go quiet. They go underground, the way water goes underground in drought country, invisible but present, shaping the landscape from below. Weeks pass and the calculation is not mentioned and the brothers work side by side and their mother cooks at the fire and the crow does not return and it is possible to believe that the thing in the keeping room before dawn was a dream.

But Elias watches Caleb now.

Watches the way his hands move when he is near a tool that could be a weapon. Watches the paths he takes through the barn. Watches which side of him is closest to the door. He watches and he files and he cannot stop and he understands that the watching has changed something, has made him a person doing a thing he said he would not do, that the calculation is still running whether he authorizes it or not.

And Caleb knows.

Of course Caleb knows. Caleb has their mother's eyes, which are eyes that see things, and he sees Elias watching and he feels the watching the way you feel a hand that is not quite touching you but is very close, and the feeling of it changes him too, makes him careful in a way he was not careful before, makes him note the exits, makes him sleep with one part of him not sleeping.

This is the resentment that outlives the rivalry.

This is the thing that was put in them on a Tuesday in October of 1842 in Ohio on a farm that did not fail, not that year, because the soil came right in the spring, came right the way soil sometimes comes right, inexplicably, and the yield was good and the fence held and their mother did not have to go down the lane anymore.

None of them spoke about why.

Malphas receives sacrifices willingly.

He decieveth all the sacrificers.

Elias left the farm at twenty-two.

He went west.

He did not say goodbye to Caleb, which was the thing he would carry longest, longer than the calculation and longer than the watching, the not-saying of it, the morning he saddled the horse while the house was still dark and rode out of the yard without looking back at the windows.

Caleb inherited the farm.

He worked it until he was fifty-one and then he sold it to a man from Cleveland and he went to live with his daughter in Columbus and he died in the winter of eighteen seventy-four in a room that smelled of coal smoke and old wood, with his daughter's hand in his and his eyes on the window.

What he was looking at nobody could say.

Elias was already dead by then. Had been for six years. Died in Kansas, not violently, which is the thing you would expect from such a story, but quietly, of a fever, in a boarding house, with no one he knew in the room.

Neither of them ever spoke of what happened.

Not to their mother, who died in fifty-eight still doing the math of a farm that worked better than it should have and not asking why. Not to wives or children or priests.

Not to each other.

The crow came on a Tuesday and what it left in that house was not a deal unmade but the making of it, the having been asked, the moment in the south field when two brothers looked at each other across the broken soil and knew what the other was thinking and did not say it and did not do it and lived the rest of their lives inside the having-almost.

That is what Malphas trades in.

Not the killing.

The almost.

The resentment that outlives the rivalry because there was no rivalry, only the moment that could have been one, only the calculation placed inside two people like a seed in bad soil that does not bloom but does not die, that lives in the dark under everything, shaping the landscape from below.

He receives sacrifices willingly.

He deceiveth all the sacrificers.

The crow does not need to come back.

It is already inside.