49. Dead
"What's dead?"
"Something you will never have to worry about."
Like his brother, Jacob didn't comprehend dead either, forever closed eyes and the cold skin when he grabbed his mother's hand. And Esau's, tan from years of work in the sun, shone pale in the moonlight. At first Jacob wept because he was confused, and realized that his anger had brought a terrible mistake beyond his knowledge, but beyond that, he grasped little of why Esau slept even days after the accident. He had stabbed Mother, and that must bring death, but Esau, his body had been tossed out of the cave of light, and did that bring death? It didn't have to, Jacob told himself, and there was still a chance. If he didn't understand death then he didn't have to accept it yet.
When he explored the human village, the one where Esau claimed that their mother had killed everyone, Jacob studied the bodies, rested his hand on a chest and slowly came to recognize the lack of a rise and fall, the glazed-over eyes of those who stared into the stars, the sheet-white skin. The village reeked of an unfamiliar odor, and flies circled the corpses as if they also wondered why the men did not breathe. When Jacob returned to his brother, they buzzed there too, and Jacob swatted them away. Before, there was no smell, but now, bile rose in Jacob's throat at the scent and he knew then that Esau was as dead as every man and woman in that village.
Turning away, he crumpled to his knees and vomited on the grass, and sat there for a long moment before he looked back at Esau. Jacob tried one last time, he pulled Esau's head up by the hair so that he sat up like Jacob, but with lidded, sunken eyes. "Wake up, Brother," Jacob shouted, and waited. He swallowed, throat burning from the stench and the vomit, and said, "Wake up."
He waited until his chest ached and he clenched his teeth, until he rested his head against Esau's forehead and choked up sobs. He pled again for Esau to wake up, uselessly, as Jacob understood then. There would be no erasing this. And Mother could no longer whisper soothing promises in his ear, hold him like he held his brother now.
The noise of the insistent flies gradually replaced his sobbing and he slapped one against a rock with the palm of his hand. He carried Esau on his back to the old camp, and placed the body by their mother's, with the white and the black rocks. Jacob never visited that site, later living in a statue by the beach, far away from Esau's body. But even there, his brother haunted him until the day Jacob finally died too.
