The Voice Among the Trees

In the evenings, when the heat went out of the day and a cool breeze came moving through the trees, God came walking in the garden. The man would hear Him coming, and go out to meet Him, and they would walk and talk together, as a son talks with his father at the end of the day. The sound of God walking among the trees belonged to the garden as surely as the sound of the river did.

That was how things were.

Among all the animals in the garden, the cleverest was the serpent.

But the serpent watched them. He watched them working in the garden and eating its fruit, and going out gladly in the evenings to walk with God. He watched how happy they were, and how they obeyed God in everything, and how they lacked nothing at all. And something in him turned sour, the way milk turns in the heat. He could not bear it. He could not bear that they should be so content.

And something darker than any serpent saw what was in his heart, and found a way to speak through him.

It was in the eighth year, on the seventeenth day of the second month. The woman was walking alone near the middle of the garden, not far from the two trees, when a voice spoke to her from among the leaves.

"Is it really true," said the serpent, "that God has told you not to eat from any tree in the garden?"

He said it lightly, almost laughing, the way you might say to a child, Is it really true they won't let you stay up past dark? And of course it was not true. That was the point. He had put it wrongly on purpose, so that she would have to put it right.

"Oh, no," said the woman. "We may eat the fruit of any of the trees. It's only the tree in the middle of the garden. God said, 'You must not eat from it, and you must not touch it, or you will die.'"

Nobody had said anything about touching it. But she said it anyway, and perhaps she did not even notice.

The serpent came a little closer.

"You won't die," he said. "You won't die at all. God knows perfectly well that on the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God Himself, knowing good and evil." And he told her that if she knew what that tree knew, she would live a far happier life than this one: a life, he said, no lower than a god's.

The woman looked at the tree.

She put out her hand, and took the fruit, and ate.

Nothing happened. Not at first.

Then she went to her husband, who was close by, and gave the fruit to him. And he took it from her hand, and ate.

Their eyes were opened.

The trees had not changed. The fruit still hung on the branches. The river still ran. But the man and the woman could no longer stand together the way they had stood that first evening, and there was a new kind of work in the world: putting something between yourself and another's eyes.

Then the evening came, and the cool breeze moved through the trees, and they heard the sound they had heard every evening of their lives.

God was walking in the garden.

And for the first time, the man did not go out to meet Him.

He took the woman by the hand and pulled her in among the trees, as deep as they could go, and they crouched there in the shadows, holding their breath, among the very trees God had made for them, and hid.

And God called out:

"Where are you?"

He knew. Of course He knew. But He did not thunder, or come crashing through the leaves after them. He asked. The way a father calls for a child who has not come in for supper, knowing perfectly well which hedge the child is behind, and waiting for him to come out by himself.

At last the man answered. "I heard You in the garden," he said, "and I was afraid, because I was naked. So I hid."

"Who told you that you were naked?" said God. "You always used to come to Me. Why do you run from Me now?"

The man said nothing.

"Your silence is not a good sign," said God. "Have you eaten from the tree I told you not to eat from?"

And the man said, "The woman You gave me. She gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate it."

Not my wife. Not bone of my bones. The woman You gave me, as if it were partly God's fault for giving her to him at all.

So God turned to the woman. "What is this you have done?"

And the woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."

And when God turned to the serpent at last, the serpent had nobody left to point at.

God spoke to the serpent first.

"Because you have done this, you are cursed above all the cattle, and above every beast of the field. On your belly you will go, and dust you will eat, all the days of your life."

"I will put hatred between you and the woman," God said, "and between your children and hers. He will crush your head, and you will strike at his heel."

Tuck that away. It is the first promise in the world that someone is coming to put things right, and it is hidden inside a curse, so small you could miss it, like a seed dropped in a furrow. One day a child of the woman would bring his heel down on the serpent's head. The serpent would strike at him. But it was the serpent's head that would be crushed.

Then God turned to the woman.

"Your pain will be great when you bear children," He said. "In pain you will bring them into the world. You will long for your husband, and he will rule over you."

And then to the man.

Adam stood on the red earth that had given him his name. He had been made from it, and given work upon it, and now he would have to wrestle with it all his life until at last it took him back.

And yet even then, in the worst hour there had ever been, there was kindness.

The man turned to his wife. He had just heard that he would die, and he gave her a name, and the name he gave her was Eve, which means Life, because she would be the mother of all the living.

And God saw the two of them standing there in their fig-leaf aprons, already going brown at the edges. And He made them clothes Himself, coats of skins, warm and strong, and put them on them with His own hands, the way a father dresses a child too small to do it himself.

Then God said, "The man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil. And now, in case he reaches out his hand and takes from the Tree of Life as well, and eats, and lives forever..."

He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to.

That was the day the animals fell silent.

It was the new moon of the fourth month, and the ground outside the garden was wide and empty and hard.

Then he turned, and took his wife by the hand, and went to find somewhere to dig.

Behind them, in the place where God used to walk with them in the cool of the evening, the sword of fire went on turning.