bel was not just stunned. He was not going to set up, groan and maybe clutch his head, no matter how long I waited. There was no breath in him. He was dead.
I got up from where I had squatted beside him. It was hard to take it all in. I had hit out at him, and he had grabbed me, twisted my arm behind me and made me beg and then turned away laughing as he had done so many times before. But this time, I had snatched up a stone and with both hands smashed it into the back of his head as hard as I could. I wanted to hurt, yes, but the thought of killing him never entered my mind. I had never killed anything in my life except a few of the bugs that threatened the crops.
Abel was the killer. Abel was the one who took the lambs by their muzzles in one huge hand and sawed at their throats with a sharp flint, delighting at their cries and the great spurt of blood at the end. He had once seen me watching and said, "I could do the same thing to you, piss ant, and one day maybe I will." But now he was dead.
I never wanted to be a farmer. I had no choice. From the time I was old enough to walk, my daddy had first took, then sent me to the fields. As soon as I was able to do something by myself, Daddy turned it over to me. At twelve years old I was doing it all, with an occasional hand from Mama or one of the Watchers, working from sunup to sundown. Daddy sometimes wandered out to inspect and criticize but mostly he laid around the cave complaining of his back. "You can't just take out a rib and let it go at that," he said. "It leaves you unbalanced, makes you walk womperjawed, puts a awful strain on the alignment of your spine. I'm not complaining, mind you, I understand that's the way he wanted to do it, and I wouldn't go so far as to say he was wrong, but it has just about ruint me for life."
When Abel come along, I expected him to help, but Daddy had other ideas. "We don't need another dirt farmer in the family. There's just no future in it. You go out and break your back day in and day out and the best you can do is raise just enough for yourself with a little left over for seed, and next year you've got to do it all over again. You don't never get ahead. No, what we need is something a step up from dirt farming."
He huddled with the Watchers and the next thing I knew, they was training Abel to be a herder of sheep. It was a soft job. All you had to do was follow the herd as they grazed, maybe pick up a stray lamb now and then and take it back to its mama and keep the predators away. The herd increased on its own, growing every year. The payoff was all the meat you could eat and a wealth of warm skins for clothes and carpets and bedding.
"My son, the shepherd," Daddy was fond of saying and welcomed Abel with a big grin and a slap on the back whenever he showed up at the cave, swaggering around and towering over everybody. Mama and the girls was a little afraid of him and kept out of his way as much as they could. I would have, too, but the need for water made that impossible.
"It's not like ours is the only spring in the whole country," I complained to Daddy. "He can find another one and move his sheep there. I can't move the crops."
"I'm staying out of it," Daddy said. "You'll just have to settle it between yourselves."
So the sheep got first turn and the crops had to get along on what was left, which in the dry season was next to nothing. When I got afraid we'd lose the barley and the lentils entirely, which we needed to carry the family through the winter, and demanded more water, Abel just laughed, and in a sudden blind rage I swung a fist at him, which he dodged without effort.
And now he was dead. I stood a long while staring down at the body, not thinking much about anything. Then because it seemed the right thing to do, I dug a hole there at the edge of the lentil patch and rolled him in. At the last minute I spotted the stone, bloody and brain spattered, and throwed that into the hole, too. I filled in the dirt and smoothed it out. Who would know?
