Page 6 of Broken Country

“I don’t want to laugh at you,” I burst out. “I want to take back every mean thing I’ve said. Can we start again?”

This time it’s me who holds out a hand for him to shake.

“You’re a strange girl, Beth Kennedy,” he says, taking my hand.

“Good strange or bad strange?”

“Good strange, definitely. My kind of strange. I have a sixth sense for these things.”

The light is beginning to drift from the sky by the time I get up to leave. We have been talking for several hours.

“I’ll walk you to the road,” Gabriel says.

“Escorting me off your land?”

“More eking out the last minutes with you.”

I feel a rush of pleasure at this, not that I show it.

“When will you come again?”

I like that for him it’s a foregone conclusion we will see each other again.

“At the weekend?”

“Come on Friday evening. The lake is magical at night.”

There’s a frisson of awkwardness when we say goodbye, as if we should shake hands or kiss or something, but we do neither.

“Goodbye, then,” I say.

“The tweed is going straight in the dustbin,” he calls after me.

“Good,” I shout back.

At the bend in the road, I turn around to wave and I can sense his eyes following me until I disappear from view.

1968

In all the fantasies over the years of meeting Gabriel Wolfe again, driving his child and his dead dog home was never one of them. Leo is sitting in the back of the Land Rover, the dog wrapped in an old coat of Frank’s. His weeping cuts me to the bone.

Gabriel occasionally tries to bridge the impossible task of placating us both, and excusing the dog. “It was instinct,” he tells his son. “Lurchers were bred to hunt and kill. The farmer did the only thing he could. He had to stop him.”

“He murdered Rocket,” Leo says.

“Oh, honey,” Gabriel says, with a slight twang that makes me think of his American wife. “He had to protect his lambs.”

Gabriel says this without much conviction, and I understand. How can a lay person appreciate the true cost to a farmer in losing his sheep? It’s not the money, although we rely on the sale of each lamb to keep us going through the winter months. It’s the heartbreak of seeing your animals destroyed. The absolute terror of the flock as they watch their own being slaughtered. Five months of nurturing the pregnant ewe, the joy of its lamb being born, which doesn’t diminish no matter how many times you see it, only for the lamb to be lost to a savage, bloody death.

Even so, the boy’s pain is hard to bear.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Beth?”

I glance at Gabriel. He has not lost any of his handsomeness with age.

“This is not your fault.”

---