Page 82 of Broken Country

Frank yells, “Jimmy, no—” and darts toward him.

“All right, all right, keep your—” Jimmy says as he releases his hands from Gabriel’s neck and takes a step back, but the rest of his sentence is lost as, just then, the door bursts open.

It’s Leo.

Leo with a shotgun aimed at Jimmy.

Leo, staggering backward from the force of the gunfire.

Horror seconds, nothing making sense. Jimmy on the floor, silent, motionless, blood pooling across his pale shirt. Frank, kneeling beside him, his palm pressed to the shot wound, trying to contain his sobs long enough to blow air into his brother’s lungs. The child’s screams. Over and over, he shrieks. His face bone-white with shock, shotgun dangling at his side. Gabriel, not moving to comfort him, notat first. As if we have been frozen into some awful tableau, and for a moment, none of us can break free.

“I’m calling an ambulance,” I cry, coming to my senses.

But Frank gets up from the floor. There is blood all over his hands, his face. His right sleeve is soaked in it, all the way up to his elbow.

“Not yet, I need a minute to think. He’s gone. Jimmy’s dead, Beth.”

At this, Leo begins to cry. “Have I killed him? Dad? Have I killed him?”

Gabriel swoops his son up into his arms and Leo wraps his legs around his waist like a small child. Buries his face in Gabriel’s neck. “It’s all right,” Gabriel says, rubbing the small of his back.

But it isn’t all right. It will never be all right again.

Frank is crying too. Silent tears course down his face but his voice is terse, businesslike. “Get the boy out of here,” he says to Gabriel.

“What are you talking about? We have to call the police.”

“I’m sorry,” Leo whimpers. “I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean to.”

“Beth.” Frank’s voice is sharp. “Get them out of here, you go with them. I’ll deal with this. I’ll say it was an accident.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“Right now. I mean it. You must do as I tell you.Please, Beth.” He yells to make me understand, trying to penetrate my shock, and perhaps his.

“We have to tell the truth about this—” Gabriel says, but Frank cuts him off.

“No. The boy will end up in court. He’s eleven, isn’t he? They will make him testify. Is that what you want?” He looks down at Jimmy’s body. “He’s my brother, let me deal with it my way.”

All Gabriel can ask on the car journey back to Meadowlands is why.

“Why would Frank do that? Why would he take responsibility for something he didn’t do?”

I’m crying too hard to answer him.

My foolish, noble husband, with his misplaced sense of guilt.

1969

Farming does not give time off for tragedy, heartbreak, or prison terms: I am exhausted physically, mentally, emotionally as I haul myself around our land, but it is one of our busiest seasons. There are late-born lambs to console me that arrived when I was away, and a few last ewes still waiting to birth. I check their rears for any signs of labor, press my palms to their bellies in search of a breech, the act now as routine and meditative to me as it once was to Jimmy and Frank when I first watched them. I mix their feed and the sheep swarm around me, allowing me to trail my fingers along their wiry, woolen coats. After the days in court, the release of being here is like a shot of adrenaline.

It is little more than a year since a dog tore into this field and attacked our lambs, igniting a sequence of events none of us could have imagined. That Leo would appear, looking a bit like the boy I had lost, needing a mother when I was still so desperate to be one. That Gabriel and I would be together again day after day and we would realize the feelings we had kept tamped down inside ourselves had been there all along, just waiting to reappear. That this man I had obsessed over, this boy who once opened me up to desire then abandoned me, or so I thought, would turn out to be not the villain I’d created in my mind but someone I still cared about, someone I still loved.

When I see Gabriel walking up the field toward me, I think perhaps he is an apparition, some kind of hallucination from my tired, fragile mind. But the man keeps on coming, his tall, willowy form unmistakable to me.

“Beth.” He stops a couple of feet from me.

I push back a strand of hair with a hand coated in sheep feed.

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