Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

58. 1969

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.

“I had to come.”

“OK,” I say, although it isn’t. It’s the opposite of OK. I am not ready to see Gabriel. I am not ready to see anyone.

“I never thought he’d go down for it. Robert was meant to be the best there is, everyone thought he’d win. I’m so sorry, Beth. I’ve let you down.”

I don’t want to have this conversation. This pointless, hopeless conversation.

“How long will he get, do you think?” Gabriel asks.

“Robert says to expect eight years. But he could get out sooner. Maybe even in five, if we’re lucky.”

I grimace at the word, so does Gabriel. Lucky, we are not.

“I’m sorry,” Gabriel says again. “I should never have let Frank do this. I didn’t want to at the time. Do you remember—” He breaks off, floundering.

I am a wall of silence. I know I need to speak. I need to help Gabriel deal with his guilt. It’s just that I am so tired. Tired of all of it.

“Robert let us down too,” Gabriel says.

“That’s not fair. He did what he could. The story never really added up. He didn’t have the full facts.”

“I’ll never understand why Frank did it. Why would he take the fall for a child who wasn’t his?”

It must be the exhaustion, there’s no fight left in me. No resistance. Words begin to form in my mind, words I must not say, but they’re rising, unbidden in my throat, in my mouth, rushing out of me, into the air. “He couldn’t save your son.”

“What are you talking about? He did save him. He’s gone to prison for him.”

My heart is hammering so hard I feel I might pass out. “Your first son.”

It takes a second, that is all.

“Bobby?” he says, voice faltering on his name.

I incline my head, the merest breath of acknowledgment, it is as much as I can do.

“My son . He was my son?”

He roars in pain. I have never heard anything like it. This howl. This long yell of torment and rage and sorrow as, at last, it all falls into place.

“Gabriel.”

I move closer to him, but he backs away. “Don’t come near me.”

I watch as Gabriel covers his face with his hands and begins to sob. This thing between us, this shocking, hidden thing, it is unforgivable. I’ve always known that. And so has Frank.

He looks at me again, brushing tears from his cheeks. “Leo looked like Bobby, didn’t he? I see it now, that photograph of yours, the one Leo liked so much. Christ, poor Leo. You cheated him out of a brother. And me out of a son. You stole him. You and Frank.”

“He was my son too. And you weren’t there for me, remember?”

“But—” Gabriel’s voice rises to a wail. “I would have stood by you! I loved you. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wanted to. Your mother knew. And I hoped she’d tell you for me.”

“My mother knew? My mother?”

The horror in his face. I am almost too afraid to carry on.

“I didn’t tell her, she worked it out. I thought she might want to help me, knowing it was your child I was carrying. But all she cared about was protecting your reputation. She made me promise never to tell you. She paid me off, Gabriel. A big fat check for my discretion.”

“No,” he says. “No, no, no. She wouldn’t do that to me.” The pain in his voice, the doubt, it is heartbreaking.

“You know she would. When did your mother ever care about anyone other than herself?”

There is a long silence. And then Gabriel looks at me, eyes like ice. “All those stories you told me about Bobby. That was your guilt, wasn’t it? You’d kept him from me all these years, and you thought you’d throw me a few snippets to make yourself feel better.”

Rage explodes within me. The last bit of stored anger breaking free. A wild, wild woman screaming in her field of sheep. “Frank is in prison because your son murdered his brother. He took the fall so Leo didn’t have to. So you didn’t have to watch your son stand up and testify in court. So you wouldn’t have him taken away. And, yes, it’s because he got to be Bobby’s father and you didn’t. And, yes, he felt guilty about it, especially after Bobby died. But where were you when I needed you? Where were you when I was asked to leave school, pregnant and unmarried at seventeen? Frank took on me and another man’s baby without a second thought. Because he loved me. And Frank”—I’m crying hard now—“was the best father to Bobby. Better than you could ever have been.”

I sink to my knees, bury my face in my hands.

After the shooting, we tried our best—Gabriel, Frank, and me—to convince Leo it was an accident. We knew he never meant to shoot Jimmy, we told him. Hadn’t he just been trying to protect his father? Any son would have done the same.

Even so, Leo became more and more depressed as the months went by and the trial drew near. In the end, Frank went to visit him at Meadowlands, knowing it was a risk in a village full of gossips as it meant breaking his bail conditions, but he did it anyway.

“What’s the point of me doing all of this, if the guilt still poisons him?” Frank had said. “I’m going to make him understand, once and for all, that he’s just an unlucky kid who got tangled up in an adult mess that was way beyond his comprehension.”

“I’m sorry,” I mumble at Gabriel from behind my hands, I cannot bring myself to look at him. The rage has left, I am ashamed. “I’m an awful person. I do terrible things. No wonder you hate me. I hate myself.”

I sense Gabriel kneeling down on the damp grass, feel his hands on mine, gently lifting them from my face.

The way he is looking at me, this stare that has everything in it, grief and sadness and passion and loss, innocence and anger and a light slowly fading. A lie that has been at the center of everything. A lie that has always been too big for absolution. And yet, what I read in Gabriel’s eyes is not blame or hate, as I expect, but love.

We are embracing—holding on to each other really—while the sky slowly darkens around us and sheep mewl and chunter and birds swoop to their nests, in the place Bobby, our son, most loved to be.