Broken Country

by Clare Leslie Hall

I look at his face again, beautiful to me then and now and always, one final glance between us before everything changes.

I don’t know I am trespassing, I am lost in a dreamworld, my head full of romantic scenarios in which I triumph. I picture myself beside a fountain with an orchestra in full flow, receiving an impassioned declaration of love. I read a lot of Austen and Brontë at this time, I have a tendency to embellish.

I’ve heard talk of Gabriel Wolfe, the famously handsome boy from the big house, but this is the first time I’ve seen him in the flesh. He has a good face: dark eyes framed by eyelashes my girlfriends would kill for, wavy brown hair that flops across his forehead, sharp cheekbones, elegant nose. A patrician kind of beauty, I suppose you might call it. But he is wearing tweed trousers tucked into woolly socks. Draped across his shoulders like a cape is a jacket of matching tweed, belt dangling.

It’s strange, the patchwork stories we tell someone when we want them to catch up, a shortcut to knowing us, as if such a thing were possible.

I didn’t know a kiss could be like this, that you could lose yourself in it, no thoughts in your head, your whole body alight to the touch and taste of another.

I know full well the healing charms of a puppy. And there is someone who needs that even more than me.

My body has been aflame since the last time Gabriel and I were together, there is no other word for it. I have kissed a few boys but never one who connected me to this sharp and insistent desire. I long now for things never imagined before, I think of him undressing me, of his fingers trailing across my skin, of our bodies pressed together, of more. There is an ache I have that was not there before, as if I have been catapulted into a foreign universe; where previously lust did not exist, now it’s all there is.

we’ve spent very little time in the company of children, and never one the same age. That was our choice and I know why we made it, but I hadn’t realized how lonely it would feel living a life that had no children in it.

This is a love story and it is better, by far, than any of the ones I have dreamed up in the past. If I’m allowed a wish, just one, then it is this: I wish for our story to have a happy ending.

I’d taken solace in books for my entire life. As a child I’d become so absorbed in my favorite stories, the characters sometimes felt more vivid to me than my friends. Even as an adult, I could still lose myself in fictional worlds, feeling the wrench when I was forced to return to real life. And, quite suddenly, I didn’t have the heart or the mental capacity for any of it. I could not listen to the radio. I could not manage a conversation with anyone other than my own family and, even then, only at the most cursory level. But what I could do was work, really hard. It was my father-in-law, David, who put me back to work on the farm, understanding hard physical labor, twelve-hour stretches of it, was a necessary outlet for my grief. I can do everything the men do, milk cows, herd sheep, mend fences, heft hay bales. Me and Frank and Jimmy, the hardest workers you’ll ever come across. When the doorbell rings, I am kneeling on a sill furiously shining a window with newspaper and white vinegar. It is annoying to get down and answer the door but I do it—country people usually do. We

He is mine and I am his and we’ve been together forever.

Reading another person’s diary is the worst kind of deceit, the lowest, the ugliest. I will not allow myself to do it. Minutes pass, and the temptation to look again burns in my throat. It’s no good: I cannot resist. This is how Adam must have felt biting into his apple. One minute there’s purity and innocence, the

next I am fully immersed

in a world I wish I had nev...

And then we’re kissing and it doesn’t even feel wrong, kissing one man, and then another. They are different things. This is a love story with too many beginnings. I refuse to think about how it is going to end.

One strike of the match, that was all it took. If Bobby had lived, I would have continued in my little enclave of good fortune. But Bobby died. Everything fell apart.

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.

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

Ours was a complicated tale with many pieces to fit together. All of us were to blame in some way—Gabriel and me, Frank, Leo, and Jimmy too. Everyone played a part in the tragedy. And everything was about Bobby, really, when you dug deep enough.