THAT WAS THE FINAL ENTRY.
I sat unmoving with the notebook open against my chest. I felt as if through hearing her voice like this a great rock had been levered off me and I was lying now in the crater of its impression, the ground still cool where the weight had been for so long.
After a while, I got up and went out to the terrace, wanting to see what she had seen on her last day.
It was early evening and the declining sun cast a lustrous glow over the valley. I stood taking long drafts of air. Birds were singing in the stand of old oaks just below the house. Beyond was the bare, raked field of walnut trees, and beyond that a grass-covered sheep path, and then the slope of walled pastures to the river. In the distance the river’s surface was slate and blue with a fine misting of gold. Nearer, I could see the sheep massing in one corner of the fields, and hear their childlike bleating and the tinny, irregular rhythm of their bells. A man with a long stick was calling to them. In the transforming light the stick seemed to dance like a wand, and the sheep wore veils of gold on their newly shorn backs. I watched as they filed through an opening between two walls and onto the path that wound up through the hamlet, the dusky shuffling of their hooves and plaintive sound of their cries rising steadily up the valley like a mourning procession.
I stood seeing all this as she had seen it. And then I went through the house and out the front door and up to the gate, where the sheep were passing. Here on the paved road their hooves clicked like a constant hail of stones. They were close to home now and had begun to hurry, throwing off their attitude of somnolent mourning and filling the air with occasional bleats of expectation. The man followed the rear of the flock. He was silent now, no longer needing voice or stick. From ten yards he offered me a nod, sober though not unfriendly, and then he too was past and the sheep were well up the road toward his farm. Soon the road was empty. The hamlet was utterly quiet except for the cawing of a crow and the distant tonk of a bell. And I stood at the gate, not yet ready to go inside, the notebook still in my hands.
Not long afterward a car approached, coming from the village. It slowed to a stop in front of the gate, and a woman dressed in beige pants and a black cotton shirt climbed out. She was thin and striking, with cropped white hair and fine-boned hands. She stood observing me across the hood, her large dark eyes moving slowly from my face to the notebook in my hands, and back to my face. Strong lines at the corners of her mouth gave her an initial expression of severity or hardness. Then that shifted, and her eyes were lit with recognition and deepened by intense feeling; her mouth softened.
“So, it is you,” said Corinne Conner.