WALKING OUT INTO THE MOIST ISLAND AIR, I considered what we had heard about opposition to Bert’s development plans. Frank Hickey had pointed the guards in that direction. Maybe Mom had nothing to do with Bert’s death, but it didn’t resolve my dilemma about her lost button. I was still holding it back.
Angie’s voice cut through my brooding. “Wasn’t that supposed to be a condolence call? I don’t think we were very consoling.” I couldn’t disagree.
By way of distraction, we made a game of trying to identify plants by the side of the road. Ferns abounded, but we didn’t know the types. The rosy purple bells bunched on stalks looked like the lupine in marshland back home; they were profuse along the ditch at the verge. When we came to the farm at the end of the lane, there were masses of calla lilies. The farmer’s wife must have planted those, I thought. But the farm didn’t look as if a wife lived there. A woman wouldn’t let an old tractor rust in the side yard next to a muddied hatchback. And though it was picturesque to see a rooster strutting around the tractor while his harem picked at the grass, the hens were a little too close to the road for safety.
The meadows around the house stretched far back, so far that no other houses were in view. In the distance, grazing sheep seemed planted in the grass like daisies, sometimes singly, sometimes in clumps. Angie slowed up, assessed the site, and said, “You know, this is just the kind of place I’d like to live in. Life would be simple—your garden, your animals, and a view of the ocean or the mountain any time you wanted to look. It feels like God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.” (All’s right? Only if you don’t think about it. Bert’s death, family strife, our mother under suspicion of murder. There’s no getting around the problem of evil.) Instead of saying anything, I smiled. I protect my sisterly bond with Angie by keeping such thoughts to myself.
Angie gave the place a longing glance, and we turned to face Slievemore Mountain. The soft green of summer grass blended with the gray of the ruins clinging to the slope, but the noonday sun caught a patch of stark white. That would be the evidence tent over the ruin where I had found Bert. I also noticed a van in the parking lot below. White, with yellow stripes. “Looks like the only people visiting the village are official,” I said. “The guards must have closed it to tourists.” I wondered if the technical team had found any useful evidence.
“Oh, rats,” Angie complained. “I wanted to see it up close. Let’s at least go read those panels.” She pointed at information boards across the parking lot, next to the gate to the village. The first one offered nothing but rules and regulations. The other gave a history of the site. It mentioned megalithic tombs but didn’t disclose where they were. It attested to settlement from the Middle Ages till the Great Famine that began in 1845, when villagers abandoned the site and moved closer to the sea, a sure source of food. From that time, families sent their sheep and cattle to the mountain in summer, accompanied by youngsters who would spend the day tending them. The shepherds would use a ruin as a day-house and would carry milk down the mountain to the family at evening. I wondered what they did on a rainy day, with no roof overhead. Maybe they made a tent like the one over the crime scene.
The blast of a horn made me jump. Someone was driving up the dirt road fast, honking like a seal. The car halted ten yards beyond us, and a spotted black-and-white dog sprang out. It ran at full speed up the hillside, on a mission to corral a flock of sheep that was grazing below the line of ruins. Sharp whistles came from inside the car. A tall man jumped out, whistling and calling. The message to the dog was clear: Get those sheep out of where they don’t belong. The dog barked roughly and darted back and forth, frightening the sheep up the hill, forcing them into a run toward the crumbling walls of the village. Most of the flock headed where they had been sent, but the dog kept running to confront outliers, pushing them up the hill.
When the sheep were assembled in a single group, the man knew that his dog needed no more signals to get the job done. Waving cheerfully to us, he called, “Hi! How are ya?” and apologized for the ruckus. He explained that his sheep belonged farther up, on the steeps. During the night they had drifted all the way down to the road. No one complained until four sheep wandered into the graveyard below the west end of the village. Then he got a phone call from the lady who keeps a guesthouse in the old presbytery. “Good thing she didn’t call the guards,” the man said, nodding toward the white van. “They’re trouble and strife.”
He introduced himself as Bobby Colman, owner of a VW Golf and one very smart dog. “Blackie, there, she’s a class herder.” He pointed toward an invisible presence up the hill. I could tell already that Bobby was a talker, and he didn’t disappoint. Angie asked if he called himself a shepherd. “Blackie’s the shepherd,” he laughed. “I’m the fella that feeds Blackie. She runs the flock from field to pasture. Then she rounds them up when they stray. Once in a while she chases them back to the farm, to be sheltered, or sheared, or what have you. I’m just her drudge.” He winked at Angie and gave me a crooked smile.
Hmm, I thought. He’s the flirter. Angie’s the flirtee. And I’m the duenna who needs to be won over. Bobby was easy to look at, probably closer to my age than Angie’s. His flat-weave fisherman’s sweater, gray with wear, stretched tightly over wide shoulders and a full chest. Snug jeans, tucked into muck boots, revealed a slim lower half. Back home I would have taken him for a swimmer or a quarterback, but it was hard farming that gave Bobby his barrel chest. While his body looked strong and controlled, his face was free, expansive with laughter. I noticed Angie noticing, as well as Bobby noticing that Angie was noticing.
He charmed us for more than an hour, long enough for me to have to sidle over to the gate for something to lean against. With Angie’s encouragement, Bobby the Shepherd gave us his life story, and more. He had been kicked out of school for being too wild, he confessed, and he was glad of it. “Those uni types are soft,” he declared. “No confidence. Confidence comes from hard work and discipline.” He learned that from his first big job, in England, as foreman at a Goodyear plant. “I’d take one of our young Irish bucks for ten of their city lads. Weaklings, they were. Yell at ’em once, and they quit the job.” He was glad to return to Achill after eight years, with pounds in his pocket. His parents gave him the homecoming of the prodigal son.
“I’m one of many,” he said. “We left when there was no work here, returned when there was no work there. All my old pals came home—from Canada, the States, Australia, England. They brought families back too, every one of ’em. I should have done the same, but now I’m an Irish bachelor taking care of me old dear and five hundred fat sheep.”
“Five hundred? That’s amazing!” Angie’s big blue eyes said the same.
I asked, “Are all five hundred up the mountain? That’s a lot of sheep for Blackie to herd.”
Bobby smiled at our ignorance. “I don’t send more than a hundred to one spot. Don’t want to overgraze the common land, nor my own neither. I’ve got four meadows just over there.” He nodded toward the farm we had passed, the one Angie had admired. I could see it coming. Angie lit up with pleasure and, in the most innocent way, flattered the man silly with praises of his home. What could I do but let the scene play out?
This wasn’t the first time I had watched Angie fall for a guy and the guy fall for her, even if he was totally inappropriate. Last year it was a French gendarme who didn’t mention he was engaged. The one before that was a barista with plans to better himself by stealing motorcycles. There were a few others too. Lovely, naïve Angie had a history of falling into the arms of the wrong man. The family was dubious when, after the barista breakup, she announced she was entering a convent. We had a feeling that this spiritual romance would prove as short-lived as her more earthly ones. Instead, she was more faithful to Grace Quarry than any of her lovers had been to her. She kept the promises of a “sojourner” for a full year and then had a slip right under the nose of her mother superior, who, in the spirit of infinite mercy, took her back. Angie spent the next year working in a shelter for battered women. At the end of that term, she decided to put off taking final vows. I had feared that seeing the sufferings of women abused by men would solidify Angie’s choice of the celibate life, but instead, it seemed, the job forced Angie to face hard realities. She began to suspect what everyone else already knew: she did not, after all, “have a vocation” as a nun. For Angie, this trip to Ireland was a strategic break from the convent, a time to consider reentering the world.
“The sheep are just my day job, you know,” Bobby went on. “I have a band too, the best on the island. You should come hear us. We’re playing tonight.”
“Really?” Angie said. “What’s your instrument?”
“The fiddle. The banjo too. And I sing. We’ll be at the Annexe, just over in Keel.” He gestured toward the sea. “Why don’t you come?”
“What time do you play?” asked Angie.
“The usual. We start at nine and go until closing. You should both come.” He looked my way, making a conscious gesture to include me. I thanked him for the invitation and, just to be polite, I said we would try to make it.
“Super!” said Angie. “We’ll be there.”