The Shepherd

The Shepherd

Nobody could understand why people who got married kept dying. Their causes of death varied—accidental burns, steep falls, unbreakable fevers. Some claimed it was punishment for indifference. Others argued that vows over such matters as honor and fidelity were inherently doomed. The younger couples took no notice, of course. They walked around holding hands and getting engaged, despite all the widows and widowers roaming our town like war veterans.

When the shepherd became engaged, many of us were shocked. He lived alone where he’d been raised, in the coastal Oregon valley that reminded his parents of their homeland in Wales. His mother had died too young, his father not long after from grief. Their only child was odd and detached—too sensitive for his own good. Before dawn he could be found walking the misty hills, and still walking as the valley changed colors in the sun. 

It was true that his strange disposition made him ideal for his job. The sheep he tended were black, cultivated by his ancestors to have a high tolerance for pain. During lambing season, the dams didn’t bother to flinch when he reached inside them. The lambs emerged quick to their feet and vigorous. They fetched a high price at market because of their spinning wool, and because their meat carried a mild flavor. 

***

The shepherd spotted her at a distance, crisscrossing his lower fields like a trapped fly. Before he knew it, the dogs were barking at her boots. His dogs were as black as his sheep. The shepherd raised the animals together so their colors could interweave. 

“Morning,” the woman said, dabbing her forehead with her bare arm. She was known in the area as a wanderer who appeared without warning. Her dark brown eyes seemed to forage everything in her path. “Which way to town, please?” 

The shepherd pointed over the heather to the far ridge, where the rocky cliffs made a fortress out of the valley. He noticed his hand trembling. He remembered how his father once said that meeting his mother was the most terrifying day of his life.

The woman thanked him. She set off, completed a series of meandering circles and ended right back in the shepherd’s field. It was what happened in that part of the country—you went back to where you started before you found a way out. By that time, the rain had come. She was soaked through. Her wet clothes made tight contours of her body. 

“I have to go to town anyway,” he lied. 

He walked her toward a gap in the ridge that opened his land like a key. Her presence gave him dimension in the widening expanse of light. He knew then that he could love her with more than his short life could hold. It was the power she had of lifting him almost bodily off the ground with her voice. 

By the time they emerged from the valley, they were engaged. He owned the land all the way to the ocean, he told her, and wanted to share it. She accepted his outstretched hand—though later, he recalled some hesitation. 

***

Together they explored the western regions of his farm. The green grazing pastures turned to scrubland, and sandy hillocks sprung out of the beachgrass. Nesting birds flew away as they approached. The air smelled powerfully of salt. Soon there was a dull, monotonous roar, where the high cliffs dropped abruptly to the waves. The wind off the sea rushed into their faces and opened their mouths like shells.

“If you were running fast,” she shouted, standing right at the cliff edge, “you wouldn’t know there was a drop here!”

He stepped carefully toward her. He peered down at the rocks where the bones of his sheep lay scattered. They were driven there long ago, chased by wolves before he’d trained his dogs to protect their flock. The distances made his head swim. The waves seemed to crest and fall in some other place and time. 

“Think of it,” she shouted, “running straight to your death!” Her eyes shone with excitement. “It would feel like an eternity of flight.”

He gripped her hand and pulled her quickly from the cliff edge. He held her close, all the way back to the farmhouse.

That night, still somewhat shaken, he read his favorite stories to her out loud in the parlor. They were simple tales, fables from the time before spouses started dying. Afterward, he played what he remembered were comforting songs on the piano. The shepherd had played well in his childhood, before his mother died. The maid was surprised to hear him, and hid in the corridor to listen. 

***

The corpses of our spouses were dissected and their insides examined. Experts believed something harmful must have been introduced into the food supply. The government sent out teams of inspectors to investigate. 

The inspectors questioned all farmers who supplied meat. The shepherd told them he had long noticed changes to the land. Strange objects had been blowing into his valley—sharks’ teeth carried by seagulls, mismatched bees’ wings, fat bulbous seeds that grew into trees he’d never seen the likes of. He confessed he was only beginning to understand the wider world. Until recently, he said, his future held only sheep.

When the inspectors had gone, the shepherd asked his fiancée if she had any fear of marriage. They were sitting together in the parlor at sunset. He closed his fingers around her hand as she took what seemed a long time to answer.

“I am not worried by anything,” she finally said, “except the absence of love.” 

For a moment he was startled by the wild excitement in her eyes, like she’d had at the edge of the cliff. Then his fiancée laughed and kissed him, and they began to plan their wedding. But just before the date of their marriage, she developed a fever and pinching headaches. She squirmed in bed as her ankles and calves seized with pain. For two straight days, she lost consciousness. When she awoke, she had no movement in her legs.  

The family doctor came straight away. After his examination, he motioned to the shepherd to speak privately out in the corridor. 

“Her limbs are just the start,” he said. “She’s dying.” 

As the shepherd stood there, he felt his own life slip away. His boots seemed to sink into the floorboards. “You’re certain?”

“Yes. I’m afraid her brain is swelling.”

“How long does she have?”

“Who knows?” the doctor said, raising his eyebrows. “A month, maybe. You didn’t get married yet—am I right?”

The shepherd hurried back into the bedroom. He didn’t hear the doctor leave. He didn’t eat. He sat by his fiancée’s side and barely noticed when her parents arrived to collect her. They were strange people from the next town, and new to Oregon. They waited mutely at a distance as the shepherd asked them, his eyes streaming, that she remain in his care. The wedding ceremony, he said, would wait until she got better. The parents agreed.

The shepherd hired a builder to widen the halls. He constructed a network of wooden ramps to accommodate a wheelchair. Many of us openly called the shepherd a simpleton. The couple were not expecting. He was still relatively young—why nurture a dying creature for whom he had no obligation? When he paid to have her portrait painted and hung above the piano, everyone agreed that he’d lost his senses.  

It didn’t take long. In a few weeks, just as the doctor had predicted, his fiancée lost her ability to sit up on her own. She couldn’t breathe without gasping. 

“Please, kill me,” she asked the shepherd, before her speech finally failed. 

With a tablet and chalk, he devised a system of yes and no questions answered by blinking. Each time she asked to die, it was the one request he refused. Each morning, he placed her at the window so that she might look out over the valley. It pleased him to work in the line of her sight. He felt she bestowed on his land all the remaining spirit she contained.  

Then, as gradually as the sunrise, the color returned to her cheeks. Her breathing, which had grown shallow and thin, stabilized. These changes came after he’d hired his new cook. The man was tall, with broad shoulders and delicate long fingers. The taste of his meals, it was said, shifted the spirits of the dead.

***

Once a month, for six years, the doctor peered into the invalid’s ears. He drew blood from her spine and tried to interpret the alternating hues. One morning, she blinked frantically at the letters on the shepherd’s chalkboard, rushing through the yes and no questions to report an exciting, excruciating pain in her legs. The doctor believed she was delusional. Then he saw that her toes were twitching, and her eyes wet with tears. 

The shepherd applied a special poultice he used with his sheep. At night, he kept reading stories to her and playing the piano. The butler speculated, due to the bounce in the shepherd’s step, that she’d regained control over her body. 

The doctor declared a reduction in the swelling of her brain. It was possible she’d continue to improve. This news filled the shepherd with waves of joy. They would marry, he tentatively announced, when she could speak their wedding vows.

A few weeks later, his fiancée stood for the first time on wobbly legs. The effort had seemed to exhaust her. But by the next morning, she’d disappeared with the cook. 

The shepherd had been out in the fields. He returned to find cold lamb on the table and an almost empty house. The butler had left, together with the rest of the staff, fearful that they’d somehow be implicated. 

Only the maid stayed behind. Staring fixedly at the piano, she reported what had happened. “I knew she wasn’t right the moment I met her. That lady won’t be back, sir. Not if I know the likes.”

“I can’t begrudge her,” the shepherd replied. With both hands, he supported himself on her empty wheelchair. 

“Why not?”

“Stuck here on a sheep farm, day after day, amongst all this muck?”

He went to bed in his clothes. He couldn’t work. His sheep wandered aimless in the fields. Soon the dogs grew lazy and stopped guarding against wolves. 

One night, he was awoken by frantic bleating. It sounded like screams. He hurried outside to the near pasture, where the eviscerated remains of his lambs lay in the trampled bloody grass. The shepherd studied the new pattern to the stars. It was a sign, he believed, that she could speak again, that someone could hear her voice. He thought of the pain in her legs, and hoped the cook knew how to apply the poultice.

***

She appeared in the early hours, while he was still in bed. He bolted forward and found her standing at a distance in the candlelight. Her hair was shorter, her face pale.  

The shepherd was so relieved, he got out of bed and knelt at her feet. “Whatever you need,” he said, “I’ll give you.”

She slipped her hand around the back of his neck. “What I need is to sleep.”

Her voice had come back, just as he’d believed it would, and stronger than before. He wept at the sound of it. Then he emptied the room of himself. He asked the maid for complete silence and sent an urgent message to town for the best staff. When they arrived, he gave them strict instructions to grant his fiancée’s every wish when she awoke.

That day, out in the pastures, he thought of all the mistakes he’d made—the childish stories, the annoying songs. What torture it would have been for her. Ever since she’d left, he had become disgusted by his own smell. Now that she’d returned, he was more aware of it than ever, no matter how many times he bathed. How had she stomached him each night, stinking of grass and dung? 

Her face appeared at the window when he was repairing a fence. He smiled and waved, then saw that all the new staff were walking back to town along the hills. His breath turned sour with fear.

He ran to the house in a sweat. The dogs barked at his ankles, short-changed from a day of herding. Inside, she stood in the dining room, glaring at the wheelchair in the corner. 

“Six long years I spent in that thing. All I heard, every day, was how much of a saint you were. How I was selfish for living. I can’t bear it. I told them to go.”

“I’ll find the cook and invite him back. I won’t interfere.”

She placed her face in her hands. The shepherd tried to comfort her, but she knocked his hands away. The following morning she was gone.

***

The buyers at the livestock market swapped anecdotes, shoulder to shoulder with their boots on the rails of the holding pen. One of them heard that the shepherd still read his stories aloud to himself. Another buyer, a friend of the maid, heard that the shepherd played his piano every night under his fiancée’s portrait, occasionally glancing at her inside the wooden frame.

These stories traveled along with the shepherd’s prize-winning livestock. Farmers offered increasingly high prices for the use of his rams. Breeders selected for a certain type of neck—strong yet docile, flexible and ready for the knife. That year, our newly wedded stopped dying. Word spread—getting married in our town no longer meant a death sentence. 

The shepherd grew old and reflected. He remembered the feeling he’d had that day, as they’d walked together out of the valley, and the pleasures where once there had been nothing. He remembered how he’d worked under her gaze at the window, returning each night to the warmth of her skin. He visited his parents’ grave and imagined his father’s grief. He himself had become a kind of widower, engaged to a living ghost. He doubted anyone would notice the moment his heart stopped beating.

One morning, he walked all the way to the cliff where his sheep had been chased. He peered down at the crashing waves, and the rocks scattered with bones. He asked himself what it would feel like, to run at full speed without knowing—an eternity of flight—and recalled pulling her back from the edge. She was there beside him, it seemed, restraining his own dark impulse.

When the shepherd heard that our married couples were no longer dying, he went into town to see them with his own eyes. In his work clothes, his hair long and disheveled, he sat alone on a park bench as the newlyweds walked past. Some widows and widowers had remarried. Other couples began renewing their vows. They lived to see their children, and even their grandchildren become adults. 

The shepherd returned to the valley with his face tingling, almost numb. Never again did he read his stories out loud, or play the piano under her portrait. People stopped gossiping about his madness. In old age he became respected, almost admired. There goes a man, we whispered, who loved without fail.

***

The shepherd shrank over time. His shoulders buckled, and a creeping damp spread into his legs. It hardly mattered, there was nowhere he wanted to go. He’d heard that our town had expanded, that the adjoining valleys were paved with roads. He was content not to witness such a thing. 

Late one afternoon, the maid found him in the wheelchair, occupying a dark corner. She moved him to the window so he could see what was left of his flock. His sheep had always been of his blood, of the hills and the land he’d loved. Now, separated from the last ewes, his prized rams had grown old. They dithered about and dropped their teeth in the grass.

“Take me back to the corner,” he said, and she did. 

He fell asleep with his head sunk into his shoulders. In the shadows, time seemed to slip in and out of the room like a guest.

“Some strangers here,” the maid announced.

The shepherd sat up at a familiar face in the distance. As if still dreaming, he saw his fiancée. She was fuller and deeper in the hips. She had a man with her, a different one from the cook.  

“I’m only here for a short visit,” she said. She searched for her portrait on the wall, but it had been taken down. 

“Stay,” he said. His arms shook as he tried to hoist himself up. “The place is yours, if you want it.”

His fiancée came over to him. He read in her eyes the remnants of past lovers, and children in her bent back. She had generated more life than anyone deserved, creating people out of nothing, stirring the dormant and practically dead. As a young man, he never could have anticipated such happiness. He smiled as she took the handles of the wheelchair, and brought him to the window where a fine sun was setting against the high cliffs of the valley.

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